...And All His Rowdy Friends

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A-a-a-and another musician weighs in on our Kenyan Muslim Socialist President:

Country music veteran Hank Williams Jr. is doing his best to become the official troubadour of the we-hate-Barack-Obama crowd. During a performance at the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 17, Williams told the audience, “We’ve got a Muslim president who hates farming, hates the military, hates the U.S., and we hate him!”

The throng of heartland Americans cheered enthusiastically.

Williams isn't the first and only. Ted Nugent and Dave Mustaine have also targeted President Obama with some pretty virulent speech, accusing him of planning to take our assault rifles away by staging the Colorado and Wisconsin rampages to do so. It really has become, as David Horsey points out, an American tradition that goes back a few decades. I just don't remember it being quite this hateful. I assumed that the underlying motivation was the fact that Obama was an African American, but Horsey suggests there's more at work, and he may very well be right.

...What seems strange is that Obama elicits such extreme dislike when, in fact, he is an exemplary family man and his policy positions would have made him a conventional liberal Republican not that long ago.

Many will argue that the hatred has everything to do with the color of Obama’s skin. Unquestionably, race is a factor for some people, but the phenomenon is bigger and broader than that.

Hank Williams Jr. is really typical of a large number of Americans who simply do not like how the country has changed. (One of his songs is a nostalgic tribute to the Old Confederacy built around the lyric, “If the South would’ve won, we’d have had it made.”) In the minds of folks like Hank – addled by talk radio tirades, apocalyptic evangelism and Internet fabrications – Obama has been morphed into a creature who embodies everything they believe is wrong with the urban, multiracial, feminized, gay-tolerant, secular society America has become.

They do not really hate Barack Obama, they hate today’s USA. [Emphasis added]

Perhaps so.

And that's a shame. A damned shame.