Obama bashing: Are his critics unhinged?

last updated 8 January 2015

So what if 69 percent of Americans approve of Barack Obama? said Josh Greenman in the New York Daily News. In the high-decibel world of the right-wing punditocracy, Obama is a dangerous radical bent on destroying the American way of life! Over the past few weeks, as Obama has taken drastic government action to fix the ailing economy, his detractors have ramped up their rhetoric to fever pitch. From his radio pulpit, Rush Limbaugh is denouncing “the central planners, the statist tyranny crowd in Washington.” Fellow right-wing ranter Mark Levin is telling listeners that Obama plans to steal their “liberty” and “private property.” On Fox News, the often hysterical Glenn Beck labels Obama “a fascist” and has called for conservatives to “think the unthinkable,” and launch a “revolution.” This kind of “apocalyptic” talk is chilling, said Charles M. Blow in The New York Times. While right-wing demagogues are calling for patriots to “rise up” against Obama and his one-world Marxist minions, somewhere out there, another Timothy McVeigh may be taking them seriously.

As an unapologetic conservative myself, said David Horowitz in Salon.com, I, too, am concerned by all this “over-the-top hysteria.” True, when George W. Bush was president, liberals were no less apocalyptic, often comparing him to Hitler. But that doesn’t justify my colleagues on the Right calling Obama “a closet Mussolini,” and comparing him to Saddam Hussein. Obama’s a leftist, yes, but “we are not witnessing the coming of the Antichrist.” To denounce him with such frantic hyperbole only allows the media to portray conservatives as a bunch of dangerous crackpots.

For an accurate view of what conservatives really think, said Mark Tapscott in the San Francisco Examiner, please come to a “tea party protest.” So far, there have been several dozen of these tea parties in communities from Cincinnati to Little Rock, Ark., to Ridgefield, Conn., attended by thousands of Americans alarmed by the president’s trillion-dollar deficits and endless giveaways of taxpayer money. “I can remember nothing like this so early in any administration in my lifetime,” said Scripps Howard columnist Jay Ambrose. The tea parties—patterned after the American colonists’ Boston Tea Party—constitute a bona fide populist uprising against a power-hungry government that “robs hardworking, frugal Peter to pay slothful, reckless Paul while excusing the crime as social justice.” We conservative Peters aren’t planning an armed rebellion. But we do plan to fight Obama every step of the way.