Re: Strange anger at Obama for Tuesday speech to schools
 

I'm just wondering what the hell any of that list about guns has to do with what this thread's actually about. Although I guess it ties together just as well as the thinking behind morons bringing AK-47s to health care reform townhalls. Maybe Mongoose should start up a new thread especially for anyone who wants to spout every ignorant conspiracy theory that's been floated about Obama, from the "birthers" to the "death panelers", to the people who still believe Obama is Muslim, to the people who claim he's a "racist", etc.

And by the way, since you've chosen to use it Mongoose, what exactly motivates you to refer to Obama as "Barack Hussein Obama"? And keep in mind that we're not idiots, so just saying "well that's his name, isn't it?" is probably not going to be accepted as an honest answer. Obama himself doesn't generally go by that full name, and no one aside from his most fervent opponents refer to him by it, so realistically, it probably has nothing to do with just being thorough in identifying him. I know that in most cases, the name "Hussein" is raised in a blatantly transparent attempt to make him sound scary to people who are predisposed to being afraid of Muslims and various other middle-easterners (oddly enough, many of whom also do happen to have racist tendencies), but I really do want to know what your personal reasoning is behind using it.

Re: Strange anger at Obama for Tuesday speech to schools
 

another dynamic in the states that I find interesting is our battered housewife relationship to government.

In canada I noticed that newspapers scream bloody murder at the emergence of levels of corruption that would simply just be shrugged off in the states. We tend to be more cynical and just act like that's the way governments are supposed to act.

Part of the reason universal health care works in places like the UK and Canada at all is that the people take on a level of ownership of government and take responsibility for who they elect. It is understood that you must consider a candidate's ability to not turn a government program as their own personal gravy train.

That's part of my reservation about single payer, universal healthcare in America. It will mean we have to take responsibility in our government, and participate in the management of its handlers by the democratic process, as opposed to just expecting it to work like a mcdonald's drive thru. We'll have to bag language like "track record" and "typical government waste" when dismissing the problems of government.

And all of this is so far removed from the way americans relate to their government currently, that I wonder if it isn't best kept in the hands of corporations that are just better regulated and forced to provide unconditional healthcare.

You can't vote out corporations, like you can a government that squandered health care and reduced the quality of service. That being said you don't have to work or put any effort into them either. just money.

Re: Strange anger at Obama for Tuesday speech to schools
 

Let's be honest, there is no credible reason for using his middle name, other than the one you describe above.

Short of admitting this, there's very little that the name-caller can do, beside:

(a) disingenuously play dumb ("it's his name")
(b) disingenuously backtrack ("it's just a joke... i'm winding you guys up...")(c) do a disappearing act.

Let's see, shall we.....

Re: Strange anger at Obama for Tuesday speech to schools
 

That's an interesting way of looking at it.

Re: Strange anger at Obama for Tuesday speech to schools
 

i keep laughing at the phrase "radical anti-gun group." they want to pry that gun from your cold dead hands RADICALLY. with crowbars and barcode tattoos and acid spitting vipers!


also, every time i look at the title of this thread i read "stranger danger at obama..."

Re: Strange anger at Obama for Tuesday speech to schools
 

Bit disturbed to read that there's been a 400 per cent surge in death threats against Obama since earlier this year.

Just bizarre. Seemingly one of the most intelligent, rational and calm presidents the US has had, still in the early stage of his time in the White House, yet for some, he's the most worthy of disdain.

Can't help but wonder if Bush had this many death threats given his contribution to America - and the world - while in office. Presumably, mongo will tell us we only hear about Obama's death threats because he's black?

Damn that PC commie liberal organization, the secret service.

Re: Strange anger at Obama for Tuesday speech to schools
 

Personally, I was always solidly opposed to the taunts against Bush along the lines of "not my President", or comparing him to Hitler and whoever else, or any of the other over-the-line crap that happened during the Bush administration. I opposed it because it doesn't take a genius to realize that it would all come back magnified once the tables turned. So in part, I think the amount of complaining is motivated by a sense of revenge on the part of Republicans. I've even heard some conservative pundits admit as much. They had to sit through years of MoveOn and such putting out anti-Bush propaganda that often strained the limits of truth (to put it mildly), and now is their chance to do the same thing back to Democrats.

That being said, one big difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives are far more likely to be armed. Take for instance the morons who feel it's somehow appropriate to bring guns to townhall meetings about health care. Although an NPR article about it points out the upside of people showing up clearly armed:

"By openly carrying their weapons, the gun toters are at least easily identifiable to law enforcement, including Secret Service sharp shooters who, for all we know, are watching them intently through the cross hairs of their scopes."

Anyway, we saw tons of passionate anti-Bush protests, but no one ever showed up to them with a loaded gun that I recall. And I shudder to think what would have happened to them if they did.

Beyond that, no matter how dishonest much of the opposition to Bush ever was, I don't recall anything on the level of the "birther" movement and others like it confronting him. So I guess I attribute it to a variety of factors, from legitimate opposition to Obama's policies, to revenge, to racism. And I'm definitely uneasy about where it's all headed.

Re: Strange anger at Obama for Tuesday speech to schools
 

Yeah, that's exactly it.

Liberals may have been sanctimonious and misguided at times during the Bush era, and I'll admit there was almost an enjoyment in presenting Bush as the neoconservative, Bible-bashing, fuckwit with evil Cheney pulling his strings - but (trying as hard as I can to be objective) I maintain we had rather a lot more to base that on than the right currently do with Obama!
( ^^sorry, too near bedtime for me to sort through the grammar)

What seems to characterize the current mood of the right is
(a) their sheer stupidity
(b) their strangely visceral reaction, and the very real sense that it could tip over into violence.

Re: Strange anger at Obama for Tuesday speech to schools
 

Exactly. Isn't the problem not so much the constant attacks, but the sheer stupidity of the attacks, on both left and right? In which case there's never an excuse to be stupid.

For example. Dick Armey will take any criticism that his tea-bagging movement shelters obama=hitler nuts by saying Moveon.org "ran those ads that compared bush to hitler" when 1. it was never created by moveon.org, it was created by a forum user for a contest, 2. it was never run by moveon.org but taken down from their website promptly after complaints about the ad started coming in.

So I guess the equation for Dick Armey is for every one smug liberal film student we can brush off an army of hostile tea baggers as just part of the political environment? Sean you were right to object to the vitriol against Bush for this reason, as you saw how this would play out. I'm just frustrated because I think the conservative players and pundits like Armey are being very disingenuous passing the buck to past cases of liberal tastelessness - they don't see a connection as much as they see a convenient scapegoat for their own interests.

Meanwhile, the GOP itself did in fact run ads against democratic senators juxtaposing them with pictures of osama bin laden when they simply didn't go toe to toe with Bush policies.

And lets not forget what happened to the dixie chicks. I'm sure plenty of radio stations in berkeley have played toby kieth without any drama.

So to be honest, my perspective was that even in the bush hay day years, there was a competition between mob justice against liberals who dared not fall in line and the liberal/anarchist demonstrators who screamed "baby killer."

My thoughts are that all complaining, all attacks are great, so long as they aren't stupid. Regardless of where they point, they are a good thing. And that's part of my frustration with the mongooses of the world. We have to spend our time arguing about birth certificates and who's being more racist, the mixed race president or the angry marshmallow spewing hate 4 hours a day from florida? When really there are plenty of good reasons to get on Obama's case.

Frankly Obama is a huge disappointment to me. He's like the popular easy going student body president in high school who just wants to get the goths and the preppies together for a year of unity. Fuck unity.

And while we're at it, anybody realize we have more private military contractors on the government payroll now than we did under Bush?

I mean jesus Mongoose, do I have to do your job for you?

Re: Strange anger at Obama for Tuesday speech to schools
 

Case in point...

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A spokeswoman for a Republican congressman who called President Obama "an enemy of humanity" said Tuesday that he should have clarified that he was talking about the president's policies on abortion.

Bethany Haley, a spokeswoman for Arizona Rep. Trent Franks, told CNN on Tuesday the congressman was actually referring to "unborn humanity" — a specific reference to the president's policies on abortion.

Franks used the term in a speech to conservative activists Saturday in St. Louis, pointing to Obama's decision to aid international family planning clinics that perform abortions.

"A president that has lost his way that badly, that has no ability to see the image of God in these little fellow human beings, if he can't do that right, then he has no place in any station of government and we need to realize that he is an enemy of humanity," Franks said.

Franks' speech was recorded by the liberal group People for the American Way.

In an interview with the Washington Independent after the speech, Franks also renewed a call for Obama to produce a copy of his birth certificate to end the questions by "birthers" who doubt the president's birthplace. Franks said he had once considered filing a lawsuit to get it, but did his own investigation and became convinced that the president was born in the United States.

Haley called the controversy a "silly debate" and said it is "ridiculous that the president doesn't just produce [the birth certificate] and make it go away." In the interview, Franks implied that the president might be trying to hide something else.

"Probably, Barack Obama could solve this problem and make the birthers, you know, back off, by simply showing us his long-form birth certificate," Franks said. "That'd solve the problem. There's some other issue, I don't know what it is, that he doesn't want people to see the birth certificate on."

So in one speech, this tool calls the President an "enemy of humanity", and then feeds the "birther" movement's rabid idiocy. Has it occured to Franks that perhaps Obama hasn't accomodated "birthers" with his long-form birth certificate because doing so would mean then having to accomodate every nutty, unfounded demand of every group of idiotic whack-jobs out there trying to delegitimize the President? A legal copy of Obama's birth certificate that has been verified by Hawaii's director of the Department of Health, as well as the Registrar of Vital Statistics is available for anyone to see. If that's not enough for the dumb-ass "birthers", then nothing will be.