I will admit that I pay less attention to the quadrennial presidential frenzy than I probably should. While I can name most (probably not all--how many of them ARE there?) of the GOP candidates and all one of the Democratic candidates, and while I’ve read countless news accounts and editorial discussions in the aftermath of the endless debates among the former, I still cannot pin down exactly why any of them chose to throw their hats into the proverbial ring. Why does Michele Bachmann want to be president, for instance, aside from “God told me to do it”? What does Rick Perry see himself as offering the country? Or baseball-glove out of Massachusetts, or the now nearly forgotten pizza guy, or salamander-serial-adulterer, or Ron “Methuselah was a KID” Paul. I admit I kind of like the Utah Mormon, Huntsman, but that may be as much because his daughters are a hoot as anything else.
I would love to ask every one of them, in a quiet, non-photo-op moment (if there were such a thing), WHY they, personally, not only want the job, but deem themselves qualified for it. Like that moment in the movie, “Blind Side,” when Michael turns the tables on the NCAA investigator, telling her that they want to know why everybody else wants him to go to Ole Miss, but not why HE wants to go there.
Why whatever percent of voters want Paul or Bachmann or Romney or Perry or Cain or Huntsman or whomever to become president (which mostly boils down to “anybody but the black guy” anyway) doesn’t interest me nearly as much as why that handful of people each individually want to become president.
Frankly, I sense that none of them really want the job.
Running for president has become less about becoming president, than merely the lucrative game of running itself. Heck, just tagging along as the vice-presidential candidate four years ago made Sarah Palin rich. She didn’t even have to bother going back to her original day job as Alaska governor. She has demonstrated that there are almost as many perks to being a presidential candidate, in however teasing a way, as to the job itself--plus none of the headaches.
Ron Paul apparently gave up his medical career to become a career politician and then a career presidential candidate. Near as I can tell, he “consistently” stakes out positions that will keep him “interesting” and “attractive” to just large enough a portion of the electorate to make him seem viable as a candidate, but not to large enough portion of same to make him actually likely to be elected.
It’s not the job, it’s the adventure, and the money and publicity that flow along with it.
As my own job seems threatened and my “career,” such as it is, in doubt, I’ve begun thinking about other lines of work. Running for president is starting to look like a pretty cool opportunity, and it’s not like I haven’t thought about it before. Back in the 1970s, here in Missouri, we had a guy run for governor, “Walkin Joe Teasdale,” who got the name because he actually perambulated on foot around the state, and eventually managed to beat the incumbent governor, Kit Bond, who came back to beat Walkin Joe four years later. I was in high school at the time, given to daydreams (always better than algebra or geometry), and one day I wondered what would happen if an 18-year-old Midwestern kid started walking across the country, announcing himself as a presidential candidate for the election 17 years hence. He could work odd jobs, talk to people, generally spend 17 years getting his name out. People would KNOW him, or think they did, and he would know people, his eventual constituency.
I never got much further with the story than that, but now I wonder.
Could there BE a better job than running for an office you know (and hope and pray) you’ll never win?
Guess you’ll have to ask Ron Paul or Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich or . . . Whomever. Don’t ask B. H. Obama, though--he tried to pull off this “running” thing and actually won, much to his apparent chagrin and dismay.
VOTE MEDIAN PERSPECTIVE IN 2020!
Showing posts with label obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label obama. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Babel-ing.
It was quieter here, much more peaceful, when Cecil the puppy, if he can still be called a puppy, was asleep on the floor, his hind leg and nose occasionally twitching as he dreamed (and yes, dogs DO dream--I googled it, plus Stephen King described it in at least two of his 587 novels). Now that he’s awake, he first made sure that everybody else--Xena, Wendy, Muffins, Chewie, Evi and Sabrina, not to mention ME--was awake as well. At the moment he has one of my old shoes and is bashing it against my computer stand. No, this is not annoying. Well, not TOO annoying.
I would take him outside if it weren’t 30-something degrees with a wind gusting out of hell, or maybe Nebraska.
Just another (mostly) house-bound day. Winter, or oncoming winter, or almost winter, or warning-shots-over-the-bow of winter tend to make us hunker down inside until we get acclimated and go about our more-or-less normal business.
Those of us who are housebound AND without television tend to wander about online, flit more or less mindlessly from Sports Illustrated (and the Iron Bowl, the Alabama-Auburn football game) to Salon to somewhere that something on Salon sent us, to sometimes really bizarre places where we find “alternate universes,” in a way--whole worlds outside the world we normally inhabit. People, or whatever the inhabitants call themselves in those worlds, are looking at us from the outside, scrutinizing and theorizing and hypothesizing and mostly just guessing, based on their own alien experiences . . . Us. Much in the same way that we scrutinize and theorize and hypothesize and mostly just guess about “them,” those from other worlds.
I watch Cecil on the floor, his hindleg jerking and his nose twitching, and imagine that he is dreaming (he IS), then free-associate, try to imagine what he is dreaming about, envision him dreaming of chasing thrown sticks or wrestling with Nina, one of the other dogs, or terrorizing (in a playful way, of course) the cats, and then it hits me that I have NO way of seeing his dreams--Cecil is not me, he is not even human. He sees his everyday wakeful life in ways I cannot really even imagine, and thus his dreams likely are very different from any I could imagine.
Then I go back to web-wandering and learn that an American aircraft carrier group may or may not have been stationed offshore of Syria (many “news” reports say it is; the Navy web site says the carrier group is currently ported in the south of France, Marseille, and all the sailors are having a great time there).
One site or another or a few say that “Barry” Obama is about to pick a fight with Syria, for some reason or other.
Another site or two or three claims Turkey is fixing to invade Syria.
Still another one says that Ukraine is being set up by the “great powers” (U.S. and Britain, specifically) to become the new “Libya,” that we--the great powers--are laying the foundation to take over Ukraine and its oil on some humanitarian pretext or another.
What is unnerving is that I cannot muster enough documentation, online, to prove ANY of them wrong, even in my own mind.
From my perspective as a photographer, somebody who is accustomed to looking at subjects from different angles, different . . . perspectives, and from my perspective as a human being who grew up in a large family, I know that opinions--perspectives--have a tendency to vary from one person to another.
I’m beginning to understand where “the tower of Babel” came from, and even that God was made nervous by the fact that all the people of the world of the day shared a common language, could communicate meaningfully with each other, and so decided to jumble things up a bit by inflicting a multiplicity of languages upon “His people.”
So many different languages, so little communication. For some divine reason, God (well, God of the Christians and Jews; I don’t know about Allah or the assorted gods of the Hindu religion, or any of the myriad others currently ruling the myriad separate earths we all simultaneously inhabit) didn’t want us to be able to communicate with each other. Somehow He perceived human communication with each other to be a threat to His own power, or so I gather. So He decided to splinter us by splintering our once-common language. “Divide and conquer.”
Mind you, I’m not a biblical scholar, and in fact have spent the last 52 years or so paying as little attention to the Bible as possible. (I tried once to read it cover-to-cover, but got bogged down in the “begats”). It’s interesting, though. As a biblical non-scholar, I’ve never tried to view today’s corporate world through a biblical lens--but as I read today about the Tower of Babel, etc., I kept remembering how many of my employers have had strict rules when it came to employees communicating with each other. We were always expressly forbidden to discuss salary with each other, for instance. I always wondered why, but didn’t worry about it overmuch. Now I see that our bosses were just trying to follow a page out of God’s “stick-it-to-’em” book.
But I digress. Of course.
In the course of all my web-wandering and maundering today, I came across a whole lot of what I can only characterize as “really interesting shit.”
But I found no reliable answers even to simple questions, for instance “Where is the USS George HW Bush” currently floating?” One source says Marseille, France; another few sources say “off Syria.”
Sad state of affairs, when you cannot trust your OWN press, much less that of any other nation, and when you cannot trust your elected representatives or virtually any one else to provide you real, “spin”-less information.
Maybe I should go back to watching dogs dream.
I would take him outside if it weren’t 30-something degrees with a wind gusting out of hell, or maybe Nebraska.
Just another (mostly) house-bound day. Winter, or oncoming winter, or almost winter, or warning-shots-over-the-bow of winter tend to make us hunker down inside until we get acclimated and go about our more-or-less normal business.
Those of us who are housebound AND without television tend to wander about online, flit more or less mindlessly from Sports Illustrated (and the Iron Bowl, the Alabama-Auburn football game) to Salon to somewhere that something on Salon sent us, to sometimes really bizarre places where we find “alternate universes,” in a way--whole worlds outside the world we normally inhabit. People, or whatever the inhabitants call themselves in those worlds, are looking at us from the outside, scrutinizing and theorizing and hypothesizing and mostly just guessing, based on their own alien experiences . . . Us. Much in the same way that we scrutinize and theorize and hypothesize and mostly just guess about “them,” those from other worlds.
I watch Cecil on the floor, his hindleg jerking and his nose twitching, and imagine that he is dreaming (he IS), then free-associate, try to imagine what he is dreaming about, envision him dreaming of chasing thrown sticks or wrestling with Nina, one of the other dogs, or terrorizing (in a playful way, of course) the cats, and then it hits me that I have NO way of seeing his dreams--Cecil is not me, he is not even human. He sees his everyday wakeful life in ways I cannot really even imagine, and thus his dreams likely are very different from any I could imagine.
Then I go back to web-wandering and learn that an American aircraft carrier group may or may not have been stationed offshore of Syria (many “news” reports say it is; the Navy web site says the carrier group is currently ported in the south of France, Marseille, and all the sailors are having a great time there).
One site or another or a few say that “Barry” Obama is about to pick a fight with Syria, for some reason or other.
Another site or two or three claims Turkey is fixing to invade Syria.
Still another one says that Ukraine is being set up by the “great powers” (U.S. and Britain, specifically) to become the new “Libya,” that we--the great powers--are laying the foundation to take over Ukraine and its oil on some humanitarian pretext or another.
What is unnerving is that I cannot muster enough documentation, online, to prove ANY of them wrong, even in my own mind.
From my perspective as a photographer, somebody who is accustomed to looking at subjects from different angles, different . . . perspectives, and from my perspective as a human being who grew up in a large family, I know that opinions--perspectives--have a tendency to vary from one person to another.
I’m beginning to understand where “the tower of Babel” came from, and even that God was made nervous by the fact that all the people of the world of the day shared a common language, could communicate meaningfully with each other, and so decided to jumble things up a bit by inflicting a multiplicity of languages upon “His people.”
So many different languages, so little communication. For some divine reason, God (well, God of the Christians and Jews; I don’t know about Allah or the assorted gods of the Hindu religion, or any of the myriad others currently ruling the myriad separate earths we all simultaneously inhabit) didn’t want us to be able to communicate with each other. Somehow He perceived human communication with each other to be a threat to His own power, or so I gather. So He decided to splinter us by splintering our once-common language. “Divide and conquer.”
Mind you, I’m not a biblical scholar, and in fact have spent the last 52 years or so paying as little attention to the Bible as possible. (I tried once to read it cover-to-cover, but got bogged down in the “begats”). It’s interesting, though. As a biblical non-scholar, I’ve never tried to view today’s corporate world through a biblical lens--but as I read today about the Tower of Babel, etc., I kept remembering how many of my employers have had strict rules when it came to employees communicating with each other. We were always expressly forbidden to discuss salary with each other, for instance. I always wondered why, but didn’t worry about it overmuch. Now I see that our bosses were just trying to follow a page out of God’s “stick-it-to-’em” book.
But I digress. Of course.
In the course of all my web-wandering and maundering today, I came across a whole lot of what I can only characterize as “really interesting shit.”
But I found no reliable answers even to simple questions, for instance “Where is the USS George HW Bush” currently floating?” One source says Marseille, France; another few sources say “off Syria.”
Sad state of affairs, when you cannot trust your OWN press, much less that of any other nation, and when you cannot trust your elected representatives or virtually any one else to provide you real, “spin”-less information.
Maybe I should go back to watching dogs dream.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
OWS, Hope, Change . . . yada yada yada.
From where I sit, out in northwest Missouri farm country, I can’t yet decide if OWS is going to have any immediate or long-term impact on the direction of our nation, or of the world. The movement seems largely to be tilting at windmills.
For instance, I’ve read--and many OWS’ers are well aware of this--college tuition has increased 900 percent over the past 30 years, yet salaries for entry-level jobs requiring a college degree have remained fairly stagnant. Is there any chance of the OWS movement significantly rolling back tuition costs? No. None. And in a sense, they wouldn’t want to--rolling back tuition costs would mean elimination of a lot of jobs on campuses all over the country. Is there any chance of the OWS movement significantly increasing salaries paid by the lovely corporations running this country? No. None.
Does OWS have any shot at all at decreasing corporate influence on our nation’s government? No. We have the best Congress money can buy, and congresspersons will NOT give that money up. Even if OWS managed to find, back, and get elected “pure” candidates, those candidates, once elected, being human and all, very likely would very quickly succumb to monetary apples offered them by the myriad corporate “Eves”--and they would find ways to justify that to themselves.
And the evil corporations are not comprised solely of their CEOs and other multimillion-dollar executives--they also employ a lot of real people, most of them among the 99% who aren’t the “movers and shakers” of our political and economic world.
I love OWS and everything it stands for--but I still cannot figure out how it can succeed, and trust me, I’ve been trying.
It is going to take someone with a lot more imagination than I’ve been blessed with to come up with a real, tangible, doable plan--with real, tangible, accomplishable goals. It is relatively easy to see and rail at problems. Solutions are more elusive. The people--or “persons,” as the Supreme Court refers to corporations--will never give up or even minimally share their power. Why would they? Politicians will never give up the bounty they receive from those in actual power.
Much as I would love to see 435 representatives and 100 senators, maybe even a president (and I actually like Mr. Obama) out on the unemployment line, along with a few hundred or thousand corporate CEOs, I do NOT want to see their secretaries and housekeepers and cooks and on and on and on in the same line.
The question is how to “hurt” the bosses enough to get their attention, without hurting the many people who depend on them.
I would make a LOUSY revolutionary.
What I’m afraid of is that we’ve already slid too far down the slippery slope towards the end of “America as we know it” ever to recover.
OWS gives me some faint sliver of hope, but it’s just that, a faint sliver. People seem to be waking up, to be catching on to the essential etiology of what ails us, but it may be too late. We have reached the point of wanting “change,” but are essentially powerless to effect that change, on anything more than a purely individual level, if even that.
Come to think about it, maybe that IS the key--we all must find ways to effect change on an individual level.
When I figure out what that means, I’ll let y’all know.
For instance, I’ve read--and many OWS’ers are well aware of this--college tuition has increased 900 percent over the past 30 years, yet salaries for entry-level jobs requiring a college degree have remained fairly stagnant. Is there any chance of the OWS movement significantly rolling back tuition costs? No. None. And in a sense, they wouldn’t want to--rolling back tuition costs would mean elimination of a lot of jobs on campuses all over the country. Is there any chance of the OWS movement significantly increasing salaries paid by the lovely corporations running this country? No. None.
Does OWS have any shot at all at decreasing corporate influence on our nation’s government? No. We have the best Congress money can buy, and congresspersons will NOT give that money up. Even if OWS managed to find, back, and get elected “pure” candidates, those candidates, once elected, being human and all, very likely would very quickly succumb to monetary apples offered them by the myriad corporate “Eves”--and they would find ways to justify that to themselves.
And the evil corporations are not comprised solely of their CEOs and other multimillion-dollar executives--they also employ a lot of real people, most of them among the 99% who aren’t the “movers and shakers” of our political and economic world.
I love OWS and everything it stands for--but I still cannot figure out how it can succeed, and trust me, I’ve been trying.
It is going to take someone with a lot more imagination than I’ve been blessed with to come up with a real, tangible, doable plan--with real, tangible, accomplishable goals. It is relatively easy to see and rail at problems. Solutions are more elusive. The people--or “persons,” as the Supreme Court refers to corporations--will never give up or even minimally share their power. Why would they? Politicians will never give up the bounty they receive from those in actual power.
Much as I would love to see 435 representatives and 100 senators, maybe even a president (and I actually like Mr. Obama) out on the unemployment line, along with a few hundred or thousand corporate CEOs, I do NOT want to see their secretaries and housekeepers and cooks and on and on and on in the same line.
The question is how to “hurt” the bosses enough to get their attention, without hurting the many people who depend on them.
I would make a LOUSY revolutionary.
What I’m afraid of is that we’ve already slid too far down the slippery slope towards the end of “America as we know it” ever to recover.
OWS gives me some faint sliver of hope, but it’s just that, a faint sliver. People seem to be waking up, to be catching on to the essential etiology of what ails us, but it may be too late. We have reached the point of wanting “change,” but are essentially powerless to effect that change, on anything more than a purely individual level, if even that.
Come to think about it, maybe that IS the key--we all must find ways to effect change on an individual level.
When I figure out what that means, I’ll let y’all know.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Tebowmania
As only a casual follower of the NFL--that is, I’ll read Peter King‘s “Monday Morning Quarterback” column in Sports Illustrated (online edition), skim through the scores, etc. every week--I’ve nevertheless somehow become fascinated by the whole “Tebowmania” thing out in Denver and, apparently, across the country. Tim Tebow, of course, is the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback out of Florida who helped win the university two national championships, and who against “conventional wisdom” was surprisingly selected in the first round of the NFL draft in 2010 by the Denver Broncos.
None of this would be particularly interesting except that I’ve never seen a single player polarize so dramatically fans and experts and casual followers. Even people who never watch football games and don’t care one whit about the National Football League seem to have an opinion, seem passionately to want the guy to succeed--or fail--for reasons apparently having little to do with the game of football at all.
See, Tebow is an unabashed Christian. He doesn’t hide it, doesn’t downplay it, it’s just what he is, and he is comfortable enough, and sincere enough in his faith that he doesn’t apologize for it.
He is at once revered and reviled for that. The people who revere him call him “just a winner,” which, in fact, he seems to be (game last night bears, uh, witness to that); the people who revile him call him “Saint Timmy.”
I’ve never actually seen the guy play, and, in all honesty, am not enough of a football fan to be able to dissect and identify problems with his “throwing motion” or whatever. I sorta watched the Broncos-Jets game last night, or anyway the last six or so minutes of it--I say “sorta” because I don’t actually have TV; I was watching a Sports Illustrated graphic of it on my computer, which is a whole ‘nother story. When I tuned in after I got off work, the Jets had just punted, burying Denver back at their own 4- or 5-yard line. I looked at the stats real quick and saw that the Broncos had done virtually nothing on offense all evening, and at that point trailed 13-10.
Because of the Tebowmania thing, I found myself glued to the computer screen, watching the red line marking the line of scrimmage move inexorably from the right side of my monitor towards the left. It is admittedly weird watching a game that way, without seeing players or actual action or anything but a green cartoon football field with lines moving across it, yet it is fascinating at the same time, probably for the same reasons. When I was in high school and working every Sunday as a dishwasher at a local truck stop, I used to listen to Kansas City Chiefs games on the radio as I worked--watching the graphics last night was similar, but letting sight, rather than sound, trigger my imagination.
Anyway, that final drive of the Broncos just mesmerized me.
And, as I said earlier, I’m just a casual fan, but still read about the NFL. From what I’ve read about Tebow, his teammates believe in him. They will follow, however the season plays out for them as a team, because he is a leader.
His detractors, on the other hand, keep saying, “well, yeah, it has worked so far, but just wait--he’ll run into _____ or _____ or _____ and he’ll fall flat on his face.”
His fans, of course, want desperately for Tebow to succeed. His detractors want even more desperately for him to fail--so desperately, in fact, that even if he were to wind up winning a dozen Super Bowls, they would gloat that he had actually “failed” because he never managed to complete more than half of his passes, or whatever. He could become the winningest quarterback in NFL history, and STILL the detractors would be deriding him as “Saint Timmy.”
Which brings me to President Obama (believe it or not).
I’ve never seen so many people want so desperately for a president to “fail.”
And, as apparently is the case with Tim Tebow in an entirely different field, that desperation seems to stem less from Obama’s policies than it does from the fact that the president is black (“half,” the detractors remind us; “his mother is white, but he calls himself black, what’s up with that?” It would be the subject of a whole ‘nother post to respond to that one, although I have, in fact, responded to my dad on precisely that question).
Has any other president, or presidential candidate, been “forced” to produce his birth certificate?
Has any other president (aside from John Kennedy, who was Catholic) had to face inquisitions based on his religion?
Conservatives don’t like liberals, liberals don’t like conservatives, that is a given. But I have NEVER seen the level of utter hatred directed at a president as I have in the case of President Obama.
As with Tim Tebow, President Obama’s critics deride the equivalent of “arm motion” with the level of vitriol you might expect people to laser-direct at a confessed child-rapist. President Obama tries to work with the people “across the aisle,” and he is called “weak;” President Obama tries the other tack, “my way or the highway,” and he is called Nazi. Tim Tebow throws a pass and misses, he is called pathetic; Tebow runs it in from 20 yards out, people say he is “just not a pocket passer.”
What is heartening is that both Tebow and Obama seem to be riding their particular storms out with dignity, and even a bit of class.
I’m not a big football fan, I am not a Christian, and I am even less of a fan of politics--and particularly not of “partisan politics”--so maybe my perspective is skewed by the fact that, in my opinion, I don’t HAVE to have an opinion unless I so choose (and so research, etc.). From my more or less objective standpoint, though, many of the “haters” of Tebow and Obama nourish their hate ignorantly--that is, they won’t even admit the real reason they hate, even to themselves.
Interesting times, we live in.
None of this would be particularly interesting except that I’ve never seen a single player polarize so dramatically fans and experts and casual followers. Even people who never watch football games and don’t care one whit about the National Football League seem to have an opinion, seem passionately to want the guy to succeed--or fail--for reasons apparently having little to do with the game of football at all.
See, Tebow is an unabashed Christian. He doesn’t hide it, doesn’t downplay it, it’s just what he is, and he is comfortable enough, and sincere enough in his faith that he doesn’t apologize for it.
He is at once revered and reviled for that. The people who revere him call him “just a winner,” which, in fact, he seems to be (game last night bears, uh, witness to that); the people who revile him call him “Saint Timmy.”
I’ve never actually seen the guy play, and, in all honesty, am not enough of a football fan to be able to dissect and identify problems with his “throwing motion” or whatever. I sorta watched the Broncos-Jets game last night, or anyway the last six or so minutes of it--I say “sorta” because I don’t actually have TV; I was watching a Sports Illustrated graphic of it on my computer, which is a whole ‘nother story. When I tuned in after I got off work, the Jets had just punted, burying Denver back at their own 4- or 5-yard line. I looked at the stats real quick and saw that the Broncos had done virtually nothing on offense all evening, and at that point trailed 13-10.
Because of the Tebowmania thing, I found myself glued to the computer screen, watching the red line marking the line of scrimmage move inexorably from the right side of my monitor towards the left. It is admittedly weird watching a game that way, without seeing players or actual action or anything but a green cartoon football field with lines moving across it, yet it is fascinating at the same time, probably for the same reasons. When I was in high school and working every Sunday as a dishwasher at a local truck stop, I used to listen to Kansas City Chiefs games on the radio as I worked--watching the graphics last night was similar, but letting sight, rather than sound, trigger my imagination.
Anyway, that final drive of the Broncos just mesmerized me.
And, as I said earlier, I’m just a casual fan, but still read about the NFL. From what I’ve read about Tebow, his teammates believe in him. They will follow, however the season plays out for them as a team, because he is a leader.
His detractors, on the other hand, keep saying, “well, yeah, it has worked so far, but just wait--he’ll run into _____ or _____ or _____ and he’ll fall flat on his face.”
His fans, of course, want desperately for Tebow to succeed. His detractors want even more desperately for him to fail--so desperately, in fact, that even if he were to wind up winning a dozen Super Bowls, they would gloat that he had actually “failed” because he never managed to complete more than half of his passes, or whatever. He could become the winningest quarterback in NFL history, and STILL the detractors would be deriding him as “Saint Timmy.”
Which brings me to President Obama (believe it or not).
I’ve never seen so many people want so desperately for a president to “fail.”
And, as apparently is the case with Tim Tebow in an entirely different field, that desperation seems to stem less from Obama’s policies than it does from the fact that the president is black (“half,” the detractors remind us; “his mother is white, but he calls himself black, what’s up with that?” It would be the subject of a whole ‘nother post to respond to that one, although I have, in fact, responded to my dad on precisely that question).
Has any other president, or presidential candidate, been “forced” to produce his birth certificate?
Has any other president (aside from John Kennedy, who was Catholic) had to face inquisitions based on his religion?
Conservatives don’t like liberals, liberals don’t like conservatives, that is a given. But I have NEVER seen the level of utter hatred directed at a president as I have in the case of President Obama.
As with Tim Tebow, President Obama’s critics deride the equivalent of “arm motion” with the level of vitriol you might expect people to laser-direct at a confessed child-rapist. President Obama tries to work with the people “across the aisle,” and he is called “weak;” President Obama tries the other tack, “my way or the highway,” and he is called Nazi. Tim Tebow throws a pass and misses, he is called pathetic; Tebow runs it in from 20 yards out, people say he is “just not a pocket passer.”
What is heartening is that both Tebow and Obama seem to be riding their particular storms out with dignity, and even a bit of class.
I’m not a big football fan, I am not a Christian, and I am even less of a fan of politics--and particularly not of “partisan politics”--so maybe my perspective is skewed by the fact that, in my opinion, I don’t HAVE to have an opinion unless I so choose (and so research, etc.). From my more or less objective standpoint, though, many of the “haters” of Tebow and Obama nourish their hate ignorantly--that is, they won’t even admit the real reason they hate, even to themselves.
Interesting times, we live in.
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