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More on what's new and not new.....


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Larry Hernandez

Sun Sep 13 2009, 10:25PM

Registered Member #6

Joined: Mon Jun 29 2009, 02:44AM
Posts: 21

As I was thinking about my last post while having Sunday lunch at one of my favorite dives (yeah, I do fret over what I have just said or written), it struck me that there is another difference between what normal traditional political discontent with a current president has been like, and what now is happening in regard to this president, Barack Obama.

Part of what prompted this further thought was recalling a new promotional commercial for the new season of NBC's Law and Order that I saw last night. In it, the season beginning surprise is a teasing hint that the fictional New York City DA Jack McCoy may indict the G.W. Bush administration for some unidentified crime. Repeatedly, when I saw this blurb, (easily done because my Dad and I watched three Law and Orders in a row) I called out some variation of "Go for it!" Like some, many or all local Democrats, I would have no problem identifying any number of crimes with charge to any number of Bushies.

But, if it where not for the Supreme Court's taint of his s-election in 2000, I would never openly challenge Bush's legitimacy as President. The same is true of Bush's father, Ronald Reagan or any Republican president I have known in my lifetime. My criticisms of these presidents may have been fierce and sometimes loud, but they always centered on their policies, and perhaps their lack of character and virtues I prize, but not on their right to be US president.

But that is precisely what the current crop of presidential naysayers are doing: challenging Obama's legitimacy as the duly elected US president. As my earlier post stated, they may be using various fig-leaves to cover racism as a motive to attack his policies and charge him with un-American philosophies, but make no mistake about it: The attack is on the man himself, and not his actions.

This is evidenced by a gross inability to level seriously intelligent criticisms of specific policy decisions, proposed positions or character flaws. Think of it, any number of us local Democrats could have filled a small telephone book with such criticisms of G.W. or Nixon. But from today's critics of Obama, what do we get? What are leveled are wildly inarticulate and vaguely abstract charges of things like Socialism or having a lack of patriotism. No specifics that stand up to fact-checking, just a slew of "isms."

It has gotten so inane that I am now unwilling to go at it anymore with some of the more active local critics that post repeatedly on the Daily Bulletin's opinion page on-line comments section. It is now always an exercise in arguing with "dinner tables," to use Barney Frank's apt quip. We no longer have a common language or inhabit the same planet.

That's too bad because in doing so, I am leaving the game to them to run roughshod over. But time is too short to waste on such pointless things as trying to reason with the unreasonable.


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