E.J. Dionne, Jr.: On the President as Alien
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/on_the_president_as_alien_20120223/
On the President as Alien
Posted on Feb 23, 2012
By E.J. Dionne, Jr.
They say that President Obama is a Muslim, but if he isnt, hes a secularist who is waging war on religion. On some days hes a Nazi, but on most others hes merely a socialist. His especially creative opponents see him as having a Kenyan anti-colonial worldview, while the less adventurous say hes an elitist who spent too much time in Cambridge, Hyde Park and other excessively academic precincts.
Whatever our president is, he is never allowed to be a garden-variety American who plays basketball and golf, has a remarkably old-fashioned family life, and, in the manner we regularly recommend to our kids, got ahead by getting a good education.
Please forgive this outburst. Its simply astonishing that a man in his fourth year as our president continues to be the object of the most extraordinary paranoid fantasies. A significant part of his political opposition still cannot accept that Obama is a rather moderate politician quite conventional in his tastes and his interests. And now that the economy is improving, short-circuiting easy criticisms, Obamas adversaries are reheating all the old tropes and cliches and slanders.
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Its another breathtaking slander to label Obamas choice as an attack on religion altogetherand I say this as someone who strongly opposed the presidents initial decision not to offer any accommodation to religiously affiliated institutions on contraception.
And how strange it is that Obamas critics imply that hes a Muslim and also condemn him as a secularist. He must be terribly clevermaybe its that fancy education of histo be both.
As for Obama as a socialist, ponder two numbers: 13,005, which the Dow Jones average hit earlier this week, up from a low point of 6,547 in March 2009. Some socialist.
We are blessed with the freedom to say whatever we want about our president. But those who cast Obama as something other than one of us dont understand him, and dont understand what it means to be American.