Along with Daily Kos, one of my other go-to sites for my daily fix of left-leaning political commentary is Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. Today he does one of the best summations of the current ploy by the GOP to denigrate and delegitimize President Obama. First three (fair use) paragraphs here, and I highly recommend clicking the link and reading the whole thing:
Revanche and the First Black President
No alternative or dark explanations are required when it comes to Republican desires to dictate the replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Control of the federal judiciary has been a transcendent goal of the conservative movement for two generations. And in the face of political and demographic change, the Republican Party has become increasingly dependent on the Supreme Court to entrench its political power through attacks on voting rights, unions, one person one vote and decisions like Citizens United, not to mention Bush v. Gore. So the stakes, on the merits, are vast. And yet the manner of the refusal to even entertain the nomination of a President with a year left in office is, as Lauren Fox notes in this story, simply a culmination of Republican efforts not simply to block Obama's policies but to delegitimize, degrade and denigrate his presidency and the man himself.
There are certain stand out moments, like when South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson (R)screamed out "You lie!" when President Obama was presenting his health care plan to Congress in September 2009. Or more recently, there was the unprecedented instance of the Speaker of the House negotiating with a foreign head of state, behind the back of the President, to come to the House to advocate against the President's signature foreign policy initiative.
But the deeper pattern is one of persistent and pervasive denigration and - I hate jargon words like 'othering' but, well ... othering. We talk about the so-called "birther" controversy that at least among morons and racists dogged President Obama for years. But birtherism is better thought of as the clownish outlier of a more pervasive phenomenon. Even today you can routinely hear Republican presidential candidates telling crowds that President Obama doesn't believe in 'American exceptionalism', is trying to damage America, cut it down to size in favor of other countries, wants to make America more like other countries, is driven by hatred of America etc etc etc. President Obama is in so many ways, an outsider, an enemy who wants to hurt us,Americans.
Again, the full post can be found here:
talkingpointsmemo.com/...