Obama’s Thin-Skinned Supporters

Obama’s supporters are not even trying to hide their unusual and extreme degree of esteem for the President.  Consider this overwrought guest column in today’s Orlando Sentinel by Florida A&M  law professor Jeremy Levitt:

The far right and its right-wing brethren’s most recent barrage of indignant and visceral attacks against President Barack Hussein Obama has led me to conclude that the scourge of anti-Obama fanaticism is nothing more than foolish racism masquerading as patriotism and phony Christianity. . . .

The U.S. president is the head of state and government, as well as the highest official in the country and commander in chief of the armed forces. He is not only the most-influential and -recognized political figure in the world, but also the living embodiment of our democracy.

While I believe that it is healthy to constructively engage and criticize government, the far right has shamed our nation by attacking President Obama with unpatriotic idioms and schemes.

As a close follower of presidential politics, I do not remember another time when an American president was so unpatriotically maligned by Americans [ummm, did he forget all that Bush=Hitler Stuff?], namely, right-wing politicians and media, and the millions of Joe and Judy plumbers who would disown Jesus if they knew he was African, and Obama if he were the Second Coming. [I can assure you, he's not, but I suppose we have to consider that he might be according to Levitt.]

The truth remains that right-wing anti-Obama rhetoric around abortion, health care, education, gun control and foreign policy are cowardly coded smoke screens intended to mask fear and racism.

Whether it is the birthers movement, gun-toting right-wing anarchists, bigoted congressmen, hate marchers or garden-variety dogmatists, the fact remains that Obama won the election. [Notice, this important historical occurrence does nothing to calm this crazy man down.] . . . .

I would remind the far right what the Apostle Paul wrote, ” … there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God.” Hence, Obama is the U.S. president and leader of the Free World because he was appointed by God.

Need I say more?

This is more than over the top.  It’s in lunatic territory.

Has anyone before called the President the “living embodiment of our democracy.”  Americans have long cherished their Constitution and the electoral process, vowing to be a loyal opposition and to glorify the process and the laws, so that we are a “government of laws, not men.”  Levitt is peddling the alien “Fuehrer Principle,” the idea that one man is so wise, so englightened, someone called by destiny to lead us to peace and prosperity such that any opposition to him is evil and irrational by definition.

And the stuff about God-given authority has a kernal of truth, but we in America also believe in God-given rights.  But when it comes to a black, liberal Presdient, all of a sudden the folks telling us just a few years ago that “dissent is patriotic,” sound like Joseph de Maistre defending the House of Bourbon.   The explicitly racial triumphalism of Obama’s supporters is unique and scary, and it may be their undoing.  Would that it were so!

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Kosovo Op-Ed Published in Orlando Sentinel

Below is a link to my Kosovo Op-Ed in the Orlando Sentinel.  The comments on the on-line version are surprisingly pro-Serb.  I guess people everywhere are fed up with wars being waged over half-baked abstractions like Democracy and Self-Determination. 

Here’s an excerpt:

No one believes that the Kosovar Albanians will act as tolerant stewards of a multicultural society. Since 1999, Kosovar extremists have destroyed Christian churches and monasteries and expelled thousands of Serbs in a campaign that one NATO commander described as “ethnic cleansing.”

History has not been kind to the Serbs. After World War II, the communist regime murdered Serbians en masse who fought against the Nazi invaders. In the 1990s, though all sides committed atrocities in the Balkans, Americans and Europeans singled out the Bosnian Serbs for condemnation. The hypocrisy reached its peak in 1995 when the West remained silent as well-armed Croatian forces expelled 200,000 Serbs from Bosnia’s Krajina region. Today in Kosovo, the holy land of the Serbs, the West has explicitly approved the nationalist aims of the Albanians by recognizing an independent Kosovo.

This is a bigger issue than Serbia. Once again, the United States has needlessly provoked Russia. In recent years, we’ve meddled in its Ukrainian neighbor’s elections and pushed NATO’S boundaries farther eastward. In 1999, a weak Russia could do little to support its Serbian ally. But today Vladimir Putin’s Russia is strong, and its patience with the West has worn thin.

We may soon find that we have insulted Russia one time too many.

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