Obama's Legacy: A Damning Indictment on White Conservatism in America (or, "Would the last conservative leaving the Democratic Party remember to take the Confederate flag with you?")

The art of leadership...consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention.

--Adolf Hitler, Germany's president and Nazi Party leader (1933-1945)

If Dwight Eisenhower had come back from the war and decided to run as a Democrat---which he almost did---there would be no Republican party today. They would be like the Ku Klux Klan, small knots of hate-crazed rich people scattered in walled ghettos around the country, instead of the dominant ruling autocracy that they have been for most of the last four decades.

--Hunter S. Thompson, excerpt from "Better Than Sex" (1994)

Barack Obama is not a person who would defend the rights and heritage of the European-American people.

--David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan leader and current T.E.A. Party spokesperson 

(quoted in 2008)

Obama, I think he's a piece of shit. I don't care that his mother is white...I don't think America wants a black president. Most of them are too afraid to say that they believe the way I believe.

--Ron Edwards; Imperial Wizard, Imperial Klans of America (quoted in 2008)

The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.

--Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), National Journal interview (10/23/10)

The demographics race we're losing badly. We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.

--Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) on the future of the Republican Party (Washington Post interview, 8/30/12)

It takes a certain level of hypocrisy for anyone who is conservative and Caucasian in the United States to argue that the main reason for his or her resentment towards Barack Obama isn't because he happens to be half-African-American, especially given the fact that so many Caucasian conservatives have done everything possible to make sure that Caucasian Democrats and independents end up feeling a sense of guilt for having elected Obama as president since the beginning of his term in 2009. This certain level of hypocrisy is nothing new in American politics of course, but it really has come to the forefront in such a way that it is now laughable to hear white conservatives blame Obama for everything that is wrong with the U.S. while attempting to justify Richard Nixon's counterculture-fueled paranoia and George W. Bush's calloused ineptitude during their terms in the White House.

The Obama "Sock Monkey": The first warning 
sign of a racist backlash from white conserv-
atives towards Barack Obama's candidacy
 during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Regardless of whether or not it is because "white, right and uptight" conservatives feel a desperate sense of entitlement to attack Democrats by whatever means necessary for political gain, their inability to feel any sense of shame regarding how they are seen by the rest of the world when it comes to attacking the first African-American president in U.S. history only bolsters the impression of how ass-backwards white conservatives in America really are. It's no wonder as to why the United States continues to be treated more like a bad joke internationally instead of as a respectable superpower when a certain percentage of the U.S. population refuses to accept an African-American as their president solely on the basis of his skin color. 
What makes the punchline to this joke so tragically ironic is that this deep-seated resentment towards an African-American president being in office is coming from current representatives of a political faction whose purpose was founded on the basis of emancipating slavery within the United States---the Republican Party.  

See if you can spot any African-Americans in this crowd
of T.E.A. Party "patriots".

Of course I blame the T.E.A. Party movement and the conservative social media for the perpetual amount of "silly season", "kiss-up/kick-down" politics which has fueled the GOP's determination to bring out the most delinquent aspects of American culture since Obama's presidency began. What makes it all the more worse for both the GOP and the T.E.A. Party is the fact that what started as a somewhat-legitimate movement to stop unnecessary Federal spending became nothing more than a corporate-sponsored/lobbyist-funded excuse to legitimize the existence of bigotry in the U.S., even to the point of making democracy itself a target for practicing discrimination by attempting to pass legislation which prohibits voters from being able to cast their ballots with anything other than a voter I.D. card, including a birth certificate. 
But there is something more to this than mere political tactics based on resentment towards a sitting U.S. president from an opposing faction; something more insidious and nefarious within the extreme partisanship of the conservative movement itself.

"Every picture tells a story": Photo of a racist in attendance at a
Mitt Romney presidential campaign rally in 2012.

Let's get down to brass tacks and be honest with ourselves once and for all: To say that racism has played a large part in the amount of vitriol being expressed by white conservatives in the U.S. towards President Obama really would be an obvious understatement at this point in time. All this talk among conservatives about constitutionality, less government and more freedom will mean nothing once Republicans are able to gain a majority in Federal, State and local government. Unfortunately, the only time that conservative voters choose to bitch about big government and less freedom is when Democrats have any amount of influence in Federal, State or local government. But whenever Republicans gain a bureaucratic majority, it's amazing how conservatives suddenly become silent about having to pay more in taxes for unnecessary spending and for legislation which limits their freedoms. 
Ask yourself: When was the last time you heard a conservative complain about having paid taxes for the outsourcing of U.S. jobs or the Patriot Act?... Think about it.

I know that Republicans have a reputation for putting their party's platform above everything else when all is said and done, but to include within that platform the idea of getting citizens to pay taxes for the purpose of outsourcing jobs and for passing legislation which limits civil liberties only proves how far Republican politicians and voters are willing to go in compromising their own country's founding principles just to preserve their party's financial interests. When you actually stop and take this into consideration, you must admit that it doesn't get much more un-conservative, un-patriotic and un-American than that. 

PRIORITIES QUIZ: What kind of demo-
cratic republic allows only the wealthiest
one percent of its population to make the
rules for the other ninety-nine percent to
live by?

Regardless of how sincere or disingenuous conservatives are about believing that Barack Obama is everything that they have accused him of being, I am quite certain that they would have made similar arguments in response to Hillary Clinton had she won the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. The difference is that their arguments against Hillary probably wouldn't have included tasteless images of her as an African witch doctor if she had ended up winning the 2008 presidential election over John McCain.

Attacking the credibility of the Democratic Party is to be expected from Republicans and conservatives when it comes to furthering their political and social agendas, but for these same Republicans and conservatives to argue that Barack Obama will be remembered as the worst president in U.S. history without taking responsibility for their own actions in trying to guarantee such an assessment is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who has been paying even a modicum amount of attention to both Obama's presidency and how the post-Reagan-era Republican Party chose to react to it.

A harsh revelation for uninformed conservatives who
vote Republican in 21st-century America.

The sad truth that the Republican National Committee will have to face in the years ahead is the fact that their decision to accept "white, right and uptight" conservatives into their party has done nothing more than help to create a political, economic and social agenda within the Republican establishment which mandates that only "Christian" Caucasians should be classified as legitimate citizens, and that all others are (in their personal opinion) savage outsiders and/or foreigners who should have very little or no say in how the U.S. is governed, even if those "savage outsiders" or "foreigners" were born within the United States, like themselves.

If such an agenda appears similar to what white separatist/racist hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan have been preaching for decades within the U.S., well that's because both agendas are similar, quite frankly. I mean let's face it: If it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it sure as hell isn't a pony, right?

This image of an Obama lynching is 
brought to you by your local "white,
 right and uptight" T.E.A. Party 
organization.

To put this in a more theoretical perspective, what better way for pro-Confederate domestic terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan to perpetuate the idea that the Civil War didn't end with General Lee's surrender to General Grant in 1865 than to use their financial resources for the purpose of infiltrating the very political party that Abraham Lincoln used to promote federalism and the abolition of slavery, and then manipulate that party financially in order to promote "traditional Southern-Christian values" like anti-federalism, racism, secession, slavery and social castes? 
"Seems too crazy to be true", you say? It isn't so crazy when you consider that the Ku Klux Klan has relentlessly attempted to play an active role in undermining America's political process and national sovereignty since the group's inception following the Civil War.

Your local T.E.A. Party leader could also be a member of the
Ku Klux Klan, and you wouldn't even know it unless you 
were already aware of the KKK's history in 
American politics.

"But the Klan was formed by white Democrats in the South after the Civil War", you argue. Continue reading, because what you're about to discover has been the Republican Party's dirtiest and ugliest little secret for the last fifty years...   

Anti-Obama memes like this one reflect 
the blatant level of racism among white 
conservatives in the U.S. today.

For those of you who didn't know this already, it helps to keep in mind that a large percentage of white conservatives in the South and in other parts of the country abandoned the Democratic Party and became registered Republicans after feeling betrayed and disillusioned by President Lyndon Johnson because of his decision to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. This explains why so many white conservatives have such a genuine resentment towards liberalism in America. Whenever white conservatives claim that liberalism drove them out of the Democratic Party, what they're actually implying is that they left the Democratic Party because liberal Democrats refused to tolerate their inherently-prejudicial beliefs regarding race, gender, class and religion. 
This was how the derogatory expression "Northern Yankee Liberalism" originated among white conservatives above and below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Alabama Governor George Wallace. Many U.S. political
historians believe that Wallace (a segregationist) was one
 of the more influential conservative legislators in the South 
who promoted the idea among fellow white conservatives 
to abandon the Democratic Party after President Lyndon 
Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting 
Rights Act of 1965 into law. Wallace himself ran for presi-
dent as an independent candidate in 1968 after leaving
 the Democratic Party.

Civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. expressed his views regarding the ideology of preserving racial inequality among white conservatives within both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party when he made the following statement during a 1958 interview...

"Actually, the negro has been betrayed by both the Republican and the Democratic Party. The Democrats have betrayed him by capitulating to the whims and caprices of the Southern Dixiecrats. The Republicans have betrayed him by capitulating to the blatant hypocrisy of reactionary right-wing Northern Republicans. And this coalition of Southern Dixiecrats and right-wing Northern Republicans defeats every bill and every move towards liberal legislation in the area of civil rights."

 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (center-left) watches as
 President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil
Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964.

Lyndon Johnson himself (a Democrat from Texas) was worried about how Southern conservative Democrats would respond after he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. According to his former White House aide Bill Moyers, Johnson told Moyers the following day, "I think we've just delivered the South to the Republican Party for the rest of my life, and yours". Sadly, President Johnson was proven correct in his assessment as Southern white conservatives were increasingly abandoning the Democratic Party instead of renouncing the South's history of racism and inequality by the time of his death in January of 1973.

John Ehrlichman was just one of many members in Richard
 Nixon's White House who made an effort to criminalize those 
in the African-American community who were opposed to 
the Vietnam war by equating those members with drugs 
and criminal activity within the anti-war movement 
during the late 1960s and early '70s.  

As you have probably figured out by now, this abandonment of the Democratic Party by white conservatives in the South and in other regions of the U.S. following the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act being signed into law proved to be a golden opportunity for the Republican National Committee to capitalize on politically. Since then, the RNC has been shamelessly continuing to capitalize on President Johnson's decision to make civil rights and voting rights for African-Americans and other U.S. citizens of different ethnic and economic persuasions a reality.

Regardless of what colors they choose to fly, the Ku Klux
Klan's message of hatred for democracy, ethnicity, equality 
and justice still remains prevalent.

Leave it to Caucasian conservatives within the GOP to take their racist views into the voting booth and use their ballots in order to piss on the graves of Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Baines Johnson, and all for the cause of preserving white supremacy in 21st-century America. Not only is the level of animosity towards President Obama authentic from white conservatives within the Republican Party, but it is also a level of animosity that has been five decades in the making. 

President Lyndon Johnson (center), signing the Voting Rights
Act into law on August 6, 1965

This also explains why so many white conservatives in the U.S. want to undermine (and ultimately repeal) the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 today. The reason why conservative Caucasians didn't want the acts passed into law in 1964 and '65 is because they wanted to preserve racism, segregation and other institutionalized forms of bigotry and inequality in America, plain and simple. Well, that mentality still exists among the majority of white conservatives in America fifty years later. Surprised? Don't be. As I have already stated, if it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it sure as hell isn't a pony.

The more things change for the better in America,
the more white conservatives want things to remain
the same---for the worse.

It should also be noted that the Southern Poverty Law Center has reported that there was a 280 percent increase in the number of memberships to known racist hate groups within the United States like the Ku Klux Klan since the beginning of Barack Obama's presidency. Given the amount of vitriol that has been expressed by Republicans and conservatives towards Obama within the social media, this report from the Southern Poverty Law Center should come as no surprise either.

"We want our country back": Whether conservatives
 like it or not, their ideology can be traced directly back
 to white supremacist/race-hate groups like
 the Ku Klux Klan.

    
Any political faction making the argument that civil rights and voting rights need to be reevaluated while using immature and blatantly racist tactics to discredit their rivals clearly doesn't have a constituency with the collective intellectual capacity to realize or understand how much their argument could come back to haunt them someday. For the Republican Party and its Caucasian conservative base, the demand for "reevaluating" (i.e. repealing) civil rights and voting rights legislation while using racism as an excuse to attack an African-American president and his constituents ultimately works to no one's advantage in the U.S.---especially theirs.
If for no other reason, Barack Obama's presidency will be remembered for the level of racism that was exhibited not by any Democrat in public office, and not by any liberal journalist, analyst or pundit in the social media, but by the majority of white conservatives within the Republican Party who were more than willing to express their racist views in protest to his election in 2008 and 2012...

...A certain level of hypocrisy indeed.   

"The South Will Rise Again"?: Apparently someone forgot 
to tell this T.E.A. Party "genius"about the number of 
victories that the U.S. Marine Corps had in defeating 
Confederate forces during the Civil War.