I read this article, and was reminded of a political pundit on the Martin Bashir Show who said something similar.
This current article by p.m. carpenter talks about the troubles Abe Lincoln had with his political opponents and the comparison to Obama’s political opposition today.
[...]
Not since Abe Lincoln took office has a president’s political opposition been so ruthlessly determined to oppose — even to the point of national disloyalty, which is precisely what the GOP’s treacherous machinations over the debt limit represent. It is futile to look back on Obama’s first two years and speculate that he should have done this, or that he should have done that, and then this or that might have proceeded better; it is futile because whatever path Obama might have chosen, his opposition was acrobatically hellbent on obstructing it.
If Obama is to be properly faulted, then his fault lies in the rather incongruent criticism of excessive rationality. No one, least of all a chief executive of profound intellect and with a corresponding belief in the great and unifying power of Reason, could have predicted in January 2009 that the spiritually broken Grand Old Party would redouble its preceding madness, and then double that, and double even that again. No one could have predicted the right’s absolutely surreal hypocrisy on debt and spending, its Obama-as-Hitler posters, its “death panel” frenzies and its birther lunacy and its Socialist Dictator! dementias. Neither could anyone have predicted the activist left’s infantile behavior and ceaseless crankiness.
No one could have, and no one did.
Yet now we encounter the magnificent bounty of hindsight. And it’s pointless. Because the right was always determined to sabotage Obama’s presidency — if “unusually extreme and intransigent” methods, as Frum grants, proved insufficient, then what the hell; economic treason might do the trick — and with each passing day, it doubles down on its determination.
Again … not since Lincoln.
Related articles
- Obama Invokes Lincoln To Urge Compromise On Debt Deal (blogs.abcnews.com)
- Meep Meep Watch? (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
- Op-Ed Columnist: Obama and His Discontents (nytimes.com)
- Who killed Abe Lincoln what happened to him where did Lincoln get killed when did l Abe Lincoln assassinated why did Abe Lincoln get assassinated (wiki.answers.com)
- David Frum: Obama is His Own Worst Enemy (delong.typepad.com)
- Hey GOP! Please Ignore David Frum! (alan.com)
- Sharpton: Debt fight about ‘your mama,’ not Obama (thegrio.com)
- An Un-Healthy Discourse about Washington, DC (americanage.wordpress.com)
- The Naivety of David Frum [Dispatches from the Culture Wars] (scienceblogs.com)
