The Crack-Up Continued

A CNN poll has 79% of Americans believing Obama did well on his first overseas trip and that he improved our image abroad. The President holds a 65% approval rating this week. He managed some significant policy achievements at the G20 Summit in London and also laid out his Afghanistan policy before the NATO countries with some hesitancy shown by the European countries. A meeting with his Russian counterpart produced a willingness to negotiate a new arms reduction treaty and his Prague speech laid out a vision to eliminate nuclear weapons. He concluded the trip with an appeal to Turkey, who at least privately has expressed relief that the American Administration has changed. The one negative of the week was the launch by North Korea of a missile that could carry nuclear weapons.

But these events seemed not to have touched parts of our political system. One can argument about the President's tone, the fruitfulness of his meetings and even the rhetoric he used in his major speeches. But that's not what we heard.

Instead, Michell Bachman warned her constituents to be armed and ready for revolt. Yesterday,she warned that President Obama intended to turn the expanded AmeriCore program into re-education camps.

New Gingrich with an eye to the 2012 Republican presidential nomination echoed former Vice President Dick Cheney by saying that President Obama made us less safe as a nation. Newt promised he would have intercepted the North Korea missile. What would have happened if the U.S. missed? Then Newt warned us about electronic pulse weapons being developed. How many threats, Newt, are we supposed to be afraid of at the same time?

Rudy Guiliani, America's Mayor, blasted President Obama for not speaking about Islamic terrorism in his talks abroad. And it was the diplomatic language President Obama used toward the Muslim world that seemed to set the Republicans off. Frank Gaffney speaking on a major television station, not Fox, claimed that the way President Obama spoke to the Muslims was a coded language saying that he, Obama, would introduce Sharia law.

Sharia law got alot of bang for its buck this week. President Obama's nominee for the lawyer to the State Department, the scholarly Dean of Yale Law School Harold Koh, was attacked in the New York Post, Fox News,the National Review, for advocating Sharia Law. Consequently, Republican Senators have placed a hold on his nominee despite Ted Olsen's defense of Koh's integrity and scholarship in the days Koh served in the Reagan Administration.

But Republicans also put a hold on Dawn Johnsen's nominee as chief of the Office of legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. Johnsen has actually held the post before during the Clinton Administration. Her crime was publishing articles depicting her negative opinion of the torture memos by Johnny Yoo.

Both Koh and Johnsen's nominations are held up by the Republicans to coerce the Obama Administration from releasing the second tranche of torture memos as promised. Previews of these memos indicate they are darker than the first, which were alarming enough in that they claimed the President had the power to suspend several articles of the Bill of Rights and to allow the U.S. military to conduct search and seizures in American homes without warrants.

A man convinced that President Obama would seize all Americans' guns, an idea promoted by the NRA, the rightwing websites and some talk show personalities shot and killed four policemen in Pittsburgh. The man had been a blogger on racist and neo-Nazi websites and claimed all the media and financial institutions were run by a zionist conspiracy. Glenn Beck, the Fox television personality most vocally identified with warning the public about the Obama gun seizure policy denied culpabilityfor the man's attacks on the policemen, saying he only provided information on the worst case scenerios, while the man himself was a nut. he went on to say that there would be unrest in the country because people were fed up.

Beck's companion on Fox, Sean Hannity, selectively edited President Obama's speech to Europeans where Obama mentioned America's occasional haughtiness in foreign affairs without showing Obama's criticism of "insidious anti-Americanism". The Newt popped up again to claim that Obama's foreign policy was like Carter's fantasy world.

This type of rhetoric has escalated several fold since the fall rallies of the McCain-Palin campaign. Is this a diversionary tactic so we don't recognize that the Obama budget swam through both the House and the Senate? Is this nuttiness meant for us to forget that the Republican counter-budget released on April 1 was a joke and was perceived as a joke by everyone inside the Beltway? Or are these people purposely trying to stir up hatred of the President in order to provoke an attack on him? It certainly is not the language of dialogue or constructive opposition. It feeds the dark paranoid bottom-feeders in our political culture.

On a more fun note, the "birthers" held a conference here in Washington to probe the "profound" mystery of the President's birth. To protest the state of Hawaii's less than cooperative attitude to the birthers requests for information, the crowd has called for a worldwide boycott of Hawaii as a tourist destination.

But even more fun is the whole Palin family. Todd's sister got nailed for breaking and entering in a house. Levi, Bristol's former fiancee, went on television to talk about having sex with her in Sarah's house and asserting that Sarah had to know. This provoked the now predictable attacks from Governor Sarah that Levi lied. The Queen of the North will soon get even with a book rumored to be searching fro a seven-fgure advance--certainly a reasonable sum in a time of a deep recession. Sarah again provided much needed entertainment by slamming the McCain campaign for not having anyone around with whom she could pray.

And finally as we head toward Easter, some evangelicals are challenging the whole premise of the religious right saying that they would be more persuasive if they simply acted as Christians and stayed out of politics. Amen, Brother.