Yesterday, I was awakened by a friend, after not enough sleep, to the news that my President had deservedly been honored with the Nobel Prize for Peace.
This friend is a committed liberal>>>progressive. He's one of the good guys.
And when I talked to him later in the day and he basically said:
"Barack Obama doesn't deserve the Peace Prize, because all he did was TALK about peace. It's just the Nobel committee trying to influence US politics, and the award will now prove politically inconvenient in the US."
I, however, apparently have an IV in my arm for a continuous Kool Aid drip, because, seemingly unbelievably, I think my President does deserve the honor he was accorded. And I believe that for many of the reasons cited in the recommended diary by blackwaterdog.
So I started pondering about what this problem is that people, even those who 'should' support him, have with Barack Hussein Obama having any success. Apparently, among 'progressives' unless the African American President of the United States of America does not satisfy the very exacting specifications of each individual's idea of what should be done, he is a sell-out do-nothing.
There's no conclusive way of determining what's at the root of that, but as I thought about it, I did come to an excruciating, embarrassing, and sad end to my contemplation.
As my mental wanderings led me down path after path in trying to find an explanation, I came to dead end after dead end. Only one seemed to provide any possibility of an explanation. Regretfully, I concluded that even among progressives, this is a racial thing. Even for them, President Obama has got to do more, do it better and in less time than anyone else on the planet, in order to prove that he is 'worthy' of the presidency, or our support or the Nobel Peace Prize or ...... ?
If it is not racism, someone please explain to me why it is, that when the President of the United States is a Black man perfection is the only measure of success?
Update: No where in this diary do I say whether I think the President has performed "PERFECTLY".
Furthermore, I'm not saying this 'anything less than perfection is a failure' attitude IS racism, I'm saying my unhappy conclusion is that it's probably racism, and given that I ended the diary with a question, I intended to open a discussion regarding other possible explanations. Not to hear new iterations of 'he hasn't done anything' or 'he's god and can do no wrong'.
Furthermore, this diary is NOT about the Nobel Prize, it is a general question about what is at the root of the "'anything less than perfection is a failure'" many on the left seem to have about President Obama.
I'm updating here, because the discussion in comments is veering off into Nobel territory, and that's just the example, not the subject.