photo by Extreme Liberal
R-E-S-P-E-C-T!
The level of disrespect being shown towards President Obama is unprecedented and has to stop. It comes in both blatant and subtle ways and there are many reasons for it. Anyone who is honest with themselves knows that a lot of it stems from the color of his skin. Not all of it, for sure, but a whole hell of a lot of it. We all remember the signs from the Tea Party asking for their country back…back from what, you motherfuckers, the man won a clear victory in a democratic election with a wide electoral margin. President Obama IS the leader or OUR country, all of us, even you racist assholes…whether you like it or not.
One of the latest examples of this disrespect was covered very well by Joy Reid at The Reid Report. I’ll let her explain it…
Republicans derive a benefit from their base by disrespecting the president.
The GOP base wants its leadership to not just oppose Barack Obama, but to go out of its way to obstruct, block, and if at all possible, show open contempt and disrespect for him. Republicans understand that their base will punish them for any hint of respectful, or worse, accommodating behavior toward Obama, and that they will be rewarded by their base for elevating the level of negative attention they give the president.
[...]
Today’s Republicans, who have been overrun by a hardcore tea party faction in addition to the resurgent religious right, have made the calculation that there is literally no bottom — and no level of disrespect so great that they will pay a price with white independents.
[...]
Case in point: before House Speaker Boehner took the unprecedented step of publicly brushing back the president’s request to address a joint session of Congress next Wednesday, he was being egged on to do just that by none other than Rush Limbaugh. That Boehner decided to puff out his chest on this one is telling.
Of course, that is just one example of the clear disrespect shown towards our President. And the Republicans are playing it out to the full extent, with some legislators openly saying they won’t attend the jobs speech and don’t even want to hear what the President has to say. The adult equivalent of holding your hands over your ears and saying, na na na na, I cant’ hear you! I hope all those people without jobs are paying attention to the “Party of No New Jobs”.
But if that isn’t enough, apparently the hater of everyone, Matt Taibbi, doesn’t want to hear it either. The more I read about Taibbi, the more I realize that he just says whatever the hell comes to his hateful mind. I found this piece where Taibbi predicted a McCain presidency…showing his willingness to just say stupid shit with no basis in reality. But I digress.
The Grio has a piece that helps to spell out just some of the disrespect from the Republicans over the last few years.
The “You lie!” shout during the president’s speech on health care reform before the joint session of Congress in Sept. 2009
The recent posturing, walk-outs and tantrums thrown over the debt ceiling debate, which eventually led to our country’s credit being downgraded.
Newt Gingrich referring to the president as “the food stamp president” and saying that Pres. Obama “knows how to get the whole country to resemble Detroit.”
Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn — who supposedly enjoys a warm relationship with the president, saying he doesn’t think President Obama wants to destroy the country, but “his intent is to create dependency because it worked so well for him as an African-American male” who “received tremendous advantage from” welfare programs.
Congressman Mitch McConnell’s bold proclamation that he wants to be Senate Majority Leader to make sure that Obama is a one-term president.
Rush Limbaugh saying that he wants to see this president fail. (Note: Limbaugh has modified that statement to say he meant his “policies.” But when it was said, it was less than a year into Obama’s presidency and he was still cleaning up the mess from the previous president’s policies, which Limbaugh had very little to say about during the Bush era).
Former Fox News host Glenn Beck declaring on the air that the president “hates white people” and “the white culture.”
Television personality Donald Trump’s over-the-top taunting of the president, hyping unprecedented demands to see the president’s birth certificate.
The shouts of “We want our country back!” by the Tea Party.
And the frequent habit of not calling the president by his proper honorific: “President Obama”, rather than just “Obama” — by quite a few elected officials, pundits and others.
That last one, not calling President Obama by the title he earned by winning the presidency, is one that permeates both the left and the right and in newsrooms across the country. I’ll admit that liberals did the same thing to President Bush, and it was wrong then too. Once a president leaves office, I can understand dropping that title but while a president is sitting in that oval office, she/he is deserving of our respect. I remember hearing a discussion on NPR about standard journalistic practices of calling any president by their honorific title when first referring to her/him and then dropping the title after that in a story or article. Journalism sure has changed in recent years hasn’t it?
It goes even further than just not calling him by his earned title, many of them show their disrespect by simply saying his name with disdain. And a lot of that comes from the left. I’ve never seen Jane Hamsher or Glenn Greenwald say President Obama’s name without them oozing contempt for the man and showing outright hatred in their white superior, elitist tone. I always have to wonder what makes them think they are superior to a man who was the President of Harvard Law Review and elected to the most powerful position on the fucking planet…and they feel like they can be condescending to that man. Hmmmm, I smell racism, how about you?
Rmuse does an excellent job of characterizing the “emoprogs” in this post about the speech nontroversy.
The extreme left are laboring under the mistaken belief that all Americans are hard-left extremists and that the president is shunning the will of the people. The egocentric left either cannot or will not acknowledge that America is a right-leaning Centrist population that rejects the EmoProg’s agenda on principle alone. This is not an indictment of the far-left’s core beliefs, because their philosophy is shared by nearly all Liberals; but not all Liberals are self-important and lack understanding of American voters. Most Liberals also do not share the belief that primarying the president will “pull Obama to the left” or encourage him to award Bradley Manning the Congressional Medal of Honor, but then most Liberals are not self-important egocentrics either.
The Grio also reminds us that it isn’t just Republicans that have a lack of respect for our President that stems from his race and it began before he was even elected.
This negative “attention” that this president seems to attract cuts across partisan lines. Even before he took office, Joe Biden referred to him as the first “clean, articulate” African-American candidate. (Which we assume was meant as a compliment).
And let’s not forget Bill Clinton, who chalked up Obama’s win in South Carolina to being similar to Jesse Jackson’s wins there in the 80s and then had the audacity to cry foul, saying the race card was played on him when Obama supporters called him out.
There are many more examples of disrespect for President Obama and the office that he holds from the left, Cenk Uygur oozes that nasty hatred damn near every time he mentions our president. And by the way, what Uygur said in that clip was proven wrong very soon after that.
What drives me absolutely nuts about this phenomenon in politics is that President Obama is deserving of more respect than any president in my lifetime. He has avoided attacking Republicans, much to the chagrin of the far left, since he began running for president. He has kept his rhetoric respectful, even for people that probably don’t deserve that respect. Remember his dressing down of the clown Donald Trump, he was even tactful about that. So when people try to say that he doesn’t deserve their respect or that he has brought it on himself, I have to pound my head on the desk and wonder what in the fuck is wrong with these people. This president has gone out of his way to represent everyone in this country and treat all people with respect, even those not deserving of it…yet, he is enduring the worst lack of respect of any president in our history.
Go read this most excellent piece at The People’s View that lays out what President Obama has done for of all our people…in the face of the most obstructionist congress in our history. The man deserves more respect than any president in history, now give it to him, damn it!
Agree with all of this. The problem is, I think, these people are such thugs they simply don’t care.
As long as the tea party representatives derive benefit for disrespecting the President, they are going to continue to do it. I think the best we can hope for is haranguing the media when they do it. They have no excuse and people calling them out might help. In the mean time, we do have to take some of our own medicine…I was never kind or respectful to GW Bush for even a moment. Plus I think the President actually uses their disrespect to his own advantage. People *are* watching this from the middle and they don’t like what they see. They may not write blogs or tweets about it, but they do notice. The President has gone a long way toward casting himself as the true moderate who genuinely is willing to compromise.
AN OPEN APOLOGY TO ANDREW YOUNG
“I want Barack Obama to be president,” pausing for effect, “in 2016…It’s not a matter of being inexperienced. It’s a matter of being young,” Young said. “There’s a certain level of maturity … you’ve got to learn to take a certain amount of sh*t.”
He went on to say that Obama needs a protective network that he currently lacks — a quality that could hurt him if he were to be elected. He said Hillary Clinton already has that kind of network, including her husband to back her up.
“There are more black people that Bill and Hillary lean on,” Young said. “You cannot be president alone. … To put a brother in there by himself is to set him up for crucifixion. His time will come and the world will be ready for a visionary leadership.”
When Andrew Young made those comments I was incensed. I was appalled that a freedom fighter who stood with Dr. King through thick and a lot of thin who took the slings and arrows with Dr. King to pave the way for someone like Barack Obama to become president would want to stop this progress either out of fear or some perverse loyalty to the Clintons whose policies by and large were antithetical to what Dr. King fought for. But his words have proven prophetic.
I’m an absolute believer that history is a window into the future. I was so offended by Andrew Yong’s derisive tone that I couldn’t appreciate what he was fully saying. He was speaking from the experience of standing under Dr. King when he stood atop Mount Sinai after leading us out of the land of apartheid and being there to catch him when white folks and cowardly Negroes pushed him off that rock for daring to believe that he was truly free to speak his mind. He was warning us that Dr. King’s past would be Barack Obama’s future. We just didn’t want to hear it.
Nowhere on the stones that adorn the new King Memorial–truly a glorious testament to this giant among men—will you see any evidence of the tumultuous last year of Dr. King’s life when he went from a patriot to traitor in the blink of an eye. But certainly those must have been memories Andrew Young was recalling when he made those comments about Senator Obama’s presidential candidacy. I thought he was hating, but he was merely saying “I’ve been there.” Black folks like me just didn’t want to hear it. We all wanted so desperately to get out of the desert and into the promise land.
While most of us are unaware or elect to pretend not to be aware that Dr. King was arguably the most hated man in America at the time of his death, Andrew Young remembers. He remembers when Dr. King went from Time Magazine’s person of the year in 1964 to being branded a traitor by the same magazine only three years later when he dared to speak out against the Vietnam War. And it wasn’t just editorialist of the all the major magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, that echoed this damning sentiment, other so-called civil rights leaders, friends and clergy turned against him as well. In a Harris poll released before his assassination 75% of whites and even 55% of Negroes expressed an unfavorable opinion of Dr. King. If they could turn on Dr. King so easily, what chance in hell did Barack Obama stand? NONE!
People will argue President Obama should have done this or should have done that, but there was NOTHING that he could have done or said to have changed the inevitable. He was always going to be held to an impossibly high and double standard. He was always going to have to contend with the opposition of the entire Republican Party who still embrace the Dredd Scott rule that a Negro has no rights that whites are bound to respect and the left wing of the Democratic Party who always cannibalize Democratic presidents, as they ALWAYS do. LBJ is suddenly back in favor with liberals after 40 years of never being mentioned publicly by any prominent Democratic and risk reminding the world that LIBERALS destroyed the presidency of the man who passed the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act and Medicare. As Andrew Young correctly notes, Bill Clinton succeeded in defending himself from the left with the protection of the black establishment. The same establishment that sees President Obama as a threat to their access to (white) power.
I’ve asked CBC apologists like Roland Martin to explain why Maxine Waters, John Conyers and the rest of the CBC that have been in office since before I was born why they didn’t “unleash” on Bill Clinton after welfare reform; three strikes laws; the continuation of the disparity between powder and crack cocaine sentencing; one strike public housing rules which resulted in the eviction of countless poor black mothers and grandmothers from public housing; the Omnibus crime bill which gave rise to the industrial prison complex and historic rise of black and brown for profit incarceration; the drug penalty added to the higher education act which kept tens of thousands of mostly young black and brown kids out of college because of misdemeanor drug convictions, which ironically George W. Bush modified to make less draconian; NAFTA which was the biggest blow to labor since the Reagan era; DOMA which effectively legalized Gay discrimination; DADT; and on and on? His response, “They tried.” Tried what?! The few black folks to speak out against Clinton’s assault on poor black folks were Marian Wright Edelman, Reverend Sharpton and Minister Farrakhan. Certainly not Maxine Waters, John Conyers, Alcee Hastings, Sheila Jackson Lee, Tavis Smiley, Cornell West or Donna Brazil. None of them!
President Obama has been the most progressive president since LBJ, and he gets, as Andrew Young predicted, crucified. He not only gets blamed for what he hasn’t done to their satisfaction, he gets blamed for not cleaning up Bill Clinton’s sh*t fast enough. Nothing was ever going to be good enough for them, and we couldn’t see it.
Don’t get me wrong. I have no regrets about electing our president. I am as proud of him today as I was in 2008. And I will work my ass off to see him re-elected. Unlike “progressives” who talk a good game about championing the nameless poor and disenfranchised, I know these people by name. They raised me, nurtured me, sacrificed for me, and prayed for me to have a better future than their pasts. And I will be damned if I’m going to leave them vulnerable the hell the will face from a souless and heartless Republican president and Congress. This country while blinded by impatience, hate and racism may not see it, but it still needs him. The only thing I regret is that neither he nor we, his supporters, were prepared for what he would be up against from the right, left and the Negroes on the Democratic plantation.
Andrew Young warned us, and we should have been prepared.
Great comment, NMP. Thanks for that.
Very interesting and insightful. I feel a post of my own coming on in response.
NMP, do you blog somewhere that this is posted online? I’d be happy to add a link to your comment so people can read more of your work.
No. I just enjoy reading this blog and the comments. My first time posting here and quite a while anywhere for that matter. Lately I’ve been sparring via email with journalists and politicos like Roland Martin. Most of them are as superficial and vapid as they appear on air or in print. They offer the same factless hyperbole in private as they do in public. I don’t contest their right to voice their opinions, usually criticism of the President, I just ask them to back them up with facts. They never can. How they keep their jobs is a mystery.
well said, NMP. i may front-page this comment — it’s that good.
Wow, NMP. I wish I had 1/10 the eloquency that you possess! eveningeorgia, I find myself nodding my head in total agreement at your post!
Thank you all for such thought-provoking statements.
NMP, I read and agree with both posts.
I have my doubts about journalists and politicos myself; some of them make sense and some of them do not.
Obama is out there by himself; the left cannot be relied relied upon to provide cover. The left, at most times and places, has had to tendency to fragment into factions. Mostly over arcana and personal feuds that mean little to any disinterested person. In 2011, the situation is as it usually is for the left.
Arcana … like 9% unemployment? Personal feuds … like $16 trillion for crooked bankers and stealing from workers’ retirement paid for out of their own paycheck? Seriously, you people are pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.
Then vote for Nader dickhead cocksucker!
A truly honest and insightful read! Thank you, NMP!
NMB
This was the most cogent analysis of this presidency that I have read, and I have been reading a lot.
Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with us; they are powerful and true.
Perhaps Mr. Young was remembering the pain, humiliation, and stinging hatred that he experienced when he and Dr. King stepped into history. That was a brutal, frightening time. Perhaps he was being protective of President Obama, and did not want him to go through what he knew, and many of us of that era knew, that he would experience. I do not know, but I do know this: Regardless of what he is experiencing, President Obama is president because it was time. He was and is going to experience the “trial by fire” that those who step out first will experience. If Mr. Young and Dr. King had not stepped out when they did, I and millions more might still have been waiting for the right to vote, and to eat in restaurants, and to sleep in motels, even now.
So I believe that President Obama is president because it was and is time. This is our “fierce urgency of now” moment. When I say that, I do not mean just for Black America, but for all America. We need a president, who thinks, and reads, and listens, and plans with pragmatic wisdom and efficiency. That man today is President Obama. We need more like him, no matter what race, creed, or color. We need men and women like him, in congress, in governors’ offices, and in mayors’ offices. In short, we need leaders who want what is good for everybody and not these screaming, invective flinging, narrow-minded folk that we are currently experiencing, on the right and the left.
I am so glad we have a president who has good sense, even while being Black. (Imagine that!)
I, like you, intend to do all I can to re-elect President Obama. He is the man for these times.
eveingeorgia
I agree.
NMB – well said.
And @ Extreme Liberal: Family-name-only is (and has been) the journalistic standard for second reference for a long time. I just like to say “President Obama” both onscreen and in conversation a lot because it annoys the hell out of baggers, tea and fire alike.
And to take it a bit further, the one that doesn’t sit all that well with me is “Mr. Obama” – being President, he gets the honorific the first time and then the standard second reference is OK.
Or, as one editor once put it (long enough ago that I can’t recall who it was), “the President” is also appropriate for any reference.
this is so on point, thank you. you broke it down like a fraction