Courtesy of Associated Press/Kevin Lamarque, POOL
A few days ago, several republican Congress members figured President Obama's jobs speech wasn't worth showing up for. Besides, football season was kicking off and the Saints and Packers were up. Sen. David Vitter had a nice watch party set up and everything. So you could read the disappointment on their faces when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid dropped the hammer by scheduling a can't-miss roll call vote on the debt ceiling right after President Obama's speech. This kept Vitter, Jim DeMint and other GOP senators back in D.C., but House Reps. Paul Broun and Jim Walsh were no-shows. Jimmy didn't want to be "a prop of another one of the president’s speeches," so he picked up his shine box and went home. At least Broun got chewed out over Twitter for it.
Many republicans weren't happy to be there. Even John Boehner looked like he'd rather do something else. I wonder why -- after all, John was the one who told the president, "No, you can't make your speech on the date you want."
I can't remember any other president being disrespected to the degree President Obama has over these past 4 years. I can't remember Bill Clinton catching this much hell over the Monica Lewinsky mess. And while legislators may have held a low opinion of George Bush, they maintained professional decorum and didn't blatantly disrespect the president over such. But #44? Whoooo boy...
"Marxist," "socialist," "punk" "ZERO" "O-bambi." These are just a few of the names and descriptors thrown at Obama these past 4 years. At least no conservative has had the stones to call Obama "boy" in public, and no one would dare call him that old racist standby, "Nigger." That's the real-life equivalent of Godwinning the hell out of yourself and your political career. Didn't Lee Atwater have something to say about that?
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
No one can call him a "Nigger" and not be tarred and feathered by popular opinion right then and there, so the code words and dog whistles have become so oblique, words and issues you didn't think had much of a racial connotation are now being used in lieu of more "honest" racial epithets.
One of the earliest attacks on the president was the whole birth certificate conundrum, because the underlying theme was that Obama was an "Other," a non-American, something completely foreign from the norm established over a 232-year period. And in a way, he was outside of the American norm -- born of a white mother and African father in an American state considered "foreign" in many ways, educated in a foreign country and long rumored to be a member of a distinctly foreign religion, one considered America's "public enemy #1" at the moment.
Instead of calling the man a "Nigger," Teabaggers asked for his birth certificate, on the hopes that if he was faking his American-ness, he would be impeached, removed and replaced with a white male president as the natural order of things intended. The natural order stated that no Nigger could ever become president of these United States, and lo and behold, there was one in the Oval Office, and he wasn't on the janitorial staff.
When the birth certificate mess didn't pan out the way they hoped, the Teabaggers and GOP hangers-on who wanted to stay in their good graces resorted to absolute obstinance. Color-aroused anger became so great among congress members that one in particular, Rep. Joe Wilson, made history with an outburst during a presidential address to Congress: "You lie!"
These days, it seems like everyone wants to disrespect the president. If it isn't foreign leaders and news media outlets pushing the man around, then it's the usual suspects -- die-hard white conservative members of the "grassroots" Tea Party and other similar organizations. Even the people you'd figure would have Obama's back are now gunning for the man to be primaried within his own party. No disrespect intended to Digby's Hullabaloo or Firedoglake, but I do find it disturbing when you piss and moan about the guy just because he hasn't shoved a stack of hundreds or a pony under your pillow just yet.
They claim the man wants to destroy the country, yet by being obstinate fucks, the GOP nearly landed the U.S. in economic hot water by prolonging both the debt ceiling crisis and our current economic recession. The desire to see Obama walk away from the Oval Office in shame with failure hanging from his shoulders drives part of the effort to bleed the American government dry by a thousand tax cuts and to assign as many government functions to private corporate interests as quickly as possible. Make no mistake about it -- they want this man to fail. They want him to fail so hard that no other black person even thinks about approaching the title of "president" for the next generation or even longer. And thanks to this drive, millions of Americans are homeless, unemployed, without proper medical care and just generally hopeless.*
And that's what it all eventually boils down to, although no one in polite company will admit to it. As long as people claim they're not "racist" while participating in discriminatory speech, actions and thought that continues to power the nation's collective neurosis regarding ethnic relations between black and white society, they'll never admit to it. Thanks to continuous propaganda originally designed to assuage white consciences over slavery and give their poorer white counterparts a windmill to charge at, Don Quixote-style, America's eaten up the meme that blacks are inherently inferior, criminal and lascivious, that whites are the supreme default "race" in both America and around the world, and that no mere "Nigger" could -- or should -- hope to accomplish anything of note anywhere. And this meme was enforced with extreme prejudice, by low-information rubes and the downright ignorant, and by a government that codified inequality and injustice into law to appease the rubes and assholes.
It took a long time and the lives of countless many to get blacks on something resembling an equal footing. Even then, many whites didn't believe blacks were capable of achieving anything unless they were helped along by a "liberal" government they've grown to despise for that very reason. As long as the benefits enjoyed by Americans were restricted to the "right" kind of Americans, everything was peachy keen. Even today, an accomplished black man with considerable experience at his profession is seen by some as an "Affirmative Action" hire whose credentials are nowhere worth the value of any other white male hire. Many conservatives called Obama an "Affirmative Action" president.
Epic amounts of asshole/fuckwad behavior spawned a legion of batshit insane presidential candidates who made their bones coasting along the wave of Teabagger-stimulated stupidity and nativism. First, an Alaskan governor who staked a claim on the republican vice presidency based on sex appeal from frustrated 40 and 50-year old men and a collection of "take our country back" nutcases living in fear of the Negros running off with their goods, money and women, and then another genuinely insane woman who handed out promises of $2-gallon gas brought to Americans by more drilling and presumably more wars for natural resources and more environmental ruin. Other candidates include a slick and polished G.W. Bush-clone with a hypocritical affinity towards religious fervor and state-sanction retribution, a man whose entire premise is based on being an unrealistic gold bug and a pizza chain exec who's only there for "colour." Oh, and to make awful, awful video tributes.
Unfortunately, the current color aroused bout of collective insanity will end only when the goal of removing Obama from office has succeeded and a white president, preferably a white Republican with southern tendencies and a lack of empathy for poors, blacks and other detritus collecting at the bottom of America's social swimming pool. The red cloth will disappear from in front of the bull and all of the glass in the china shop will be swept up and thrown away. All will be well with the world once again, as far as many are concerned. Too many whites in this country believe a variant of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's opinion on the Dred Scott decision, circa 1857:
"It is difficult, at this day, to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the constitution was framed and adopted. But the public history of every European nation displays it in a manner too plain to be mistaken. They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior race, and altogether unfit to associate with the white races, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit."
As a black man, he has no rights which his fellow whites are bound to respect. As the president, he still has no rights that are worth respecting, as far as his fellow whites, conservatives particularly, are concerned.
*By now some conservative troll would chime "that enough hope and change for ya?" But because this is Different Day, Same Shit, trolls are an endangered species only found in worthwhile quantities on other blogs. And since the trolls know what's good for them, it will stay that way.
