When I watched the RNC use legal maneuvering to take silence the voice of dissent within its ranks I decided to vote for Obama. At first it was a knee jerk reaction of anger and frustration but the more I considered the decision the more I realized that there was more to it than protest.
I had planned to vote for Obama in 2008, something happened to me in the voting booth; fear, latent racism, lifelong Republican family brainwashing, who knows but I voted for McCain. That being said I was genuinely glad that Obama won, primarily because I was excited that the first President of the United States my son would know would be black. In my childhood black media figures were criminals on the local news, comedians, athletes and radicals. To my mind race would figure less in my children's consciousness if black was the color of the president as a counterbalance to all the negative stereotyping of non-white races that persists in the Western media. So far this theory appears to hold water as my son regularly tells us that he wishes he was black. Thank you President Obama.
I have always been a radical. I have never succeeded in suppressing my brain's need to point out every contradiction inherent in large bureaucratic organizations. Thus I have never understood how people who call themselves small government Republicans can advocate the endless growth of the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense, how people who call themselves Civil Libertarians can stand by silently while the Constitution is shredded, how people who claim to follow Jesus can advocate the accumulation of wealth and the waging of war, or how people who call themselves Muslims can send children to their deaths in a way which is forbidden by the Koran in multiple ways. The smear campaign which has been waged against Obama since the day he became president has been rife with all these forms of contradictions.
Obama is the poster child for the American dream: Kenyan/Arabic name, bi-racial, child of a divorced/remarried/single mom, childhood in Islamic as well as Christian cultures. His presence in the Whitehouse is a testament to every ideal this country has ever espoused: all men are created equal, race doesn't matter, we don't discriminate on the basis of religion, all families are equal, you can do anything you set your mind to. But what do the mouthpieces of the Party of Lincoln do the second he gets elected? "HE'S A SECRET MUSLIM, HE'S NOT A REAL AMERICAN, HE LOVES THE TERRORISTS BECAUSE HE WANTS TO STOP WAR, HE WASN'T BORN HERE' HE WAS EDUCATED IN A SHARIA SCHOOL". This makes me feel sick to my stomach when I hear it. Hannity, Boortz, Limbaugh and the millions of mindless minions who take this garbage and perpetuate it on Facebook and Twitter represent everything I hate about this country. This is the type of thinking that makes us the intellectual laughing stock of the world. This is why Americans who travel and live abroad pretend to be Canadian lest they are put at the children's table during adult conversation.
The most frustrating part for me is the implication that if any of the "horrendous facts" about Obama were true it would be a scandal. He's a Muslim who wasn't born in America who holds postcolonialist views and thinks America must abide by International law and this is a bad thing?
I remember when everyone in Republican circles was lamenting the birth in America requirement because it would have prevented the rising star of the party at the time from becoming President. When Schwarzennegar was married to a Kennedy and on his way to becoming the governator the birth requirement was bandied about as archaic and obsolete. The tenacity with which the Obama haters cling to this completely irrelevant law is indicative of how desperately they hate Obama for reasons they are ashamed to articulate.
Let's face it Libertarians: Obama is the most radical president we have had in a long time. He has basically opened the spigot on government spending for the middle class. Now before you roll your eyes and read me Austrian economic theory let's use basic logic to analyze our history. In the 42 years I've been alive the government debt has grown drastically but the lion's share of the money our government has borrowed has been used for purposes that 1) In no way benefit the average taxpayer who is ultimately on the hook to pay the money back, 2) Further enriches and entrenches the existing powers be they financial or military 3) have little or no beneficent for me or anyone I know.
Thus I ask you: why is it that the right's entire line of "rational" attack on Obama is based on the amount of money he has spent since coming to office? Why is it so radical and unacceptably risky for an administration to increase the federal debt to improve the lives of everyday people when EVERY SINGLE ADMINISTRATION (except Clinton) before Obama did the same thing but spent money on things like wars and tax cuts for the rich (Bushes), defense buildup (Reagan) and (see the internet for how all America's debt was accrued while the quality of life of the middle class steadily got worse every year).
So someday in the bright future Libertarianism may be the solution, but there is an ongoing fight for control of the resources from an inevitably expanding mountain of debt. Our government debt grows everyday, Obama's administration is using more of that money for the middle class than Bush did, or Romney would. That makes the choice easy.
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