Obama Haters

I have something to add to my last post.  Trying to understand why the hatred of Obama is so vicious, I think I made a fundamental ... (sorry) ... basic error. I ascribed the attitude to irrational fears about the Constitution, which is thought of as scripture by a certain portion of the illiterati that dominates talk radio and cable commentaries.

Now, my thinking has, please pardon the expression, evolved. I noticed that Mr. Obama's uniqueness lies not in his political philosophy or his policies. Let's face it: he is not simply our first African American president.  That in and of itself would be enough to set certain segments of the American electorate to boil their teapots.

But he is more than that. He is of mixed race heritage: an African father and a liberated midwestern latter day hippie intellectual white mother.  As I have noted previously, his mom, Ann Dunham, was a product of the 1960's, a true believer in the notion that a better world could be created if people gave up biases based on race and gender.

I think that this fact blows minds of many whites, especially in the south and midwest ... and Alaska.  It is the worst nightmare of those who were on the wrong side of the civil rights movement.  The white supremacists always feared that "integration" (remember that notion) might result in mixed "mongrel" races. 

That the races have been mixing ever since the beginning of time was an inconvenient fact ignored by the racial purists, many of whom have never accepted the outcome of the Civil War, much less the Supreme Court opinions, government policies, and societal evolution that resulted in people like:

Tiger Woods, Halle Berry, Derek Jeter, Blake Griffin ... and Barack Obama.

As Churchill noted about the Nazis, certain attitudes are so extreme and wrongheaded that they leave no ground for debate.