Posted by
flagwaver on Thursday, January 13, 2011 11:13:03 AM
I am no fan of our current President, and have not been shy in letting that be known here at this blog and in personal conversations with friends and family. One of my main complaints is that I do not believe that President Obama is up to the task, and that stems from his seeming to have received credit all of his political life for things that he has not actually done.
Think about it; he taught a course in constitutional law and that morphed into his being some distinguished professor of constitutional law and an expert on the subject. He was given a Nobel Peace Prize simply for not being G.W. Bush; he was called a racial conciliator for throwing his granny under the wheels of the Racial Greyhound; he is purported to be an excellent orator for being able to deftly read his teleprompter; and he is credited for saving the American economy by creating trillions of dollars of debt in a couple of short years and presiding over a steady 9%+ unemployment rate. So I am not one to spend my energies giving him a lot of credit when it is obviously not due to him.
However, I am going to give the man credit for the way he has handled himself and his White House during the time following the tragic shooting rampage in Tucson, including his performance last night at the televised memorial service. While the media and politicians have been falling over each other to blame Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, talk radio, and the "lack of civility" for the actions of one seemingly mentally unstable person, Obama and his White House have made a decision not to engage in such talk. In fact. Mr. Obama made clear in his remarks that no one knows what prompted this act of violence and that blame could not be assigned to anyone for what happened. That was just the right tone to take and showed Mr. Obama, especially in this particular instance, as capable of realizing that partisan politics does not always rule the day.
What is bothersome to me is that so many conservatives are still attacking Obama as if he did something wrong here. They act as though he could have stopped the media from trying to assign blame to conservatives for this, but that was happening before he even had all the facts in hand. Besides, nothing the President could say or do would stop the likes of Keith Olbermann, Paul Krugman, or Ed Schultz from launching on the nearest conservative target; that would have been akin to trying to stop the sun from rising in the eastern skies.
Further, there are complaints about the way the crowd acted, treating it more like a "pep rally" than a somber occasion, the passing out of t-shirts that stated that Tucson and America would thrive together, and the fact that the event was held at the McCale Center on the U of A campus; according to critics, the event should only have been held in a church somewhere. But in all honesty, what does that have to do with the President? I understand why they held it in the basketball arena, since it was a public memorial and they wanted to get as much of the public in as possible; after all, this event was a blow to the entire community. The t-shirts don't bother me one bit, since there was nothing at all political about the message on them, and just because this was a public memorial service doesn't mean it had to be a weepy occasion. Maybe it's just me and my experience in the black church atmosphere that I grew up in, but even funerals have a way of becoming celebrations; we are sad that we have lost a loved one, but we celebrate their lives and the fact that we believe that in their leaving us, they have gone home to their just reward in glory. So the lack of total solemnity just wasn't that big of a deal to me, and again it cannot be laid at Obama's feet. If he had admonished the crown in some way, lots of folks would be screeching about that today as not being presidential.
The bottom line is that President Obama has done lots of things to earn the disfavor and disapproval of conservatives, but his actions during this time has not been among them. This is probably his most "presidential" moment since assuming office and we should be willing to give him credit for it.
Sometimes you have just have to give a person the credit that they have earned.