Name-Caller-in-Chief

Trey Smith

I didn't watch or listen to Barack Obama's second inaugural address. I didn't expect to hear anything earth shattering -- just a bunch of tried-and-true political rhetoric. David Sirota, however, did listen and he noted on Tuesday that one of the things that Obama said is that the time for name-calling should come to an end. We have some serious issues that need to be addressed and calling other's names is not the way to initiate discussion.

It sure sounds good, but as Sirota points out, Obama has been just as guilty with name-calling as anyone else! While the Right lampoons Obama, the president takes aim at progressives.

It was, for instance, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who berated liberals as “fucking retarded" for daring to try to press congressional Democrats to back the health care promises Obama himself made.

It was Obama who deployed his official spokesman to tell reporters that liberals working to hold the president to his campaign promises “ought to be drug tested” because they are “crazy.”

It was Obama’s reelection campaign that sent out an email slamming Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman as a “political rookie” and hammering liberal health care activists as the “Firebagger Lefty blogosphere.”

It was a “Democrat close to Obama” who used an interview with Politico to castigate LGBT activists as “naive” for daring to push the president to support basic equality under the law.

It was an Obama adviser who denigrated liberals as the “internet left fringe” and who implored progressives “to take off their pajamas” just because they expected the president to actually advocate for the policies he promised to during his election campaign.

It was a “senior Obama adviser” who labeled those supporting a public health-care merely “the left of the left.”

It was an anonymous confidante of Obama’s national security adviser who slammed civil libertarians questioning the president’s extra-judicial drone war as “Cheeto-eating people in the basement working in their underwear.”

The list goes on and on – these are just a representative sample of a White House that often seems as eager to utilize obnoxious fact-free invective against progressives as the Angry Right-Wing Hate Machine. That invective may be a bit less harsh and offensive, but it is still exactly the kind of “name calling” the president deplored in his speech.

What makes this situation so bizarre is that Obama picks on the very people that the Right charges is his base! For example, in the eyes of ultra conservatives, Obama is a raving socialist and yet Obama is scathing TOWARD actual socialists. Other right-wing demagogs charge that Obama is the epitome of "black politics," while the president himself continually besmirches black progressives.

It will be interesting to see if Team Obama is true to this idea to stop name-calling. If we use his first term as a guide, it most likely won't come to fruition.