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Look, I didn't hide my distaste and distrust for George W. Bush. I thought (and still feel) he was a miserable president with a political and moral agenda that took the country in a dangerous direction. I thought his eight years at the helm resulted in the decay of respect for the United States around the world (and resulted in the implosion of our economy as well).
I disliked him (intensely) as a president, but I never thought of him as "evil." Mostly, I thought of him as insufficiently prepared intellectually for his position. I never doubted that he was doing what he did from a sincere belief that it was -- from his point of view -- best for the country. I'm confident that he loves his family, that he doesn't kick his dog, that he's a good friend to those he likes. If he wanted to sit down with me and share a beer, I'd do it and I wouldn't feel that I was sitting across from Satan Himself. He's a man with whom I have severe differences in outlook and with whom I'm unlikely to agree on much at all, but he's just a human being. Flawed like anyone else.
I didn't wish him dead at any time in his presidency. I didn't believe he was the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.
The level of vitriol I'm seeing leveled against Obama is troubling. Perhaps I'm misremembering, but the outrage of the left against the Bush administration never seemed to reach this fever pitch of loathing and outright hatred. Yeah, there was a fair amount of vocal anti-Bush sentiment out there, but it seemed less directed at the man than at his policies. The anti-Obama outrage seems more directed toward Obama himself.
I'm beginning to wonder if much of it isn't disguised racism coming to the surface. I find it difficult to fathom the loathing of some of the right wingers toward this man in any other way. They hate Obama not because of his political beliefs and agenda, but because of what he is: a non-white. I wonder how many of the birthers out there are actually more upset that Obama has African heritage than at any imagined discrepancy in his birth record. I wonder if people bringing automatic weapons to Obama rallies aren't substituting guns as a symbol for the lynching noose. I wonder if the preachers saying that God hates Obama and here's the proof in the bible aren't really more upset at his racial heritage. I wonder if "Obama is really a Muslim" isn't code for "OMFG! We have an uppity black man in the White House!"
No, I don't think all criticism of Obama is racially motivated. There are people who are as disturbed by Obama's policies as I was of Bush's. That's fine. I have no problem with that. Criticism of policy is legitimate -- heck, I don't like some of what Obama's done, though that's for the opposite reason the right wing doesn't like it. I feel Obama's been too centrist in his decisions. Actually, Obama's centrist leanings only make the vitriol coming from the far right even more suspicious: look, this is a president who's just a couple inches to the left of center. Obama's not anywhere near as liberal as Johnson or Kennedy. Heck, on the health care issue, he's not as liberal as Richard Nixon. So why is the far right wing frothing at the mouth?
Because for all the progress we've made, there is still a strong undercurrent of racism in America and the election of Obama is bringing it to the surface. That's my hypothesis.
What's yours?
I disliked him (intensely) as a president, but I never thought of him as "evil." Mostly, I thought of him as insufficiently prepared intellectually for his position. I never doubted that he was doing what he did from a sincere belief that it was -- from his point of view -- best for the country. I'm confident that he loves his family, that he doesn't kick his dog, that he's a good friend to those he likes. If he wanted to sit down with me and share a beer, I'd do it and I wouldn't feel that I was sitting across from Satan Himself. He's a man with whom I have severe differences in outlook and with whom I'm unlikely to agree on much at all, but he's just a human being. Flawed like anyone else.
I didn't wish him dead at any time in his presidency. I didn't believe he was the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.
The level of vitriol I'm seeing leveled against Obama is troubling. Perhaps I'm misremembering, but the outrage of the left against the Bush administration never seemed to reach this fever pitch of loathing and outright hatred. Yeah, there was a fair amount of vocal anti-Bush sentiment out there, but it seemed less directed at the man than at his policies. The anti-Obama outrage seems more directed toward Obama himself.
I'm beginning to wonder if much of it isn't disguised racism coming to the surface. I find it difficult to fathom the loathing of some of the right wingers toward this man in any other way. They hate Obama not because of his political beliefs and agenda, but because of what he is: a non-white. I wonder how many of the birthers out there are actually more upset that Obama has African heritage than at any imagined discrepancy in his birth record. I wonder if people bringing automatic weapons to Obama rallies aren't substituting guns as a symbol for the lynching noose. I wonder if the preachers saying that God hates Obama and here's the proof in the bible aren't really more upset at his racial heritage. I wonder if "Obama is really a Muslim" isn't code for "OMFG! We have an uppity black man in the White House!"
No, I don't think all criticism of Obama is racially motivated. There are people who are as disturbed by Obama's policies as I was of Bush's. That's fine. I have no problem with that. Criticism of policy is legitimate -- heck, I don't like some of what Obama's done, though that's for the opposite reason the right wing doesn't like it. I feel Obama's been too centrist in his decisions. Actually, Obama's centrist leanings only make the vitriol coming from the far right even more suspicious: look, this is a president who's just a couple inches to the left of center. Obama's not anywhere near as liberal as Johnson or Kennedy. Heck, on the health care issue, he's not as liberal as Richard Nixon. So why is the far right wing frothing at the mouth?
Because for all the progress we've made, there is still a strong undercurrent of racism in America and the election of Obama is bringing it to the surface. That's my hypothesis.
What's yours?
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Yes! And
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For these people, the vitriol is because they simply can't process that fact. They were convinced on a gut level that Obama was going to lose, that he should have lost, and now that he's proved them wrong they're angry and bewildered, as we all are when reality makes a fool of us. It's easier to find some outlet for those feelings, no matter how absurd, than to accept that you were wrong all along.
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Dixiepubs
Conservatives don't believe in America.
The US has always had a range of people who were clinically insane. Race isn't only what lies at the focus of their psychosis, but it certainly one of the elements. I've generally pegged about 15% of the population. Those who knew -- inerrantly -- that the Bible justified US-style slavery. Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats in the 1948 election and the McCarthy-Era hatemongers who thought (and still think) they were being patriotic by slamming on Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra even as they failed miserably to find any Communists. George Wallace voters.
Most of the racial psychotics were in the Democratic Party up until Nixon's "Southern Strategy". The goppies successfully stole the Wallace voters who became the David Duke/Pat Buchanan wing of the Republicans, to their everlasting shame. The party who's 2008 campaign theme was "America First" now wants to secede from the country. The Dixicrats are now the Dixiepubs.
When Obama won, he not only had to overcome the voter suppression and outright voter fraud that the GOP has institutionalized. He also had to overcome the decidedly unCrhistian hatred from the Christian right. His 7% technical margin of victory is several percentage points higher, I strongly suspect.
But the sphincter conservatives are not happy. They will never be happy. They're nuts. High-functioning nuts, but insane nonetheless. Obama has done a fair job gingerly stepping through the minefield of racism and hatred, but he can never convince the clinically insane.
I've written about this before, so forgive the scattershot just-woken-up mini-essay. That this country's Puritan streak has a major downside has been known for a long time. Obama is in the right place at the right time.
I wish he'd done more to celebrate his victory and come down hard on the Bush/Cheney administration. He's trying to be a centrist, when simply fixing the problems of the last eight years will require some liberal solutions. Which he is loathe to use, thanks to a very conservative news media and a wish not to further inflame the hatemongers. I think this is the wrong way to go: He should come out swinging. So far, he hasn't. I still have hope for a feistier Obama setting the agenda, taking the suggestions of people with admirable track records and ignoring those who have been wrong for so long. We shall see.
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I remember the Clinton Years
Once upon a time, politicians fought tooth and nail to win elections and then worked with other party members to draft and pass legislation that would benefit the general population. Now it's all a football game mentality. Tackle them so hard that they'll never get up and play again.
I don't know who started it but I'd like it stopped and I note that the Republicans are the ones with the hate talk show sponsors.
Look at the difference, for example, between Glen Beck and Jon Stewart. Beck pretends not to be a comedian and stirs up unrest while Stewart claims to be a comedian and has been delivering better newscoverage lately than any of the major networks.
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To be fair, the same could have been said in 2000, and especially in 2004, following Bush's victories over Gore and Kerry.
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I don't think you're being at all paranoid by wondering just how much of the rabid and irrational attacks on President Obama are based in racism.
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Re: Dixiepubs
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I think because what we're seeing now as the "far right wing" is what used to be the "radical right bat-shit crazies." Over the past eight years, they got the idea that they are mainstream.
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I think this is just how our politics work, now. Maybe there are some people motivated primarily by racism, but the anti-obama stuff doesn't really look that unusual based on what we've seen since 1992.
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Remember how much hatred Bill "Bubba" Clinton drew? There was an obvious campaign of character-assassination against him. Subtract that level of hate from the level Obama is currently drawing, and there's the amount motivated by racism.
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2) I did actually see/hear a lot of violently vitriolic anti-Bushism. Granted, this may reflect more on the people I hang out with than on the left in general. :) There was a lot of outright hatred that really did surface as "he's the reincarnation of Hitler" and "I'd like to string him up." (And some even more violent reactions to Cheney.) I think the biggest difference was that it was said amongst friends, as obvious hyperbole, and was not "on display" in the same way as a gun on a shoulder at a rally is.
I have a theory, as well, and that is that while lefties like myself feel as vehement and are equally as capable of violent expression and violent thought, we... usually... have a check and balance system already in place against it. Most of us would honestly prefer a peaceful revolution because we believe in peace, and the right to disagree. On the flip side, there is a longer history of violent oppression connected with both racism and the far right... there is, in my opinion, a quicker willingness to "go to the gun" and to actually believe that force is an appropriate response.
That's my theory, and why I think it surfaces in such scary ways from the right in a way that it doesn't from the left, at least in this country. (In other countries there are certainly longstanding examples of violent oppression from governments supposedly espousing "leftist" politics, from Stalin to Castro, etc.) My experience of the left in this country is that we do not manipulate symbolism the way the right does, often to our own detriment, and often leading to a ceding of the "symbolic" ground to the right. Granted, one of the primary reasons for that is that the left tends to ground itself in a stronger tradition of "symbols are just that, and we need to look beyond them", but that doesn't help when the right is very happy to embrace symbolism and symbolic discourse, and manipulate it, and take advantage of the symbolic nature of the human brain.
I guess my theory comes down to that I see the left as having more scruples, in many settings. Not so much that we have less hatred and violent reactions, but that we have more scruples about letting that off its leash, and trotting it out in a public forum, and ACTING on it.
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It's racism, but also being opposed to the whole ethnic thing of his semi-African Christianity, and being of mixed-race. It is, in many ways, their worst nightmare come to life.
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I think that the tone and content of public discourse are getting increasingly idiotic, and what we're seeing is mostly just another iteration of that. Obviously there are some racists out there whose bigoted opinions override anything else in their lives, but I think the right-wing population on the whole is just acting stupider and less circumspect each year.
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Politics infuriates me enough that I try hard to ignore it, but furor over the President's recent school address makes me ask: if a man aces Harvard & then rises to the cream of the political crop, by what standard does a thinking person say "This person has no right to address my child" if it is not racially motivated?
Despite popular belief, racists do have some intellectuals amid their ranks & they have been thinking long & hard (& will continue to do so) about how to conduct their speech without pissing off a very large number of newly political black voters (or potentially violent protesters - people on both sides remember LA).