[N]o president in our nation’s history has ever been castigated, condemned, mocked, insulted, derided, and degraded on a scale even close to the constantly ugly attacks on President Obama. From the day he assumed office — indeed, even before he assumed office — he was subjected to unprecedented insults in often the most hateful terms. He has been accused of being born in Kenya, of being a “secret Muslim,” of being complicit with the Muslim Brotherhood, of wearing a ring bearing a secret verse from the Koran, of having once been a Black Panther, of refusing to recite the pledge of allegiance, of seeking to confiscate all guns, of lying about just about everything he has ever said, ranging from Benghazi to the Affordable Care Act to immigration, of faking bin Laden’s death, and of funding his campaigns with drug money. It goes on and on and on. Even the President’s family is treated by his political enemies with disrespect and disdain.
In trying to sort through, and in some fashion understand, the visceral hatred directed at Barack Obama, it would be easy to conclude that the widespread, deeply personal disdain is firmly rooted in racism. While that’s undoubtedly true, as an explanation it’s both simplistic and inadequate. After almost six years, I still find it challenging to wrap my head around why so many- including some thoughtful and intelligent people- hate this President with every fiber of their being. It simply defies logical understanding. They deride Obama as incompetent, as “the worst President ever,” and yet they can in no way credibly claim that his predecessor was anything but the poster child for incompetence and criminality. All you need to do is compare the record side by side…and it makes George W. Bush look positively inept.
There are many reasons for this state of affairs, and people are free to believe what they will, no matter how well-considered or distressingly moronic it may be. It’s become clear over the course of President Obama’s term that the tone and timbre of our public discourse has degraded to a point where cheap personal insults pass for debating points. No longer does one need to support an argument; now merely believing something to be true renders it so. Abject reality and empirical truth are valued far less than belief and faith. Truth is now relative, a fungible concept hostage to the whims of fanatics and zealots whose primary interest is self-aggrandizement. (How else could one explain the careers of soulless talking heads like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Andrea Tantaros, etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseum?)
Somewhere along the line, legitimate disagreement morphed into visceral, ugly, intensely personal hatred and calumny. When one can advocate for the assassination of a sitting President with no recognition of just how sick and twisted (never mind illegal and immoral) that is…well, Bienvenidos a America, no??
If one browses even respectable websites, one can readily find bumper stickers, coffee cups, and tee-shirts for sale with such messages as: “Dump This Turd” (with an image of President Obama); “Coward! You Left Them To Die in Benghazi” (with an image of President Obama); “Somewhere in Kenya A Village Is Missing Its Idiot” (with an image of President Obama); “Islam’s Trojan Horse” (with an image of President Obama); “Pure Evil” (with an image of President Obama); “I’m Not A Racist: I Hate His White Half Too” (with an image of President Obama); “He Lies!” (with an image of President Obama); and on and on and on.
As stupid and painfully uneducated as stuff like this is, it’s free speech, protected under the 1st Amendment. If I’ve written it once, I’ve written it a thousand times: Free speech can be, and very often is, ignorant and objectionable speech. Of course, that also means that people like me get to point out the ignorance, racism, and moronic hatred for what it is.
To believe that Barack Obama is the worst President ever is to willfully ignore the “accomplishment” of the inept, doctrinaire Republicans who proceeded him. Bushes 41 and 43 both presided over recessions, the most recent one almost crashing the economy altogether. (Now Jeb Bush wants to become Bush 45?? Yikes….) Yet if you ask the knuckle draggers, who do you think they hold responsible? Of course, it’s The Black Guy in the White House ©. Honestly, I think some of these folks blame this President for everything from the Lindbergh kidnapping to Pearl Harbor to the Tet Offensive to 9/11. It’s as ridiculous as it is unfair, but there it is.
I used to write about how I believed that America was beginning to resemble the set from Idiocracy. I’ll submit that I’ve significantly misunderestimated the degree and depth of the ignorance and racial hatred extant in America today. Our republic doesn’t merely resemble the set from Idiocracy, it’s become an actual (and barely functional) idiocracy. Someday, historians will look back at the demise of Pax Americana and ask only one question:
“WTF???”
