More RESPECT for the President, Please!

President Barack Obama began his term with the highest of accolades in the press. Hardball host, TV’s Chris Matthews, felt a tingle go up and down his leg whenever Obama speaks. Newsweek’s Evan Thomas said he hovered over the nations, like “a sort of god.” All too soon, however, the President came crashing down, like Icarus in Greek legend. Young Icarus flew too close to the sun and the wax that attached the feathers to his homemade wings melted. Icarus plunged into the sea. President Obama may have gotten too close to those klieg lights.

He senses it himself. “They talk about me like I’m a dog,” he complained recently. Actually, Mr. President, that’s wrong. Americans love their dogs. Just recall the furor that erupted when Lyndon B. Johnson lifted his beagles up by their ears. Americans liked those beagles a lot more than they liked LBJ.

This campaign is bringing out the worst in some of Obama’s critics. I want to say: Enough! Let’s show some more respect for the President of the United States. It’s gone too far when a candidate for governor of one of our famous states publicly tells the president he can take his endorsement and “shove it.”

What’s that you say? Was the president really going to endorse a Republican? Not at all. The candidate who told the commander-in-chief to take his job endorsement and shove it was none other than Frank Caprio, the Democratic candidate for governor of Rhode Island.

It seems the president is campaigning in the Ocean State, but is pointedly not embracing Caprio. Instead, the President’ non-endorsement will be seen as a blessing-in-disguise for former Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee. Chafee is running for governor as an independent.

Obama continues to have a high approval rating in Rhode Island—if not in the Caprio household. Rhode Island is one of the few states where local candidates are happy to be seen with the embattled President.

How bad is it getting on the campaign trail? Well, local candidates seem happy to bring former President Bill Clinton in to campaign for them. They’d rather have an impeached former President, one who turned the pardon process into a fire sale during his last days in office. Does anyone remember Marc Rich? Clinton gave him a pardon for dealing in oil with Saddam Hussein. Even TIME magazine cited the Marc Rich pardon as one of the ten most scandalous in our history. Yet candidates prefer to hug Bill Clinton on the hustings to being hugged by Barack Obama.

Does anyone remember the White House in 2000? Bill Clinton survived impeachment and decided to throw a last lavish party for the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the President’s House. He invited those famous “Friends of Bill” to the East Room for a ceremony. Some of them had been allowed to rent the Lincoln Bedroom for sleepovers. Let’s hope he didn’t rent it by the hour.

The late Mary McGrory described the scene under the glittering chandelier as hundreds of Bill Clinton’s strongest backers crowded into the sparkling hall. They were there to hear author David McCullough read from his best-selling biography of John Adams. America’s second President was the first to live in the White House.

McCullough’s deep, sonorous voice rang out with the words of Adams’ prayer for the White House. FDR even had it carved into the mantle of the fireplace in the State Dining Room.: “"I pray to heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that hereafter inhabit it...May none but the honest and wise men ever rule under this roof."

The Washington Post’s McGrory records that when McCullough got to the “wise and honest” part, all of Bill Clinton’s closest friends looked at their shoes.

Yet, apparently, this year’s crop of candidates would rather have the jolly, gregarious Bill Clinton stumping for them than the White House’s current occupant. One thing you have to say for Bill Clinton: He never came off as “holier than Thou.”

Maybe it’s the President’s unfortunate tendency to talk down to the American people. He tends to say they cling to their guns and their religion. He thinks they’re not thinking straight if they oppose his policies. They tend not to be rational when they’re afraid. Barack Obama talks about us as if he wishes he could elect a new people.

I’d like to see more respect for the Office of President. But I have one word of advice for the current occupant: RESPECT: It’s what you have to have in order to get.

You wrote: “Yesterday the Yuan [Obama] challenged Hispanics to “attack their enemies..” F’in jerk wad POS.”

From 2003:

The second American civil war: what it’s about
townhall.com | 10/14/03 | Dennis Prager
Posted on 10/14/2003 12:41:44 AM EDT by kattracks
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1000671/posts

Whatever your politics, you have to be oblivious to reality to deny that America today is torn by ideological divisions as deep as those of the Civil War era. We are, in fact, in the midst of the Second American Civil War.

Of course, one obvious difference between the two is that this Second Civil War is (thus far) non-violent. On the other hand, there is probably more hatred between the opposing sides today than there was during the First Civil War. And I am not talking about extremists. A senior editor of the respected center-left New Republic just wrote an article titled, “The Case for Bush Hatred,” an article that could have been written by writers at most major American newspapers, by most Hollywood celebrities, and almost anyone else left of center. And the conservative hatred of former President Bill Clinton was equally deep.

In general, however, the similarities are greater than the differences. Once again the North and the South are at odds (though many individuals on each side identify with the other). And once again, the fate of the nation hangs in the balance. The two sides’ values and visions of America are as incompatible as they were in the 1860s.

For those Americans who do not know what side they are on or who are not certain about what the Second American Civil War is being fought over, I offer a list of the most important areas of conflict.

While the views of many, probably even most, Americans do not fall entirely on either side, the two competing camps are quite distinguishable. On one side are those on the Left — liberals, leftists and Greens — who tend to agree with one another on almost all major issues. On the other side are those on the Right — conservatives, rightists and libertarians — who agree on stopping the Left, but differ with one another more often than those on the Left do.

Here, then, is Part One of the list of the major differences that are tearing America apart:

The Left believes in removing America’s Judeo-Christian identity, e.g., removing “under God” from the Pledge, “In God we trust” from the currency, the oath to God and country from the Boy Scouts Pledge, etc. The Right believes that destroying these symbols and this identity is tantamount to destroying America.

The Left regards America as morally inferior to many European societies with their abolition of the death penalty, cradle-to-grave welfare and religion-free life; and it does not believe that there are distinctive American values worth preserving. The Right regards America as the last best hope for humanity and believes that there are distinctive American values — the unique combination of a religious (Judeo-Christian) society, a secular government, personal liberty and capitalism — worth fighting and dying for.

The Left believes that impersonal companies, multinational and otherwise, with their insatiable drive for profits, have a profoundly destructive effect on the country. The Right believes that the legal system, particularly trial lawyers, lawsuits and judges who make laws, is the greater threat to American society.

The Left believes multiculturalism should be the ideal for American schools and for government policy. The Right believes that the Americanization of all its citizens is indispensable to the survival of the United States.

The Left believes that the Boy Scouts as currently constituted pose a moral threat to society. The Right believes the Boy Scouts continue to be one of the greatest moral institutions in the country.

The Left believes in equality more than in liberty. The Right believes more in liberty. For example, the Left believes that for the equality’s sake, men’s clubs must accept women. The Right believes that for liberty’s sake, associations must be free to choose their own members.

The Left believes that when schools give out condoms to teenagers, they are promoting safe sex. The Right believes that when schools give out condoms, they are promoting more sex.

The Left believes that poverty, racism and psychopathology cause violent crime. The Right believes a lack of self-control, lack of religious practice and lack of good values are the primary causes of violent crime.

The Left believes that “war is not the answer.” The Right believes that war is often the only answer to governmental evil.

Any one of these differences is enough to create an entirely different America. Added together, the differences suggest people who live in different worlds that are on a collision course.

And I have only listed some of the conflicting views.

Next week, in Part Two, I will discuss the other major conflicts making for the Second American Civil War.

The second American civil war: What it’s about: Part II
townhall.com ^ | 10/21/03 | Dennis Prager
Posted on 10/21/2003 12:31:19 AM EDT by kattracks
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1004834/posts

In part one, I described nine areas of major conflict between the Right and the Left in American life, a conflict that rivals the First Civil War in intensity, though thankfully not in violence. Here in part two, I describe 15 others.

The Left regards American nationalism as dangerous, is more comfortable celebrating world citizenship and prefers that America follow the lead of international organizations such as the United Nations. The Right celebrates American nationalism, distrusts world organizations, prefers that America lead humanity and regards the United Nations as largely a moral wasteland.

The Left believes that sensitivity to minorities’ feelings trumps the majority’s will. The Right believes that when not immoral, the majority’s will trumps that of the minority. For example, because some employees do not celebrate Christmas, the Left believes that organizations should rename their Christmas party the “holiday party.” The Right believes that because the vast majority of Americans celebrate Christmas, the party should be called a Christmas party.

The Left believes that a woman must have an unrestricted right to choose an abortion but no right to choose a silicone breast implant. The Right believes that society must decide when abortions are moral and legal but a woman has the right to choose to have a silicone breast implant.

The Left believes that attacking world poverty will greatly reduce Islamic terror. The Right believes that poverty is largely unrelated to Islamic terror.

The Left believes that George W. Bush attacked Iraq mostly for economic gain. The Right believes George W. Bush attacked Iraq to protect America and to change the Arab world for the better.

The Left believes that a high rate of taxation of people who earn more money is a moral imperative. The Right believes that allowing people to keep as much of their money as possible is a moral imperative.

The Left identifies with the values of most university professors in the liberal arts and values their insights. The Right regards most of these professors as moral idiots.

The Left believes that the greatest danger to mankind, as former Vice President Al Gore wrote in his book “Earth in the Balance,” is the threat to the environment. The Right believes that the greatest danger to humanity is, as it always has been, human evil.

The Left believes that marriage should be redefined and that judges alone are entitled to do so. The Right believes that the millennia-old definition of marriage as between members of the two sexes is inviolable and that it can’t be redefined by jurists.

The Left believes that in terms of parenthood, all a child needs is love, whether that love comes from a single parent, two men, two women or some other adult. The Right believes that children do best with the love of two married parents of the opposite sex.

The Left believes that opposing race-based college dorms, graduation ceremonies, congressional caucuses or professional organizations is racist. The Right believes that race-based college dorms, graduation ceremonies, congressional caucuses and professional organizations are racist.

The Left believes that labeling any enemy of the United States “evil” is wrong. It was wrong when President Ronald Reagan labeled the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” and it was wrong when President George W. Bush labeled Iran, Iraq and North Korea an “axis of evil.” The Right believes that not labeling such regimes “evil” is a sign of moral confusion and appeasement.

The Left is preoccupied with health. Leftist parents are more likely to believe that it is preferable that their teenager cheat on a test than smoke. Parents on the Right are more likely to believe that it is better that their teenager smoke than cheat.

The Left believes that just as America and the Soviet Union were equally responsible for the Cold War, Israel and the Palestinians are equally responsible for Middle East violence. The Right believes that just as the Soviets were responsible for the Cold War, the Arab enemies of Israel are responsible for Middle East violence.

The Left believes that criticism of Christianity is important and that criticism of Islam is bigoted. The Right believes that criticism of Islam is important and that most criticism of Christianity is bigoted.

I am well aware that not everyone on the Left agrees with every leftist position and not everyone on the Right agrees with every rightist one. Nat Hentoff is a leftist who doesn’t support abortion rights; Pat Buchanan is a rightist who doesn’t support Israel. But the existence of individual exceptions does not negate the fact that all the positions listed here as Left or Right are correctly labeled.

The fact is that this country is profoundly divided on virtually every major social, personal and political issue. We are in the midst of the Second American Civil War. Who wins it will determine the nature of this country as much as the winner of the first did.

The ‘cold civil war’ in the U.S.: The common space required for civil debate...(MARK STEYN)
MacLean’s, Toronto, Ontario, Canada ^ | 22 October 2007 | Mark Steyn
Posted on 10/22/2007 9:40:16 PM EDT by dufekin
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1914895/posts

William Gibson, South Carolinian by birth, British Columbian by choice, is famous for inventing the word “cyberspace,” way back in 1982. His latest novel, Spook Country, offers another interesting coinage:

Alejandro looked over his knees. “Carlito said there is a war in America.”

“A war?”

“A civil war.”

“There is no war, Alejandro, in America.”

“When grandfather helped found the DGI, in Havana, were the Americans at war with the Russians?”

“That was the ‘cold war.’ “

Alejandro nodded, his hands coming up to grip his knees. “A cold civil war.”

Tito heard a sharp click from the direction of Ochun’s vase, but thought instead of Eleggua, He Who Opens And Closes The Roads. He looked back at Alejandro.

“You don’t follow politics, Tito.”

That’s quite a concept: “A cold civil war.” Since 9/11, Mr. Gibson has abandoned futuristic sci-fi dystopias to frolic in the dystopia of the present. Spook Country boils down to a caper plot about a mysterious North America-bound container, and it’s tricked out very inventively. Yet, notwithstanding the author’s formidable powers of imagination, its politics are more or less conventional for a novelist in the twilight of the Bush era: someone says, “Are you really so scared of terrorists that you’d dismantle the structures that made America what it is?” Someone else says, “America has developed Stockholm Syndrome towards its own government.” Etc. But it’s that one phrase that makes you pause: “A cold civil war.”

Or so you’d think. In fact, it seems to have passed entirely without notice. Unlike “cyberspace” a quarter-century ago, the “cold civil war” is not some groovy paradigm for the day after tomorrow but a cheerless assessment of the here and now, too bleak for buzz. As far as I can tell, April Gavaza, at the Hyacinth Girl website, is pretty much the first American to ponder whether a “cold civil war” has any significance beyond the novel:

What would that entail, exactly? A cold war is a war without conflict, defined in one of several online dictionaries as “[a] state of rivalry and tension between two factions, groups, or individuals that stops short of open, violent confrontation.” In that respect, is the current political climate one of “cold civil war”? I think arguments could be made to that effect. My mother, not much of a political enthusiast, has made similar assessments since the 2000 election ...

Indeed. A year before this next election in the U.S., the common space required for civil debate and civilized disagreement has shrivelled to a very thin sliver of ground. Politics requires a minimum of shared assumptions. To compete you have to be playing the same game: you can’t thwack the ball back and forth if one of you thinks he’s playing baseball and the other fellow thinks he’s playing badminton. Likewise, if you want to discuss the best way forward in the war on terror, you can’t do that if the guy you’re talking to doesn’t believe there is a war on terror, only a racket cooked up by the Bushitler and the rest of the Halliburton stooges as a pretext to tear up the constitution.

Americans do not agree on the basic meaning of the last seven years.

If you drive around an Ivy League college town — home to the nation’s best and brightest, allegedly — you notice a wide range of bumper stickers, from the anticipatory (”01/20/09” — the day of liberation from the Bush tyranny) to the profane (”Buck Fush”) to the myopically self-indulgent (”Regime Change Begins At Home”) to the exhibitionist paranoid (”9/11 Was An Inside Job”). Let’s assume, as polls suggest, that next year’s presidential election is pretty open: might be a Democrat, might be a Republican. Suppose it’s another 50/50 election with a narrow GOP victory dependent on the electoral college votes of one closely divided state. It’s not hard to foresee those stickered Dems concluding that the system has now been entirely delegitimized.

Obviously the vast majority of Americans are not foaming partisans. It would be foolish to adduce any general theories from, say, Mr. “Ed Funkhouser,” who emailed me twice in the small hours of Tuesday: the first epistle read, in total, “who needs facts indeed. How do you live with yourself, scumbag?”

An hour and a half later he realized he’d forgotten to make his devastating assessment of my sexual orientation, and sent a follow-up: “you are a f—kin’ moron. and probably queer too!”

No doubt. Mr. Funkhouser and his friends on the wilder shores of the Internet are unusually stirred up, to a degree most Americans would find perverse.

Life is good, food is plentiful, there are a million and one distractions. In advanced democracies, politics is not everything, and we get on with our lives. In a sense, we outsource politics to those who want it most and participate albeit fitfully in whatever parameters of discourse emerge. For half a decade, the “regime change” and “inside job” types have set the pace.

But that, too, is characteristic of a cold war. In the half-century from 1945, most Americans and most Russians were not in active combat. The war was waged by small elite forces through various useful local proxies.

In Grenada, for example, Maurice Bishop’s Castro-backed New Jewel Movement seized power from Sir Eric Gairy, the eccentric prime minister, in the first-ever coup in the British West Indies. Mr. Bishop allowed the governor general, Sir Paul Scoon, to remain in place (if memory serves, they played tennis together) and so bequeathed posterity the droll paradox of the only realm in which Her Majesty the Queen presided over a politburo. Though it wasn’t exactly a critical battleground, Grenada springs to mind quite often when I think of cultural institutions in the U.S. and the West. The grade schools no longer teach American history as any kind of coherent narrative. “Paint me warts and all,” Oliver Cromwell instructed his portraitist.

But in public education, American children paint only the warts — slavery, the ill-treatment of Native Americans, the pollution of the environment, more slavery ... There are attempts to put a positive spin on things — the Iroquois stewardship of the environment, Rosa Parks’ courage on the bus — but, cumulatively, heroism comes to be defined as opposition to that towering Mount Wartmore of dead white males. As in Grenada, the outward symbols are retained — the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance — but an entirely new national narrative has been set in place.

Well, it takes two to have a cold civil war. The right must be doing some of this stuff, too, surely? Up to a point. But for the most part they either go along, or secede from the system — they home-school, turn to talk radio and the Internet, read Christian publishers’ books that shift millions of copies without ever showing up on a New York Times bestsellers list. The established institutions of the state remain under the monolithic control of forces that ceaselessly applaud themselves for being terrifically iconoclastic:

Hollywood’s latest war movie? Rendition. Oh, as in the same old song?

A college kid writes a four-word editorial in a campus newspaper — “Taser this: F—k Bush” — and the Denver Post hails him as “the future of journalism. Smart. Confident. Audacious.” Anyone audacious enough to write “F—k Hillary” or “F—k Obama” at a college paper? Or would the Muse of Confident Smarts refer you to the relevant portions of the hate-speech code?

Speaking of which, Columbia University won’t allow U.S. military recruiters on campus because “Don’t ask, don’t tell” discriminates against homosexuals, but it will invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose government beheads you if they think you’re bebottoming.

It’s curious to encounter the soft-left establishment’s hostility to the state. Go back to that line of Gibson’s: free peoples develop “Stockholm Syndrome” about government all over the world, not least in Stockholm.

It seems a mite inconsistent to entrust government to manage your health care and education and to dictate what you can and can’t toss in the trash, but then to fret over them waging war on your behalf.

Perhaps the next president will be, as George W. Bush promised, “a uniter, not a divider.” Perhaps some “centrist Democrat” or “maverick Republican” will win big, but right now it doesn’t feel that way.

Asked what would determine the course of his premiership, Britain’s Harold Macmillan famously replied, “Events, dear boy, events.” Yet in the end even “events” require broad acknowledgement.

For Republicans, 9/11 is the decisive event; for Democrats, late November 2000 in the chadlands of Florida still looms larger.

And elsewhere real hot wars seem to matter less than the ersatz Beltway battles back home. “The domestic political debate has nothing to do with what we’re doing here,” one U.S. officer in Iraq told the National Review’s Rich Lowry this week, “in a representative comment offered not in a spirit of bitterness, but of cold fact.” As Lowry remarked, “This is the lonely war” — its actual progress all but irrelevant to the pseudo combat on the home front.

In Neuromancer, William Gibson defined “cyberspace” as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation.” The “cold civil war” may be another “consensual hallucination,” but for many it’s more real than “the lonely war.”

Lots more here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1917754/posts?page=34#34

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