E.J. Dionne, Jr.: On the President as Alien

[babylonsister]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/on_the_president_as_alien_20120223/

On the President as Alien

Posted on Feb 23, 2012
By E.J. Dionne, Jr.


They say that President Obama is a Muslim, but if he isn’t, he’s a secularist who is waging war on religion. On some days he’s a Nazi, but on most others he’s merely a socialist. His especially creative opponents see him as having a “Kenyan anti-colonial worldview,” while the less adventurous say he’s an elitist who spent too much time in Cambridge, Hyde Park and other excessively academic precincts.

Whatever our president is, he is never allowed to be a garden-variety American who plays basketball and golf, has a remarkably old-fashioned family life, and, in the manner we regularly recommend to our kids, got ahead by getting a good education.

Please forgive this outburst. It’s simply astonishing that a man in his fourth year as our president continues to be the object of the most extraordinary paranoid fantasies. A significant part of his political opposition still cannot accept that Obama is a rather moderate politician quite conventional in his tastes and his interests. And now that the economy is improving, short-circuiting easy criticisms, Obama’s adversaries are reheating all the old tropes and cliches and slanders.

snip//

It’s another breathtaking slander to label Obama’s choice as an attack on religion altogether—and I say this as someone who strongly opposed the president’s initial decision not to offer any accommodation to religiously affiliated institutions on contraception. And how strange it is that Obama’s critics imply that he’s a Muslim and also condemn him as a secularist. He must be terribly clever—maybe it’s that fancy education of his—to be both.

As for Obama as a socialist, ponder two numbers: 13,005, which the Dow Jones average hit earlier this week, up from a low point of 6,547 in March 2009. Some socialist.

We are blessed with the freedom to say whatever we want about our president. But those who cast Obama as something other than one of us don’t understand him, and don’t understand what it means to be American.

[JNelson6563]

1. I'd be glad if many just remembered he's mere mortal

But of course I ain't talkin' 'bout the wingers on that, I'm talkin' about "our own", or so they like to claim.

Julie--strongly doubting that claim in some instances