This past weekend reflects the state of anti-Obama invective as literally countless American patriots in Washington rage against the President while the dean of terrorists delivers a mild harangue against him as “powerless.”
In both cases, there are fact-check problems. The bin Laden message comes in a ten-minute audiotape with an undated photograph while the Tea Party crowd, estimated at tens of thousands by neutral observers, swells to two million in the reports of sponsors and right-wing bloggers.
Such discrepancies signal a shift of passion from foreign haters to homegrown. David Frum, the former George W. Bush speechwriter, notes the “wild accusations and the paranoid delusions coming from the fever swamps…
“Like all conservatives, I am concerned about this administration’s accumulation of economic power. Still, you have to be aware that there’s a line where legitimate concerns begin to collapse into paranoid fantasy.”
In his 9/11 anniversary message, bin Laden seems comparatively weary and old-fashioned in his rhetoric. “The time has come,” he tells Americans, “for you to liberate yourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neo-conservatives and the Israeli lobby.”
At the center of all this, Barack Obama on 60 Minutes observes “a coarsening of our political dialogue” and notes that “in the speech that I gave announcing that I was running for President. I said, ‘We can disagree without being disagreeable.’ And I think that the vast majority of the American people, that’s exactly what they want.