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 inGuess 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.
And the craziness begins in more earnest…as Capitol police (unpaid, btw) fired on the driver of a Lexus erratically speeding around near the US Capitol. No idea what was going on, a woman driver with a child in the car, apparently unwisely farting off police too soon after a mass killing. And the Capitol police are being hailed for “a great job”…I so hope that great job doesn’t just turn out to be shooting an unarmed female who did something stupid.
Well said
he’s also Sidney … Poitier
Nah.
Ever since being first elected, Obama’s been doing a perfect Jackie Robinson.
Always polite. Always controlled. Always competent.
Quietly absorbs egregious insults both public and private.
Does his job brilliantly while the peckerwoods throw filth at him.
And this fooled the peckerwoods into thinking that Obama was soft and would never fight back, no matter how grievous the provocation. And he let them think that, and compromised when progressives like me screamed that no compromise was necessary, and always offered the olive branch, always offered to co-operate …
until the Rs overreached fatally and publicly caught their hand in a beartrap.
I really think I’m going to like the 2014 elections more than I had anticipated.
i saw the publiklans during clinton, i KNEW it would be cubed w/ obama. i just wish obama called them on it.
I do enjoy reading your work, it usually has insight and humor, especially humor such as your line …”A slightly left of center President is…”. That did bring a smile.
The man is further to the right on most issues than were both Nixon and Goldwater, I guess if you want to view them as way out there radical leftists, then that could give you a ‘center’. ;^).
But you are right that both Presidents Clinton and Obama made the same mistake, they have Ds listed under political affiliation, which means no matter how hard they work(ed) to implement Republican policies, the minorities in the Republican party would not accept it and still be able to report back to their money donors that they opposed the Democrats.
Where do I start with the last comment from jerryy:
Nixon pretended to be semi-liberal in his first term and took a sudden right turn in his second only to be derailed by Watergate. He was a McCarthyite before Tailgunner Joe and was the architect of the Southern strategy.
Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and advocated bombing North Vietnam back to the stone age. Sound left of center to you?
@Joel: Jackie is not a bad analogy. He was “unleashed” in 1949 or 50 and became a legendary bad ass. He was more like Samuel L Jackson than Poitier after that.
@Syrbal: I assume you’ve heard that the driver hit a Secret Service agent with her car and tried to run some other cops down. The whole thing reeks of suicide by police to me.
That is all.
Whatever the reason, the GOP TeaTards have really jacked up the insanity.
They’ve nailed their dick to the table, and are threatening to set the table on fire if they don’t get their way.
Senator Barry Goldwarter supported women’s right to choose (abortion rights), gay rights, medical marijuana use, and keeping religion private.
President Nixon started the EPA, pushed for auto safety standards and established the basic social safety nets (some called it welfare). President Nixon spied on political opponents and groups, but not the entire US population as we are currently seeing President Obama push into.
President Obama also started out under the gusie of ‘liberal’ and pushed hard to the right after he was elected.
Tit for tat is not the point, only a basis for comparison. We could discuss whether bombing via airplane (in Vietnam) is different that using remote control robots to murder
people whom are only going to wedding or funerals (or just being a US citizen). Or how these undeclared wars are spreading all over the globe — from Afghanistan somehow into Yemen and various places in Africa vs Vietnam into Cambodia. There is lots of foreign policy area for examination.
Or possibly stick to the overall domestic situation (cuttijng social security, propping up Wall Street at the expense of the lower and middle economic classes, etc.