The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson writes in a blog entry at Huffington Post Black Voices that it is high time voters challenged the GOP's campaign of insults that has been unleashed on President Barack Obama. While presidents have always been fair game for criticism, the assaults against Obama are particularly egregious and racially charged.
Republican Gov. Jan Brewer insults the president with a finger-wagging tarmac rant in Arizona. As a result, sales of her book soar.
American presidents have always been fair game for public criticism. But isn't it past time that we challenge the campaign of insult, racial slur and utter disrespect that has been unleashed on Barack Obama?
Consider just the Republican presidential contenders. The campaign started with Donald Trump's ugly nonsense about Obama's birth certificate, suggesting that he was un-American. Newt Gingrich devoted a book, To Save America, to denouncing Obama's "secular socialist machine that represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany."
Gingrich began his comeback from life support when he reasserted his claim that Obama was the "food stamp president," a pure dog whistle to the unreconstructed among South Carolina voters.
Mitt Romney is no exception, saying Obama wants to lead America into a "European social welfare society" while he would take us back to an "American opportunity society." Obama, the theme is, isn't like us. He takes his cue from Europeans, not Americans. One of Romney's ads in South Carolina criticized Obama for adopting "un-American" economic policies.
But the presidential candidates are simply the top of a cesspool. Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) said of Obama that he didn't "even want to have to be associated with him. It's like touching a tar baby and you get it, you're stuck."
Read the Rev. Jesse Jackson's entire column at Huffington Post Black Voices.