Now, let me make something clear from the outset: I am not a big supporter of Barack Obama.
While I will admit to being impressed with him at times before he actually became President, the fact that he was a prominent politician treading carefully, jockeying for positioning in one of the two major political parties of the United States. He seemed to say some really cool things, but then again, politicians are known for telling you what you want to hear.
A part of me was impressed in 2008, when he seemed to hold a certain ability to inspire people. It reminded me of my childhood, when people would talk about the youthful John F. Kennedy as representing something new, something idyllic, for the country. A new spirit, and a new direction for the country.
Maybe this was our answer to it?
Well, it was not enough for me to vote for him - I refuse to vote for either major party unless there really is no other choice. Even then, I hesitate a little bit.
Still, people really seemed to love him and be moved by him. That honeymoon lasted maybe through the first few months of his Presidential term, but it ended rather quickly. By his own admission, his star fell rather quickly. Before long, he was one of the most demonized Presidents ever. From having all of the answers, to being the face of all the country's problems. I never witnessed anything like it before. He went from being the embodiment of the most idealistic, and unrealistic, hopes and ambitions that people had, to the scapegoat of all the cynicism for the deteriorating state of the country that many other people had.
Can't say this with any degree of certainty, but that was probably the quickest such turnaround in American history, and perhaps, even, world history, although I cannot say that for certain..
To my mind's eye, neither interpretation is correct. What Barack Obama was, and is, is a politician with a false sense of entitlement. He does what is beneficial to him or, rather, to his political career. He capitalized on all of the hope that people felt he represented, using it like a surfer uses a wave to coast into the White House. But once in there, he inherited a hell of a lot of problems. Many of his harshest critics seemed to conveniently forget not only this, but that their man, the one who preceded Obama in office, was largely responsible for the huge mess the country was in. So, for me, neither side had much credibility.
That said, Obama, to me, has been more or less what I expected him to be when he first won office: a disappointment. That, because what he truly represented, other than the soundbites spreading the positive message of "hope" and "change", was essentially more of the same. What I mean by that, is that both of the major parties these days are pretty much sponsored by the same special interests that have actively worked against the American people. They may do this to different degrees, but let us not make the mistake of fool ourselves into thinking otherwise. The two parties quite clearly work to maintain a de facto corporate supremacy within the nation, and they are going to continue to do so until we, the people, put a stop to it, one way or the other.There may be slight variations in policies, and the two parties seem to agree to really make a big deal out of those few issues. Make a lot of noise with the infighting, so people will not notice what is glaringly obvious: that they agree with each other on almost everything but those few things. There hardly seems to be a difference between the two.
What I have noticed, on the other hand, is that the political divisions within the country have never been greater by the regular people. The nation seems polarized like never before in my lifetime, and with each new president to take office, these divisions seem more stark and more extreme. I remember "Impeach Clinton" bumper stickers on the backs of cars (plural) within weeks of his taking office. At the time, I was shocked, because I had never seen anything like that before. But before too long, it became commonplace.
Still, I thought that maybe it would be relegated to Clinton. Again, there had been nothing like that with either Reagan or Bush I, that I had seen. But with George W. Bush, it started up all over again. Of course, Bush's crimes were far more serious, albeit less glamorous and sexy, than Clinton's. But starting wars and pursuing a new, aggressive foreign policy will offend people, naturally. There were plenty of bumper stickers that essentially undermined Bush during his years in office, and so, it was not a surprise at all that Tea Baggers would exact a measure of revenge when Obama came into office.
The problem with a a hell of a lot of neocon criticisms (and I mean the majority of the criticisms that they are very vocal about) has been a complete lack of substance. I can understand criticism in terms of foreign or domestic policies. Criticizing the increased debt, for example, and reinforcing the importance of keeping within one's budget would be more or less on philosophical grounds. Ditto with foreign policy, or abortion. You agree with them, or you don't. But these are real issues, and these issues can at least be understood, if not condoned. They have substance.
But the constant harping on whether or not the President was born in the United States? The excessive focus on Benghazi, which many Republicans, and especially the Tea Party section, absolutely harp on, seemingly no matter what the subject, while ignoring (rather conveniently) similar incidents during Republican administrations. Ditto with the national debt and budget deficit, which were increased very dramatically during Republican administrations of the past, as well. Trying to portray Obama and his wife as hating America would be another flashy "news" piece lacking substance, but that hardly stops his opponents from pounding on these issues, and focusing so excessively on these opinions with no basis in fact, but mere speculation, that they can hardly be taken seriously by anyone but the most extreme right wingers.
Even worse are the criticism that seem to hearken back to an earlier, much less attractive element of the American character: prejudice. When Obama is accused of being a "secret Muslim", for example. That begins to smack of racism, based on his name and skin color, and has nothing to do with Democrats versus Republicans, or liberal versus conservative, left wing versus right wing. No, such "criticisms" reveal more of what's wrong with those who make such claims, than of the President himself.
And then, there are the charges that seem to come even closer to racism. Recently, that noted luminary of our age, Ted Nugent, did not just go to the boundaries of bad taste and what can really only be described as blind hatred (and possibly racism), but he invaded that boundary, going well into territory that should make us all, as Americans, uncomfortable.
In his recent hate filled rantings, Nugent referred to President Obama as "a communist-raised, communist-educated, communist-nurtured, subhuman mongrel."
Back while attending Rutgers, I read a book, "Hitler's Army" by Omer Bartov, that described how the Wehrmacht truly had become Hitler's Army. Many people had essentially dismissed notions that those fighting members of the German army were simply doing the job asked of them, no more or no less. They were fighting the war physically, but had not subscribed to the racist notions of their leaders. In fact, Bartov suggested, evidence shows that they had, and in a big way. The language used in personal letters would indeed seem to suggest that many of those fighting subscribed to the views of Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, and other high-ranking Nazis, as evidenced in the language that they used. When I first heard specifically what Nugest had said in regards to Obama, I thought, "Wow! That sounds like the language that the Nazis used when describing the "communist hordes" of the Soviet Union, threatening western civilization." The Nazis saw themselves as the last defenders of western European culture, and they were the only things standing in the way of an onslaught of Asiatic mongrels threatening to invade from the barbaric USSR.
Many Tea Baggers view American civilization, and the greatness of the nation that once was, according to them (even though glaring imperfections and blatant racism was a significant part, even possibly a defining part, of that "old" America of the glory days of yesteryear), view "communists" like Clinton, Pelosi, and especially Obama as a threat to the very essence of what America is all about. That is why they keep harping on the "birth" issue, and that is why they harp on the very un-American (at least to them) notion of Obama being a "secret Muslim".
But calling Obama a " subhuman mongrel?"
That's taking it to a whole new level!
I was amazed that people did not see just how blatantly racist this criticism was. And then, I found out that, indeed, some had noticed. Specifically, Wolf Blitzer.
Here are quotes from an article by politifact.com, elaborating further on Blitzer's exploring this particular issue:
"That’s what the Nazis called Jews to justify the genocide of the Jewish community," Blitzer said in a Feb. 18, 2014, interview. "They called them untermenschen, subhuman mongrels. If you read some of the literature that the Nazis put out there, there is a long history of that specific phrase he used involving the president of the United States."
In his CNN interview, Blitzer cited the work of Nazi party official Julius Streicher. But our research shows Blitzer is correct well beyond an individual Nazi party official. The words subhuman and mongrel were used interchangably but generally had the same derogatory meaning. David Myers, a historian at the University of California at Los Angeles, said Adolph Hitler used the word "untermensch" or subhuman in his book Mein Kampf in 1925. "From that point forward, it was part of the Nazi lexicon," Myers said. "That and ‘mischling’ or mongrel, were intoned with daily regularity by the Nazi propaganda machine."
The man Blitzer mentioned, Streicher, was an early Nazi party leader in Nuremberg and Franconia and a fierce anti-Semite. In the mid 1920s, he began publishing a tabloid aimed at the working class called Der Sturmer, "The Attacker." The front of each edition carried the slogan, "The Jews are our misfortune." In 1935, Der Sturmer carried a student essay that parrotted the teaching materials in the classroom. Here is the English translation: "Regrettably, there are still many people today who say: Even the Jews are creatures of God. Therefore you must respect them. But we say: Vermin are animals too, but we exterminate them just the same. The Jew is a mongrel. He has hereditary tendencies from Aryans, Asiatics, Negroes, and from the Mongolians. Evil always preponderates in the case of a mongrel."
In 1899, the English anti-Semite Houston Stewart Chamberlain wrote extensively about physical characteristics and race. He claimed "the Semites belong to the mulatto class, a transition stage between black and white" and were "a mongrel race which always retains this mongrel character." In 1942, the Nazis printed an infamous pamphlet, Der Untermensch, which translates to "subhuman." The Holocaust Research Project translation provides this front panel quote from the head of the German SS, Heinrich Himmler: "As long as there have been men on the Earth, the struggle between man and the subhuman will be the historic rule; the Jewish-led struggle against the mankind, as far back as we can look, is part of the natural course of life on our planet. One can be convinced with full certainty that this struggle for life and death is just as much a law of nature as is the struggle of an infection to corrupt a healthy body."
Mark Roseman, director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University, said the German word for subhuman, untermensch, did not tend to be used by the Nazis in the adjectival form. So the words weren't often used in combination.
"But the underlying claim, namely, that Nazi policies were preceded, facilitated, and accompanied by language that compared Jews to animals, and declared them to be subhuman, is of course absolutely correct," Roseman said.
Wow! Pretty shocking stuff, huh? This is the type of "criticism" that goes beyond any measure of intelligence or credibility, and simply is revealed as dangerous ignorance, hatred, and blatant racism of the most despicable kind, and really should have no fertile grounds whatsoever. Activists and commentators on both the left and the right should immediately, and without equivocation, unite in condemning such statements and exposing them for what they really are: racism, pure and simple. As such, they really should have no room in American political discourse. If they do, then it seems to me that they lend credibility to the charges of racism leveled at Obama haters.
As I said earlier, I am not fan of President Obama. In fact, I may even have a bigger (and possibly more valid) laundry list of criticism of his administration and approach than many neocons, including Nugent. But the thing is, the focus should be on what he does, not on who he is. I don't care if he's black, and I don't question whether he is secretly a Muslim, or if he perhaps was born outside of the United States. My beef with the man, and his administration, is based on what they did, or in many cases, what they did not, do. my problem with him is not that he is the first black President, but rather, that he seems to resemble his predecessor, in language and in action, far more than I feel comfortable with. My problem with him is that, far from the image that he symbolized of a different, a better future for the country, he has instead further entrenched the disparities and the problems that existed in the United States. Mind you, I am not suggesting that he started them, only that his policies have not helped. In fact, in some cases, they may have exacerbated them.
Ted Nugent has proven himself to be an idiot in the past. On many levels, he represents the very worst that America has to offer. He is a stupid, racist, redneck, with a big mouth, and unfortunately, a prominent platform from which to voice his ridiculous opinions. He has said and done plenty of dumb things before this, but this latest just goes much further than anything that I have known him to say before - and that's saying something! To my mind's eye, anytime that you can be compared to Nazis, it's time to back away from whatever you are doing. And language like this to describe anybody is absolutely unacceptable.
No, I am not a fan of Obama. But he deserves better than that. Let's keep the focus on substantive issues, and leave prejudices where they belong: in the garbage heap of past history.
The article I referenced can be found by clicking on the following link:
Wolf Blitzer: Ted Nugent used Nazi terminology, 'subhuman mongrel,' to describe President Barack Obama
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/feb/18/wolf-blitzer/wolf-blitzer-ted-nugent-used-nazi-terminology-subh/
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