Read no further, if you believe the Obama administration is beginning to arrest people for using incandescent bulbs. Read no further, if you believe Obama raised taxes when, in fact, he lowered income taxes on 95% of tax payers (probably you), and that middle-class median income taxes are now the lowest since 1955. Read no further, if you believe Obama is a socialist (67% of Republicans), or wants to take away Americans' right to own guns (61% of Republicans), or is a Muslim (57% of Republicans), or was not born in the US (45% of Republicans). Read no further, if you believe, like Rush (8/26/2009), that Obama, "with dangerous intentions," "wants to create a crisis," so that "the Obama army," "given marching orders," can "seize power overnight."
Read no further, if you are unwittingly part of a new McCarthyism, in which inflammatory language and tactics are used to stir fears that the nation is being destroyed from within. The language? How about Mike Huckabee on the Obama budget: "Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff." How about Sen. Inhofe on Obama's speech in Egypt: "I just don't know which side he's on." How about Beck: Obama hates white people. The McCarthyite attacks are legion. If you do not think so, then do not read on.
If you do not understand that history is important, then you will discount the fact that the Obama budget has taken place in the middle of a recession, coming after the biggest downturn since the Great Depression, and was seen as absolutely necessary by nearly all economists in order to pull the economy out of a financial meltdown in which the global economy was spiraling, plunging, downward into a catatonic state of no lending, no spending, and no production--toward a depression--in which 700,000 jobs were lost just in the month Obama was inaugurated. If you are so amnesiac to recent history, or do not understand that the financial meltdown required drastic and rapid measures, by both the Bush and Obama administrations to turn around the all-important global confidence in the workings of the US economy, then you do not understand the extreme situation the US and global economy were in. And, you have probably forgotten the economy grew at 3.5% in the last quarter of 2009. A depression was avoided. But, you are fuming because you believe Obama resents America's heritage (47% of Republicans)?
Does it mean anything to you that Obama moved at once to categorically renounce torture, a big stain that Bush-Cheney left on our national honor? Or, that the administration is on schedule to withdraw troops from Iraq? Or, that truly landmark health-care legislation was passed, a hundred-year quest, with provisions that will ensure health insurance to nearly everyone while, according to the CBO, not adding to budget deficits?
If you have historical amnesia and, further, do not understand the critical impact of the Bush tax cuts while the economy was weak which left the present administration with $2 trillion in lost revenue; and the two Bush-Cheney wars of choice that will cost a few trillion dollars--then, I'd say you are feeling comfortable lounging in the easy chair of Foxanoia watching the buffoon Beck draw his guilt-by-association charts of supposed communist connections of White House officials. Yes, forget recent history, and revel in the smears of the McCarthy clones.
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