Another day, another bias

Another day, another misguided and fallacious comment on the political scene, in this case a parting shot at President Obama and all "liberals" in general; and by the way. I'm really, really tired of the word "liberal" being used almost as a curse word by persons who truly don't understand the concept, but  judge all progressives by their own twisted, imaginary standards based on what they (the Far Right) assume all progressives believe. Accordingly I shall, in this essay, address some of those misconceptions, even though I've done so before.

        One friend's favorite saying is that they oppose the current administration because "They want to give away things to people who don't deserve them."  In the case of this individual that position is transparently based on race. The individual stated in 2008 that they could "never vote for Obama," which in the context of the conversation actually meant "never vote for a person of color."   There are several observations needed here. First, the race issue is key to this individual, since they also obviously believe the majority of welfare recipients are Black  (they're not) and even more indicative of personal bias, since the president is Black, obviously he would unfairly favor  Black Americans. This is, in fact an indicator of the racial bias and favoritism of the critic and, by projection,  its assumption that the President would exhibit the same social pathology. In fact, absolutely the only change to the 1996 (Republican majority in both Houses) Welfare Reform Act during the last 8 years has been to allow states more flexibility. It was done at the request of five states, three of them with Republican governors at the time.

        Another friend, in a semi-rant some time ago, used the term "Obama Phones."  He simply refused to believe me when I pointed out that the program giving low cost cell phones to low income individuals was incepted by FDR, and signed into law by ...wait for it....Ronald Reagan! The first actual free phone was distributed by the Bush administration, whose economic collapse, by the way, made many more Americans eligible for one. President Barack Obama has had absolutely nothing to do with this program , except, of course, get "blamed" for it by morons of the Right.

        In conversation on the golf course, the subject of  the Zika virus outbreak in Florida came up, as well as discussion of  the potential for tourism to take a hit. I opined that we (Congress) should already have allocated funds to the CDC to accelerate  development of a vaccine but that the President's request for 2 billion was stalled when Congress decided that this would be a good time to defund Planned Parenthood in the same bill. In a truly weird twist of facts, this was batted back to me as being the President's fault. I got nuthin' here, it just staggers the mind.