The Right and the Disrespecting of the U.S. Presidency – An Open Letter to the Tea Party

December 9, 2013 at 4:59 pm (Daily Headaches and Rage Inducers, Politics, Religion and other silliness) (Americans, Barack Obama, Georege Bush, George W. Bush, Michelle Bachmann, Obama, Obamacare, President Barack Obama, President Bush, President Obama and the Tea Party, President of the United States, racism, Senator Rand Paul, Senator Ted Cruz, Tea Partiers, Tea Party, Tea Party Patriots and racism, United States, White House)

Dear Tea Party,

We get it, Tea Party; you don’t like having a black President.  In light of the recent government shutdown, it’s become painfully clear that the very idea of having someone in the White House whose tan is deeper than John Boehner’s is wildly offensive and unsettling to you folks.  And while it is your fundamental right to be on the wrong side of history, you self-proclaimed patriots have spent more than five years disrespecting both the office of the President of the United States, as well as that fun little part of our Declaration of Independence which states “all Men are created equal”.

You Tea Partiers repeatedly talk about battling the tyranny of President Obama and the unconstitutional power he wields like “a vicious African warlord” – very classy – and yet it was the previous President (George W. Bush, for those who’d effectively erased his name from their memory banks) and his administration who set up wiretapping without consent from the FISA courts, sat idly by while “Wall Street got drunk,” and sent well over 4,000 Americans to their untimely deaths in Iraq based on evidence about WMDs that a decade later remains about as “real” and “legit” as President Obama’s Kenyan birthplace.

Recently, one of the darlings of your T.P. movement – Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Canada) – had his father give a speech on his behalf.  And one aspect of Pastor Rafael Cruz’s speech was how he would like to, “send him back to Kenya.”  In case you were wondering, the “him” is President Obama.  In case you were also wondering, yes, what “Pastor” Cruz said was racist.

Now again – this time with feeling – you T.P. peeps have the right to dislike any politician, and you also have a right to vocalize that disdain, including and about President Barack Obama.  But if you’re truly about facts, integrity, and love of country, then you need to stop with all the transparent lies and hypocrisies.  Let’s look at the facts of the relationship between the Tea Party and President Obama and see just how from the very beginning this anger and disrespect was never about Obama’s policies, but rather about his appearance, a.k.a. His Blackness.

According to your own official website (teaparty.org) – on the “About Us” page – you TPers have been around for at least a decade, with the website up and running since early September, 2004.  On this same page you also list your 15 Non-negotiable Core Beliefs; guiding principles that you believe make you better Americans and staunch supporters of both freedom and our beloved Constitution.  Here are six of those Non-negotiable Core Principles listed in order as they appear on your site: #2. Pro-domestic employment is indispensable. #4. Special interests must be eliminated.  #6. Government must be downsized.  #7. The national budget must be balanced.  #8. Deficit spending must end.  #9. Bailout and stimulus plans are illegal.

If the Tea Party movement really feels these principles are that important, and if you guys have been around for at least the past ten years, then why didn’t you rear your enraged heads during the Bush Administration?  Why did you only begin to make yourselves known across America in early 2009, less than one month after Barack Obama swore an oath to this nation as its 44^th President?

During the Bush Administration, corporations shipped millions of jobs overseas to places like China and India, which goes against Number 2 on your non-negotiable list.  Special interests ran rampant throughout all eight years of Bush and Cheney’s reign, hijacking both our political leaders and our banking and investing systems.  Even now, your favorite son Senator Ted Cruz (R-Calgary) has his health plan through Goldman Sachs, which was the beneficiary of a massive bailout in September, 2008, courtesy of Bush and his then-Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson.  These hard facts go against Numbers 4 and 9 on your list.  The Bush Administration also increased the size of our government by a near-insane amount – can you say Department of Homeland Security – and added to our national debt by trillions (while simultaneously keeping the cost of the Iraq war off the budget books), which goes directly against Tea Party Core Principles, 6, 7, and 8.  All of these facts are known to the American people.  Now, the good news is most Americans are bright enough to know when they’re being fed a big pile of manure, yet here you guys are, feigning to the heavens how President Obama is to blame for all of the above issues, as though prior to January 20, 2009, our nation didn’t have a care in the world, other than fighting the “terrarists”.  And let’s not forget the cost of human life the Bush Administration is responsible for when it demanded action in Iraq for non-existent WMDs, which led to more than 4,400 Americans dying and tens-of-thousands more of our soldiers coming home emotionally scarred, physically injured, or both – though apparently those last two figures pale in comparison to the murder of four Americans in Libya during President Obama’s watch (based on your unending Benghazi “outrage” for the cameras over at Fox *News Channel).

Major Tea party protests began within weeks of President Obama’s first term.  In February, 2009, you guys held a protest decrying the TARP bailout bill and blamed Obama for its implementation, even though President Bush signed it into law the previous year.  TPers also held a very public commemoration / protest on September 12^th, 2009 in honor of the 9/11 attacks eight years earlier, many with signs questioning how a Muslim President (the guy from Kenya) could ever be elected in the wake of such horrific events.  Nevermind that the Tea Party never held a single large-scale protest of the previous administration’s security failures or their failure to capture bin Laden.  I guess you were too busy on September 11^th and 12^th, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008.

So what happened that made the TPers finally come out?  Why stay quiet for several years, only to make yourselves known in the days following Barack Obama’s moving into the White House?  And how could you be so upset with President Obama’s policies after less than three months in office?  That simply isn’t enough time to know whether policies will be successes or failures, yet you folks immediately, and irrationally, deemed him with the latter, as though it were already written in stone.

Now maybe you’re still not convinced of your own racially-based stance against our current President; maybe you still need a bright white light shone on what has become so painfully obvious to the majority of Americans.  Let’s remind you of what some of your other high-profile Tea Party leaders have said about the American President.  Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Crazytown) has publically labeled Obama’s energy policy, “a tar baby,” as well as described the President himself as, “The Ghetto Gangsta”.  Glenn Beck, when not crying or drawing on his chalkboard, has called President Obama, “a racist,” and “a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”  Beck uttered this poisonous dreck on Fox *News Channel.  Funnily enough, Rupert Murdoch, the man who owns Fox *News, is also a major financial contributor to the Tea Party and has provided major players within the party countless opportunities to come on his network to take verbal swipes at President Obama.  Now, I would like to believe all these connected dots are little more than coincidence, and that there isn’t an actual coordinated, racially-based effort to embarrass the current President day-in-and-day-out.  But since, like millions of freethinking Americans, I’m not an idiot, I have no choice but to see you TPers for what you’ve repeatedly proven to be: politically aligned racists who would rather shut down the federal government during the first black President’s time in office than make any mature or rational effort to actually repair damaged and failing aspects of said government.  For a movement that proclaims to love our Democratic process so much, you sure cannot respect the fact that Barack Obama was elected twice to office by the American people; both times in near-landslide victories.  Wouldn’t you be taken more seriously if you instead put efforts into electing adults to Congress who then honored our Founding Fathers by working hard to change policy and create new laws for our land, rather than sharing e-mails that depict the White House lawn as a watermelon patch?  Doesn’t it make more sense to figure out ways to serve the American people with dignity and honor, rather than behave with petulance and bitterly trash our freely-elected President with protest signs that read everything from “Obama-nomics: Monkey See, Monkey Spend,” to “Obama’s Plan = White Slavery”?

Years from now it is a given that history will remind us that President Obama was the nation’s first African-American President, and perhaps it will even claim that he was an average President who had some successes and some failures.  We’ll have to wait and see.  But based on your own words and actions, TPers, there is little doubt history will be far less kind to you and to the ugly truth that motivated you to spend far too much time and effort disrespecting the President and the office which he so legitimately represents.

Irritated and onto you,

.

Eric Frost-Barnes