Golly! That President Obama! When Republicans tell outrageous and disgusting lies, he just tells the truth! Why, he’s almost as bad as they are!
That’s the gist of the bizarre rap of TV big-shot (five Emmys!) Jeff Greenfield in a recent piece for Politico Magazine, headed “Getting the Politics of Fear Right: Trump exploits our fears while Obama underestimates them. Why can’t someone just deal with them?”
According to Jeff, “It is true that too much playing-up of fear is a bad thing, even for demagogic politicians (who rarely get elected in the end, though they may soar for a while). But neither can our political leaders afford to ignore fear altogether, as Obama is sometimes accused of doing. It’s both important and healthy for responsible politicians to address realistic fears, or the demagogues will move in.”
Sorry, I don’t understand why a “moderate” playing up of fear is a good thing, nor why demagogic politicians somehow have a right to play on people’s irrational fears more than “regular” politicians do, nor why Jeff, after explicitly saying that Obama is wrongfully ignoring people’s fears, suddenly shifts to what can best be described as the “passive hypothetical”—“I didn’t say that Obama is ignoring people’s fears! I said he’s sometimes accused of doing that! By, you know, someone!
Similarly, at the Washington Post, David Ignatius, while admitting, again, that the president is, you know, right, feels that the president shouldn’t have been so “petty and political” in making fun of Republicans who, he said, are “scared of widows and orphans” and “Some of them seem to think that if I were just more bellicose in expressing what we’re doing, that that would make a difference,” two perfectly accurate descriptions of statements made by Republican leaders. The president also unsportingly pointed out that the anti-Muslim hysteria cultivated by virtually the entire Republican Party strengthens the hand of the jihadists.
Also at the Post, Dana Milbank moans that the President, in his joint press conference with French François Hollande, lacked pizazz. While François was all “we’re going to totally kick their faggy derrières,” Obama was all, you know, rational. “There was little difference in their strategies for fighting the Islamic State, but Hollande was upbeat and can-do, while Obama was discouraging and lawyerly. It was as if the smoke-’em-out spirit of George W. Bush had been transplanted into the body of a short, pudgy, bespectacled French socialist with wrinkled suit-pants.”
Yeah, the smoke-’em-out spirit of George W. Bush that left 5,000 Americans dead and 30,000 wounded, throwing a nation of 30 million into chaos, a chaos that led to the creation and flourishing of ISIS!
Afterwords
My last link takes you to an excellent article by Juan Cole, whose name I couldn’t quite insert without interrupting the florid rhetoric of my last paragraph. But read Juan. He knows a lot more than I do.
My last assault on the compulsive even-handedness of the lamestream media, on domestic policy this time, is here. I ran a brief review of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, a brief book by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, which dares to say that the Republicans are worse than the Democrats here.
