Is Barack Obama Hurting the Country?

 Mike L.

{Cross-Posted at Israel Thrives and Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers.}

Barry Rubin certainly seems to think so.  In his most recent article entitled Why They Love Usama, Hate Obama, And How Obama Uses the Same Tactic at Home he asks the following question:

Why are tens of thousands of Middle Eastern Muslims chanting about how much they love Usama bin Ladin and how much they hate Barack (Hussein) Obama?

His answer is that Usama is one of them and Obama is not.  It's the politics of "us versus them."  It's the politics of drawing a line in the sand and whoever is on our side of the line are the "good guys" and whoever is on the opposite side of the line are nothing less than the devil.

Well, guess what? That is the line of the Obama Administration and its Newest Left supporters. All African-Americans should support the regime because Obama is black and anyone opposing him is a racist. All “Hispanics” should support the president because he really wants open borders and the turning of all illegal immigrants into citizens, while everyone else is a racist. 

All women should support the ruling group and leftist ideology because it wants to give them free birth control and anyone on the other side hates women.

This is the kind of politics that we get from places like Daily Kos, as well. It's a zero-sum mentality that sees those who we may disagree with politically not merely as one's opponent, but as a mortal enemy. It is this kind of thinking, for example, that leads a progressive-left sycophant of Barack Obama to literally threaten me with violence for daring to step out of line.

One of the things that pleases me about Israel Thrives is that, unlike many other political blogs, we have an acceptance of other political types and of other political viewpoints.  We have people at IT on the political left, on the political right, and ranging throughout the center.  We have Obama supporters and Obama critics, such as myself.

Yet for some reason no one on Israel Thrives is threatening violence against anyone else.  No regular participant thinks of the others as mortal enemies.  We are simply people of various viewpoints who are willing to come together in expressing those viewpoints.  We may disagree on any number of issues but, unlike the Obama administration, we do not seek to make those disagreements into hard lines of hatred.

It was during the Bush years that we began to hear about "red states" and "blue states."  Pat Buchanan's "culture wars" took off in a big way and it sometime seemed as if the country was on the verge of ripping itself to shreds.  Obama promised, of course, to be a uniter, not a divider, but this has turned out to be false.  It has turned out to be a lie.  The fact of the matter is that Barack Obama is a bigger divider than George W. Bush ever was.

Supporters of Barack Obama are very much encouraged to view their political opponents as the very worst people on the planet.  This is why so many progressives despise conservatives and Republicans while almost entirely dismissing the problem of radical Islam.  The real enemies of your average "Kossack" are not people like Osama bin Ladin, but people like Mitt Romney or anyone else associated either with the Republican party or the political right.

I think that the Obama administration is doing the American people a terrible disservice when it encourages this kind of toxic zero-sum mentality.  Y'know, it was not all that long ago when I was told in these pages, by a hostile Obama supporter, that Barack Obama is not Adolph Hitler.  I was a little taken aback at the time because it has never occurred to me to compare Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler and I have certainly never done so.  The truth of the matter is that my critic was projecting his own toxic zero-sum mind-set onto me.

They honestly think that if you oppose the Obama administration this makes you both a racist and a misogynist.   And it is for this reason that American politics has become as toxic as it has.  The current political climate is perhaps the very worst it's been since the Vietnam War era.  The progressive-left gave birth to the Occupy movement and the Occupy movement thought it was a dandy idea to fight the police in the streets of Oakland.

I was just moving here right around that time and I cannot tell you how thrilled I was to see my new city going up in flames directly after Laurie and I purchased our first home in it.  Most progressives, of course, are not fighting the cops in the streets, but the kind of hatred, and economic class resentment, that the Obama administration encourages is just terrible for the well-being of the United States and of the American people.

Whoever wins the next election, the United States will continue to be a major world power and the vast majority of American citizens will continue to know the kinds of freedoms and opportunities that are denied people throughout the world, particularly in the Muslim Middle East.

I wish that progressives would recognize that fact because then they might stop spitting absolute hatred at their fellow Americans.

That would be nice.