I can appreciate that the right wing  might pine for the days when our president spoke in monosyllabic sentences, but I do not understand how they can look at Obama as an extreme left-wing ideologue.  The left wing, under Obama has gotten little or nothing of what they had hoped to achieve. I’m quoting Salon’s Glenn Greenwald here:
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“The Left wanted a single-payer system, then settled for a public option, then an opt-out public option, then Medicare expansion — only to get none of it, instead being handed a bill that forces every American to buy health insurance from the private insurance industry.  Nor was it “the Left” — but rather corporatist Democrats like Evan Bayh and Lanny Davis — who cheered for the hated Wall Street bailout; blocked drug re-importation; are stopping genuine reform of the financial industry; prevented a larger stimulus package to lower unemployment; refuse to allow programs to help Americans with foreclosures; supported escalation in Afghanistan (twice); and favor the same Bush/Cheney terrorism policies of indefinite detention, military commissions, and state secrets.”

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Combine this with the news that Obama will detain 50 terrorists without due process and I really do not think that they have much to complain about.  On the contrary, Republicans should be elated with the way events are shaping up.  Obama is literally codifying the illegalities of the Bush administration.  This will make it even easier for the next (inevitable) Republican administration to support and further these policies.

I am puzzled by vehement hatred directed towards Barak Obama by the Republicans.  This across-the-board dismissal does not add up.  Obama campaigned as a centrist, and if anything his administration has bent over backwards to work with, and accomodate the Republicans.

While it is true Obama has made tepid attempts to bring home the troops from Iraq, he has upped the ante in Afghanistan in the form of a surge which most analysts predict will fail.  We continue to pay for our folly with American,Afghani, and Iraqi lives.  In this way his foreign policy has mimicked the Bush administration.  Although Obama’s rhetoric is more elegant, his implementation of policy is the same — force before diplomacy.

We continue to deny prisoners their right to a trial and we continue to eavesdrop on our own citizenry via the NSA’s monitoring of international telephone calls coming into the U.S.   The Patriot act will soon be up for renewal and there is little to make us believe that it will be struck down.

So I ask those on the right:  How is Obama that different from Bush?  Health care will be enacted without a public option.  The taxes that will be imposed will not undue the harm to the deficit that Bush created by squandering our surplus nine years ago.

I believe that partisan politics is largely at fault for this negativity, but I can’t help but think racism is playing a part as well.  There is a large group of the population that still cannot tolerate a  Black president.  To them, a Black man is inferior. and to see Obama in the Whitehouse refutes their credo. 

It would be one thing if Obama offered a truly different vision of our country, but he hasn’t.  It is the left that has more of a reason to be disillusioned.  If I was a Republican I would breath a sigh of relief.