As increasing amounts of damning evidence of Donald Trump’s corruption, incompetence, and cruelty as President of the USA piles up, it is finally starting to have an effect upon even his most loyal supporters and the critics of the previous President, Barack Obama.

Read this blog entry. I will copy passages from it in green italics and my responses will be in blue bold.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/happy-birthday-president-obama/

Happy birthday, President Obama

I believed everything the right-wing talk show hosts said about the 44th president, even the birther conspiracy. I couldn’t have been more wrong

August 4th is the birthday of President Barack Obama. I thought long and hard what I could give the 44th president of the United States as a birthday president. If I had the option, I would give him a sincere apology for the hate I gave him when I was a conservative over the years during his presidency. Whether it was on Facebook or Twitter. I was foolish and close-minded to not question the demonizing of the President on Fox and other conservative outlets.

I guess it took him a lot longer than me to wake up. I was raised in a conservative suburban Southern Baptist family, but it only took a couple of years in college learning things I had never known before to change my mind about politics, religion and other things I had previously been ignorant about. BTW, my dad still watches FOX News often, and I have to bite my tongue when he rants about liberal policies.

Since day one, when Barack Obama announced his presidency, there was a not so good feeling in my stomach of the thought of him “a black man” being the president of the United States.

News flash: There is absolutely NOTHING in the Constitution of the United States that says that a black man should never be President of the USA, so being uncomfortable about it is actually unAmerican. The supreme law of the land is (surprise, surprise) RACE NEUTRAL. Besides, Obama was half white and was raised by white people.

I began activism in politics shortly after 9/11, and Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly were the first talk show hosts I began to watch and listen too. I believed anything they had to say about him, without question because even back then media outside conservative outlets were considered fake news, and I assumed this was true.

It took me watching Keith Olbermann on MSNBC to show how much of a liar O’Reilly was, and Hannity is no better even now. Fake news is an issue when it contradicts reality, not when it contradicts your ideological biases.

 

I even believed in the birther conspiracy that Trump helped spread thinking he was un-American and shouldn’t be the president.

The birther conspiracy being that Obama was born in Africa, not Hawaii. Sen. Ted Cruz was born in Canada, while Sen. John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, but no one made “birther” attacks on them when they both ran for President. Oh, but they were white, so…..

I believed that he wanted to take our rights away, including the right to bear arms, using every mass shooting as a way to make it happen.

Another news flash: Gun control is NOT the same as gun confiscation and is actually called for by the Second Amendment, which opens with the telling phrase “A well-regulated militia….”. By opposing all forms of gun control, the NRA and its extremist allies have enabled an UNREGULATED MOB, making law and order more and more difficult. Our inner cities are gang infested because of the gun nuts enabling them. Of course, we cannot make it IMPOSSIBLE for criminals to get guns, but we can certainly make it more DIFFICULT for them. To do otherwise is like enabling burglaries by refusing to put locks on our doors.

I’ve condemned him for any little thing he said and made it to something more. When he said, “conservatives cling to their bibles and guns.” I considered it to be hate speech towards us, and now I see he was disappointed that conservatives don’t want to look past their religion and guns, no matter who it hurts, and when I realized I was wrong about what liberal values are about, I was wrong about President Obama.

All Obama ever did was tell the truth about the harm conservatives have done, period. That only offends liars and the ignorant. Conservatism is based on two things and always has been: lies and bigotry. If it were not for double standards, they would really have none at all. Even their religious values are twisted to serve the agenda of elitists, not the common people.

He’s done so much for the United States in so many ways. After all, what I’ve learned especially about white privilege, I see when he talked about conservatives, he was right and mainly wanted them to see what it’s like to put on the shoes of black people, Muslims, anyone who is not in the conservative close-minded bubble.

That’s because liberalism is based on the emotional value of EMPATHY, the ability to share in the feelings and thoughts of others. Therefore:

He never was anti-Semitic or anti-Christian, or even Muslim himself.

Obama was a member of the United Church of Christ, one of the most liberal mainline Protestant denominations. In the eyes of most evangelicals, liberal Christians are not much better than atheists because of the liberals’ willingness to question or even reject traditional dogmas that are clearly not based on reality. As a Unitarian Universalist and a non-theist who supports religious liberty for all, not just evangelicals, I have also felt like one of the Christian bigots’ targets.

He was a decent president, a wonderful family man, and a good patriotic American.

Obama is still on his first marriage as is Bill Clinton. By contrast, Ronald Reagan was actually the first President to ever go thru a divorce and Donald Trump has been divorced TWICE and is notorious for having affairs with multiple mistresses even during his marriages. So much for “family values”.

He helped many veterans and military and he was a good friend to Israel. Just because he didn’t kiss their butts like the way Trump is doing doesn’t mean he was not a friend. A friend holds you accountable when you are wrong too. Sometimes, the Israeli government makes mistakes too like any other government.

Mistakes? That’s putting it mildly. As someone who used to support Israel, I now see clearly that it has committed countless abuses against Arabs whose ancestors were living in Palestine before 1948. It deserves NOTHING more from America. Zionism should be abandoned and both Israel and the Palestinian authority should be dismantled and the entire land of Palestine put under ONE state that favors NO ethnic or religious group over any other. The parturition of Palestine proposed by the UN in 1947 was indeed a colossal mistake, but considering the vast amounts of sympathy for Jews after what happened during the Holocaust, it is still understandable. It is not too late to fix things…..we simply have to get rid of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Zionist bigots who back him.

He was honorable and diplomatic with Iran, and the money he gave them wasn’t even ours, as I used to believe; he was returning their own money and did his best trying to prevent a war.

It was the least we could do after we stabbed the Iranian people in their collective backs in 1953. Their hatred for America from 1979 onward stemmed directly from that. We were outright hypocrites.

By no means was he a perfect president, sure he made mistakes, but he did not deserve the hatred he received while he was in office and even now, by me and other conservatives. I will take this time and wish President Barack Obama a wonderful birthday, and I am truly sorry to believe any of that hateful propaganda about you, and I am sorry that I took out my frustrations on you. Lastly, it was an honor to serve in the United States military under your leadership.

Happy birthday, President Obama.

Sincerely, David Weissman

I would love to see Obama himself respond to that message. As for me, all I can say is, “You are forgiven. When you know better, you can do better.”