GOP's "Hate Machine" Won't End With Obama Presidency

The following post was written by my friend and fellow blogger, Frank Moraes at Frankly Curious. I think he's absolutely right.

Shakezula is a very smart guy, but I think he was wrong yesterday, Yesterday Was All We Had. He noted that there will be a lot of very sad people when Obama leaves the White House, but the saddest of all will be "the people who profit from Barack Obama Hate Machine, Inc." He is right to some extent. Just in the most general sense, Fox New and other conservative hate organizations do best when the Democrats are in charge. When the Republicans are in charge, the Hate Machine is asleep. Everything is just fine because "our guy" is in charge and they only start to complain at the end when even the truest of the true believers can't deny how bad things have gotten.

But Shakezula said this, "Assuming the next president isn't named Trump or Cruz, neither a President H Clinton or B Sanders would generate a tenth of the visceral reaction and hence the money and the power that's come from using President Barack Hussein Obama to frighten to terminally resentful white people into falling in line and forking over the cash and/or votes." I don't think that's true. I accept that there is something special about Obama because he is a black man and these kinds of people are terrified of black men.

But Obama has done an amazingly good job of not being a black man. This is part of how he became president. The main thing that the conservative base hates about Obama is that he's a Democrat. Someone I have to work very closely with is a hate radio addict and, as a result, a bigot. She is certain that Obama is intent on starting a race war. Now that may sound like it goes along with Shakezula's contention, but I heard the exact same thing about Bill Clinton when he was in office. The big conservative complaint against the Democrats is not that they are black but that they are on the side of the black man against the white man.

Really: in the 1990s, I was a libertarian. And I was amazed at the things that people would say about Clinton. I said about him more or less what I say about Obama today: he's the best president we can reasonably expect. Yet the conservative vitriol against both men was almost identical. They were both socialists who were determined to use racial tensions to start the revolution. It was the Obama Hate Machine before anyone knew who Obama was. It was nuts then and it is nuts now. I mean, why would the leader of the most powerful nation on earth want to start a revolution? Also stated was that even though nothing big happened during the first term, just you wait until the second! And then nothing happened and they just dropped it.

But you know who did wait until his second term to show his true colors? George W Bush. This was the man who originally ran on "compassionate conservatism" and then got all the evangelicals to vote for him because the gays were coming. And then once he won re-election, he told the nation that he was going to privatize Social Security. This is entirely typical. The Republican Party is all about projection: they see voter fraud everywhere because they commit voter fraud. They see conspiracies everywhere, because they commit conspiracies. And they think the Democrats are always lying because their entire economic and foreign policy positions are based on lies.

If Clinton or Sanders is the next president, the Obama Hate Machine will just change to the Clinton or Sanders Hate Machine. Nothing substantial will change. There will just be new bits of their personal biographies that will prove that they truly want to destroy the country. It will continue on. Sure, Obama being black helped in a certain way. But there is lots of good material coming from a woman or a socialist. In fact, if the next Democratic president happened to be a black man, it might make their work harder. You can only claim that the president wants to destroy America because he's black for so long. You have to come up with new narrative — new hokum to sell.

It's not the Obama Hate Machine; it's the Democratic Hate Machine. And the conservative base will continue to shell out money to fight it for as long as there are angry old white people.

(Note -- The angry haters image above is from stinque.com.)