Sublime to ridiculous and back again
Nov 22, 2009 Medialites, Politics and Poker
I guess it’s just so much easier to find a label for someone, no matter how idiotic the proposition is, than to articulate meaningful criticism. It wasn’t all that long ago that we were hearing that Obama, who is merely big-government liberal, was a Red (click the picture). This morning it’s even better:
DAVE KOPEL EXPLAINS: President Obama Is Not A Jihadi. “There is not a scintilla of evidence to suggest that our President is a jihadi.”
Kopel seems to see it the same way; as he explains in his own short piece,
Jihadi, Commie... whatever
My view is that there is not a scintilla of evidence to suggest that our President is a jihadi. . . .
One portion that didn’t make the cut was my equating the allegation of “jihad?” with the earlier claims of some mean-spirited extremists that President Bush was as evil as Hitler.
True that, but of course no one’s surprised about that “editorial” cut. It’s still depressing that “our side,” or what I once thought was “our side,” has descended to this.
I am telling you, I was there, as a small-time activist for my state GOP and on campus as well, during the Reagan years. Despite what they said about us, we were occupying the moral high ground — and the intellectual high ground. It was the professors and so forth who were sputtering with epithets about us, but we were promoting ideas, not labels. We took pride in that.
Depressing to what it’s come to, but, again, not surprising.
November 23rd, 2009 at 3:55 pm
No way is Obama a big government liberal in the same sense as traditional Democrats since FDR. One shudders to think what Obama-as-President would have done in the runup to WW2 or, for that matter, in any confrontation with totalitarians. He seems to be more on their side than on ours.
November 25th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
I don’t think Obama is particularly further out there, Bob, than the vast majority of Democrats.
It is simply inappropriate to compare him to FDR. Any Democrat before Johnson — actually, Johnson too — would be regarded as a reactionary by today’s Democratic party. That doesn’t make any of them communists — much less Jihadis.
December 2nd, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Obama and his close associates are not arch-leftists because of some comparison I might make, but because of their beliefs and actions.