President Using Hateful Language?

Recently I read a post over at The Billy Blog. Apparently the head writer of the Billy Blog took issue with the President saying "the debt ceiling should not be 'used as a gun against the heads of the American people to extract tax breaks for corporate jet owners.'"

The Billy Blog then equates that statement to the President's call for more civil discourse following the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in Tucson on 8 January. For the record the President said at the shooting memorial “at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do, it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.”
An interesting side note is that the first person to raise the issue of the vitriolic rhetoric was not even talking about politicians. It was the Pima County Sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, who didn't blame politicians, he blamed the media for sending out signals that insane people can gravitate towards. It should be noted that the sheriff admitted a close personal friendship with the victim and made those statements the same day. It eventually became clear that Jared Lee Loughner was completely unbalanced, had been obsessed with Congresswoman Giffords, and is in the process of being forced to take medication so that he is even mentally competent to stand trial for actions he took when he was apparently mentally incompetent.

The Billy Blog referenced the liberal outrage that painted Loughner as a right wing extremist, failing to mention the same was true of the right. Rush Limbaugh, the head of right wing media, claimed Jared Loughner knew he had the "full support" of the Democratic Party who would inevitably cover for his heinous acts and see that he is freed. The Republican blogosphere even attempted to label him a "registered Democrat" who was mad that Congresswoman Giffords for voting against Nancy Pelosi's agenda, even though the Washington Post later debunked this claim.

I have to agree on some level that the one line the President spoke about holding the gun to the head of the American people seems terse and a call to demonize the other side's tactic. It has the effect of making me think that he is just applying to our basest instinct. I had to do some searching, but I did find the entire video and fuller quotation of what the President said. The question is asked 30 minutes in. It turns out that one line the Billy Blog took umbrage with was actually at the beginning of a response to a tweet posted by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof who asked "Was it a mistake to fail to get Republicans to commit to raise the debt ceiling, at the same time tax cuts were extended?"

The President did indeed say "The debt ceiling should not be something that is used as a gun against the heads of the American people to extract tax breaks for corporate jet owners" and he followed it up with "or oil and gas companies that are making billions of dollars because the price of gasoline has gone up so high. I mean, I'm happy to have those debates. I think the American people are on my side on this."

Not content to enjoy a second away from the narrative he only speaks with a teleprompter, he went on: "What we need to do is to have a balanced approach where everything's on the table. We need to reduce corporate loopholes, we need to reduce discretionary spending on programs that aren't working, we need to reduce defense spending. We need to look at entitlements, and we have to say, 'How do we protect and preserve Medicare and Social Security for, not just this generation, but also future generations?' And that's going to require some modifications even as we maintain its basic structure."

And on: "So, what I'm hoping to see over the next couple of weeks is people put their dogmas aside, their sacred cows aside, they come together and they say, 'Here's a sensible approach that reduces our deficit, makes sure that government's spending within its means but also continues to make investments in education and clean energy and basic research that are going to preserve our competitive advantage going forward."

Wow, a "sensible approach"! "Happy to have those debates"? "Gun to the head"! What the hell was he thinking saying his opponents were in an all or nothing position when they should be meeting in the spirit of compromise? I'll admit I hadn't heard the talking point the Billy Blog wrote about with the "gun to the head" line until I saw it on the Billy Blog, so I did a Google search and found that this exact small quote was blowing up the right wing blogosphere. Obviously this fits the liberal hypocrite narrative. I almost wish this had hit the anti-Christian narrative because he referenced Hindu's sacred cows. That would have been equally as ridiculous.

I also would like to point out that the gun to the head reference is pretty pretty tame when compared to free market capitalist and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffet's claim that Republicans were "playing Russian Roulette" and threatening to "blow America's brains out" over the debt ceiling. After that pronouncement by one of America's premier job creators I think the President was being rather kind in his rhetoric.

I understood what the President was talking about when he said that we need to stop with the divisive rhetoric. I also understand that several liberal commentators blow stuff out of proportion, and see anyone saying anything remotely off color is evil. No one is immune to having dopes in their leadership. To me, he was talking about the guy in New Hampshire holding a sign advocating the watering of the Tree of Liberty while openly brandishing a pistol. Now, I'm not against someone doing what is legal, in this case openly carrying a weapon, but the allusion this fine fellow is making happens to be to a famous Thomas Jefferson line in support of personal freedoms given the French Revolution and the Whiskey Rebellion's bloodshed. The full line goes "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure."

This guy was later interviewed about the intentions of his protest. He claimed that he was getting people to "remember the rights we have and how quickly we are losing them." He didn't feel that spilling the blood of patriots and tyrants was a call to violence either! He then went on to indict both parties for destroying our freedoms. It was later revealed that he was a part of the birther movement that still seeks to discredit the President by claiming he was not born a US citizen.

I remember asking my dad when I was a kid watching "Family Ties" if he had served in Vietnam. He told me no, and when I asked him if he was a protestor he told me no with a very stern look and went through the litany of reasons he was proud he had never gone to a protest. I couldn't imagine living in a time that was remembered for two main political events, and not at least witnessing one. As a result I have been at least a viewer of anything I believe is shaping our national dialogue.

Even though I do not consider myself a Tea Bagger I attended a Tea Party in Beaumont, Texas thrown by Dick Armey's Tea Partier "The Tea Party Express." I saw a bumper sticker calling for the impeachment of President Obama. Also present was an interesting take off of the famous "Don't Blame Me... I Voted For Bush!" bumper stickers that took off mere weeks after President Clinton had taken office.

What was so interesting to me is that this picture was taken less than a year after President Obama took office. I asked the owner of the vehicle in question what he wanted to impeach the President for. He cited communism and socialism, but was unable to give real examples of this outside of a healthcare bill that hadn't been passed, and the last time I checked not yet signing legislation was not an impeachable offense.

All I could think of was how "(t)oday at the same time young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of" this man's "manic obsession to bring down our Commander-in-Chief."

My point is that for whatever reason there is a hardcore segment of our population that will openly call for the death or impeachment of a President directly after his election, statistically 4 years after chiding the opposing side for daring to defy a President with almost one complete term. The newest media leader of the Tea Party even said this before the end of President Obama's first year:



I'm not even saying that liberals and progressives are going to stand behind a Republican every time he takes office, but it took Katrina to get Kanye West (not a paid political pundit) to level the same claim against President Bush, which he later apologized for. It also took the invasion of a country under the pre-text Donald Rumsfeld has admitted was less than 100% provable to get major calls for impeachment. In his first year in office I never saw a call for impeachment of the President, except for this comical call made by cartoonist Ted Rall.

Eventually the comparisons to Hitler got out of control, and while the right decried them, they turned right around and embraced it for their own purposes. Proving once and for all that two wrongs do make a right wing victory slogan. Heck, even a Democrat made headlines by referring to a gay Jew and a black man as "supporting this Nazi policy" when they supported healthcare reform.



President Obama was making a call to both sides to say that there needs to be an end to the demonization of all opposition. The call was for some kind of realization that we may never agree, but we all have a valid point, something that had already been mentioned by Jon Stewart in his Rally to Restore Sanity.

I guess in the end the Billy Blog probably would have done better to listen to the President's speech in which he called for a more civil discourse. He later said "(b)ut what we can't do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another. As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together." The right wing blogosphere didn't hear that line apparently, as they kept it in the memory banks just for the purpose of turning on each other.

All I can tell the Billy Blog is you're like family guy: "Well, according to the Geneva Convention, paragraph 7, sentence 8, word 3: the." I'm not going to mock the President for telling us to work together, but I'm going to sure as hell tell him what I think we should be doing when he doesn't get it right.