Posted on 02/22/2014 2:15:25 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
So we have reached the aporia of the Right’s main argument against President Obama, wherein their arguments are deconstructing themselves via their own rhetoric undermining their claims.
Republicans call the President a dictator and say his boot is on their necks, he is stomping on the Constitution, he is an “imperial” president. And yet all of them remain free to say these things in public, on TV. There isn’t even any backlash to speak of.
Leading this charge is the still bitter Sarah Palin, whose behavior post 2008 loss makes John McCain’s look magnanimous and mature. Palin posited that after Obama left Americans for “destroyed”, the press finally woke up. Palin seems to miss the fact that she is still free after all of these many years of traitor-adjacent behavior to write and speak whatever she pleases, no matter how egregious, including her attempt to portray criticism of her “speech” (her gun sights over Democratic districts prior to the Arizona massacre) as “blood libel”.
No brownshirts have come for Palin. Yet she wrote this on her Facebook page, as if Obama were Hitler, just as elected Republicans across the country inaccurately portray him:
"What? Lamestream calls for empathy, even outrage, for a First Amendment violation that’s on par with all the abuse we’ve brought to your attention as Obama stomps on our Constitution. You’ve IGNORED us, you’ve marginalized us, you’ve left us for “destroyed.” But when Obama’s boot is on YOUR neck you finally wake the h*ll up and cry foul? Good Lord."
Then she linked to this Breitbart article bemoaning the loss of freedom under this President, as if George W. Bush’s “free speech zones” and silencing of the Dixie Chicks had never happened.
They were for it before they were against it, apparently. (According to the very conservative ACLJ’s press release, the press actually had a “significant” First Amendment and free press victory today as the Obama administration pulled the plug on a newsroom “monitoring” system – aka, studying “perceived station bias.”, a thing conservatives are very against, as you might imagine.)
A dictator would never have allowed Sarah Palin to attack him while on foreign soil, during a time of war and while the country faced a huge financial crisis, no less. This is why the foreign press called Sarah Palin a traitor, while our own press continues to give her and her fellow Republicans (it says a lot about the party that Palin is no longer the most outrageous attack dog) access as if the things she says are not outrageous.
“And now she turns not only against the fibre and backbone of her country, but against its democratically elected President… “
That was in 2010, and Sarah Palin and the GOP have hardly let up since then.
While the right gets Martin Bashir fired for his suggestion that Sarah Palin might not think policy issues were just like slavery if she actually knew anything about slavery, when the Dixie Chicks said they were ashamed that Bush was from Texas, their music was shut out by mainstream outlets around the country:
"Music superstars the Dixie Chicks are finding out that criticizing President Bush’s plans for war in Iraq can cost you air play, big time."
The Right has a very selective sense of free speech and free press.
And while the finer points of their failed arguments can be endlessly mocked, it really comes down to one thing. If Obama really were the dictator they accuse him of being, none of them would be free to continue accusing him of being a dictator.
If you are allowed to have public discussions about executive branch decisions with which you disagree, and you are not being shunned for it or fired over it, then you are most likely not living under a dictator.
Living under a dictator would be more like it was under George W. Bush, when even “liberal Hollywood” shrank in fear of being accused of being unpatriotic. So they turned their backs on Michael Moore’s March 23, 2003 Oscar speech — and on film sets in the weeks that followed, hard core liberals expressed disdain for the disrespect for our president, calling Moore’s behavior uncivilized (public shaming is a good silencer). I was there.
What was Moore’s crime? He spoke out against the war Bush had just started, just days prior. This is what he said that caused such a disruption — compare this to what Republicans say every single day about a President who did NOT lead us into a war on false pretenses. Moore referenced the way Bush was not really elected (a fact, he was appointed by the United States Supreme Court), and that the war was based on fictitious reasons (also true):
"We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious President.
We — We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fictition of duct tape or the fictitious [sic] of orange alerts, we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you.
And any time you’ve got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up. Thank you very much."
So it’s odd that Republicans keep accusing President Obama of being exactly what George W. Bush was in reality — a fake president, with dictator-esque tendencies. Under Bush, this country edged closer to a state of fascism, in which the people were kept in line through constant fear. People were arrested for wearing t-shirts that criticized Bush. ABC reported:
The Bush administration has agreed to pay $80,000 to a husband and wife who were ejected from a presidential rally because of their anti-Bush T-shirts. The settlement ends a suit brought by a Texas couple and the American Civil Liberties Union, claiming the couple’s First Amendment rights were violated when they were arrested and removed from a taxpayer-funded event featuring President Bush because their shirts read “Love America, Hate Bush” and “Regime Change Starts at Home.”
From terror alert levels to arrests for wearing the wrong t-shirt near the President to having your business ruined because you spoke out against what turned out to be an illegal war, things were bleak under Bush.
It turns out that Moore was correct. A boot on your neck? PBS reported, “And Moore was booed, stalked and threatened for it. He had to get a security detail to protect him from the death threats (some of which were encouraged by the media), and he claims that Homeland Security scratched up his Oscar at the airport on the way home.”
When you are openly criticizing the President of the United States and not too subtly trying to incite an overthrow of the government because you are still bitter that you lost to him, and no one comes to arrest you, the President is not a dictator. When you are still invited to have a reality TV show funded in part by the taxpayers of this country, the President is not a dictator. When you are still deemed to be civilized company and not being shunned for daring to suggest that you oppose something the President is doing, the President is not a dictator.
That is one fact of which you can be sure: President Obama is not a dictator and he is not silencing dissent. The proof is the fact that Sarah Palin is not in Gitmo. She is, in fact, making a living off of taxpayer money that Obama could easily put a stop to if he were that kind of petty, thin-skinned dictator — were he a Chris Christie type, for example, or a Nixon, or a Bush.
Note: For the fact challenged who got Martin Bashir fired, I did not say Sarah Palin should be in Gitmo. I am against Gitmo, just as Bashir is against slavery.
Sarah Jones has to pull up the Dixie Chicks to get into high pity party mode? Yikes... we can pull up stuff from this WEEK... What a load...
I still wonder how leftists can velcro their shoes on in the morning or afternoon when they get up
Liberals have prided themselves on keeping their minds so bleeping wide open for so long that when their brains fell out, they failed to notice the resounding "SPLAT!" made when what little gray matter they had hit the ground and the now brainless Liberal went merrily on their way, leaving their brains to dry out on the road to hell, which, as you know is paved with Liberal good intentions. As we wisely flee the other way, it will be on the splattered cobblestoned brains of the myriad lock-jawed, mind-washed, goose-stepping Liberals empty-headedly following the prancing promisers of Utopia in the Demoncrat party.
Saying "Splat!" whenever one of them makes one of their truly idiotic claims, makes a truly idiotic suggestion, or proposes another idiotic unconstitutional law, is the only way you can explain them. My girlfriend and I cannot get five minutes through any news report without yelling at least two vociferous and usually simultaneous "SPLAT!"s at the screen. We at least feel a bit better.
Perhaps if enough of us start yelling "SPLAT!", even in public, it might be the ridicule needed to wake people up how brainless what Liberals are doing really is.
SPLAT! You can hear it echoing in the Democrat caucuses every day. . . and unfortunately more frequently every day now in the Republican RINO wing.
Reminds me of the sixties when radicals disrupted speaking appearances by conservatives on various college campi. They claimed “fascists” shouldn’t be allowed to speak. Not realizing of course that they themselves were the fascists. The female idiot from Harvard is just a direct line from the sixties Marxist fascists. Freedom of speech seems to be alien concept to them. Like it is to all fascists.
2nd Amendment still in force - they know that they need to “fix” that before they can do as they want to do.
Sarah Jones of PoliticusUSA compares the Dixie Chicks situation of 12 or 13 years ago - (where some PRIVATE STORE owners refused to carry music albums of the Dixie Chicks. Sarah, it’s a free country - store owners can’t be FORCED to sell liberal recording artists, right? ) to what this foot grinding into the face of citizens President and his goons are doing to citizens...today.
Here’s a sample of some of the stuff conservatives are dealing with - most of the links are from Drudge in the last few DAYS...
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/371602/echoes-irs-fcc-snooping-scandal-david-french
The IRS targeting scandal is of course multi-faceted, but one of its key elements was the use of comprehensive IRS questionnaires to determine everything from tea-party donor and member lists to the actions and activities of family members and even identifying “persons or entities with which you maintain a close relationship.” In other words, the Obama administration IRS was abusing its regulatory authority to essentially discern the inner workings of an entire political and cultural movement.
http://nypost.com/2014/02/22/christine-odonnell-i-was-a-victim-of-the-irs/
On March 9, 2010, around 10 a.m., I announced my plans to run for senate representing Delaware.
Later that same day, my office received a call from a reporter asking about my taxes.
It’s since come out, after a halting and unenthusiastic investigation, that a Delaware Department of Revenue employee named David Smith accessed my records that day at approximately 2 p.m. — out of curiosity, he says.
That these records ended up in the hands of the press is just a coincidence, the IRS claims.
The regulation follows disclosures that the Justice Department secretly subpoenaed almost two months’ worth of telephone records for 21 phone lines used by reporters and editors for The Associated Press. Separately, the department secretly used a search warrant to obtain some emails of a Fox News journalist.
Earlier this week, four Senators sent a letter to FBI Director James Comey demanding an explanation for what they termed the “selective prosecution” of D’Souza.
“I am a public critic of the president and I do recognize this has made me vulnerable to a form of counterattack,” D’Souza said. He added that Obama, whom he characterized as “vindictive,” had released a video response to 2016 on his website, proving the film had gotten under the president’s skin.
http://www.wnd.com/2014/02/ben-carson-obama-officials-acting-like-gestapo/
ASHINGTON – Dr. Ben Carson, the brain surgeon turned popular political analyst, told WND Obama administration officials are “acting like the Gestapo” with the Justice Department indictment of Dinesh D’Souza coupled with the Internal Revenue Service’s political targeting of the administration’s critics.
“I believe we are dealing with an extremely corrupt administration,” he said.
Dr. Carson himself became the subject of an IRS audit after criticizing Barack Obama’s policies at the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington last year.
“I’ve always been someone who has been very careful about my finances and the way I take care of my business,” said Dr. Carson. “I’ve never undergone this kind of scrutiny before, but then it comes after the prayer breakfast. They’re harassing my family. They’re harassing my colleagues. And they’re not finding anything – so that just makes them dig a little deeper.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/942975/posts
McCain Backs Bush-Hating Dixie Chick
NewsMax ^ | July 9, 2003
The Bush-bashing Dixie Chicks have a friend in presidential rival Sen. John McCain.
During a Senate hearing on radio consolidation, McCain, R-Ariz., “sharply questioned” Cumulus Media CEO Lewis W. Dickey Jr. about his choice not to air the cheesy Chicks for a month, AdAge.com reported Tuesday.
Dickey said that Cumulus had yanked the songs only on its country music stations after a “hue and cry” from listeners and requests for local programmers for direction.
Or, Obama is a chickenshit dictator that lacks the courage to take her on.
Yet.
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