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Lowry goes on in his article to disagree with Obama's positions on a variety of issues, and sing the praises of Bush -- for example, because the latter gave us the Iraq surge -- never mind that is was of course simply a partial bail-out from the disaster he himself had created. That's fine, even if Lowry's politics are about as thoughtful and welcome as... well, a third Bush term. He's certainly entitled to his policy preferences. However, when you write an article assailing a president for the incessant and grossly unfair blaming of another president, you're kinda expected to give an example. Maybe even two. Heck, I'll go even further. If you do this whilst tossing around highly inflammatory language -- such as claiming with respect to Obama's public rendering of Bush that, "no calumny is too much to heap on him, and no defense is ever offered" -- then you really ought to produce four or five doozies to illustrate your incendiary claim, shouldn't you? Lowry -- along with the research staff he presumably presides over as editor of a major publication -- provides a whopping zero. Not a single one. Instead, he tells us that Obama "impugns his immediate predecessor with classless regularity". Hmm. Very strange. Apparently Obama's highly regular epithets are so classless they can't even be printed in a family magazine. That's the only reason I can think of for Lowry to leave them out. Maybe, for example, Obama didn't just refer to the "mess" he inherited, but called it a "darned mess" instead. Disgusting. I wouldn't publish such filth if I was Lowry either.
Jay Nordlinger gives his readers roughly the same treatment (or perhaps the same rough treatment) in his "O's (Latest) Insult", also published in The National Review. Nordlinger is furious that Obama recently said to some of his supporters, "Democrats are an opinionated bunch. You know, the other side, they just kinda sometimes do what they're told. Democrats, y'all thinkin' for yourselves."
Wow! Can you believe it?!?! Have you ever seen something quite so egregious in your life? Next thing you know, Obama will be calling conservatives something really sickening, like maybe "dittoheads" perhaps!!
As with the Lowry piece, I kept cruising along, waiting to see the great crimes of the president laid out in all their horrid glory. Instead, we lucky readers are treated to a lengthy recounting of some unfinished business from the author's college days (never a good sign) and some random quote attributed to the Washington Post -- which, last I heard, was still a newspaper, not Michelle Obama's husband. That's it. All of which nevertheless prompts our friendly correspondent to end his piece thusly: "I have 30 more things to say, of course [translation: "Six paragraphs in and two days past deadline and I'm completely out of filler for this crappy piece already"], but here's one more: Do you recall President Bush insulting Democrats, as Obama has insulted us, explicitly? Sometimes our post-partisan president can be a rather nasty piece of work."
Golly, I don't know! I'd have to think about that. Maybe Bush wasn't so explicit about verbally trashing Democrats (except, of course by cutely calling it the "Democrat Party" rather than the Democratic Party), but I'm still a bit riled up about him stealing the election from "Sore Loserman" Al Gore, doing it again against John "Flip-Flop" Kerry, and scheduling the Iraq war vote in late October 2002, in order to turn it into a smear against that other party in the election just two weeks later. Call me crazy, but I think those are bigger insults to Democrats -- and to democracy -- than is Obama noting that those Republics "just kinda sometimes" have strong party discipline. Which, of course, also happens to be just kinda completely... true.
Ah truth. Pesky, annoying, truth. That's it! That's what's missing from these unfortunate right-wing rendezvous with reality. A little truth. You know, like where traveling to Europe just means you saw Buckingham Palace and ate some snails floating in garlic, not that you apologized for America. Like where being guilty of continually blaming your predecessor for the sixteen crises crippling the country might require that you are actually continually blaming your predecessor. (Or, heck, even that you are doing it once. And never mind that your predecessor was himself as fat a target for righteous blame as ever existed.) Like where being guilty of thoroughly insulting the other party actually requires a thorough insult, and one that also doesn't happen to be an accurate statement of fact. That kind of truth.
I mean, seriously. Even if we forget the astonishing Freedom Fries arrogance of these cognitive cripples, is this as clear a case of paranoia as one could possibly conjure up, or what?
The great irony, of course, is that they've got themselves all whipped up about Barack Obama, of all people. If there was ever a guy in the White House who was more innocuous, less offensive, and more happy-faced than Pleasant Obama, I can't imagine it. If regressives today are this freaked out by the Kumbaya Kid, what would they do if they had a pugnacious liberal like Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson to deal with?
I, for one, would sure like to find out. And not only for the spectacle it would surely be.
Let's face it, nobody wears psychopathologies on their sleeves more proudly than the regressive right. And nobody's politics are more completely driven by their sense of wounded social status than these very same clowns.
They've been freaked out for decades, a epoch of epic paranoia occasionally interspersed with the ecstasy of witnessing a Reagan or a Bush beat up on one group of brown people or another in their name.
But now they're so far gone they've taken to simply making up perceived insults out of whole cloth, and clinging to them with a ferocity usually reserved for parachutes at about 300 feet.
Unreal. (Literally.) Next thing you know they'll be saying that the president is a secret Muslim trying to convert the country to Islam!
Oh, wait. Never mind...
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