Posts tagged president barack obama

George [W] Bush was the first Cable TV President we had. And what I mean by that is that he was the first President that was only President to the people that voted for him. He did not give a fuck about the people that didn’t vote for him. And Obama is actually trying to be President to the whole country. And you know, there’s a lot of compromise to being President to the whole country….in a weird way our complaints about Obama are because we miss Bush…We miss the guy that didn’t give a fuck about these other..[unintelligible] Bush didn’t give a fuck about us, he just really really didn’t. And we kinda want our own—We want revenge we don’t want justice. That’s the problem with the democrats, we want revenge [laughs]

And that is what the attack on Van Jones is about: exploiting white fears and anxieties. Anxieties about a black President, anxieties about a basket-case economy (which they’re trying to blame on the black President even though it was well in the crapper before he came along), anxieties about a changing demographic balance in the nation (which animates their fear and anger over immigration), anxieties about a popular culture whose icons look less and less like them as the years go by. And so they play up the militant black guy image, turning a low-level bureaucrat into a “Green Jobs Czar,” (the latter of which term they have sought to spin into a communist thing, despite the fact that the Russian Czars were actually the royalist pigs who were thrown out by the Russian left, a small historical detail which doesn’t matter to illiterate people of course), and making him the bad guy who’s running the Obama administration from behind the scenes. No, it’s not only about race. But if you think it’s merely a coincidence that the right has sought to make Jones such an issue—rather than some of the other administration officials they are now threatening to “expose” (two of whom are white)—then you haven’t been paying attention to Republican and conservative politics for the past forty years. This is what they do. It’s the only language they speak, at least fluently.