I really, really don’t like to get into politics on this site. I mean, most authors use their blog to talk about their latest works and promote them. I do as well, though not as much as I could. Frankly, I prefer to do so when I have concrete news to tell you regard a new work…more specifically when it nears completion/publication.
Getting back to politics, of late I find the whole thing so damn depressing. A few years back when George W. Bush was president and pundits were ripping him and his policies, conservative mouthpiece Charles Krauthammer stated that Bush’s opponents were suffering from “Bush derangement syndrome”. In other words, they could not see past their hatred of the man to more reasonably look at his policies.
However, there is little doubt that many of Bush’s policies, including the disastrous (and arguably justified by outright lies) decision to invade Iraq, the pathetic response to Hurricane Katrina, and the way the economy crashed during his watch, created a sense the critics were more right than “deranged”.
When Mr. Bush left office there were very few -and that goes for today as well- who spoke kindly about his term in office. Rather than defend him, most in the Republican Party or those who espouse conservative values, chose to ignore his time in office and, instead, focus venom on the current officeholder, Barack Obama.
And yet, if there is any case of a “derangement syndrome”, it would have to be regarding Obama’s term in office. Say what you will about his time in office but at least we have had a continuously improving economy, health care legislation (good or bad, the fact is that we are one of the last of the first world countries to move in this direction and we should applaud this legislation even as we work to make it better), and no new (idiotic) wars.
Before you start screaming, let me say this: Is all milk and honey? Absolutely not. There are many things I’ve felt Mr. Obama should have done but hasn’t. At times I feel he is too meek and wish he had (yes) George W. Bush’s backbone.
But what bugs me the most about the people who so despise Barack Obama’s presidency is the fact that they don’t realize he, like Bill Clinton before him, are most akin in policy to yesteryear’s Republicans.
Indeed, the patron saint of today’s Republicans, Ronald Reagan, would probably be derided as too leftist to these new conservatives which goes to show just how far the right in this country have moved.
Most worrisome to me is the level of hate they project. At a family dinner, I was amused to learn, and subsequently mentioned, the news that during a Republican Jewish Coalition speech Republican Presidential contender Ben Carson (no brain surgeon…oh, wait) talked about Hamas yet referred to them, over and over again, as…Hummus.
Yikes.
When I mentioned this, my relative almost jumped down my throat, first saying something to the effect of “well, I hope they (I’m assuming Hamas?) are insulted by being called that” before realizing what Mr. Carson said was yet another boneheaded line (of which there are more) and defending him by absolutely ignoring what he said and focusing instead on just how much Obama has ruined this country.
The wide-eyed hatred spewed was, frankly, startling, as was the lack of specifics as to just how Mr. Obama had ruined the country.
Naturally, I’m not the first person to go to a family function and get involved in a political spat nor will I be the last, but I was surprised at just how much this individual bought into the conservative Obama “derangement”.
As I already mentioned, there most certainly are things to criticize about Mr. Obama’s presidency (as there are for most presidencies), but I don’t and can’t see his failures as being anything on the level of “disastrous.”
There is no moral to this story and there is no clever conclusion to offer except this quote, which I’ll reproduce here from memory and therefore may not be verbatim, regarding the current state of Republican candidates for presidency:
“I hope one day the candidates turn to face the camera and say ‘April Fools!’.”