THE LIMITS OF OBAMA-HATING HYSTERIA: Has the Irrational Right’s Fear-mongering Tactics Breached the Public’s Tolerance Limits?

THE LIMITS OF OBAMA-HATING HYSTERIA: Has the Irrational Right’s Fear-mongering Tactics Breached the Public’s Tolerance Limits?

The latest manipulated non-issue of the Obama-hating right wing appears to have landed in the public spotlight with a loud, resounding ‘plop’ Of course, what that faux-turmoil entailed was wailing how Mr. Obama, by piping in a live video feed to schools across the country, encouraging the students to stay in school, study hard, and be responsible for their behavior is actually advancing a Socialist Agenda.

As was written in the Hartford Courant editorial dated Sept 9th, “What, exactly, was the fuss all about? The controversy over President Barack Obama's speech to the nation's schoolchildren on Tuesday had the intellectual depth of a schoolyard scrap. Fortunately, like so many of those recess ruckuses, it seems to have ended when the bell rang.”

The cynicism is such that, as per the website, abpnews.com (Associated Baptist Press), a prominent black Southern Baptist pastor demands that an Arlington, Texas school district explain why it did not allow President Obama's Sept. 8 speech on education to be shown live in the district's classrooms, and yet is planning later in this month to send selected fifth graders to a similar message by former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura.

Still, except for such back-lash events, the entire affair threatens to sink beneath the waves of the very next news-cycle and is quite possibly an example of a major loss of both the energy and passion that the rightwing supporters exhibited only six months ago.

For example, with the resignation of Obama’s ‘Green Tsar’ Van Jones, which the website, Newsbusters.com (the network voice for the extreme rightwing organization, Media Research Center) hypes as a ‘major controversy’ even though much of the rest of the country appears to have expressed itself with a long, resounding yawn, is also apparently about to be forgotten by this time next week.

Anthony ‘Van’ Jones (born Sept 20, 1968) served for six months in early, 2009 as Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) until he became "embroiled in controversy" over past political activities, public comments about Republicans, and signing a petition for 911Truth.org. He resigned from the position late last week.

An environmental advocate, civil rights activist, attorney and author, Jones has earned his reputation as an environmental advocate from a long involvement in community activism.

He was appointed by President Barack ObamaBarack Obama in March 2009, to the newly-created position on the White House Council on Environmental Quality, where he worked with various "agencies and departments to advance the administration's climate and energy initiatives, with a special focus on improving vulnerable communities" until he was cut loose in a midnight purge due to the controversy of some of his past activities.

Those ‘past activities’ consisted of: a) his affiliation with a ‘90s group called Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM) has opened him to accusations that he associated with Communists, b) in 2004, he allowed his name to be put on a letter requesting an investigation into whether the Bush administration allowed 9/11 to happen as a “pre-text to war” and, c) he is accused of calling Republicans a bad name.

Foregoing the question of just what ‘associated with Communists’ means this many years after the Fall of the Wall (will the Republicans have Joe McCarthy rise out of his grave and demand of Mr. Jones, “Are you now, or have you ever been ….?”), and setting aside the fact that calling politicians names like ‘a**holes’ is only an act of Freedom of Speech, surely the most ridiculous episode so far has been the wholly artificial demand for Mr. Obama’s birth certificate to be produced.

As has too often been the case in these tempests-in-a-teacup scams that the Irrational Right keeps blowing out of all reasonable proportions, the birther crowd ignores how a birth certificate has never been an issue with any president before Mr. Obama, and that no one to date has produced a birth certificate for any of the first thirty-six men to hold that office.

The situation got so absurd that, at one point, an individual (who has not been proven to be an actual person as of this writing) attempted to sell Mr. Obama’s ‘Kenyan’ birth certificate on E-bay – a document that only the most extremist and hardcore Obama-haters have tried to accept and promote as the real thing.

However, the low point of the entire, sad affair must go to the birther group that ‘made’ a video about their version of the reality of the situation. They went go far as to plagiarize a spoof documentary created by the website, Media Matters, incorporating entire sections of the mockumentary into their own, completely oblivious to the fact that none of it was meant to be taken seriously.

WND Productions (whoever they are) released ‘A Question of Eligibility’ in August, a nine-minute testament to the art of making the ridiculous appear serious.

According to Gawker.com, “Most of the movie is just clips of cable news people talking about the election and Obama's first few months in office. But the highlight is surely this all-time classic of unintended consequences.”

Charging $17.99 a copy, the producers of the documentary use, in its entirety, a video that Media Matters originally put together to mock Fox News coverage of the president's first 100 days. Gawker tells us that we can spot the rip-off because the blue bars and white text that Media Matters mark the 100 days with are still on the screen. Where the liberal group set out to mock the hyperbolic rhetoric of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the Rupert Murdock owned network's line-up, WND treats this like pages from the Gospel and purport to ‘show’ how Barack Obama was secretly born in Kenya, raised in Indonesia, and is the son of Malcolm X!

Of course, not all Republicans are either the extremists who manipulate the gullible conservatives in a pathetically transparent attempt to get their party back into power, or passively accepting of any hyperbole that Rush Limbaugh and his ilk is spewing over the airwaves at any given moment.

In fact, on Monday, Sept. 8th, talking to CNN in a Paris interview, no less a personage than Laura Bush praised the performance of her husband's successor in that she thinks President Obama and his wife are both doing a good job under tough circumstances.

As well, the former Laura Welch, breaking with many Republican apologists (including Mr. Cheney), criticized Washington's sharp political divide during an interview covering a range of topics including her thoughts on life after eight tumultuous years in the White House: first lady Michelle Obama, former Vice President Dick Cheney, the situation in Afghanistan and Myanmar.

As Bob Ray Sanders, writing for the Star Telegram website (star-telegram.com) put it, “It is too bad that those caught up in what they regard as a socialist conspiracy to destroy our democratic society are infecting their children with the disease of intolerance.

“And believe me, just like the swine flu, intolerance is contagious”