The Naked Truth

I remember when the verbal brickbats started being thrown at President Obama - very shortly after his Inauguration in 2009. Surprisingly, the first shots didn't come from the Right, as so many people reckoned they would, but from the Left. The Huffington Post, fronted by a woman who is the biggest moral fraud of modern times, someone who - along with Rupert Murdoch - has ruined the face of modern journalism and media journalism, at least in the United States.

When people speak of deporting undesireable immigrants, start at the top and trickle down with Rupert Murdoch and Arianna Huffington, each of whom came to these shores from their native countries by way of Britain and each of whom are reviled in that country.

Says a lot for us that we still take the shit Britain dishes.

I suppose as the Left criticized the President, that gave leeway to the Right to criticize him even more. It wasn't hard to see what, exactly, was behind the Tea Party's motivation - good old-fashioned racism: Sometimes covert and cleverly disguised under accusations of socialism, foreign and unAmerican; sometimes more overt, with pictures of the White House lawn being turned into a watermelon patch or ugly jibes likening the First Lady to a gorilla.

But the racism of the Left (and it was there) took the shape of patronising comments - sighs about how "weak" the President was, how he needed "backbone" or how his feet had to be "held to the fire." Far too many so-called Progressive pundits fell into "white massa" mode - from Cenk Uygur and Keith Olbermann's lengthy essays "telling the President what he should do" to Rachel Maddow's white privileged pretend Oval Office address as President Obama to Michael Moore's and Bill Maher's despicable remark about thinking they voted for the black man and having the white man show up.

Then came the piece de resistance in 2010, when talk show host Ed Schultz got the hump with Robert Gibbs's call-out of the Professional Left's whingeing and whining and urged Progressives not to vote in the mid-terms. That worked out so well, didn't it? And then came Chris Matthews's celebrated interview with Alex Witt last year where he accused the Obamas of not being grateful enough for the privilege of living in the White House.

Now, in the final two weeks of a messy election campaign, the Professional Left stepped in, panicking, right after the first debate, and showed that their shallowness was just as overwhelming as that of most average Americans: they chose style over content in that debate, when Mitt Romney bellow-weathered and bullied his way through the evening saying nothing and drowning out the President's factual response. The Queen Mother of kitchen sink Progressives, sad-eyed Joan Walsh, who infamously and inadvertantly admitted last year that she resented black people assuming they were part of the President's base, moved in for the Clintonista kill.

The media made this election. They surmised early on that Romney, like John McCain before him, enjoyed tepid Republican support. Even the choice of Eddie Munster Paul Ryan, the Ayn Randian darling of the Right, who's sucked the government's tit since adolescence but doesn't want anyone else to do so, didn't bolster Mitt's popularity with the tribe. But the media wanted a compelling, neck-and-neck race to offset the historic triumph last time of the nation's first African American President.

So, thanks to the media's consistent overkill of points taken out of context and deliberate misinformation, we have a race to close to call - and because of this, race is entering into the race.

From John Sununu's deplorable summation of Colin Powell's support of the President being based on the colour of both men's skin to Sarah Palin's horrifying "shuck and jive" remarks, more and more race and racism is being openly brought into the campaign dynamic by the Republican party as a scare tactic aimed at low information white working class voters. Fear of the other. Fear of the black man, or any minority, taking over.

For people being fooled by Mitt's so-called moderation, please note that it wasn't until 1978, that the Mormon church even allowed African Americans to venture inside their churches. Until then, the Mormon belief was that black people were descendents of Cain (as in "Cain who killed Abel"). Cain was marked by God for having killed his brother, and the Mormon belief is that that mark was black skin. So, black people were marked as substandard and sinister from the getgo in the Mormon church.

It's not just about race either that the Mormons (and Mitt Romney's core beliefs) bear scrutinising. The Mormons led the clarion call in the 1970s against the Equal Rights Amendment. They are against serious further education for women and abhor any woman who achieves this and operates proficiently in a male-dominated world. Women are for big love and big families. Now think again about Mitt's flip-flopping on abortion and women's health and Miss Ann's speech addressing all the Stepford Wives.

This is what I've always said was at the core of everything that's been stacked against this President for the past four years - by Right and by Left: the simple matter of race and racism.

Isn't it time we all got over ourselves? Because the thought of Mitt's mob taking the White House and Capitol Hill is fucking scary, people.