I think I just realized something re: my feelings about Obama...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’ve always had a thing for the underdog, for everything from games to… well, whatever. I think one of the reasons I have concerns/hopes for (not about, at least in this case) Obama is because I kinda feel sorry for him.

Here’s why: I feel like it’s one thing to disagree with a politician. It’s quite another to fling some of the crap our President is getting these days. I can take “I fundamentally disagree with how he sees the economy and how to fix it.” I can’t take “SECRET MARXIST WHO IS ACTIVELY AND DELIBERATELY WORKING TO BRING DOWN AMERICA!!!” I can take “he isn’t fulfilling his own campaign promises, and doesn’t understand how to really fix the ailing health care system.” I look less favorably on “DEATH PANELS!!!” I can at least understand “he doesn’t have the experience to really lead an entire political party and nation, and depends too much on the advice of people I frankly don’t trust.” I can understand a lot less “HE’S A MUSLIM WHO WANTS TO PUT US ALL UNDER SHARIA LAW, AND HE WASN’T EVEN BORN HERE!!!”

It seems like there are way too many people for whom the all-caps stuff is their primary and/or only means of arguing against him, even a few elected officials, and frankly, I don’t want them to “win.”

It’s a poor reason for supporting someone, I admit, especially if he isn’t doing stuff I want done, and it certainly cannot, and should not, shield him against ALL criticism. It’s just an impulse.

M and P to the max, eh?

2

Nope, you have a pretty decent take on it all. The US is going through a rather pitch-a-fit spasm of adolescence with racial equality. The “Other/Foreigner” crap that Obama has to deal with is a fallout result of that. It’ll probably take another decade of sputtering and dullards to get to a point of real inclusion and equality for all citizens.

I support Obama for taking office in a climate he knew would be a crappy row to hoe in any case, whatever race. To do that with the tag of First non White guy is a double row hoed. I have all hope of Obama getting things done, and, really, if not, want to see more reasons why it can’t work.

3

Sort of like when Bush was a chimp-looking motherfucker who was teh most stoopit president of all time (and somehow cunning and evil too) who wanted to kill as many brown people as he possibly could and who was gonna take over the military and declare himself President For Life?

You mean crap like that?

:wink:

4

You forgot Bush=Hitler.

5

Oh, yeah, that too! Thanks. :slight_smile:

6

You don’t even need to look at modern politics. Politics have always been dirty.
And the same sort of themes keep repeating themselves over and over in history:

Interesting how each generation has to start over again with the same old ploys.

7

Perhaps. Though I’d think that’d make conservatives, even angry ones, even MORE sensitive and reluctant to sling such arrows at our current president, no? :smiley:

8

No!

:smiley:

9

Then what the heck are you complaining for?! :wink:

10

Not complaining at all. I’m just wondering whether the empathy you feel for a president who gets called names and criticized in a ridiculous manner applies across the board…or not. :stuck_out_tongue:

11

In my experience, the human instinct to say “gosh, I hate that this is happening to me. I’m certainly not going to perpetuate it when the tables are turned!” runs somewhat secondary to the instinct to go “BWA-HA-HA-HA! Who’s laughing NOW!? BLOOD FOR BLOOD!”

Also seems to run hand-in-hand with the tendency to go “Wh-what? What are you doing this to ME for?* I’m* the good guy!..you stupid plebeians!” :smack:

12

I think a big difference is that I never got email forwards about how horrible Bush was, challenging his Christianity, or even calling him the anti-Christ.

It’s possible that the people who say that have become more Internet savvy.

13

This is a binary black/white view to you. Like, if we were to find out that 99% of the US population thought Obama was a lizard man who wanted to eat all your babies, and 1% of the US population compared Bush to Hitler, you’d say “see, both sides do it, therefore it’s excused!”

The Obama hatred is far more baseless and runs far deeper than any hatred for Bush - which was, incidentally, often based on very real things like killing hundreds of thousands of people. Obama has done nothing but try to cope with good will and good intention with a bad situation, and yet receives the most absurd level of hatred for anyone I may have seen in my lifetime.

And now you’re thinking “oh you’re just a liberal so you see it that way” but I’m really not. I’m actually probably the most objective person on these boards on political issues, I have no ties whatsoever to either political party. I’ve voted for Bush (woops) and Obama, and actually voted more libertarian than anything else.

There are matters of degree. The unjustifiable hatred and crazy claims against Obama are massively more widespread and less substantiated than the others.

But go ahead and play your "someone on your side once said something sort of similar, so HAHA NOT ONLY AM I AND MY SIDE EXCUSED FROM ALL WRONG DOING BUT NOW YOU’RE A HYPOCRITE! HA HA! HA HA!!! game. It’s the most boring thing in politics.

Anyway, to the OP - I’m not even rabidly pro-Obama or anything, but I’m pretty staunchly against bullshit. So I’m the guy who feels compelled to point out to these fucking idiots (AND THEY’RE FUCKING EVERYWHERE FOR FUCKS SAKE, I can’t go anywhere without hearing about the new communist plot) when they’re factually wrong. So lots of people view me as Obama’s lapdog just because I debunk stupid, false shit.

The best one once was that someone made the connection that “NAZI” in german meant “national socialist” and Obama is a socialist, so… and I tried to explain that, even if you were to apply the term socialist to Obama, that’s not the same thing the Germans meant, and that their idea of socialism wasn’t like, say, modern Denmark or something, and so you’re really just exploiting the similarity in naming rather than similarity in ideas… and the guy responded to me “well, thank you for defending the nazis I guess”…
:smack:

14

What can I say, except “Horseshit!” The hatred for Bush, both around here and in liberal circles throughout the country, bordered on psychotic. Calling Obama a Marxist or a Muslim or a socialist is child’s play compared with the level of hatred and vitriol directed at Bush, and while I don’t know it for a fact I’d wager that a far smaller percentage of the electorate believes the accusations about Obama than did the accusations leveled at Bush. And while the number of innocent people killed in any war is without a doubt regrettable, your conclusion that the war and it’s results were evil is in point of fact only an opinion…or have you not noticed that most of the support for the war comes from the right and most of the opposition from the left?

There is no objective measure as to whether the war was a good thing or a bad thing, and there is no way to measure the eventual result of the war. One thing that is very likely however is that far fewer people have died as a result of the war than would have died eventually under the reign of Hussein and his two sons. I’ve seen estimates of from half a million to one and half million deaths from the Iran-Iraq war and tens of thousands of others have been killed within Iraq’s borders by either by Hussein’s WMDs or by soldiers using conventional weapons, and this doesn’t take into account the terror, abuse and repression visited upon the Iraqi population as whole by Hussein and his henchmen. So where’s your compassion for them and all the other people who died because Saddam Hussein was in power? Take a listen to Christopher Hitchens’ firsthand account of life in Iraq under Saddam Hussein and his henchmen and then try to argue to me that the Iraqi populace isn’t far safer and far better off than they were before the war.

I’m not saying we should (or ever could) be the world’s policemen, and certainly there are other countries whose populations have been similarly terrorized. And on a practical level I wouldn’t have argued that we should have invaded Iraq solely to free its population from Hussein’s leadership. But I don’t think there is any question that however many innocent people died as a result of that war, a great many more would very likely have died had Hussein remained in power. And unlike many of my brethren on the left, I tend to view a life as a life and don’t much care whether they exist within or without the borders of the U.S. If fewer Iraqi people die, and tens of millions more can live free of rape, torture, murder and terror at the hands of their government, than were killed as a result of removing that government, then to me that is a good thing.

15

What were those widely believed, false accusations that affected Bush from the primary season to the election season and through his first two years as president?

If you have a football game where one side is commiting penalties like crazy, and the other side might have a few borderline calls, but both sides receiver the same amount of penaltiesone side could justifiably say they’re getting screwed by the refs. But the other guys could say “but 8 penalties were called on both teams! It’s dead even so it’s fair!” … if the side that’s commiting tons of penalties is equally penalized to the ones who barely commited any, that’s an injustice and the apparent fairness is false.

That’s sort of a weird analogy to use but it’s what popped into my head. Bush was criticized for shit that he actually did. He started a completely voluntary war. He exploited post 9/11 hysteria to pass some of the most tyranical legislation this country has ever seen. If he receives criticism for that, then it’s justified. You’re the guy who’s saying “oh, both Bush and Obama got criticized, so it’s fair” after Bush commited 18 penalties and Obama received hatred right off the bat.

I mean - he received that hatred even early in the campaign season, before he ever had the chance to do anything, do you not remember that? When people declared he was a secret muslim sleeper agent in the summer of 2008, which of his policies or actions were they criticizing?

Most of the Bush criticism came after he did stuff that deserved criticism, and most of it was criticism of shit he actually did. The hatred from Obama started from day one before people even knew much about him, and very little is actually factually based off of anything he did.

Digging deep there - the Iran/Iraq war and some other shit from the 80s. He’s a dick. Half the world is a dick. Whether you think the war was good or not, you can at least agree that it’s a point on which people might criticize someone. What did Obama do in early 2008 that was equivelant to launching an unprovoked war that earned him all of this hatred?

Let’s invade half the world!

You have to be fucking kidding me. You think THE LEFT is guilty of only caring about lives if they’er american and fuck everyone else? This is so fucking absurd that I’d be convinced you were some sort of Poe’s law parity if you didn’t have years of this sort of behavior to back you up. Do I even need to elaborate on this one? I mean, for fucks sake.

16

IMHO, you have just demonstrated the very lack of perspective that allows people to call Obama a Marxist or secret Muslim.

There were certainly some morons on the left who actually “hated” GW Bush. But my sense is there were vastly more who felt he was simply a poor president, and that he made some terrible decisions. Going further, it’s not a stretch to say that his personal background may have led to some of those decisions. If true, that would be unsavory and annoying, but not something to “hate” someone for.

I personally feel much the same way about Ronald Reagan. I think he (and Bush, by the way) were well intentioned. They wanted what was best for the country as they saw it. I think they were mistaken in how the went about it, and in some cases caused harm to the country. But I don’t hate them.

And I think that’s the difference. I never perceived the type of actual, large scale hatred for Bush that I do sense for Obama. Not that I’m any particular fan of Obama. But I definitely will disagree if you try to tell me that people are just disagreeing with him the way I did with Bush and Reagan. It appears much more visceral than that.

17

You may not have gotten e-mail forwards about Bush, but I sure the hell did. Blood for oil, he’s as bad as Hitler, was gonna declare himself dictator, he planned 9/11 etc. I’ve yet to get one about Obama, but I’m certain they exist too. Lots of people with axes to grind have e-mail access.

18

Do you even know what “firsthand account” means?

You do realize, i assume, that Hitchens was not present in Saddam Hussein’s cabinet room when the events he describes were occurring? He is describing something he has seen on video.

By your definition, i can give a firsthand account of the Nuremberg rallies, or the Allied bombing of Dresden, or the explosion of the Hindenberg in New Jersey, despite the fact that i wasn’t even born yet, because i’ve seen videotape of the events.

19

I like to think of myself as a fairly level headed guy. Here is my take. The Bush people say that liberals were absolutely terrible to Bush. The Obama supporters say that the conservatives are absolutely horrible to Obama. Both see the other side as much more mean.

It think it is pretty easy for both sides to think they are right. When someone is mean to your guy, it seems more personal to you. It not only insults the president, but it insults you and your beliefs, your ideas. It stands out much more and you notice it.

When you heard comments or saw emails about the other party’s president you may chuckle a little because you think of it as at least 50% truth and then you go about your day and think little of it. When a spiteful comment or an email says something about your guy… “I mean, who the heck do they think they are? Are you kidding me!”

With that said, I don’t feel sorry for him. That goes with the position. People flung crap at Bush just as much. People flung crap at Clinton. He is the President, and this is politics. If he can’t take the heat, don’t join the game.

20

Are people really trying to claim equivalence here? :rolleyes:

I don’t recall 25% of the population believing that Bush was secretly some kind of non-Christian, anti-Christian, non-American, anti-American foreign agent bent on the destruction of America, and I certainly don’t recall any prominent media outlets pushing such ideas.

(I’m aware of the 9/11 truther crazies, but I’m pretty sure they also think Obama’s continuing the so-called cover-up. To me, they seem to exist outside the usual political spectrum.)

For the most part, people criticized Bush for things he actually did in the real world (whether or not those things deserved criticism has been debated elsewhere). Obama is being criticized by a large segment of the population for things he hasn’t done and things that aren’t even arguably true.

Yes, there was plenty of Bush hatred and criticism from the left, but (other than a small number of isolated crazies) it didn’t strike me as anything outside of recent American political discourse.

What we’re seeing with Obama is a whole new level of insanity. Muslim! Terrorist! Sharia Law! Death Panels! Second Amendment solutions! Birth Certificate! Kenyan Anti-Colonialist! And these things are coming from actual high profile political figures and candidates.

It’d take a lot of convincing to make me believe that this is just a mirror image of what we saw with Bush.