Highway Ramblings Brought To You By The Tea Party
I spent last week in a seminar to learn the ins and outs for an online database application for a client that I’m working with. The seminar was held in a little town about an hour’s train ride outside of New York City and very close to Connecticut. The misses and I drove the one thousand miles one way trip with our five year old son and made the trip a working vacation. She had never been to the east coast and I hadn’t spent much time their either so we were going to take full advantage of this opportunity.
The seminar was very successful. I learned a considerable appreciation for the online application I went to study and got more than a few ideals about future database application development. The misses and son spent their time exploring the area, chasing chipmunks, and studying a few artificial waterfalls at the resort we were staying. We all enjoyed ourselves and considered the trip a very successful one.
Saturday morning we started on the long drive home. While traveling through Pennsylvania along interstate 78 heading west, we saw a political billboard along the side of the highway that briefly summed up the record of President Obama as making the American people less free, endorsing bigger government, and responsible for fifteen percent “real” unemployment. The misses and I had to laugh at the sign and wondered what could anybody point to that would support the contention that Mr. Obama made the American people less free now than they were three years ago. We wondered what would has Mr. Obama done that has made the American government bigger than it was three years ago. We found the contention that Mr. Obama was responsible for the current unemployment rate dubious considering the fact that when Mr. Obama took over the reins of the country the American people were in the middle of an economic freefall resulting from the policies enacted from the previous administration. Blaming Mr. Obama for the unemployment rate would be akin to blaming firemen for the fire that burned the building down.
The sign went on to say that it was paid for by the local tea party. I just knew I had my inspiration for my next article. But by the time we read the sign we were passed it, traveling home at the illegal rate of eighty five miles per hour in a sixty five zone. I would’ve liked to have taken a picture of the sign. But it would have been miles before we would come to our next exit. With so many miles of travel ahead of us, turning around was not even close to being an option. I would look on the internet to find an image of the sign. Unfortunately, I never did find an image of it.
As we traveled down the highway the misses and I thought about what the country would be like if the tea party ran things. The tea party, with its single minded focus on cutting taxes and keeping government from being able to do much of anything to help support the development of our national infrastructure. The misses actually summed it up very well. If the nation followed a tea party mindset, chances are we wouldn’t have our interstate system that enabled us to travel so quickly and easily. The government would have never made the investment into the nation’s interstate highway system that so many people take for granted. We would still be stuck on a network of local roads with varying standards of design and maintenance.
One thing that made our travel so easy and painless was the navigation application that came with our android phone. We entered our destination into the phone and the global positioning system that the government developed guided us directly to where we wanted to go without a single wrong turn, just as long as you paid attention to the instructions the device was giving. And when you did happen to make a wrong turn, the device quickly calculated a new route to put you on track.
The billboard was gone. But I was going to use the internet to see if I could find a copy of the sign left by somebody else. Regardless, I would use the internet to let other people know how I felt about the sign and about the tea party. The same people who talk about getting government out of their lives would be using the same internet made possible by the government to tell people that the government needs to be made smaller and ineffective, so that the developments that would take us further into the future would be made totally unlikely to ever see the light of day. The tea party would prefer to dismantle our educational system that would make all the thinkers, scientists, dreamers, and the rest of us that make it possible for us to make the progress to keep us forever moving forward.
The sign reminded us that we need to keep working and making sure that government, the collective of people who come together to assure that the welfare of the nation is protected and developed to its fullest potential possible, is protected from people who don’t have the vision to see the benefits of investing into the future as a nation. Without the government the seminar that I attended would not have been possible. The highway system, the internet, the global positioning system, and many other things wouldn’t be possible if our government didn’t do its part to make progress possible. No corporation could ever do what our government has done.
To add just one more caveat to the mix, it was a federal government that made it possible for a couple of black people to pack their son into a car and travel across the country with some semblance of security that they would arrive safely to participate in the development of database applications as entrepreneurs for a fledgling software company. While the system is far from fair, without the federal government the second class status of black people would be even worse than it is now. It’s the government that initiated the social economic change that is helping to dismantle the bigotry that would have black people exist at white people’s property. The way a lot of people in the tea party operate, their against that kind of progress as well.
It Takes A Community To Raise A President
Anybody who reads this blog on a regular basis should know I can be pretty critical of President Barack Obama. Mr. Obama has been very careful to keep the black community at arm’s length so as not to give his political opponents any reason to bring race into the picture. Mr. Obama will deny that his race is a factor for any of the criticism and outright hatred that many of his constituents have for him. It’s understandable. In politics, it would be easy to say that a black man that embraces black people will be anti white.
When asked for his opinion on the Trayvon Martin case, Mr. Obama said that if he had a son he’d look like the slain teenager. Some conservatives were quick to use that comment as evidence that Mr. Obama doesn’t care for white teenagers. The same thing happened when Mr. Obama tried to put accusations of racism against white people aside when he addressed his relationship with his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In his speech, he talked about the racism he witnessed from his grandmother who he described as a typical white person. Many of his critics were quick to say that Mr. Obama threw his grandmother under his bus. This man can’t say anything about race without somebody calling him racist.
In order to give Mr. Obama some slack from the race factor, many people in the black community were willing to give Mr. Obama a pass from addressing the needs of the black community. Most black people were confident that Mr. Obama would do what’s best for the black community without being asked for assurances or for an understanding what his plan would be. He was a shoe in to win the black vote after all. Wasn’t he one of us? Didn’t he have black skin? So did Clarence Thomas and you see where that got us.
Nevertheless, the black community voted for Mr. Obama in droves and we kept our questions and concerns to ourselves. But that only helped to lead Mr. Obama astray. Instead of keeping his focus on our communities, his attention was elsewhere as he did his best to keep the assurances he gave to others around the nation and throughout the world. Mr. Obama bent over backwards to try and win favor from his conservative opponents. When the conservatives were making their pact to deny Mr. Obama anything that could be construed as a success, Mr. Obama was trying his best to gain the favor of conservative constituents by compromising time and time again with people who refused to compromise.
But by letting Mr. Obama off the hook and free to pursue the favor of conservatives who demanded concession after concession before saying no to everything, we left Mr. Obama to wander away from his political base in a fruitless appeal for bipartisanship with people who would rather drive the country to ruin in order to make Mr. Obama look like a failure than agree with him on anything that would improve the national welfare.
Mr. Obama seems to have awakened from his delusion that conservative politicians can be reasoned with. He now recognizes the fact that his political future and the future of the country depends on him taking a harder line on the people trying their best to sabotage his leadership. Mr. Obama now understands that it is naïve to think that he can negotiate with people who want him to fail at any and all cost.
Just like Mr. Obama has awakened from his slumber, the black community needs to awake from its slumber as well. If people had made sure that Mr. Obama focused his attention on the things that were important to the black community like jobs and the protection of educational opportunities and unemployment benefits while the country works through its malaise. It’s unfortunate that healthcare reform was done without a single payer option. But now that conservatives have challenged the reform in its current iteration, if it gets rejected maybe Mr. Obama would push for it on a second round. All of those things would help people in the black community as well as people who need help throughout the country.
If the black community wants to help Mr. Obama have a successful presidency, the black community needs to be willing to criticize Mr. Obama when he goes off course from his base. Staying mum as he goes down what we feel is the wrong path isn’t helping. The people who may care most about him having a successful shouldn’t be afraid to speak up and give him some feedback on what we see going down in the political arena. If we showed something that resembled a political backbone, maybe he wouldn’t be so quick to turn a back on his base to win the political favor of others.
Criticizing Mr. Obama when he fails to protect our interest is not necessarily an automatic condemnation. It ranks right up there when a parent criticizes a child or a supervisor criticizes an employee. Feedback should be welcomed in a relationship that remains respectful for everyone concerned. When Mr. Obama fails to represent us, when he fails to respect us along with the rest of his constituencies and we fail to bring that fact to his attention, we have no one but ourselves to blame for his lack of concern for us.
Mr. Obama is up for reelection and the black community, along with the Hispanic community, along with the female community, along with the Jewish community, along with the gay and lesbian community, along with the white community, along with the business community, and every other community, has interests that should be voiced and protected.
Punishing The Poor
Conservative presidential hopeful Mitt Romney frequently defends himself against the accusation that he is just too wealthy to understand what common folk are going through in these economic hard times. Indeed, the quarter billion dollar man does seem to be insensitive to people who are struggling financially. This is the man that says that he doesn’t care about poor people because they already have plenty of safety nets, the same safety nets that he wants to cut if given the opportunity. He has advocated for the automobile industry to go bankrupt and let the nation’s economy run the risk of losing way more than a million jobs.
Mitt Romney once said that people should be allowed to lose their houses so that deep pocket investors could buy them and make even more huge profits. He says that if high school graduates want to go to college or start a business in these tough times they should borrow the money from their parents, the same parents that he says should lose their jobs and lose their houses. Even though he was responsible for putting together a semi universal healthcare package for Massachusetts, he would prefer to deny the same package for the nation and wants to leave the insurance market alone so corporations can continue to make profits and deny people coverage in their time of need. This is the man who said corporations are people too.
Mr. Romney often defends himself with the retort that he’s simply not going to apologize for his father’s success and his detractors are simply practicing the politics of envy. The assumption is that his opponents just don’t like rich people or the successful. But that’s just a less than clever ruse to hide the fact that he really doesn’t have the capacity to understand what it really means for the average joe to struggle in order to make ends meet.
Mr. Romney doesn’t have to apologize for his father’s success or his grandfather’s success or even his own. Being financially successful isn’t an automatic handicap that prevents compassion towards people who are less fortunate. Being rich doesn’t seem to impede Warren Buffet’s ability to understand what others are going through. Being successful doesn’t seem to keep George Clooney from understanding the plight of people who are not successful. So the argument that Mitt Romney has to apologize for being rich and successful or has to apologize for being the son of somebody who was rich and successful just doesn’t seem to cut it. It’s not an excuse for being out of touch and totally deaf to people who need help.
In a roundabout way, Mr. Romney says that he shouldn’t be punished for being rich. I could not agree more. Being rich and successful is a blessing that should not be shunned, envied, or discouraged. Being successful and wealthy is a reward for somebody’s hard work. Being rich should never be used as an excuse to reject anyone. But at the same time, being poor or a business failure shouldn’t be seen as a reason to punish people either.
The direction our social economic culture is going we are moving away from a model that is better suited to assure that even the most humble of us will have opportunities to be lifted out of poverty to a model where people have to be wealthy and successful in order to have any security that they will not suffer undue hardship if things take a turn for the worse. These days, a visit to the doctor’s office could detect an anomaly that will be forever used to deny future healthcare insurance coverage under the justification that it is a pre existing condition. Government grants that would help people better afford college are being threatened by budget cuts meant to give everybody tax cuts and most people understand that when there is talk about tax cuts for everyone, the wealthy will benefit the most.
Mitt Romney sounds like the type of man that would be more prompt to reward the wealthy with even more wealth than help the poor with little or no wealth. As President, he would focus his energy on giving people more of an incentive to be wealthy and successful, as if being wealthy and successful isn’t its own reward. The more people make, the less they are required to contribute in order to help others who are not successful. The less somebody makes the less help they should receive from the social collective. Mr. Romney doesn’t want to do anything to encourage anyone, to give anybody the impression, that if they don’t have the resources to get ahead on their own merit that there would still be opportunities available for them.
In that respect, Mr. Romney advocates punishing people for being poor. If you get sick and don’t have the proper healthcare coverage, that’s just too bad and so sad. If you lose your job and don’t have enough money saved for all those rainy days you have to go through in order to find another job, you should lose your house so that somebody with the winds of success in their sails can take advantage of your hard luck. These are the things that Mr. Romney have said, not because he is rich, but because he really has no interest in doing anything that would help people who are stumbling and don’t have the resources to get through their troubles without some kind of assistance.
Mr. Romney might want to dismiss his political opponents as nothing but haters because he’s wealthy. But the fact that he dismisses people concerns with such contempt only reinforces the belief that he could not care less about what these people are feeling and their fears. As far as he’s concerned, he has nothing to apologize for. It all boils down to the fact that what he really cares about is making sure that the people who are successful will continue to enjoy their success. Success will be rewarded. But on the flipside, being poor will be punished.
Questions Of Leadership
President Barack Obama is under attack for politicizing the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Before Mr. Obama ever set foot in the White House as our commander in chief, people were trying to paint him as too weak to keep the country safe. Mitt Romney has often criticized the President for having an ineffective foreign policy, claiming that the President travels around the world to foreign countries apologizing on behalf of the United States and appeasing terrorist, the very people who are moving heaven and hell to hurt us.
To counter the claim that his foreign policy is worthless, Mr. Obama has used the one year anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the attacks on September 11th that destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center and heavily damaged the Pentagon, to remind people that it was his leadership that led to the United States’ greatest foreign policy triumph. And now, the opponents say that Mr. Obama is not playing fair and is trying to take credit for something that Mr. Romney claims even somebody as politically feeble as Jimmy Carter would have done.
First, everything the President does revolve around politics. If the President gets a dog it becomes a political issue. If the President takes his wife to a play in New York’s Times Square it becomes a political issue. If the President finds himself ahead of schedule and takes time to get a haircut his opponents are ready to pounce. And if he as so much grabs a burger, people will point to his potentially poor dietary choice as an example of how the people shouldn’t trust him to make the hard choices to keep us safe. Everything the President does can and will be used against him in a court of public opinion.
If people stand ready to use everything he does against him, it is only fair that he can use everything he does to support his brand. It’s why the guy who wears the title of President when the Berlin Wall comes down takes credit for the fall of the wall. It’s why the commander in chief will allow somebody to put up a “mission accomplish” banner on the front windshield of an aircraft carrier to proclaim premature success for his rash decision to go to war. If the President doesn’t toot his own horn once in a while, who will?
When he campaigned for the White House then Senator Obama made it clear that he would make the elimination of Osama a top priority if he was elected. Mr. Bush admitted that he didn’t care to look for the puppet master behind the greatest terrorist attack against the United States. Mr. Obama said he would finish the job left by his predecessor. At the same time, Mr. Romney said he wouldn’t waste America’s resources in a hunt for a single man and didn’t think it should be a priority. Mr. Obama won the election and kept his word, albeit very quietly. He rarely made a public statement filled with bravado about how tough he would be on America’s enemies.
America didn’t just happen on bin Laden. It took an intelligence network and the cooperation of many people around the world, American personnel and people from many other countries, to find him. That’s evidence of a foreign policy. In order to effectively run and maintain that network there had to be resources in place to sustain that network, resources that other people would not commit because they didn’t think his capture was important.
Finding the terrorist was just one of the first steps. Next, a plan had to be concocted to deal with him. More resources were expended to train the people who were going to go in and get him. Navy Seal Team Six needed to have every advantage to assure their success. Intelligence had to be gathered to uncover every bit of information related to the compound where Osama was staying. That information was used to recreate a simulation compound so that the team could rehearse their infiltration procedure. Intelligence continued to be gathered in order to determine the best time to spring the assault. And all of that had to happen with the approval and under the direction of the President. It didn’t happen in a vacuum.
Now, Jimmy Carter made a similar call as President when Iranian students took over the American embassy in Iran and took sixty six Americans hostage back in 1979. When diplomacy failed to win the release of the hostages, Mr. Carter gave the military his blessing to attempt a rescue. In April of 1980 Operation Eagle Claw failed miserably with the death of eight American servicemen and one Iranian civilian when a United States helicopter crashed into a C-130 Hercules transport plane.
Mr. Carter made the call to go into hostile territory on a daring mission and it failed. He paid a considerable political price for that decision. The idea that Mr. Carter deserves scorn for the failure of the people he led in a crisis situation is a part of politics. If he had succeeded, things would have been much different. He knew what the risk were and pulled that trigger regardless. It was a tough decision that was met with tough luck. But that’s politics when you’re the President.
Mr. Carter’s failure only put more pressure on Mr. Obama when he was faced with a similar decision. Failure would be a serious albatross that would impact the political future for not just Mr. Obama but the entire Democratic Party. People already assume that conservatives are better at keeping America safe and that liberals are incompetent when it comes to commanding our military. If Mr. Obama’s decisions proved disastrous, it would have only cemented that political perception and opponents would have taken advantage of it. Many of his advisers suggested that he not give the go ahead. Mr. Obama had to weigh the odds. In the end, he pulled the trigger and the mission was accomplished, finally.
Republican pundits are now saying that the assassination of bin Laden was such a unifying accomplishment for the nation that it should be off limits. A year ago, even the Republicans who would rather stand up during a presidential address and yell that the President was a liar had to give Mr. Obama his props for a job well done. It was a remarkable feat of leadership. But now it’s nothing special, anybody would have done it, anybody but President Bush that is.
Conservative political pundit Ed Gillespie went on the Sunday morning political talk shows and said that Mr. Obama was trying to use the accomplishment of the death of bin Laden as a wedge issue against the conservatives and that was indicative of him trying to divide the country. The death of bin Laden was a unifying event and now that he wants to use it as a proof of his leadership was now dividing us. So the assumption is that anything that the President points to as proof of how he brought a politically divided country together with his leadership is politically divisive. There’s just bizarre logic that only makes sense on opposite day.
Another pundit said that as a leader, Mr. Obama shouldn’t be trying to take credit for the successes of the people he leads. The only thing a good leader should be taking is the responsibility for failure. That’s why so many people who lead corporations get paid tens of millions of dollars in an annual compensation package. They never take credit for leading a company to financial success. They only take credit for leading a company to financial ruin. It’s just more nonsense to hold Mr. Obama to a different standard.
The assassination of bin Laden was an achievement that every American can enjoy. The fact that it was Mr. Obama that led the country to that accomplishment as he said he would do was something that he can take great pride in. The people who feel that this now gives Mr. Obama unfair proof of his ability to lead and defend himself against their accusations that he’s incompetent is just the way things fall in politics.
Good job Mr. Obama! If your opponents want to criticize you as being a poor leader when it comes to foreign policy, that’s going to be pretty hard to do with Osama’s demise under your belt. But that won’t mean they won’t try. Don’t let your opponents define the limits of what is and what’s not admissible as a political issue. Don’t let them take this one away from you.
Quick Notes 201205
Monday, May 14, 2012
The First Gay President
The latest Newsweek Magazine cover declares Mr. Obama the first gay President.
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Arizona Defunds Planned Parenthood
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signs into law a bill that bans public funding of Planned Parenthood in order to assure that no tax money is used to fund abortions.
Friday, May 4, 2012
Jobless Rate Continues To Fall
Although disappointing with only 115 thousand jobs added, the unemployment rate continues to fall down to 8.1 percent.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Happy Anniversary Osama!!!
We’re coming up on the one year anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s assassination!
Gary Stein Got What He Wanted
Staff Sergeant Gary Stein will get an other than honorable discharge and lose most of his benefits for violating the policies of the United States Marine Corp. Mr. Stein is being discharged for his high profile and public criticism of his boss, President Barack Obama, on Facebook. Mr. Stein used his Facebook page to express his contempt for his commander in chief with statements like “screw Obama” and openly admitting that he would refuse an order from the President and images that went so far as to compare Mr. Obama to a jackass. He later amended his statement to say that he wouldn’t follow an unlawful order of the President. But his contempt was still very much evident.
The Marines Corp say that Mr. Stein was repeatedly warned about his posts. While troops are encouraged to carry out their obligations of citizenship and are allowed to express their personal opinion on political issues and candidates and issues, they cannot take part in any political activities as official representatives of the military. Mr. Stein included a disclaimer on his posts that said that what people read was his personal opinion and not the opinion of the Marine Corp. So in all fairness he was doing nothing more than exercising his constitutionally protected freedom of speech. So Mr. Stein was able to avoid a court martial. But unfortunately for him, while freedom of speech meant that he wouldn’t have to face time in jail, it doesn’t mean immunity from any reprisals for expressing his rage of his employer.
After serving the Marine Corp for more than nine years, Mr. Stein will get an other than honorable discharge and lose most of the benefits that come with military service. Mr. Stein said he loved being a Marine and enjoyed his career as a military meteorologist. He just didn’t love it enough to keep his opinion in check and express his displeasure with Mr. Obama in a more respectful manner. He claims that all he was doing was expressing his freedom of speech. But he forgot that the military also has its own right to express its freedom of speech.
What better way for the military to let the world know that it doesn’t care for rather over the top dissention of the commander in chief than to fire people who engage in such activity? And it’s not like Mr. Stein was just yanked out of his uniform the first time somebody caught wind of his expression. He was warned and he was warned repeatedly. He made the choice to continue down a path that would pretty much guarantee a confrontation.
Mr. Stein named his Facebook page, Armed Forces Tea Party. While it’s not clear if he was an official member of the tea party, he appears to have made a connection nevertheless. He probably felt that his affiliation with an organization so vociferous in its opposition to Mr. Obama would give him ample protection to make the suggestion that Mr. Obama was a jackass. The only problem was that most of the people in the tea party who carried signs saying that Mr. Obama was a lying African and should go back to Kenya didn’t work for Mr. Obama. Mr. Stein did. He knew that he was treading in thin ice and yet he continued to press forward. It was inevitable that the amount of force he was using to push the issue would eventually meet sufficient opposing force that would make him regret his actions.
I have never served in the Marine Corp so I cannot speak from experience or with inside knowledge, but I do believe that it’s a given that the chain of command is highly valued and protected by every branch of the military. People who serve and openly challenge their superiors do so at their own peril. It doesn’t matter if an individual’s actions were unintentional or purposeful the military has an obligation to keep discipline and order. Allowing a subordinate to undermine respect for their superiors cannot be good for the smooth operation of organizations charged with the protection of our national security. Any challenge to discipline and order should be met with enough corrective action to discourage similar behavior in the future.
Mr. Stein believes he is being made an example to others. I couldn’t agree more. Other people in military service should think twice before they openly criticize any of their superiors with contempt and loathing, let alone the President. Besides it’s only fair. Mr. Stein made Mr. Obama an example of his disrespect. It wasn’t like Mr. Obama had a history of making unlawful or unreasonable orders to the military. What prompted him to suddenly voice his need to hold Mr. Obama to a standard that he didn’t hold for Mr. Obama’s predecessor President George Bush Jr.?
All things considered it looks like Mr. Stein brought his premature discharge on himself. Now he wants to cry foul and talk about regretting his choices. Maybe he’s learned from his ordeal. Too bad the price of learning was so high. He should look at the bright side now. Once his termination is complete, he will be free to exercise his freedom of speech without the fear of losing his job that he already lost. Isn’t that what he wanted, at least more than he wanted his career.
Sleight Of Hand
According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington nonprofit organization that examined a series of newspaper, television, radio, and Web outlets, President Barack Obama suffered from more negative news coverage than any of the candidates in the brutal and long winded Republican primaries. The study went so far to conclude that Mr. Obama did not enjoy a single week where his favorable treatment was more than the negative treatment. He was heavily criticized by the entire Republican field on a variety of issues that directly linked the President to happenings with negative connotations such as rising gas prices, high unemployment, and renewed criticism about the yet to be fully implemented healthcare reform.
When the Obama administration would try to defend its position on the variety of topics, that message was drowned out by the sheer volume of coverage surrounding the conservative candidates and the discipline the candidates showed when they tied their individual campaign message to the theme that anyone would be better as President than Mr. Obama. While Mr. Obama is the incumbent for the White House, the overall perception is that Mr. Obama is more like just another candidate unproven in his ability to govern and mistrusted to lead as the commander in chief despite the fact that he has been leading as the President for the past three years. This message was drilled home especially after Mr. Obama’s open microphone comment picked up when he was telling his Russian counterpart that he would have more flexibility after the election. Mitt Romney seized on this incident and tried to convince people that Mr. Obama was planning to sell the country out to what he referred to as our sworn foes.
The biggest problem for Mr. Obama is that it doesn’t take much to create a negative issue around him. Some people are still thick in the delusion that Mr. Obama is not a citizen of the country and faked his Hawaii birth certificate because somebody in some government agency somewhere slept instead of pulling out all the stops to authenticate the fact that Mr. Obama was indeed qualified to be President of the United States. Mr. Obama is still fighting suspicions that he’s a Muslim in cahoots with terrorists and is waiting for just the right opportunity to surrender America to people who hate us because we have the freedom to give up our freedoms in the irrational pursuit of people who hate our freedoms.
We’ve been told that our President hates our freedom the first time he wanted the job to lead us. Now we are told that he hates successful businesses and businesspeople. We are told that Mr. Obama hates success even though he succeeded in becoming President. We are told that our President is out to take away our right to bear arms even though as President he has not implemented a single policy that endangers our rights to own guns. We are told that Mr. Obama goes around apologizing to the world for America being America, and even though no one can point to a single apology, a lot of people have bought into the contention hook, line, and sinker.
When Mr. Obama says a murdered black teenager would look like him if he had a son, conservatives pounce and call Mr. Obama a racist. When Mr. Obama calls a woman demonized by conservatives as a slut and prostitute because she wants to exercise her right to free speech, conservatives pounce and call Mr. Obama a hypocrite for not calling Sarah Palin after she was attacked be liberals. But those same people never said Ms. Palin should apologize to the President for making insinuations that Mr. Obama is a terrorist, is creating death panels with his healthcare reform, or for a number of accusations against Mr. Obama and Michelle Obama that were unfounded or untrue.
Now that the Republican primaries are just about over and Mr. Romney is unofficially the conservative rival for the White House, all the money that was poured into the nasty, negative, campaigns to win against people who share a common political ideology and for the most part can accept each other as kindred political souls, all the money that went into treating each other like conservative dirt and can be directed against the President, the man many of us are ready to believe should have never been in the White House for whatever reason or another.
Some of the people who were running for the conservative nomination were primarily doing so with the blessing of a single financial donor. Thanks to the Supreme Court decision that has allowed people and corporations to put unlimited financial backing behind a campaigner through the sleight of hand of Super PAC donations, people who financed the conservative political civil war that has yet to officially declare Mr. Romney the winner, all that money can now be turned against the incumbent in a unified assault to fulfill the ultimate conservative dream to make Mr. Obama’s a one term presidency. Mr. Obama has had his fair share of financial backers, but the money that Mr. Obama’s reelection campaign has raised pales in comparison to the number of people with really dip pockets willing to write an eight figure check to make sure Mr. Obama loses. Soon, rumors of an illegitimate birth certificate and accusations of being an undercover terrorist will be given new life nourished by a financial tsunami that will be unlike anything we have seen in our politics before.
Mr. Obama’s reelection campaign is taking up the gauntlet thrown down by the conservative challengers. Just about any incumbent with a passion for power probably would. But if people think Mr. Obama has weathered negativity before, they haven’t seen anything yet. A financial tsunami like no other is coming. A perfect storm of political differences, personal loathing, and a Supreme Court decision that has opened the flood gates of corporate money has combined to make the future of politics like nothing we’ve seen before. The media negativity that Mr. Obama has seen to date is nothing like what’s coming.
Just a Quick Note
The latest Newsweek Magazine cover declares Mr. Obama the first gay President.
Peace
