The Brother From Another Planet

I've discussed at length the "Otherization" of President Obama as one of the most pernicious and vile themes of the last four years, how Republicans constantly drum up anger and hatred towards POTUS by saying how he's"just not like us" and changing the criteria of what he is and is not on a daily basis in order to custom-tailor their awful attacks.  E.J. Dionne at the Washington Post does a great service by picking up on this theme.

They say that President Obama is a Muslim, but if he isn’t, he’s a secularist who is waging war on religion. On some days he’s a Nazi, but on most others he’s merely a socialist. His especially creative opponents see him as having a “Kenyan anti-colonial worldview,” while the less adventurous say that he’s an elitist who spent too much time in Cambridge, Hyde Park and other excessively academic precincts.

Whatever our president is, he is never allowed to be a garden-variety American who plays basketball and golf, has a remarkably old-fashioned family life and, in the manner we regularly recommend to our kids, got ahead by getting a good education.

Please forgive this outburst. It’s simply astonishing that a man in his fourth year as our president continues to be the object of the most extraordinary paranoid fantasies. A significant part of his opposition still cannot accept that Obama is a rather moderate politician quite conventional in his tastes and his interests. And now that the economy is improving, short-circuiting easy criticisms, Obama’s adversaries are reheating all the old tropes and cliches and slanders.

Even if you actually believe all this stuff, it's the same thing that failed to win for the GOP in 2008, so why are the Republicans doubling down on this?  Because they can't win on the issues, of course.  They couldn't in 2008, they can't now.

So this nonsense is all they have.  And still, the GOP candidate will get a minimum 42-43% of the vote running on this.