Fake News and Bigotry

                                

       I’ve had a couple of interesting exchanges via e-mail over the last several days with a dear friend who happens to have somewhat different political beliefs than I. It started with him forwarding to me a spam chain e-mail which has been around for over five years. Purporting to be from a “union retiree” it is a list of the same old discredited claims re: the Obamas. It ranges from the “birther” controversy to the “fake” Social Security number thingy to the Law license “suspended,” to you name it. It even carps because the Obama girls’ birth certificates aren’t available for public scrutiny and that “no one remembers Barack from Columbia.” Maybe my (un) favorite is the whining complaint re: “Why can’t I find and read his ‘thesis’ from Columbia.” This begs the issue that a no liberal arts (Political Science) Baccalaureate degree is a “thesis” issue in the first place and apparently what is being referenced is a paper written for a political science seminar. I wrote many of these, I have retained none. So, sue me.

        Every single one of these false allegations has been discredited multiple times. The “thesis” thing floors me because no one has ever asked for any such document from any other president that I am aware. Moreover, who the hell cares anyway, since the man is out of office?  Why the continual efforts to cast aspersions on this particular former president? My personal theory is that it is a concerted effort to take attention from the pathetic tantrum prone man-child currently in the White House. Having dispensed factually with all the fake news “charges,” one has to ask “so why the continuing disaffection? Can it be the Obama attempts to make sure more Americans have health care, even if it was flawed by a recalcitrant Congress? There is no other single legislative talking point ever mentioned in these attacks, save the occasional anti-Muslim rhetoric.     

        There is a logical reasoning tool which can be applied here. “Occam’s Razor” refers to its originator, William of Ockham, an English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, and theologian. It is a thought tool for arriving at logical conclusions when presented with multiple data sets. It  is usually stated thus (paraphrased in the modern by Swinburn): ... “The simplest hypothesis proposed as an explanation of phenomena is more likely to be the true one than is any other available hypothesis, that its predictions are more likely to be true than those of any other available hypothesis, and that it is an ultimate a priori epistemic principle that simplicity is evidence for truth.”  

        I know – “huh?”  Let’s apply Occam here: when all allegations of impropriety/ obfuscation/ and poor behavior related in any way to the Obamas, their children and their dog have been dispensed with as simply slanderous maligning, all that’s left is the matter of race. Period.

         My friend, yes, he is and will always be my friend, because civil persons can disagree and remain friends, stated after about three e-mail exchanges, “I wish you’d forget that he’s Black.” I actually laughed out loud at that, because the response which immediately came to mind was two-fold. The first was “You wish I would, because you can’t.” The second was like unto it, “Reminding you that racism drives your anti-Obama sentiment makes you uncomfortable.” In my friend’s case, it probably does because he is, at heart, a truly decent person and a product of environment and experience.

        When I analyze the attitudes of the anti-Obama faction, I simply cannot grasp any other factor which accounts for the maltreatment visited upon this American family in the absence of race as the factor. The Bush girls were law breakers, ditching their Secret Service details to go drinking illegally on fake IDs, and brother Neil was a financial disaster, whose daddy (H.W.) engineered a massive bailout of his failed S & L. As a younger woman, in 1963, Laura Bush killed a young man in an auto accident where she was at fault. Ever hear of it? Texas officials attempted for years to keep it under wraps.  Didn’t think so.

        Nixon was a spouse abusing, race baiting (the “Southern Strategy)” drunken (read Kissinger’s book re: “too drunk to take a call from Margaret Thatcher”) anti-Semite (the “tapes” prove it) and obstructer of Justice. He still was not a recipient of the level of personal animosity and certainly not the absolute lies hurled at the Obamas. Billy Carter was just a joke. Imagine if an Obama had acted in similar manner. Even the hated (by the right who couldn’t stand his success) Bill Clinton took less flak for his transgressions than the unblemished Obamas.

        So, when all else is irrelevant, what’s left? Too much golf? Trump is well on the way to eclipsing Obama’s golfing frequency, and at greater cost. Still, ask most Obama haters, and they’ll bring up golf. In truth, Wilson and Eisenhower both played more golf than Obama and this was during five years of WW I in Wilson’s case. I am not criticizing either man, but of course, they are Caucasian, so no one else is either.

       How about that damned bailout of the banks “too big to fail?” Ask the man who coined the phrase and signed the TARP legislation, the cost of which, estimated at $63 Billion, actually came in at around $35 billion. That man lives in Texas now, of course, having left the details (and the bill) to the Obama Administration.

       OK, then it must be all those Executive Orders, huh?  Overall, Obama ranks 16th among presidents in total number of executive orders issued and 21st in the average number issued per year, and as a yearly average, behind Trump, Reagan, “W” Bush, Eisenhower and Nixon. While one may disagree regarding the subjects, the frequency is below that of any President since Herbert Hoover.

        So, is it the Immigration issue? The “Muslim” issue? If so, those are also symptoms of the racist bias alluded to earlier. One can’t have it any other way.

        In general, in 75 years of life on this planet, the biggest advantage I have had (other than my wife and children) is that I was raised in a household where I was taught, by example, to take each individual as simply that. The fallacy of classifying by the group (prejudice, bias) is stated so well in the movie “Gettysburg,” by Sgt. “Buster” Kilrain, that I’ll simply close with it.  “Well, if you mean the race, I don't really know. This is not a thing to be ashamed of. The thing is, you cannot judge a race. Any man who judges by the group is a pea-wit. You take men one at a time.”   So it should be.