Political discourse has reached a vile and disgusting low. The view from Conservatives is that Obama and the Democrats are fully ramped up to have the government take over every aspect of the lives of American citizens. In just a few hundred days, huge segments of the insurance sector are now controlled by the government, including the auto industry and banks. The last piece of the puzzle for total control is health care. A majority of Americans don't want nationalized heath care, or nationalized anything.A battle raged over the summer, especially in August. The Democrats tried to push through HR 3200 which would totally usurp all individual health resources, before their August recess. (They of course deny it would do any such thing.) The reason is because they knew there would be hell to pay when congressmen went back to their districts. They were right. Town hall meetings were packed. Apparently these elected politicians forgot they are the employees of the people. They began yelling back at them and insulting them (attendees only started yelling and booing when the politician told a blatant lie). People would read directly from the bill about some usurpation of choice and freedom, and the politician would still deny it was in the bill.
Now it’s come to this. If you oppose Obama on any issue you’re a racist. Some of the other things people opposing him have been called are ‘domestic terrorists’ and ‘Nazi’. These are being hurled at the political opposition by all the Main Stream Media (MSM) and the leaders of the Democrat Party. So much for objective reporting and good leadership qualities.
There have been “Tea Parties” since about April of this year. They started as anti-tax increase rallies, and grew in size every month until there are millions. They have been called ‘teabaggers’ which we learned was a homosexual sex act. Who knew? Then the terrorist, Nazi, and the rest.
It comes down to this. If you oppose the nationalization of health care, “ObamaCare”, you are a racist. If you oppose the nationalization of the banks, you are a racist. If you oppose the nationalization of car companies, you are a racist. If you oppose the nationalization of the insurance industry, you are a racist. If you oppose his decision to not provide missile defense in Central Europe, you are a racist. From a personal attack on me for defending myself from the charge of being a racist, it turns out that if you say you have friends and family of many races and love them, and had friends of many races that died in combat at your side, then you are using “race credentials” and shows that you’re even a bigger racist. Charles Krauthammer has a great observation about all this here. (He's a psychiatrist as well as a columnist.)
Obama said with his election, we will live in a post racial America. He has not said one thing to stop these vile, hateful attacks on his political opposition. Sure glad to live in a post racial Amerika.
Then it might also follow that one is a racist to use such valid arguments against such false pretexts to accuse political opposers of racism..
ReplyDeleteThe word itself is becoming taboo. Use it, then you acknowledge it, so according to those who pretend to have the moral monopoly, you must be it.
I think it could be interesting to know what Shelby Steele thinks about the whole post-racial thing. According to him, there is an inherent contradiction in the way many Obama supporters approach that issue (from Los Angeles Times, Nov. 8, 2008):
ReplyDelete“When whites -- especially today's younger generation -- proudly support Obama for his post-racialism, they unwittingly embrace race as their primary motivation. They think and act racially, not post-racially. The point is that a post-racial society is a bargainer's ploy: It seduces whites with a vision of their racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation. A real post-racialist could not be bargained with and would not care about displaying or documenting his racial innocence. Such a person would evaluate Obama politically rather than culturally.
Certainly things other than bargaining account for Obama's victory. He was a talented campaigner. He was reassuringly articulate on many issues -- a quality that Americans now long for in a president. And, in these last weeks, he was clearly pushed over the top by the economic terrors that beset the nation. But it was the peculiar cultural manipulation of racial bargaining that brought him to the political dance. It inflated him as a candidate, and it may well inflate him as a president.
There is nothing to suggest that Obama will lead America into true post-racialism. His campaign style revealed a tweaker of the status quo, not a revolutionary. Culturally and racially, he is likely to leave America pretty much where he found her.”
Shelby Steele is an award-winning author, columnist, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He, as well as Barack Obama, was born to a black father and a white mother, but, unlike the current President of the United States, he is not a liberal. At least not any more.