Playing The Dog Whistle

Did you see Obama’s news conference yesterday? If not, you missed an extraordinary performance – Obama doing what he does best: imputing malevolent motives to those who disagree with him.

The ostensible purpose of the “presser” was to announce the appointment of Crazy Joe Biden to lead a commission that will quickly, we are told, get to the bottom of the Connecticut atrocity. (An unstated purpose was to deflect attention from the just released internal State Department report on the Benghazi fiasco which predictably found that “mistakes were made,” but not made by any identifiable human beings named Barack or Hillary.)

After Crazy Joe left the stage, Obama took questions which revealed the real purpose of the news conference – to flay the Republicans for not completely surrendering to his demands for higher taxes and more spending in return for vague promises to “cut” spending at some far, distant point in the way, way-off future when everyone now alive will be long dead.

But the jaw-dropping part was when Reverend Obama drew a moral equivalence between the Republicans’ oh-so-slight resistance to his fiscal cliff demands and the Sandy Hook shootings:

After what we’ve gone through over the past several months, a devastating hurricane and now one of the worse tragedies in our memory, the country deserves folks to be willing to compromise for the greater good…

Am I going too far in thinking that before this is over, Obama and the whack jobs at MSNBC will be accusing the Republicans of complicity in the murder of women and children in Connecticut? It isn’t like he hasn’t gone there before; remember Mitt Romney, the murderer of the laid off steel worker’s wife?

Memo to David Axelrod: The murderer lived in a million plus dollar house which means his family is a part of the upper 2% who have not as yet paid their fair share. And doesn’t his father have a big job at General Electric? Bad luck there since the CEO of GE is a big Obama supporter and chairman of the president’s outside panel of economic advisers. And wasn’t there some controversy over GE’s failure to pay their fair share? Never mind.

Bottom line: Forget the GE part and go with the “if the rich paid more taxes, they wouldn’t have the disposable income to spend on such frippery as assault rifles” angle.

But I digress. In addition to the invocation of mass murder in the context of the fiscal cliff debate, Obama also, to my ear, played the race card yesterday, or as the wacky MSNBC guys and gals would say, “blew the dog whistle” by suggesting
that GOP legislators are having less difficulty saying “yes” to his fiscal cliff plan than saying “yes” to him.

So it’s not his plan to continue to tax and spend even more than we do now that bothers the Republicans. No, Obama vigorously implies, it’s that these white racists cannot abide caving in to a black man.

So there you have it: The Republicans, by refusing to abjectly surrender to Obama’s tax and spending demands are, for now at least, insensitive to the Newtown victims and all decent Americans who mourn their loss. And they’re racists to boot.

For Obama, it’s all in a good day’s work.