Leaving aside the usual suspects--the terrorist factions round the world, the seething Middle East mountain and desert folk--who are President Obama's worst enemies? The Republicans who saw it as their mission to keep him from winning a second term but failed? Those 30 members of the House and the Tea Party now holding the country hostage over an already approved health care plan nicknamed after this president? The Religious Righteous? The far Left disillusioned? The whites-only-as-long-as-they're-not-women crowd?
Let's face it, the possibilities are endless. This president has enemies. Some of them would have been his enemies no matter where or what, but many others--too many others--didn't think to hate him until someone else told them to.
They're the ones I worry about. When someone like Larry Klayman, the head of Freedom Watch, tells a Tea Party crowd we have a president who "bows down to Allah" and then says, "I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent
revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president
leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees,
and to figuratively come out with his hands up," that is not a Martin Luther King-inspired call to reason, it's a call to insurrection.
There are people out there who will hear that and it will sound to them like a call to action, not against the government but against this one man. This man who, they've been led to believe, is so all-powerful he has managed to gain control of a country that is not even his. With that crowd he is and always will be unworthy, a usurper. He does not belong and the haters will never get over having that man, that black man, in the White House.
They'll deny that it's about race, but it's about race. A glance at any Right Wing website's comment section should be enough to scare the bejeesus out of anybody, including Barack Obama. They don't just want him gone, they want him dead.
Pick a demagogue--Palin, Cruz, Paul, McConnell, Bachmann, Gohmert. Any one of them. He or she, I guarantee you, will not repudiate a single word coming from the Right Wing Tea Party ranters. The ranters are useful. They spread the fear and bring in the votes. But if anything bad ever happens to this president, those agitators fueling the fire will be shocked. . .shocked, I tell you!. . .that something like this could happen. They will not have seen this coming.
But we will have. The haters are in a rage over Obama's win of a second term. Now the cries for impeachment, the only other legal choice, are swirling. If that doesn't work--and it won't--what then? The foaming masses have been conditioned to go after Obama, to stop him, no matter what it takes. In their minds something must be done.
And it only takes one.
I've always been nervous about the vulnerability of our presidents. I'll never forget Kennedy's assassination. But with Obama, the hatred is particularly vile and I think dangerous. I worry about him.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely about race and hate...and asshats getting their 15 minutes of fame at the expense of the average American.
ReplyDeleteIt's those 15-minute-asshats who scare me most. They'll do anything for attention, and sometimes the bigger the better.
ReplyDeleteThe Jackboots came and squashed OWS like a bug...Wall street terrorism...Where are the Jackboots when we need them? If anyone thought that racism was a thing of the past is sorely mistaken...I am still called a "n-lover"...and they would be correct...My grandson is blended and beautiful...He will be taught about the evils of racism, and bigotry...the lessons have begun in the school yard, and he is doing just fine...
ReplyDeleteSad that racism has reared it's ugly head again. It's always been a battle but this bunch has brought it to the fore again, so I'm all for fighting them up front and out loud. It is what it is and we need to stop pretending it's otherwise.
ReplyDeleteI love "blended and beautiful". We're all blended, aren't we? If it's true that we all come from a single female in Africa, then the racists are trying to eat their own. Typical.
The problem is that most of them can't even count to fifteen, so they don't know when their moment is over and it's time to shut up.
ReplyDeleteThe Klaymans and others like him are just too chickenshit to say the words they really want to use against the President - we all know what those words are.
ReplyDeleteI always considered myself a "mutt"...blended, not shaken...or stirred...
ReplyDeleteAnd people want to know why there are "No Free Speech Zones" when the Secret Service is present.
ReplyDeleteThere is no difference in these "racist hypocrites"-than the ones from the 50's & 60's. They are deranged & freaking out because there is a Black family in the WH. Never in their lifetime they thought this would happen-& they would like to see it go back to the days of slavery & jim crow. Just maybe they need to take a "slow boat to China"-to get away from the U.S.& its melting pot.
ReplyDeleteI fear what comes after Obama. I want to be out of the country by then.
ReplyDeleteas are my 4 multiracial kids and 4 grandkids who are even more multiracial-due to their parents all being multiracial
ReplyDeleteyou should listen to some of the US radio programs pre WWII which were just as fascist as ones heard in Germany
ReplyDeleteIndeed. Many American politicians and business people thought Hitler was swell (and were anti-Semites). Among them Prentice Bush (George W's granddaddy), Henry Ford, etc.
ReplyDeleteI think it adds character to their persons and beauty to their exteriors...
ReplyDeleteand don't forget the biggest American hero(and I am having a senior moment trying to remember his name) who flew across the Atlantic solo. He was all for Fascist Germany, until Japan bombed Peral Harbor
ReplyDeleteLindbergh.
ReplyDeletethank you
ReplyDelete