I lied about the day. It’s from a post on Tuesday that I’ve been meaning to quote:
Today, the entire government has been taken hostage by leaders elected
by this crazed minority, who see in the face of Barack Obama everything
they’ve been taught to fear for 50 years. Start with miscegenation: He’s
not just black, he’s the product of a black father and a white mother.
(That helps explain an unconscious motive for birtherism: They can’t get
their minds off the circumstances of his conception and birth.) With
his Ivy League degrees, they are sure he must be the elitist beneficiary
of affirmative action. Steeped in Chicago politics, he’s the
representative of corrupt urban machines controlled by Democrats –
machines that ironically originated with the Irish and once kept
African-Americans down, but which are now synonymous with corrupt black
power. In Michele Bachmann’s words, Obama is a product of Chicago’s
scary “gangster government,” or did she say “gangsta”?
I’m one of those people who didn’t think things would spin this far out of control. If Barack Obama is the essence of Southern Gopers worst suspicions, he’s also Sidney Fucking Poitier in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner. If only Speaker Boner were more like the Spencer Tracy character in that movie. I really thought the whole “Clinton is illegitimate” thing had something to do with his getting only 43% of the popular vote in 1992. I was obviously wrong: any Democrat is illegitimate to the neo-Confederates, even if they win a majority of the popular vote.
There’s madness in the air right now. A slightly left of center President is being vilified for being a radical, Marxist, Socialist, Nazi, mau mau. Why? His signature achievement is a bill that extends private insurance to the uninsured. This was essentially Bob Dole’s health care plan in 1996 but now it’s all tangled up in racism, stupidity and fear.
The real reason the wingnuts hate him so much is that Obama is the ultimate other. 100 years from now people are going to look back at our time and be utterly mystified by the neo-Confederates and their reaction to our first black President. They look like idiots now but history will judge them even more harshly as people who were willing to damage the country because they were afraid of change.