Bullshit hater

I find myself regularly defending President Barack Obama against Republicans and other conservatives. So it comes as no surprise that I’m sometimes accused of being an Obama-lover. I’m told that I drink the Kool-Aid served up by the “liberal media.”

As much as I find myself defending President Obama, what is surprising is that I’ve actually criticized him about many serious issues over the years:

• I’ve been critical of the Affordable Care Act—better known as Obamacare—since it became law because I see it as a government handout to health insurance companies.
• I opposed Obama’s approach to recovering the housing market when he presented his homeowner affordability and stability plan shortly after taking office.
• I consider the fact that the detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba is still in operation to be a failed promise by Obama to close it down as soon as he became president.
• I believe Obama continues to violate Americans’ right to privacy by authorizing the NSA to gather information about our communiques en masse as they are transmitted over public communications networks.
• I strongly oppose the assassinations by drone strikes of people, including American citizens, in countries that are not at war against the USA without allowing the person assassinated due process.

The list could go on but that’s not the point of this article. I think there are plenty of legitimate criticisms that can be levied against President Obama and there is also no lack of grounds and reasoning to defend those criticisms. That’s why it disturbs me to see the endless string of criticisms of Obama coming from the Right that have no validity whatsoever.

A recent example was the speech President Obama gave after the mass shooting at Umpqua College last week. Conservatives quickly denounced the president for opportunistically politicizing the incident to press a gun control agenda. I think a reasonable case can be made that the incident should not be used by the president to advance his agenda. But in almost the same breath, conservatives deride the president for not calling for religious tolerance, as he would have if the shooter had been a Muslim, and instead demands gun control—never mind that he publicly stated no one in the USA should ever be targeted by a shooter because of how they worship. But conservatives can’t have both. If the president uses the incident to call for religious tolerance, he’s politicizing it.

The completely groundless criticism we probably hear most frequently from the Right is that the economy is worse off now than it was when President Obama took office. Do these people not remember that the USA’s economy was teetering on the brink of a total collapse at the end of 2008? The American economy lost 2.6-million jobs that year but has gained almost 8-million of them in the intervening years. The unemployment rate was 7.6% then but is now 5.1%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was around 7,000 when Obama took office but now it’s almost 17,000 and the S&P 500 has increased 157% since then. The Consumer Confidence Index was around 25 when Obama took office and is now over 100. Of course, the most telling statistic is GDP because it’s the basic indicator of a recession. It was contracting before Obama took office and has grown every year since then. By almost every major metric used for the health of the economy, it is in far better shape than it was when George W. Bush handed it off to Obama.

Although it has nothing to do with issues that impact everyday American lives, conservatives often deride President Obama for using the pronouns “I” and “me” excessively in his speeches. The implication is that Obama is narcissistic and self-serving in the presidency. But an objective count paints a very different picture. Just 2.5% of the total words Obama has used in news conferences were first-person singular pronouns—only Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt used them less often since 1929.

Although it’s an older example, conservatives also criticized President Obama for withdrawing from Iraq prematurely. They should have been pointing the finger at George W. Bush instead. It was the Bush administration that established the agreement with Iraq to complete a full withdrawal by the end of 2011 before Obama was elected president.

There will probably be criticisms of President Obama’s patriotism, faith, and birthright citizenship ‘til the day he leaves the Oval Office. Republicans have outright accused him of not loving America and intentionally harming the country. To this day, 43% of Republicans still believe Obama is Muslim. Of course, only Obama himself knows the truth on his patriotism and faith but publicly he has always proclaimed his love for his country and professes to be Christian. He has also released his long-form birth certificate showing he was born in Hawaii (PDF).

The list of invalid or outright false criticisms of President Obama could also go on. They are everywhere in the media and when I see groundless attacks in social media, I find it difficult to resist defending Obama against them. But it’s not because I’m an Obama-lover—it’s because I’m a bullshit hater. Make a legitimate criticism of Barack Obama and I’ll join you in the criticism.