Barack Obama is a Socialist who is the Queen with a domestic terrorist. He is a Muslim who was born in Kenya and is therefore unconstitutional qualified to be President. He would like to import a homosexual, crushing second amendment, and encourage abortion. According to Sean Hannity, he has thrown Israel under the “bus full of suicide bombers.” According to Glenn Beck, he has “a deep-seated hatred for white people.” According to Rush Limbaugh, he had “nothing but revulsion against the country.”
The Tenor and tone of the right-wing attacks on the United States should interfere with the President of all Americans. That is, to say the least, inappropriate. Of course, we respect the right to freedom of speech. But it has the right to do something doesn’t mean one really have to do it. The Nazis have first amendment rights to March in Skokie and the clan had the right of the first amendment to burn a cross, but that doesn’t mean we have to join or applaud them. With the right to come, or should come, maturity and personal responsibility.
Despite the ugliness of our political discourse today is sad, it’s not unprecedented. In 1798, President John Adams’s critics fumed that the leadership of Adams ‘, “every public welfare considerations” was “swallowed up in understanding the constant thirst for power, unbounded magnificence is silly, foolish adulation and selfish greed.” During the civil war, Abraham Lincoln variety attacked the North even by those who opposed the war, the draft and the Emancipation Proclamation as “the satrap,” “liar,” “Monster,” “perjurer,” an “ignoramus”, and “tyrant.” And during the McCarthy era, columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop observed that “something is wrong, very wrong, in the capital of the United States,” noted that “miasma” of political accusations “is seeping over the capital, as some hazardous from Potomac effluvium berawa.”
False, misleading and attacks sharply on our nation’s leaders do not serve our democracy. But do they really have an effect? I was struck this morning by a report from the Gallup Organization about how describes himself as an independent and Democrat, Republicans understand the ideology of President Obama and the seven remaining candidates for the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination.
In this poll, Gallup evaluated ideology on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being most liberal and most conservative 5. Not surprisingly, Republican leaning against a higher number, the Democrats against the lower number, and independent fall in-between. What is very striking to me about the results of this poll is that for each independent candidate, Democrat, Republican and Republicans all votes very similar candidate ideology. But as the following chart reveals, there a dramatic gap in their assessment of President Obama’s ideology.