Lincoln Was Hated Too

...Until they killed him.

On the day Obama was inaugurated Republican leaders met in private and swore to oppose everything, EVERYTHING, the new president tried to accomplish. This article in Tikkun summarizes it well. So do these articles: Washington Post, the Guardian, and DailyKos.

In at least one press interview these Republican conspirators compared their opposition to the Taliban. An interesting choice, considering they spent a lot of the first year screaming that Obama wasn’t killing enough Taliban in Afghanistan.

For two years the blockade leaked. Democrats got bills passed. The economy began to recover. The Affordable Care Act passed against a fierce fire from Republicans, never mind that the plan was designed around mandates and a healthcare marketplace first proposed by the Heritage Foundation. When Democrats found Republican points they could agree on Republicans hated them for it. They didn’t want compromise. They wanted dysfunction. They wanted war.

In 2010, corporations (whom the Supreme Court had reclassified as people) poured hundreds of millions of dollars (which the Supreme Court had reclassified as protected speech) to Republican candidates. Most of these candidates didn’t hide their anarchist fervor on the stump, and the wave of Republicans who retook the House of Representatives were the most radical the institution had ever seen. Radicals who scorned the rules and traditions of the House itself. They were anarchists. Their sole wish was to make the Congress cease to function. Their goal being to make Obama’s presidency a failure.

Now the opposition was total because they had the numbers. They refused to compromise on anything and could block everything. They used procedural maneuvers to prevent majority measures from passing. They used procedure to slow up ordinary congressional business. Routine stuff like departmental appointments which the opposition party generally allowed because departments needed people doing the work.

Not this time. No judges. No heads of various departments. Bush appointees were therefore left in place, which pleased the Republicans. Understaffed government agencies began to function less efficiently. Brilliant! This was exactly what the Republicans wanted. They wanted the government that did things to cease doing things like helping the unemployed, like treating veterans, like helping veterans of their wars find jobs. Maximum pain was the goal.

Then there was the debt limit. Bush had started two wars and kept their trillion dollar cost off the books. Obama put them back on the books, in a refreshing act of accounting honesty. But Republicans decided they didn't want to pay this debt. Just as they didn't want to pay unemployment benefits to vets. Or the upkeep of the nation's highways. Or relief to people suffering from the economic collapse. They didn't want to spend any money unless they could cut the taxes owed by their wealthy clients. International markets downgraded U.S. Treasury Bills, our sovereign debt. Republicans cheered. Something they wanted to happen couldn't possibly be their fault. It was the president's fault.

Republicans in the House voted more than 50 times to overturn the Affordable Care Act. They wanted to undo Obama’s signature achievement. Republicans who controlled red states refused to enact the ACA in their states, refusing federal money to assist their citizens who didn’t have healthcare coverage. A Scroogelike opposition.

Nice guys, these Republicans. Millions cheered them on. Why?

What was different? Was it because the president was….(black)? Perish the thought. Apparently it was because he was a foreign born Muslim, a silly falsehood Republicans raised again and again. Why did they raise it again and again? Because their constituents believed it. They believed it because their political masters told them to.

They hated Obama. They have hated him ever since he was elected. They hated him the moment he became black, which they prefer to believe was not in Hawaii.

People hated Lincoln too. People North and South, but mostly in the South. Until they killed him.

Lincoln had one advantage. He tried to solve serious problems that Americans had kicked down the road for generations, but he didn’t have to deal with a Confederacy that controlled the Congress and the Supreme Court. Today the Confederacy, the Lost Cause of sacred memory, lives in the Republican Party.

It didn’t die in 1865. The Confederacy lived on in Jim Crow all across the South where blacks could be lynched for registering to vote or for looking at a white person the wrong way, and there were a lot of wrong ways, whole etiquette books of them (the South was and is famously courteous.)

After LBJ passed civil rights and voting rights Southerners blamed the Democratic Party and became Republicans overnight. Nixon devised a whole program to welcome the racists and the anti-unionists and the male supremacists into the Republican fold. It was called the Southern Strategy. It was carefully written to enable white folks to hate and oppress black folks without calling them n*****s. So the Confederacy lives again. No white hoods required, just stubborn willingness to pour sand in the works of our democracy. Why? Racist spite seems extremely probable. You need to work very hard not to think so.

And it’s working brilliantly. Oppose everything, block everything Obama tries to do––even those proposals first made by Republicans––show willingness to make the nation default. The Republicans’ plan contained an explicit desire to make Americans suffer. They’ve laughingly admitted this. They know Americans will blame the president for all of their pain and frustration even if its caused by his enemies. Which is the purest, sickest, most unAmerican kind of cynicism. They've willed his exclusion from the public conversation, hogtied his economic recovery and carefully orchestrated hatred and blame from half of the country. They've gagged him and criticize him for not talking. When he does speak they damn him for poisoning the air––because they disagree. It is hard to be a black leader in a country with a history of racism. It's gotten so bad the news media feel compelled to minimize Obama's achievements. He has achieved a great deal, but who remembers? We've come a long way back since the previous president drove us into the ditch. How could a successful president be this unpopular? It is hard to explain.

So the harm is done. And we’ve let it be done. Our news media has hidden what has been done because to describe this kind of behavior honestly would appear partisan. So they soften it, disguise it, create phony balance. If the president’s opposition behaves in a racist fashion, well Obama must be a racist too.

It’s like that other case in Ferguson, Missouri, where the black man was wrongfully arrested, beaten, jailed and when the police discovered they’d arrested an innocent man from out of town they charged him with destruction of police property. While they’d been beating him up he’d bled on their uniforms.

How Racist Is This Rabid Hatred Of Obama?

Is it all about race? Being so angry there's a black president that you'd just as soon shut the whole thing down?

Shucks, we're way yonder past racism in this here country, aren't we?

It's gotten worse in the past five years, but the recent mutation of race hatred goes back to Lee Atwater's Willie Horton dog whistle ad in 1988. (The Nation has some interesting recorded conversations in which Atwater lays it all out.)

It goes back to Nixon's infamous Southern Strategy to win the racist white southerners who abandoned the Democratic Party after the Civil Rights Amendment. The voters who'd gone for George Wallace twice. (The New York Times archive spells out the Southern Strategy in its wonderful cynical detail.)

But if anyone wants to discuss the unspoken racial content in Republican hatred for this president they are accused of "playing the race card." Because Southerners are much much too polite to ever ever get racial about anything. Never have, never will.

Slate ran a very good piece about this Southern complexion, pure white Southern, in the new Republican Party.

The dog whistle of racist politics has just added another veneer on top of the old Southern gentility, which was a mask to begin with. That mask came off whenever a neatly dressed black student tried to go to a white's only school, but otherwise was as sweet as molasses, as polite and inoffensive as a pure white woman at a cotillion.

Want to know the code words? The secret handshakes and secret signals? The New Statesman listed them in a recent story.

The South and the Republican Party it dominates have learned to change the tone of their message without changing the message. The dog whistle alerts the party faithful the way it alerts hound dogs, by going directly to the lizard part of the brain that responds reflexively to fear and loathing.

A good explanation for the five year long fever of race hatred that's causing this, from Joan Walsh at Salon. (She followed up with a piece describing the angry Republican responses she got.)

To explain why this is happening now, when we finally managed to elect and re-elect our first black president, we almost have to go back to the Civil War, which certain states never recognized they lost, and certainly never recognized they were wrong about.

So it is about race. Still. Stubbornly and ignorantly.

And the Republican Party would just as soon take the whole country down as give in. In their slow, patient way they are trying to take our country back to the old Southern ways. A small aristocracy and white trash and blacks with no rights. Low wages and a small comfortable elite. Bad roads, bad water, bad sanitation, worn out soil, poor education, poor public health. That is the ideal model. What are the standards in the Reddest of the Red Republican districts? They look like the South in the 19th Century. Mostly white, mostly rural, mostly poor. Mostly taking far more in federal aid than they pay in federal taxes. We are being led backward by a backward set of backwater politicians and their extremist (but dependent) voters.

For 148 years since 1865, white southerners have done everything they could to keep African Americans down. Prevented them from voting. Stolen their property. Lynched them. Rounded them up routinely to use as free labor. Prevented them from owning homes, getting educated, getting loans, being tried fairly or being able to press charges against a white person, prevented them from using a drinking fountain designed for white people, prevented them from using the same bathroom facilities. The list is endless and the nasty unChristian southern habit of racial hatred is unending. The aim is to humiliate and degrade the other race so they are lower than you are, which is pretty low considering the ugliness of the mindset.

This ugly and difficult and expensive experiment in social engineering has been paid for by a small set of white folks who'd rather not pay enough for their white social inferiors to live decently so instead of fair pay they promise the lower class whites to make sure the black population is inferior to their own unpleasant inferiority. And they deputize the white lowlifes to enforce this.

So it's no coincidence that they believe (and persist in saying despite evidence that any normal sane intelligent person would understand) that the first black president is A. Kenyan. B. Muslim C. a communist D. a Nazi E. part of a nefarious foreign plot F. the antichrist. Whatever he is, he's got to be illegitimate because of what they've been told all these years. There can't be a black president because they all know that any dumb poor white no account is always and in every way better than a black man. Because everybody has told southern whites that every white person is superior to every black person regardless of achievements or abilities or college degrees. What gave Obama that ticket to Harvard which was rightfully meant for some proper white person?

It's hard to channel this race-hating stupidity without becoming physically sick. And it makes a person mad to think racists and racist-abetters of this sort of stupidity are in control of a whole political party. That they have enough power to shut down our democracy. But I guess that makes it easier to understand how the bigots feel. Something is wrong. Sadly, the ones who are causing the problem are too dumb and hateful to understand what it is.