by
While it's been a struggle hiding my disappointment in regards to our duly elected president not effectively vanquishing the insane and invasive Right Wing to the dank fringes from whence it slithered, and disappointed that, for all intents and purposes, our duly elected president has been more or less an ally of the corporate behemoths who run everything from the military to the media, I nonetheless remain convinced that the main thrust of Right Wing opposition to said duly elected president is based solely on a deep, dark and extremely personalized dislike.
It's deeper and darker than the Right's dislike for, say, Bill Clinton who, while an out n' proud Democrat was also very clearly a good friend to big business (NAFTA) and a thorn in the side of the poor (his welfare reform initiative) and despite his being brought down in a concerted effort by genophobic forces bent on instilling morality at the expense of governmental effectiveness, he was always regarded by the Right with respect, however grudging.
And that speaks to the glaring double standard which was and still is at the heart of the lion's share of Right Wing opposition to Barak Obama:
He is a black man.
Given the facts about President Obama's arguably centrist, over-conciliatory and über-accommodating approach toward governing, one would assume there'd be little disappointment from anyone claiming to be his political opposite, saving disappointment from those like myself who looked to him as a healing balm to the years of flaming stupidity and brazen disregard for Democracy that marked the Bush years; who saw in Obama an articulate embodiment of America's best hopes rather than the opportunistic, low-brow bullying that prospered under the aegis of neo-conservatism and unregulated corporate influence.
But that has not been the case. For the Right Wing, it's not the fact that Obama has been nowhere near the ideological anathema they tarred him as being. For the Right Wing, it is beyond politics, deeper than ideological differences.
He's a black man living in their white house.
And that reality proved even harder to bear than the mere election of a Democrat. How else to explain the Right's almost carnal embrace of apocalyptic rhetoric and unprecedented displays of nonsensical and stunningly counter intuitive/hypocritical/contradictory behavior since his inauguration?
How else to explain the suddenly awakened consciences of the conspicuously caucasian Tea Baggers who, rather than easily grasp that the causes they trumpet are actually empirically proven to be detrimental to their own interests, opt instead to bleat banal credos which sound superficially like rousing cries for "smaller government" and "accountability" but what are in truth thinly veiled, virulent, recidivistic expressions of deep-seated racism?
How else to explain the constant howl of birthers, death panelers, gun fetishists, Islamophobes and other vendors of dystopic delusions, all of which happen to have a boogie man at the core of their night terrors?
The Right will of course roll its collective eyes (the ones already warped with myopia) and attempt to shrug off the accusation of racism as a lame Liberal argument. But saying it's so doesn't mean it's so.
Like WMDs and yellow cake.
Like Trickle Down Economics.
Like women who receive abortions are more likely to come down with breast cancer in the future.
Given such a record of falsehoods, exaggerations, distractions and denial, how else can one account for the Right Wing's steady attack on Barak Obama, regardless of his effectiveness as a political leader? The tragedy is that Jim Crow America was just yesterday and the nation, humiliating as it may be to admit, has not exorcised the xenophobic demons which have motivated some of its darkest behavior.
The Right's relentless and confounding opposition to our duly elected president can be explained by paraphrasing Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective: when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
And once The Right's impossible reasons for opposing this president have been eliminated, one must conclude that fear of a black man in the white house---however improbable in this day and age---is the sad truth.