An interesting pattern has emerged in the last few weeks, as President Obama’s ratings have started to come down to Earth: You can really see a type of Obama-hatred out there that really does cross over into a purely racial territory.
This has gotten especially worse in the aftermath of Obama’s comments and subsequent mea culpa on the Henry Louis Gates arrest, but the pattern has been there all the same. You can look back to the 2008 campaign, with the Jeremiah Wright controversies, the phony rumors of a tape of Michelle Obama defaming whites, and the slow but steady emergence of the Birthers. And these days, the Birthers seem to be getting more and more bellicose.
So let’s take a look at some of those recent racially-charged attacks that have circulated against Obama, both right before and after the Gates incident.
⢠Above all others, the real celebrity here has been Rush Limbaugh. He’s done this kind of thing before — remember the “Barack, The Magic Negro” song? But in the wake of the Gates incident, he’s managed to become even more hard-edged about it. “Here you have a black president trying to destroy a white policeman,” Limbaugh declared this past Friday. Yesterday, he shared a dream he’s had about the dangers to capitalism: “I had a dream that I was a slave building a sphinx in a desert that looked like Obama.” And he joked that food-safety advocates will go after all the unhealthy foods people like to eat, one by one — but they’ll have to wait until Obama is out of office to ban Oreos.
⢠Glenn Beck said this today on Fox News: “This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture. I don’t what it is. You can’t sit in a pew with Jeremiah Wright for 20 years and not hear some of that stuff, and not have it wash over.”
⢠During his new crusade of Birtherism, Lou Dobbs suggested on his radio show this past Wednesday, right before the Gates flare-up, that Obama could be an illegal immigrant, tying this into his usual preoccupation. “I’m starting to think we have a document issue,” Dobbs said. “You suppose he’s un– no, I won’t even use the word ‘undocumented,’ it wouldn’t be right.”
⢠As we reported last week, a high-profile conservative activist against Obama on health care was circulating an e-mail that photoshopped Obama’s face onto a witch-doctor’s body. This e-mail had been circulating before the Gates incident, but still fits into the overall environment of Obama’s ratings having started to flag.
