The Dec.21 issue of The Transcript has a letter from me called "The Power of Lies". As if to illustrate when I was saying, my letter was followed by one parroting the cliche litany of rightist lies against President Obama: that he's divisive, a racist, a Muslim, a Socialist, the worst President, yadda yadda yadda. Let's go over these one by one.
Obama has never said or done anything truly divisive, only in the captious craws of rightists. He stayed above race and strove to reach out, but his efforts were rebuffed and subjected to distortion and spin. Any division is purely in the minds of those who chose to divide themselves. And by comparison, there's someone with a cockatoo hairdo who is divisive, calculatedly so.
Similarly, there's no evidence of Obama being racist! To the disappointment of more radical Blacks, like Tavis Smiley and Michael Eric Dyson, he was not the Black President, but a President who happened to be Black. (This alone was enough to annoy the haters.) The Black Community got no special goodies from him as some hoped (and resenters feared.)
Those who call Obama a racist are merely projecting. And conveniently forgetting which real estate mogul was sued by the Justice Department for not renting to Black people. Hint: It's the same guy who said that Black people live in Hell and have NO jobs and NO education. (Wrong!) Who said that violent crime is at a record high. (Wrong!) And who called for a return to racial profiling and illegal stop & frisk. There's your racist!
And let's not forget the ugly racist backlash spawned by the mere election of a Black man. Like the Tea Party signs depicting Obama as a monkey or as an African witch doctor with a bone through his nose. Yeah, HE was the racist! Or the whole frantic Birther nonsense, whose leading proponent is well known to all.
As for turning America Socialist, the word has become a catchall for "Anything I don't like" and has thus lost all meaning. I'll take the word of a real Socialist, Bernie Sanders, who finds Obama's economic policies insufficiently progressive and overly deferential to Big Money interests. Just like a Republican.
Accusing Obama of being a Muslim or even of being favorable to jihadism doesn't square with the facts. Real Muslims don't eat pork, drink beer, or claim to be Christian. And just ask ISIS, whom he's drone attacked thousands of times, how much of an ally he's been to them.
And it takes a real dislocation from reality to say Obama is the worst President. Really? Did he start an unnecessary war under false pretenses? No? Then he's off the hook for that accusation. Did his neglect of Wall Street shenanigans lead to an economic collapse, or did he in fact pull us out of the one created by his allegedly better predecessor? Looks like Obama was actually good, no thanks to the GOP and their malicious plans.
And I don't know whether to laugh or to retch when I read we should give Agent Orange a chance, just like Obama was given a chance. Oh stop it! You mean like how Mitch McConnell said from the start that their #1 priority was making Obama a one-term President? Like how the GOP did their level worst to obstruct absolutely everything he did? After that, don't be surprised if the rest of us want to give your boy the exact same chance. Especially after his campaign was an appeal to the worst in people, and was in fact Fascist in all but name. That deserves repudiation and resistance, never a chance.
Sincerely,
Stephen Van Eck
Rushville, PA