Yesterday I found myself at an acquaintance’s house for coffee and cake. The conversation around the table was light and the attendees were retelling the jokes they had recently heard. Somehow the name of Osama bin Laden came up and one of the guest looked at me and informed me as if in confidence that President Obama did not make the decision to take out OBL. Astonished that the informer, being a retired military officer, ought to understand that such a decision could only be made by the Commander-in Chief, I wanted to know the source of his information. His authority for the statement came from an e-mail containing this very confidential information.
There we go again. Since the day President Obama declared his candidacy for the office, the radical wing of the GOP, my former party, began to undermine the candidate by spreading the rumors that Obama was not a natural born United States citizen. The media, the Fox News in particular, gave this group legitimacy by calling them ‘Birthers’. Even the seasoned politicians the like of Boehner have succumbed to the villainous rhetoric of what I call the Crazy Right. None of the sane leaders of the Grand Old Party came forth to discredit these rumors. During the Health Care Reform debate the seniors were being scared by the idea of ‘Death Panels’. It is saddening to watch people who appear to be intelligent falling for such tactics. 20 to 27 percent of our population has been convinced by Fox News gang that our President was born in Kenya.
It seems that in order to acquire legitimacy with the GOP, one had to parrot the ‘Birthers’ mantra. Donald Trump was the latest of those pursuing that course. President was right to release the long form of his birth certificate calling the ‘Birthers’ what they really are – circus barkers. The nation is faced with multitude of serious problems and this manufactured controversy had been distracting from a real debate.
Although the release of the long form birth certificate by the President burst the balloon of the ‘Birthers’, they changed their cloak to the ‘Deathers’. Immediately after the very successful operation in the elimination of Osama bin Laden, the number one enemy of the United States, the ‘Deathers’ began their campaign to discredit the President. First they floated the idea that it was a staged event as no one knew where Osama was. When the al Qaida confirmed the news that their leader was indeed dead, they began to deliver the e-mails informing their ignorant followers that this President was inept in making such a decision. The apologists of the torture practices of the Bush era have begun to justify that policy and the want-to-be intellectual, Sara Palin declared the end of Osama bin Laden was brought about the former President Bush.
This noisy minority of Crazy Right had been attempting to disparage the President from the very day he announced his candidacy. Why so much hate is being directed to a person who was elected with a great majority of voted? After the elections, all he had been attempting to do is to implement what he promised during the campaign. Could it be that the Crazy Right is really the closet racists who cannot contain their rage to see an African-American occupying the White House? They are living in a time and place that saw its sunset over many decades ago and the world is no longer painted with the color of communism and democracy. Thanks to the United States, rest of the world has acquired its own aspirations and sometime their hopes and ambitions do not coincide with ours. Our foreign policies need to accept these sea changes and military power must only be used in concert with others after all dialogues had been exhausted.
The world respected us for our ideals and principles. After 9/11 our anger undermined our long standing beliefs and the policy of ‘you are with us or against us’ was followed with the zeal of an ideology. As a result our reputation as a nation of high principles became thing of the past. President Obama, having lived abroad as a child, brings a unique pragmatic prospective to the foreign policy and should be given full support in undoing the damage done by our ‘you are with us or against us’ policies of the past.
I urge all the intelligent and informed people to challenge what I call the Crazy Right, which is determined to demolish a legitimately elected Presidency without regard to the harm their misinformation does to the nation.
