Obama bashing as an American pastime

Pockets of racist resistant movements are taking over the street corners, campaigning for the White House to be returned to the White Man. They are armed with primordial sentiments and have classified Obama from being a Taliban to being a Communist as if being either in the freest country in the world has suddenly become […]

Pockets of racist resistant movements are taking over the street corners, campaigning for the White House to be returned to the White Man. They are armed with primordial sentiments and have classified Obama from being a Taliban to being a Communist as if being either in the freest country in the world has suddenly become a First Amendment crime. These right wingers would rather have massive unemployment with the attendant social problems to the Obama bailout. Now that the mid-term elections are underway, they want to torpedo the Democratic balance which has given the Obama reform a firm pedestal. In its place, they would rather have the kind of government that would impose an empiric war that has established America as a global bully whose actions are watched with suspicion.

The Obama critics, daring as they are believed to represent the views of a silent many who are too shy to join the street protests but who may vote the wrong way thereby increasing the Amerophobia that exists in certain parts of the world and endanger the lives of innocent Americans in various parts of the globe. Their posters reveal their hatred for change and dynamism; it portrays their angst. They claim that capitalism built America and not bail out. They would rather that the ailing banks collapse, that people who saved their hard-earned money in them join the army of the disillusioned relying on food vouchers for subsistence.

 These people are angry with Obama’s tax cut which favours middle and low income earners and small businesses and levies the juggernauts of capitalism who would rather that the small fishes of business are swallowed in the ocean of their greed.

These people who can afford cosmetic surgeries in the most expensive hospitals across the globe would rather that the health care reform is removed so that those who cannot afford to cure a common flu are left to die. It’s so amazing the kind of blind man’s logic that these superficially rational beings have succumbed their brains to in their quest to prevent a non-white from leading the world’s global police. They would rather have a dumb leader to one that epitomizes the true American dream.

It has not been rosy for America under Obama. To be so deluded is to fall into the same intellectual abyss as the right wing malcontents. Yes, Obama’s promises to give America a break from the war path has not succeeded. The so-called pull-out of Iraq had not come with the usual yankee gungho. Rather, they had sneaked out of Baghdad like frightened dogs with their tails in between their legs. Leadership speeches are not imbued with the usual quotable gusto, but temperate and condescending. The promise to close the Abu Ghraib prison within one year in office has not materialized. Obama made the promise, but who does not know that there is a big difference between wishes and realisables in governance in a country as diverse as America with contending interests?

Obama did not invade Iraq. The democrats did not invade Iraq; the Democrats do not have a history of the Texan western model of governance, that infamy is the lot of the Republicans. Afghanistan, the new frontier of conflict, is as unpredictable as any other bloody excursion ever embarked upon since the war of independence. A fractured country with a history of intractable rebellion and ever-contending interests which defied communist cohesion and home-grown concoctions aimed at building it. It would be a miracle if America succeeds where others have failed. It appears that in Obama’s mind, he realizes this, but the hawks are ever bent to expand the frontiers of hatred for God’s own country and its interests by not only pursuing the Afghanistan war but perhaps, even attempting to expand it to Iran.

Hamid Karzai, the western propelled puppet president of Afghanistan, is no better friend of the so-called Allied Forces than Osama bin Laden was to America before the 9/11 attacks. He even threatened to ally with his country’s arch-enemy, the Taliban and by implication, to switch to the Al-Qaeda camp if the west turns too much heat on him. Truth is that Karzai is sitting as pretty on the throne as a bird perching on a rope. He has found out that he has more than the Taliban to contend with. There is the monster called corruption buried deep within the local system and impossible to uproot in a fell swoop. He cannot afford to be distracted with foreign heckling, yet he cannot make progress with the status quo.

It is therefore, bizarrely annoying that in spite of this background, anti-Obamas are swelling in ranks accusing Obama of perhaps on one hand, supporting the construction of a mosque near ground zero where there are already dozens of such places of worship and perhaps may someday accuse him of goading on Terry Jones in his mad quest to increase his dozen or so regular disciples with his ludicrous intent to burn the Quran. Obama remains a shining example of courage under the worst circumstances, a son worthy of his father’s praise.