PJ: I read this opinion piece in the Washington Post while nodding in agreement with the author as often as I found myself shaking my head in disgust at the lengths to which many will go to try to bring President Obama down. Politics has always worn a black eye when it comes to honesty vs. rhetoric but I have never seen anything like the current discourse in the US. When news agencies such as Fox News parade false information, innuendo and outright lies to further an agenda; when prominent political figures promote lies to win positions and when ordinary citizens are driven away from facts in order to embrace the fiction of their choice, we are left wondering if this signals the end of the great society that was once represented by the phrase "Only in America".
The Washington Post
The relentless smear campaign against Obama
By Colbert I. King, Published: April 29
During Holy Week, President Obama, for the second consecutive year, gathered several Christian clergy at the White House for an Easter Prayer Breakfast during which he talked about his faith and the resurrection. He mentioned Easter in his Saturday radio address. On Easter Sunday morning, the president and his family attended services at Shiloh Baptist Church in Washington.
The next day, Foxnews.com charged Obama with failing to recognize “the national observance of Easter Sunday, Christianity’s most sacred holiday.” Two days later, Steve Doocy, host of Fox News’ “Fox and Friends,” invited Robert Jeffress, a conservative Baptist minister in Dallas, on the show and asked him “what do you think” about why Obama has never issued an Easter proclamation.
Given the opportunity for a gratuitous smear, Jeffress didn’t waste a second: “Steve, let’s look at what’s really going on here. On the one hand, we have a president who never met a Muslim holiday he didn’t like or at least wasn’t willing to issue a proclamation for, and on the other hand, here he is refusing to acknowledge, publicly, the most important event in Christian faith . . . and yet the White House is wondering, why do 20 percent of Americans believe the president is a Muslim?”
It seemed not to matter to Doocy to mention that no president in the past 20 years has issued an Easter proclamation. Doocy also didn’t acknowledge the president’s annual Easter Prayer Breakfast with clergy, though he alluded to Obama making “some comments last week regarding Easter at a breakfast.”
The charge that Obama shortchanged Easter was false. By suggesting Obama had snubbed Christianity and that he might be a closet Muslim, Fox handed its largely conservative audience yet another reason to hate the president.
The quest from the right to degrade Obama knows no bounds.
I’m looking at a photo with the faces of three chimpanzees imposed on the bodies of a man, woman and child. The baby chimp’s face is covered with Obama’s picture. It was e-mailed in California this month with the message: “Now you know why — no birth certificate!”
The sender was Marilyn Davenport, an elected member of the Orange County Republican Central Committee, who thought her GOP colleagues would also get a kick out of seeing the president of the United States depicted as the offspring of chimpanzees.
“I simply found it amusing regarding the character of Obama and all the questions surrounding his origins of birth,” Davenport said in a written statement. “In no way did I even consider the fact that he’s half black when I sent out the email.”
Davenport has since apologized, after coming under fire from civil rights groups and some local Republican leaders. But she’s still on the Orange County GOP Central Committee.
Why, come to think of it, should Davenport give up her official Republican position? She’s in good company. A CNN/Opinion Research poll conducted in August showed that 41 percent of Republicans believe Obama was “probably” or “definitely” born in another country. Even after Obama released his “long form” birth certificate this week, “birthers” — and political hustlers who cater to them — still cling to the “Obama is not one of us” smear.
I happen to think it was beneath Obama to respond to the “birthers,” most of all chief accuser Donald Trump, a rich, thrice-married New York show-off who got his start in business with daddy’s money and managed, through the successful operation of casinos, to get himself inducted in the Gaming Hall of Fame in 2005.
It’s sickening that false claims about Obama’s place of birth and his religion have been made, fanned and believed without any evidence. Sad, too, that despite all evidence to the contrary, 34 percent of conservative Republicans, according to a Pew Research Center poll last August, believe Obama is a Muslim. The percentage had risen 16 points since 2009.
What’s behind all this? Why the relentless lies about Obama?
It is, simply put, a crusade to bring him down.
Make Obama out to be the “outsider” who doesn’t belong where he is. Vilify him as a cheat who, knowing he was ineligible to run for president, intentionally violated the Constitution and defrauded the American people. Marginalize him!
Marginalize his Ivy League education and Harvard Law Review presidency. Devalue his degrees with slurs. Insinuate that merit had nothing to do with his achievements. Accuse him of lying about his religion. Repeat over and over that he’s a socialist bent on destroying free enterprise.
Charge him with being weak. If that won’t do, denounce him as headstrong and arrogant.
But above all else, brand him unqualified and in over his head. Yeah, that’s the one. It always works. That’ll get him out of there.
kingc@washpost.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-relentless-smear-campaign-against-obama/2011/04/29/AFkSVyGF_story.html
No comments:
Post a Comment