GOP propaganda tacks constantly as it strives to always fault Obama

Tom Friedman wrote a NYT column titled "Looking for Luck in Libya." It described the challenges President Obama faces, and praised him for doing as well as he has with a bad hand.


The very first comment showed what patriotic Americans are up against: millions of citizens who've swallowed the Republican Noise Machine's propaganda line, hook, line and sinker.
Here's what she said:

>>Obama does not have the temperamanet nor the good judgement to make the proper calls in regards to the war he began with Lybia. Obama is trying to pretend that he is a tough-guy cowboy , like Bush. The problem is that Obama is shallow and soft; and everyone -- including Khaddafi -- knows that to be fact. We have no Constitutional reason to be in Libya. Obama has committed an impeachable offense by going to war without congressional approval<<

My comment:

Quite a contrast to the judgment of several hundred American historians, who are polled every few years on how they'd rank all American presidents. In their last poll, done last year, they ranked President Obama a respectable #15, President Reagan a not-too-bad #18...and President Bush II 6th from the bottom--one of the six worst presidents in American history.

Yet this commentor mistakes Bush's rashness and tough-guy talk for decisiveness and courage, while assuming that if Obama isn't making a public speech he isn't lining up his ducks behind the scenes (like George Bush the 1st did with Desert Storm, in fact).

The GOP needs its followers to believe that only Republicans know anything about courage and taking the fight to the enemy. They forget who gave the Navy the go-ahead to drill the Somali pirates through the head, killing them on the spot. They forget who's been sending all those drones into Pakistan and Yemen, making our enemies terrified to take a walk in the open. They forget how Bush II botched both ward he started by doing them on the cheap, followed by a massive trillion-dollar balloon payment left to the next several presidents to deal with.

And this constant prattling about the Constitution--as if this commentor actually knows more about it than a former constitutional law professor and Harvard graduate, which is what the President is--would be funny if half the country hadn't eaten the Republicans' rat poison (tasty at first--then it kills you).

Not only that, these Tea Party types put their constitutional scholarship above that of hundreds of professional American historians. You might say they're all lib-er-ul college professors, but if they were left wing dupes they'd have given Obama a higher score than #15--and they wouldn't have put a number of Republican presidents higher than him, along with a number of Democratic presidents down in bottom-of-the-barrel Bush Country.

How do these people get the sheer gall to think they're such experts at running the United States of America and interpreting our Constitution? Do they even realize that ours is one of the shortest Constitutions on Earth because the Founding Fathers said explicitly that they expected subsequent generations to interpret it according to contemporary needs, while obeying its bedrock principles?

They do not. Reasonable people can point to Republican and Democratic presidents they respect--Eisenhower's one of my favorites,for example, even though I'm a Democrat--but these party tribalists can only see the ill one side does, and only the good the other does.


Really, I'd vote for requiring American citizens to pass the civics test given to citizenship candidates before letting them vote. That would know out a whole lotta Democrats as well as Republicans, but I think the ones left on both sides would actually be able to vote at least semi-intelligently.

I wonder if Mr. Friedman would agree with that?