Obama and Boehner — the look says it all
Would Speaker John Boehner invite an Israeli prime minister to address Congress without informing The White House and The State Department if the U.S. had a White president today?
Everyone knows the answer to that question.
Boehner’s action is reprehensible. It’s not surprising however given some of the rabid hostility towards the nation’s first African American president that we’ve seen from Republican leaders.
And we’re not even referring to the Tea Party types.
Even The Wall Street Journal’s resident Obama-hater Peggy Noonan deplores John Boehner’s invitation to Benjamin Netanyahu without consulting The White House, in her column in the Journal’s weekend edition.
Noonan, who’s never had an objective thing to say about Obama since he was elected in 2008, and who once compared him to Stalin in one of her hate-filled columns, nevertheless knows the importance of the office of the president and writes of Boehner’s action as a “bad move, a damaging snub that makes divisions more dramatic, and not only between Congress and the president.”
She also reminds the House Speaker: “The United States has an elected president who serves a four-year term, and in that time he gets to conduct the nations formal diplomatic efforts and policy and to oversee its foreign-affairs apparatus and agencies.”
Boehner’s action is way beyond merely disrespecting President Obama — it’s outright racist.
We don’t believe Boehner would make such a mockery of the U.S. Presidency had there been a White male Democrat occupying the White House; no matter how much he disagreed with or detested that president.
Boehner is winking at Netanyahu, whose own government has an ugly record on how it deals with African immigrants, and in essence saying, “We really don’t consider Obama as ‘our’ president anyway ‘if you know what I mean.'”
Boehner can forget about that Republican pipe-dream of winning more Black voters in the next presidential election cycle.
The Republicans haven’t been able to disguise their racism since Obama was elected and one of their leading gurus, Rush Limbaugh, declared “I hope he fails.” President Obama and his family endured many racist insults through the years. The list is too long, but a Google search of “Republicans and racist comments about Obama” yields some interesting incidents.
Yet President Obama has done the job that he was elected to do. The nation saw this when he recapped the past six years during the State of The Union address last Tuesday.
The nation appreciates the work he has done as reflected in his poll number that’s pushed back towards 50% while Boehner’s and his Republican colleagues in Congress remain near single-digits.
Here are just a few reminders of what Obama has been able to accomplish. The achievements are stunning given that not only did he not have the Republicans’ help but they actually worked feverishly to undermine his presidency:
1. Unemployment is down to 5.6%.
2. 11 million new jobs have been created in the past five years.
3. U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq have been drawn down to 15,000 from a peak of 180,000.
4. The deficit has been cut by 2/3.
5. 10 million previously uninsured Americans signed up for coverage in the past year alone.
6. The auto industry has been rescued and made record profits last year.
7. The stock marker has doubled.
8. Gas prices are at a record low and American families on average stand to save $750 this year.
9. The U.S. is now the leading producer of oil and gas and less dependent on oil imports.
10. Millions of undocumented immigrants have a temporary reprieve which will relieve some of the financial pressure on the nation from the cost of deportations.
If some Republicans such as Boehner were not too blinded by racist animus they would acknowledge President Obama’s historic achievements, considering where he found the country in 2009, when the economy was shedding 800,000 jobs a month, following George W. Bush’s presidency.
Boehner should rescind the invitation to Netanyahu, who never should have accepted it in the first place.
