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Obama will remain unappreciated by racist right wing conservatives
Standard Digital News
Anyang' Nyong'o
11/16/2014
Excerpt:
A few days ago Prof Michael Chege drew my attention to an article written by William Thomas from the Oval Office entitled “The real problem with Americans and their disrespect for Obama-according to a Canadian”. The date line of this article was November 10, 2014: meaning the sentiments expressed therein are current.
I learnt, from Thomas’s article, that Americans usually rally around their President once he is elected as the head of state and government. No matter what their differences are during the elections, and however much they may continue to differ on certain policy issues, Americans will at all times accept the President as the US President: respected and given due dignity due to the highest office he occupies in the land.
Unfortunately this has not been the case with Barack Hussein Obama as far as the conservative White American right is concerned, and their numbers have been growing with time. It is unfortunate, but crude racism may be at play here. Right from the word go, a Congressman had the gumption to call the President a liar as he was giving his first State of the Union Address in Congress. A solemn occasion like that had always been treated with dignity and decorum since, among other things, it signifies the unity of purpose of the three institutions of governance led by the Presidency and not an individual called Barrack Obama. It is a day not created by a Republican or Democratic President: it is created by the US Constitution.
The emotional drive of conservative White America, upset by seeing the child of a former colonised African occupying the Presidency in the US constitutionally, drives these fellows to abuse their own constitution if only to bring out their very base and primitive instincts unacceptable to the spirit of liberalism which inspired the American revolution.
When painting the face of Barack Obama with the caricature of Hitler or claiming on rooftops that Obama was born in Kenya, and even going to court to try and prove such an absurdity as the truth, they think they are fulfilling a mission to advance their political agenda. They may as well be doing so, and the conservative scare they have created among elected democrats in Congress may easily feed on their egos and incline them to think that White America will inevitably turn solidly right and foolishly racist. The facts on the ground show something different. And when the euphoria of the mid-term congressional elections thaws and Americans begin thinking seriously of a liveable future, it will be remembered that Obama achieved a lot in his two terms in office.
Paul Glastris, Rayan Cooper and Siyu Hu, writing in the Washington Monthly of March/April 2012 on “The Incomplete Greatness of Barrack Obama”, pointed out at least 50 achievements Obama had accomplished in office up to the time of writing their assessment. Five of these achievements are worth noting. First is the Affordable Care Act of 2010 which by this year had provided health insurance coverage to 32 million previously uninsured Americans. It is to be remembered that in spite of her tremendous wealth and modernity, America’s biggest problem is unfair distribution of wealth, income and opportunities and poverty in the midst of amazing opulence. The right privileged White society will never accept that these are social problems: to them something like poverty is individually ordained.
Second is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 which pumped $787 into a collapsing economy, reviving manufacturing plants and rejuvenating the infrastructure thereby creating 3.7 million new jobs in the private sector and averting the economic depression that was staring the US on its face. Obama had the audacity to do this even when opposed by some in his core political constituency.
Third was his onslaught on Wall Street financial institutions through the Dodd- Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 that sought to improve accountability and transparency in financial markets while instilling some financial discipline in Wall Street by stopping abusive lending practices detrimental to both the financial markets as well as to consumers of financial services. Understandably this has been helpful to the American taxpayer.
In the fourth place Obama ended the War in Iraq as he had promised by December 2011. That this region has continued to be prone to political instability and conflict does not negate the fact that Obama fulfilled a promise to Americans which he had made on being elected to the Presidency. Rather than accept this as a fact and congratulate him for it, the right wing would rather gloss over it as a way of building its arsenal of abuses against the President.
Finally, sometime in 2011, the duo of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama netted Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and brought to an end his long leadership of the Al Qaida terrorist movement. I have always marvelled how reluctant the right wing in the US has been to celebrate Obama for this. Let me not venture into speculating what the right would have done if this had been achieved by a Mitt Romney or somebody else of that ilk.
..........................................
View the complete article at:
http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/artic...-conservatives
Standard Digital News
Anyang' Nyong'o
11/16/2014
Excerpt:
A few days ago Prof Michael Chege drew my attention to an article written by William Thomas from the Oval Office entitled “The real problem with Americans and their disrespect for Obama-according to a Canadian”. The date line of this article was November 10, 2014: meaning the sentiments expressed therein are current.
I learnt, from Thomas’s article, that Americans usually rally around their President once he is elected as the head of state and government. No matter what their differences are during the elections, and however much they may continue to differ on certain policy issues, Americans will at all times accept the President as the US President: respected and given due dignity due to the highest office he occupies in the land.
Unfortunately this has not been the case with Barack Hussein Obama as far as the conservative White American right is concerned, and their numbers have been growing with time. It is unfortunate, but crude racism may be at play here. Right from the word go, a Congressman had the gumption to call the President a liar as he was giving his first State of the Union Address in Congress. A solemn occasion like that had always been treated with dignity and decorum since, among other things, it signifies the unity of purpose of the three institutions of governance led by the Presidency and not an individual called Barrack Obama. It is a day not created by a Republican or Democratic President: it is created by the US Constitution.
The emotional drive of conservative White America, upset by seeing the child of a former colonised African occupying the Presidency in the US constitutionally, drives these fellows to abuse their own constitution if only to bring out their very base and primitive instincts unacceptable to the spirit of liberalism which inspired the American revolution.
When painting the face of Barack Obama with the caricature of Hitler or claiming on rooftops that Obama was born in Kenya, and even going to court to try and prove such an absurdity as the truth, they think they are fulfilling a mission to advance their political agenda. They may as well be doing so, and the conservative scare they have created among elected democrats in Congress may easily feed on their egos and incline them to think that White America will inevitably turn solidly right and foolishly racist. The facts on the ground show something different. And when the euphoria of the mid-term congressional elections thaws and Americans begin thinking seriously of a liveable future, it will be remembered that Obama achieved a lot in his two terms in office.
Paul Glastris, Rayan Cooper and Siyu Hu, writing in the Washington Monthly of March/April 2012 on “The Incomplete Greatness of Barrack Obama”, pointed out at least 50 achievements Obama had accomplished in office up to the time of writing their assessment. Five of these achievements are worth noting. First is the Affordable Care Act of 2010 which by this year had provided health insurance coverage to 32 million previously uninsured Americans. It is to be remembered that in spite of her tremendous wealth and modernity, America’s biggest problem is unfair distribution of wealth, income and opportunities and poverty in the midst of amazing opulence. The right privileged White society will never accept that these are social problems: to them something like poverty is individually ordained.
Second is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 which pumped $787 into a collapsing economy, reviving manufacturing plants and rejuvenating the infrastructure thereby creating 3.7 million new jobs in the private sector and averting the economic depression that was staring the US on its face. Obama had the audacity to do this even when opposed by some in his core political constituency.
Third was his onslaught on Wall Street financial institutions through the Dodd- Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 that sought to improve accountability and transparency in financial markets while instilling some financial discipline in Wall Street by stopping abusive lending practices detrimental to both the financial markets as well as to consumers of financial services. Understandably this has been helpful to the American taxpayer.
In the fourth place Obama ended the War in Iraq as he had promised by December 2011. That this region has continued to be prone to political instability and conflict does not negate the fact that Obama fulfilled a promise to Americans which he had made on being elected to the Presidency. Rather than accept this as a fact and congratulate him for it, the right wing would rather gloss over it as a way of building its arsenal of abuses against the President.
Finally, sometime in 2011, the duo of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama netted Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and brought to an end his long leadership of the Al Qaida terrorist movement. I have always marvelled how reluctant the right wing in the US has been to celebrate Obama for this. Let me not venture into speculating what the right would have done if this had been achieved by a Mitt Romney or somebody else of that ilk.
..........................................
View the complete article at:
http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/artic...-conservatives
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