Hating Obama: The lunatic fringe and the Republican Party
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
Anderson’s homicidal fantasy epitomizes a much larger phenomenon that started even before Obama was elected and seems to have reached a crescendo during the debate on health care reform. It’s a white-hot hatred of president Obama fueled by a toxic brew of right-wing ideology, racism, and sheer paranoia.
Steve Anderson, a Phoenix pastor, wants Barack Obama dead. He says he prays for God to kill Barak Obama with brain cancer like Ted Kennedy. What a Christian thought.
Anderson’s homicidal fantasy epitomizes a much larger phenomenon that started even before Obama was elected and seems to have reached a crescendo during the debate on health care reform. It’s a white-hot hatred of president Obama fueled by a toxic brew of right-wing ideology, racism, and sheer paranoia.
It’s the force that makes people believe that Obama is not really an American and that the administration’s health care plan involves euthanasia. The right-wing media machine endlessly repeat the lies and distortions conferring on them a veneer of credibility among the most gullible and prejudiced sectors of the population. It’s the force that makes a controversy out of a presidential speech to the nation’s students to tell them they should study hard.
In a country with our history of assassinations, this mostly subterranean sense of rage in a nation awash with guns and with more than its share of deranged souls is scary, dangerous stuff. Worse still, few of the “mainstream” conservatives have raised their voices against the lunatic fringe while some have even abetted it.
Indeed, when Obama gave his brilliant speech on health care reform to a joint session of Congress on September 9, Republican Representative Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” Significantly, this break with decorum came when the president was stating undocumented immigrants would not be eligible under the health plan. Immigrants are the bête noir for many right wing Republicans. At other points during the speech, some Republicans booed. The hatred of Obama is not restricted to yahoos in the hinterland but is alive and well even on Capitol Hill. Yet Obama also received around 30 standing ovations, some bipartisan.
Yet the climate that has been created by those who compare Obama with Hitler, wave provocative signs, or show up at presidential events brandishing weapons is more than worrisome. This nation has been traumatized by too many tragedies to sit back and allow such sentiments to be whipped up by fanatics and lunatics. It’s time to demand that responsible Republicans denounce such tactics.
The worse case scenario for Republicans is for Democrats to pass a health care bill that is both effective and popular. That — and their cozy relations with the industrial-medical complex — is why the GOP is fighting so hard to defeat health care reform. Their attacks on Obama are so shrill and harsh because there is so much at stake. It is up to us, supporters of the president and his health care plan, to drown out the voices of acrimony and hate and defeat the medical-industrial lobby and its trained seals in the U.S. Congress.
