Disrespect for the President

I can remember when it was considered a big no-no to speak disrespectfully about the President of the United States even when you didn't at all agree with him about anything. In fact to do so was thought of as being almost as bad as taking the Lord's name in vain. And this courtesy was largely and studiously maintained. But today we have been enduring months of a primary campaign by the less enlightened political party where to speak ill of the sitting U.S. President in any way possible is not only the norm but also thought of as the most profitable way to get votes. How and when did this complete reversal take place?

To my observation it started happening in earnest in one of the Clinton administrations, when the Republicans, their numbers fattened like hogs in a pen by the numbers of Americans of the paler complexions who deserted the Democratic party in droves, out of their resentment at seeing Rainbows (i.e. so-called "black" people) finally obtain many of the civil rights that had been promised to them after the Civil War but had been held back by force and by numerous unjust laws and customs. And these people took out their resentment of anything that remotely resembled racial equality on any president that they saw as going along with that development, and to that end Bill Clinton was the first sitting Chief Executive that comes to mind as having been dumped summarily into the boiling cauldrons of hatred and disrespect, a fate that another President before him, Lyndon B. Johnson, also suffered but in a different cannibal pot labeled "Vietnam" instead.

Now, in the case of B. Obama, we see that process being repeated, in spades.

Yet we can expect that the next time the Republicans get their own man in there, they will demand that the deepest respect be extended to him at all times, while they will plaintively wonder where good old-fashioned American manners went.

No one knows where they went. But there's one thing that we do know for sure. When all those Southern Democratic demagogues suddenly became good, card-carrying Republican demagogues, they may have brought those manners with them, but their spiritual descendants had no idea what those things were, and they totally kicked those aside in favor instead of a badly perverted form of "truth in advertising."