Daily Archives: February 24, 2012

Here we go again, Obama Derangement Syndrome is in full effect with the current crop of GOP presidential candidates…

The Washington Post – E.J. Dionne, Jr.

They say that President Obama is a Muslim, but if he isn’t, he’s a secularist who is waging war on religion. On some days he’s a Nazi, but on most others he’s merely a socialist. His especially creative opponents see him as having a “Kenyan anti-colonial worldview,” while the less adventurous say that he’s an elitist who spent too much time in Cambridge, Hyde Park and other excessively academic precincts.

Whatever our president is, he is never allowed to be a garden-variety American who plays basketball and golf, has a remarkably old-fashioned family life and, in the manner we regularly recommend to our kids, got ahead by getting a good education.

Please forgive this outburst. It’s simply astonishing that a man in his fourth year as our president continues to be the object of the most extraordinary paranoid fantasies. A significant part of his opposition still cannot accept that Obama is a rather moderate politician quite conventional in his tastes and his interests. And now that the economy is improving, short-circuiting easy criticisms, Obama’s adversaries are reheating all the old tropes and cliches and slanders.

True, some of this is driven by cable television (a venue in which I acknowledge regularly participating). Attacks designed to gin up the conservative base are quickly recycled to gin up outrage within Obama’s own base. Moreover, Obama is not the first president caught up in the rank unpleasantness of this particularly unforgiving political moment. A quick Google search will unearth references to George W. Bush as a “Nazi,” and Bill Clinton’s Republican opponents went so far as to impeach him in a shameful episode of extreme partisanship.

On those Hitler metaphors: Can we please agree to a voluntary cross-party ban on invoking the Fuhrer in the context of American politics? Only dictators who commit genocide against millions qualify for this odious comparison. It trivializes Hitler’s crimes to use Nazi references as everyday epithets.

Continue reading here…

Related articles

• Santorum Compares Obama to Hitler, Then Denies Comparing Obama to Hitler (littlegreenfootballs.com)
• On the President As Alien (themoderatevoice.com)
• The American Right And The Demonization Of Barack Obama (outsidethebeltway.com)
• Why Won’t The GOP Honor An American Victory? (kaystreet.wordpress.com)
• Who is Obama? (politicalwire.com)
• E. J. Dionne, Jr: Is Obama A Muslim Or A Secularist Warring Against Religion? Right Can’t Decide (alan.com)