Barack Obama

Oklahoma Confederates & President Obama: (Not so) Massive Resistance

JarretR 4 Comments
A small group of Ohlahoma residents greet President Barack OBama by being obnoxious tools.

A small group of Oklahoma residents greet President Barack Obama by being obnoxious tools.

President Barack Obama — he of the funny-sounding Muslim name and clearly Leninist politics — recently visited what can be charitably described as unfriendly political territory by arriving in Oklahoma for a series of appearances that will include the first ever presidential visit to a federal prison. Obama failed to win a SINGLE county in the Sooner State during both the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. Ya see, Oklahoma is the kind of place where right-wing nut-baggery flourishes so unencumbered that it elected climate-change denying homunculus James “Snowball” Inhofe to multiple terms in the U.S. senate and, in 2013, tried to ban the imposition of Sharia Law to protect good Christian folk from the hordes of crusading Jihadists that make up less-than 1 percent of the state’s population. Freedom!

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Confederate Echoes: The Ugly History Behind Questioning Obama’s Patriotism

JarretR 37 Comments
Former Republican Mayor of New York City thinks that there colored boy is only three-fifths "Murican.

Rudy Giuliani, the Former Republican Mayor of New York City, apparently thinks that thar colored boy don’t love ‘Murica.

Remember when everyone liked Rudolph Giuliani? The former “Mayor of the World” was, after all, Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Yeah, I remember that too. But Giuliani is also a right-wing dunce.

Case in point: he recently stirred the endlessly bubbling American political chamber pot when, at a private gathering of like-minded conservative Oompa Loompas held for Wisconsin Koch Brothers organ-grinder monkey Scott Walker, he questioned President Barack Obama’s patriotism. “I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani babbled, “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.” Translation: Obama’s black different; we’re not; Anti-Americanism follows. But questioning a political rival’s love of country is an old American political tactic, and it hasn’t gotten any less vile over time.  Continue Reading →

Christianity, Islam, and the American Aversion to Nuance

JarretR 57 Comments
President Barack Obama does prayer stuff at the National Prayer Breakfast, an event that shouldn't even exist.

President Barack Obama does prayer stuff at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Americans don’t do nuance. The basic dictionary definition of nuance is “a subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound,” and boy does this ever go against the American predilection for dualistic thinking in absolutely everything. From the highest level political “masterminds,” to the status-anxiety wracked petite bourgeoisie, to the common blue-collar Bubba, Americans prefer simplistic approaches to a very complicated world. They therefore derive thought-free comfort in the notions that black and white long ago teamed up to gag the numerous shades of grey with a balled-up American flag; that there is only good (America) and evil (everything that isn’t America), and that might ALWAYS equals right — at lease when America uses might.

And no U.S. subculture better exemplifies this inoculation-proof allergy to nuance better than the conservative hive-mind. Yes, if Americans in general prefer simple answers to complex problems, the Right Wing goes a step further: they deny that complex problems even exist. Thus, we have the dunder-headed conservative reaction to President Barack Obama’s invocation at the 2015 National Prayer Breakfast. Continue Reading →

Obama Calling Lincoln: History as the Great Legitimizer

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President Barack Obama meets "President Abe Lincoln" during a 2012 campaign rally in Iowa.

President Barack Obama meets a fellow prairie stater, “President Abe Lincoln,” during a 2012 campaign rally in Iowa.

Over the summer, President Barack Obama made a series of speeches designed to drum up public and private support for better infrastructure investment as part of his broader long-term economic recovery plan. This speeches were mostly political, insofar as no such plan has any chance of squeezing through the fatalistic lunatic factory that is the current Republican controlled Congress. The president knows this, of course, but his speeches gave him the chance to do what all politicians do during their time in office: invoke history to legitimize the present…and the future.

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