President Obama's Left Wing Haters
TransGriot Note: This one's not mine. It was posted to a Democratic Facebook group I'm on and I did a little cleanup editing to it.
The author is unknown, but it calls out the so-called progressives that absolutely hate President Obama.
It’s
not news that there are people on the “progressive” side who cannot
stand President Barack Obama. Now the angries have got themselves a plan,
and maybe even a poster child. But do they have a candidate?
In recent weeks, the increasing vitriol between progressive/liberal/libertarian opponents and supporters of President Barack Obama have been lighting up the Twittersphere.
There’s
the growing rift over racial insensitivity in some of the anti-Obama
critique – centering on who is Obama’s “base”. It has pitted black
and white Twitterzens led by Balloon Juice blogger AngryBlackLady and
her supporters against Salon editor Joan Walsh and her supporters,
including most recently, a ThinkProgress blogger named Zaid Jilani.
There’s
Glenn Greenwald’s rather Nixonian enemies list, which he says consists
of 30 Twitterzens who spend all their time attacking him (for spending
so much of his time attacking the president while sliming anyone who
doesn’t attack the president as mindless Obama cultists) though he
refuses to name names.
And there’s the ongoing Obama-slam by big-time
Tweeters like filmmaker Michael Moore (@MMflint) and liberal radio talk
host David Sirota (@davidsirota), with Moore even launching his own
conspiracy theory that the Pakistanis gave the U.S. Osama bin Laden to
be “executed”, because he had outlived his usefulness to the “war on
terror.”
The most aggressive anti-Obama action is to be found in
three places: among a group of highly influential blogs connected to
Jane Hamsher’s Firedoglake and its associated FDL Action PAC and knit
together via Hamsher’s advertising network; from Greenwald, Moore and
other libertarian-leaning activists who oppose Obama’s war and national
security policies (which they say are too close to George W. Bush’s);
and from Adam Green’s Progressive Campaign Change Committee PAC, which
has spent as much time attacking the president as it has advertising
against Republicans.
Jane Hamsher, also has a new group called "Dump Obama", and she calls herself a progressive?
To pro-Obama liberals, Hamsher and company are the
“firebaggers” — as vehemently and reflexively anti-Obama as any tea
partier, and when confronted, often just as nasty. It’s thought that
some of them, like Hamsher, are into Obama-bashing for the link bait and
the cash, while others appear to be true believers in the third party
cause, including Greenwald and former Ralph Nader supporters like Michael Moore.
Up
to now, one of the things the anti-Obama progressive movement has
lacked is diversity, giving them the appearance of an all-white jihad
against the first black president. (Hamsher’s history, punctuated by her
now infamous “blackface” post attacking Joe Lieberman, doesn’t help.)
In a way, that’s a function of the fact that for decades, the leading
voices on the left, from its magazines to its radio shows to to its top bloggers, have been
conspicuously monochrome.
A recent Forbes list of the 25 most
influential liberals in the U.S. contained only four people of color:
Oprah Winfrey, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (who is Salvadoran and Greek),
Matthew Yglesias (who is of Hispanic and Jewish background) and Fareed
Zakaria (who on the list has the distinction of being both Indian, and
not really a liberal)
The liberal
talk network Air America, from which MSNBC drew part of its on-air
liberal lineup, had no solo black or Hispanic hosts until it signed
daytime talk host Montel Williams just before the network folded in
2010. The only black nationally syndicated liberal
talk radio host: is Joe Madison, AKA The Black Eagle' (who is syndicated by
African-American owned Radio One)
For the “FDLers,” the perception of
theirs being an “all white” attack on the first black president presents
a particular problem, since Democratic candidates, including Obama, are
typically propelled into office on the strength of the unanimous
support of black voters, and the two-thirds backing of Hispanics.
Last
week, the anti-Obama progressives saw an opening to change that white-only dynamic
when the ongoing verbal war that African-Americans:pundits Tavis
Smiley and his mentor, Princeton professor Cornel West have been waging
against President Barack Obama since 2007 boiled over.
A long-time coming
Smiley
and West have disliked Obama since he announced his run for the presidency in
Springfield, Illinois on the same day Smiley hosted his annual “State of
Black America” conference.
Skipping the State Of the Black Union conference earned then
Senator Obama Smiley’s enduring disdain. He and West became even more
vehemently anti-Obama after he rebuked Rev. Jeremiah Wright
over the inflammatory sermons which surfaced in the midst of the Democratic
primary (and were wielded by the Clinton campaign as they hunted for
superdelegates.)
I (the writer) attended a talk Smiley gave in the wake of Obama’s
historic 2008 Philadelphia speech on race, in which an embarrased Smiley silenced the room
at the Broward Convention Center with a broadside aimed at then Sen. Obama that was so angry and personal, it left people gasping.
Smiley’s rage at Obama became
so pronounced he eventually resigned from his twice weekly commentary spot
on the Tom Joyner Morning Show after drawing criticism from TJMS listeners. He later seemed to burn down the bridge
to Joyner entirely when he was invited back on the TJMS in 2010 and went on a
tirade that prompted the first of many flare-ups with Rev. Al Sharpton.
Undeterred,
Smiley, who had been a Hillary Clinton supporter during the
2008 Democratic presidential primary, has continued to slam the president, including
during his weekly show for Public Radio International, and in a podcast
series he and Dr. West put out periodically, called “Smiley and West.”
West’s
critiques of Obama as ignoring not just black Americans, but also poor
people, have ebbed and flowed over the years. According to the book “The
Bridge” by David Remnick, after an intervention by Harvard professor
Charles Ogletree in 2007, West softened his opposition, and even held a
series of discussions with Obama and other black intellectuals,
including Michael Eric Dyson, in which the then-candidate tried to
create detente.
It didn’t hold. West reportedly fumed at a lack
of access to the newly elected president (and to his inability to get
inaugural tickets.) He was upset about Obama naming his former Harvard
nemesis Larry Summers as the president’s top economic adviser over
West’s strong objections.
By late 2010, he began denouncing Obama in
increasingly vitriolic terms; calling his policies racist against
blacks, and calling the president a black “mascot” of Wall Street and a
“black puppet” of the oligarchs, leading to further condemnation of West
by fellow African-Americans, and culminating in this eye-opening
slight against something Obama cannot control; his parentage:
"I
think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black
men,” West said. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up
in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear
being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is
white…When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening.”
West unleashed an equally undignified slur that President Obama feels most comfortable
around “upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves
very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want.”
West's most recent attacks have led to blistering counter-attacks by
the Rev. Al Sharpton in the wake of a heated debate on MSNBC in which West also
tossed the "mascot" smear at Sharpton. Rev. Sharpton struck back with a Huffington Post piece in which he called out those who are tossing spitballs at
the president from their ivory tower while real activists work in the
trenches.
Ironically, West's broadsides have made him the perfect -- er -- mascot,
for the "progressive" anti-Obamaites, one of whom, an FDL diarist who
goes by the handle "Metamars" -- even saw an opportunity to put West on
the front lines, to "educate" ... the "Afro-Americans" to understand
that Obama is "not their friend.".
Primary the president!
West’s
ongoing vitriol included a call last November for someone to step forward and
primary Obama from within the Democratic Party. The call roughly
coincided with an “election” held by a group of activists whose goal was
to do just that: field a potential “progressive” primary candidate
against Obama.
Indeed, the idea of primarying the president has been a
hot diary topic on FDL since 2010. In February of that year,
in response to the signing of the healthcare reform bill, a 527 called
the New Progressive Alliance was formed:
In February 2010, even
before President Obama formally approved his party’s gift of 40 million
more customers to Big Insurance, blogger “Masoninblue” posted this
invitation to readers of The Seminal, a site at FireDogLake (FDL), to
join him in forming a new Progressive party. In late March, he and five
other Seminal bloggers and readers formed an online group to incubate
the process. They supported strict adherence to the basic tenets of
Progressivism, and even chose a name – New Progressive Alliance.
This
means as Liberals-True Democrats, we have to work much harder, and
while it may seem impossible at the moment, let's try to bridge our differences with
the angry left and work for the nation's good as a whole.
In the meantime maybe you want to make others aware of these movements so we can
unite and work against them.
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