I was listening to the news today, to the latest round of senseless noise from the right. Ted Cruz calling the President “lawless” (which is the right’s newest favoritest meaningless political cuss-word). John McCain, who never met a country he wouldn’t love to invade, calling the President “weak”. Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin calling for the President to be impeached, ‘cause Jesus.
I wondered, What will history think of this lunacy?
This President has been nothing but ethical and patient and honest and capable. He reached out to invite Republicans into his cabinet, and into negotiations on all important matters that have come before America in the last five years. He has been subjected to the most awful lies and invented faux-scandals. Never in my life has I seen the level of vitriol and naked hatred directed at an American official – and one so undeserving of that hatred. Everything the President supported, they opposed, even if they previously supported it. Everything he opposed, they supported, even if they previously viewed that thing as tantamount to sedition. They even have openly embraced sedition.
Republicans spent Obama’s first term dedicated to nothing other than making him a one-term president, heedless of the cost to America, to Americans, or even to the world. They had no principles, no guiding light, no philosophy, no goals, other than to get the black man out of the White House. Smaller government? No – they want to increase spending on anything military. Smaller debt? No – they want ever more corporate tax breaks, ever more wars, without paying for any of it. Individual rights? No, they want to criminalize abortion and suppress voting, and even interfere with contraceptive purchases. They accused him of pushing a partisan agenda because they refused to participate.
They have no morals, and no honesty.
Lie after lie after fake scandal after insane conspiracy theory, coupled with the most vile rhetoric I’ve ever heard from American politicians, all based on intentionally false premises and paranoid nightmares. Unthinking, mindless oppositionism, with no intent behind it other than to oppose. Well, they failed in their quest to prevent President Obama’s reelection. Their goal now?
To de-legitimize his presidency, to make it unimportant and small, to un-do this president's legacy. That is what Boehner’s lawsuit is about, and the inaction on every major issue, and the talk of impeachment – all to create a dark cloud to float over the black man who dared get himself elected.
Long run, it won’t turn out that way. This President is on the right side of history on every major issue – marriage equality, women’s rights, health care, gun safety, worker’s rights, education, infrastructure, climate change, transportation, the economy. He has made progress in all these areas, and will make more, even if he has to do it without Congress.
He has achieved something presidents have been seeking for a hundred years – ensuring affordable health care for every American. He has ended two major wars, avoided several more, gotten the chemical weapons out of Syria, navigated through crises in the Middle East (many of which were due to the incompetence of his predecessor), overseen a groundswell of support for marriage equality, shepherded the nation through the worst economic disaster in eighty years, created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, handled the BP oil gusher and Hurricane Sandy – his list of accomplishments is long and impressive.
And he did this in the face of the most do-nothing, mindlessly obstructionist Congress in American history, a Republican caucus with no hesitation about harming the United States if they think such action would also harm the President of the United States.
But nothing Republicans can do can harm this president’s legacy – and in fact, the more they try, the more his achievements will be seen against that backdrop of struggling with the same forces, the same vicious inhumanity, that Lincoln had to deal with.
I head one historian say the American story is divided into two parts, before the Civil War, and after; what went before was prelude, what has come after is result. The history of America is defined by those forces that led up to, and resulted from, that war. It is a history of a struggle for equality and freedom, for the expansion of rights and recognition of human dignity to all. I think we’re about to enter a third chapter, one dealing with the same issues and themes.
The presidency of Barack Obama has laid bare the truth that America has not resolved these issues. They still linger to poison the wells of America’s soul. The story of America is still one of healing that poison.
We see it in the birtherism – notice how the people who accused Obama of being unfit to be elected President because of an imagined foreign birth think nothing of the actual foreign birth of Ted Cruz. Another example of supporting something they used to oppose, yes, but even darker, exposing the poison. Both Cruz and Obama have mothers who are American citizens, and that really is the end of the question, because that makes both of these men American citizens from birth. The difference between these situations, the reason one is the target of rightist rumor while the other is enthusiastically embraced by the right, is as plain as the noses on their faces – well, the skin on their faces.
A hundred years from now, the history of America will be seen in three parts – the first dominated by Washington and Jefferson, laying down the principles which inevitably led, after some fourscore and seven years (more or less) to the Civil War; the second by the towering figure of Lincoln, who at great cost held the nation together and gave freedom to the people Washington and Jefferson couldn’t bring themselves to free; and the third by Obama, who took an immense step toward fulfilling the promises of Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln, facing an inhuman and inhumane force no less that that of the slaveholding South or the oppressive domination from across the Atlantic.
And people like Cruz and Bachmann will be accorded the respect given to Benedict Arnold, or to any other traitor to the nation, any other opponents of justice.
We are at an important moment in American history. We are starting a new chapter.