Monday, September 05, 2016

That (Bad Word) Obama

Opinion | thepilot.com

You know, after rereading last week’s column, it occurs to me that maybe I really have been going a little too easy on President Barack Obama.

Oh, sure, I called his plan to intervene on behalf of Libyan rebels a “terrible idea.” I criticized his intervention in Syria, even though I later had to admit his part in getting Syria to give up its chemical weapons stockpiles was, in the end, a good thing. You can look it up.

But judging from my research into the online Wingnuttosphere, I feel as if I’m remiss, because I apparently haven’t even scratched the surface of the Kenyan Usurper’s perfidy. So, let’s look around and see what else we can blame on TBO —That (Bad Word) Obama.

* In Norway’s Hardangervidda National Park, a hiker recently came upon a terrible sight: the corpses of 323 reindeer, killed by a single lightning strike.

Now, a bunch of egghead “scientists” will probably try and tell you tell you thatthis is something that happens when the reindeer huddle together in a thunderstorm. But science, as we know, has a liberal bias.

Obama, as we also know, hates Christmas, what with all his talk of “Holiday Trees” at the White House (I know multiple fact-checkers have noted that the White House actually uses the word “Christmas” and only “Christmas” in describing the tree. Facts, as we also know, have a liberal bias as well).

Anyway, if a bunch of Santa’s shaggy helpers are found hooves-up and smoking in a field, we all know who’s to blame, don’t we? I’ll bet TBO was even playing golf when those reindeer died.

* Last week, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick whipped good Americans into a righteous fury when he refused to stand during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Kaepernick explained that he was “not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” Clearly this is the fault of TBO, who we’re told over and over is the most divisive president America has ever had.

It’s bad enough that he’s black, he has to keep reminding us of it. This has done nothing but embolden other public figures, like professional quarterbacks, to remind us that some of them are black as well. Even worse, they have to keep reminding us that black people might have some actual legitimate grievances about the way they’ve been (and still are) treated in this country.

I mean, a lot of it’s true, but how dare a public figure make us feel bad by reminding us of it? This would never have happened if it hadn’t been for TBO.

* It seems that Republican Maine Gov. Paul LePage is going straight off the deep end. On Aug. 24, he claimed to have a “three-ring binder” which proved that “90 percent” of drug arrestees in Maine were black or Hispanic. Asked to provide the binder, LePage had himself a conniption.

“Black people come up the highway and they kill Mainers,” he railed at reporters. “You ought to look into that! You make me so sick!”

When The Portland Press Herald did look into that and reported that FBI statistics showed that only 14.1 percent of Maine drug arrestees were black or Hispanic, LePage, realizing — as all good Americans do — that statistics also have a liberal bias, doubled down: “When you go to war, you shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy, and the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in, are people of color or people of Hispanic origin.”

I won’t even go into what LePage said about a state legislator who insinuated that LePage’s comments about shooting “enemy” blacks and Latinos might be a wee bit racist. Suffice it to say that even my powers of euphemism fail when it comes to reporting those comments in this newspaper.

In the resulting furor, LePage suggested he might resign, then immediately retracted the idea. Now, before the advent of TBO, an elderly erratic white Republican governor would probably have been able to rave about made-up statistics about blacks and Latinos without fear of contradiction. But poor Gov. LePage, in the era of TBO, has to deal with pesky questions about actual “statistics” which, as we know … well, you know what kind of bias they have. How is an old racist supposed to keep his sanity in such times?

Answer: He can’t. And it’s all the fault of That (Bad Word) Obama. Isn’t everything? I can’t wait till his term is over. Then everything that ever goes wrong anywhere will be That (Other Bad Word) Hillary Clinton’s fault.