The Southern Strategy being used by the Republican Party to blatantly attack President Obama’s Blackness is manifesting itself in many ways. Saying at demonstrations at Town Meetings, “Give us back our country” is an Atwaterism that really says give us back our country from a Black President. The despicability factor of the Republican fringes indeed has no lower limit.

The issue is that the entire Republican Party’s attack on President Obama is really an attack on the American people because he is trying to pass a health reform passage that benefits all Americans, stabilize our economy which was disabilized in large part by the Bush Administration appointing insiders to oversight committees and agencies which allowed Wall Street to pick the US Treasury and the people clean, and he is trying to re-establish the position of the United States in the world as a world partner not the neocons view that the United States has a responsibility to lead the world at any cost to any nation.

Most people can see clearly the self-serving, obstructionist behavior and further marginalize a GOP that is almost already over the horizon.

The GOP fringe behavior further weakens the effectiveness of our government because we need a strong, ethical GOP as the voice of the loyal opposition; the GOP obviously cares more about the party than it does about the country and its people.

Maureen Dowd has two very good article that speak to this very point. One is "Boy, Oh, Boy", and the other is "Rapping Joe's Knuckles", both of which are printed below.

----- Fedallah

The New York Times

September 13, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Boy, Oh, Boy

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

The normally nonchalant Barack Obama looked nonplussed, as Nancy Pelosi glowered behind.

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

The outburst was unexpected from a milquetoast Republican backbencher from South Carolina who had attracted little media attention. Now it has made him an overnight right-wing hero, inspiring “You lie!” bumper stickers and T-shirts.

The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president. Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber.

I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.

I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.

But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.

“A lot of these outbursts have to do with delegitimizing him as a president,” said Congressman Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the South Carolina delegation. Clyburn, the man who called out Bill Clinton on his racially tinged attacks on Obama in the primary, pushed Pelosi to pursue a formal resolution chastising Wilson.

“In South Carolina politics, I learned that the olive branch works very seldom,” he said. “You have to come at these things from a position of strength. My father used to say, ‘Son, always remember that silence gives consent.’ ”

Barry Obama of the post-’60s Hawaiian ’hood did not live through the major racial struggles in American history. Maybe he had a problem relating to his white basketball coach or catching a cab in New York, but he never got beaten up for being black.

Now he’s at the center of a period of racial turbulence sparked by his ascension. Even if he and the coterie of white male advisers around him don’t choose to openly acknowledge it, this president is the ultimate civil rights figure — a black man whose legitimacy is constantly challenged by a loco fringe.

For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.

The state that fired the first shot of the Civil War has now given us this: Senator Jim DeMint exhorted conservatives to “break” the president by upending his health care plan. Rusty DePass, a G.O.P. activist, said that a gorilla that escaped from a zoo was “just one of Michelle’s ancestors.” Lovelorn Mark Sanford tried to refuse the president’s stimulus money. And now Joe Wilson.

“A good many people in South Carolina really reject the notion that we’re part of the union,” said Don Fowler, the former Democratic Party chief who teaches politics at the University of South Carolina. He observed that when slavery was destroyed by outside forces and segregation was undone by civil rights leaders and Congress, it bred xenophobia.

“We have a lot of people who really think that the world’s against us,” Fowler said, “so when things don’t happen the way we like them to, we blame outsiders.” He said a state legislator not long ago tried to pass a bill to nullify any federal legislation with which South Carolinians didn’t agree. Shades of John C. Calhoun!

It may be President Obama’s very air of elegance and erudition that raises hackles in some. “My father used to say to me, ‘Boy, don’t get above your raising,’ ” Fowler said. “Some people are prejudiced anyway, and then they look at his education and mannerisms and get more angry at him.”

Clyburn had a warning for Obama advisers who want to forgive Wilson, ignore the ignorant outbursts and move on: “They’re going to have to develop ways in this White House to deal with things and not let them fester out there. Otherwise, they’ll see numbers moving in the wrong direction.”

_______________________________________________________

September 16, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Rapping Joe’s Knuckles

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Joe Wilson, congressman, argued that Joe Wilson, chucklehead, should not be formally rebuked.

It would be a waste of time, he asserted on the House floor where, six days earlier, he had committed his conduct most unbecoming.

Other Republicans stepped up to the microphone to agree that this was a distraction from the important things they could be doing. (Like stepping up their effort to kill President Obama’s attempt to provide health care for the have-nots in society?)

“When we are done here today,” said the man who accused the president of lying, “we will not have taken any steps to improve the country.”

Actually, Wilson is dead wrong again. When House Democrats, and a handful of Republicans, reprimanded the congressman on Tuesday evening for refusing to apologize to his colleagues for breaking the rules, it was quite a wonderful way to improve America.

It was a rare triumph for civility in a country that seems to have lost all sense of it — from music arenas to tennis courts to political gatherings to hallowed halls — and a ratification of an institution that has relied on strict codes of conduct for two centuries to prevent a breakdown of order.

“When you look at the various incidents of misbehavior all across the spectrum,” Representative James Clyburn, the highest ranking black lawmaker in Congress who had pushed for the reprimand, told me afterward, “the one place we ought to be able to say that such conduct is not acceptable and just cannot be tolerated is in America’s classroom, as I call Congress. Students are looking at us, and they ought not to be able to ever feel that such bad behavior would be condoned.”

It was a powerful showdown between two congressmen from South Carolina, one black, one white; one Democrat, one Republican.

“Joe Wilson has worked very hard to cultivate a sort of choir-boy image, but I think that most people realize that there’s something else going on with him,” Clyburn said.

The two started off on friendly terms long ago when Clyburn was on the board of a national bank and Wilson was on the bank’s local board in West Columbia.

“Frankly,” Clyburn told me, “I supported him financially the first time he ran for office.”

Over the years, Clyburn tried to “look past” things that bothered him — Wilson’s “membership in some groups that call into question his feelings about his whole notion of white supremacy” and his defense of the Confederate flag flying above the Columbia, S.C., Statehouse.

Clyburn said he was “bothered a great deal” by the “real nasty things” Wilson said about the black woman who turned out to be Strom Thurmond’s daughter.

In August, Clyburn picked up a newspaper to see that Wilson was holding his first town hall meeting in Clyburn’s district, three minutes from his house, at the high school Clyburn’s children went to — an “in your face” breach of Congressional protocol.

“He was being confrontational and combative,” Clyburn said. “And Wednesday night was just bringing his town hall meeting antics to the floor of the House of Representatives.”

The black members of Congress were fed up, after a long, hot summer of sulfurous attitudes toward the first black president. Clyburn privately pressed Wilson three times last Thursday to apologize for breaking the rules — Wilson’s own wife asked him who the “nut” was who was hollering at the president — but the Republican was getting chesty with his unlikely new role as king of the rowdies.

He was regarded as a hero at the anti-Obama rally in Washington last weekend that featured such classy placards as, with a picture of a lion, “The Zoo has an African and the White House has a Lyin’ African;” “Bury Obamacare with Kennedy;” “We came unarmed (this time)” and “ ‘Cap’ Congress and ‘Trade’ Obama back to Kenya!”

A camera also caught Wilson in Washington signing for a fan a picture of himself confronting the president, and he has raised $2 million in the last week.

Former President Jimmy Carter weighed in with Brian Williams of NBC News on Tuesday: “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.” He said he felt that was true in the South and elsewhere.

Clyburn won the manners round, but Wilson was back Tuesday night tweeting his rude new fans, people who, as the minority leader, John Boehner, put it, are “scared to death that the country that they grew up in is not going to be the country that their kids and grandkids grew up in.”

It’s not. That country is gone. And in terms of biases that have faded, that’s a good thing. But partly due to the Internet, the standards of behavior in this new country are terrible.

If Beaver and Wally were around today, they’d likely be writing snarky, revealing blogs about June and Ward.