We saw what was to come a year ago when Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. sworn in President Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.
What should have been a smooth and seamless ceremony wasn't. Chief Justice Roberts got the words wrong. The new President had to go through the swearing-in later--one more time--in the Inaugural day to make sure everything was all right.
That omen to the chief from the chief would be replayed and replayed and replayed with different verses, but the same tune throughout Obama's first 365 days in office. While I seriously doubt that the swearing-in trip-up by Roberts, an activist conservative Supreme Court appointee, was designed to be an obstructionist gesture, it symbolizes what the activist, conservative Republican Party and its media movers and shakers had in store for Obama.
Since the double-dose Inaugural, day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out, our nation and its chief executive have been bludgeoned by one Republican road block to the next in a right-wing plot to assure that Obama's promise for change goes nowhere fast.
Right off there was the Birthers. According to them, Obama was not born in the United States therefore wasn't a legal citizen therefore was ineligible to be president. A little more than six months into office, the first African American president was still in early attempts to get the health reform legislation he promised through Congress when GOP Sen. Jim DeMint declared if Republicans and conservatives stop Obama on health care reform, it would “break him” and be Obama’s “Waterloo.”
After DeMint's declarations, the Birthers were joined by the Deathers--those that claimed that the Healthcare Reform Bill was designed to let senior citizens die--and the tea-baggers who were mad as hell as not going to take it any more because Obama was a foreign-born, socialist who was out to kill the unborn, old folks and truth, justice and the American way.
All along, the Republicans voted no while providing no variable alternative to all they were rejecting. As we come to the end of Obama's first year, the Republicans have helped to assure that 177 of the White House's nominees have not been appointed--that's 107 more than the 70 Bush nominees that were still waiting after his first year in office and one heck of a way to make sure that Obama can't do a good job.
So when Massachusetts' Brownie became the first Republican to win a U.S. Senate seat since Edward Brooke retired in 1979, on cue the conservatives to healthcare. Following suit, many of the MSM reports failed to point out months before Scott Brown beat Democrat Martha Coakley that the majority of Americans were in favor of healthcare reform until the right-wingers nay-sayed it to its deathbed. Nor did enough MSM reports explain that Massachusetts already has a healthcare reform law in place so the voters in that state were either fearful that a national reform law may cost them more or were pretty much into a "I got mine, I could care less about yours" state of mind.
As if we didn't know, the main history we've learned in the past year is that negative works; that it's easier to tear down than to build up and that nice guys get to experience firsthand that old saw about if at first you don't succeed, then try, try, try again.
This column has been cross-posted on the Newsvine and the African American Opinion.com websites.
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