Insight

I just read a good explanation of why this guy I know thinks Obama hates America and is deliberately trying to destroy it -- he's a Republican:

President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican from the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a health-care plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal coverage; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans staked out in the early ’90s — and often, well into the 2000s.

Well, that, and the fact that it's what I've been saying about his moderation ever since Obama came onto the scene. This guy I know wouldn't take my word if I told him Easter comes on a Sunday.

But they are serious points: both the article and my essay about the crazy. There are many things Obama has done and not done about which there are justified disagreements, from the left and from the right. But there's nothing -- NOTHING!! -- that justifies the paranoid and insane hatred of the man. The swallowing whole of the laughable internet rumors, the taking of Foxobeckian RWS™ lies as hallowed truths. Not based on his presidency, anyway.

Of course, there IS an explanation for that stuff, too...