The Slow Motion Lynching of President Barack Obama - By Frank Schaeffer

[Yo_Mama]

44. I'm not buying it.

The lynching part, that is.

Criticism is not lynching. Lynching describes a mob putting a person to death outside the law, often very brutally. Arguing with someone, or even harshly criticizing someone, is nothing like lynching. That's just a ridiculous thing to write.

I suspect that the source of the author's hysteria at the moment is that some of the criticism is sticking, but that's inevitable. It was purely an executive responsibility to do the exchange and issue all the rulings necessary to even start, and the Executive goofed. Also there genuinely is a problem with NSA-type surveillance gone wild. We neither need nor want to be a Stasi society, and I support anyone from left, right or center who points that out.

But criticism isn't necessarily attack, and in a democratic system there will be criticism of any politician, no matter how good. That's a necessary part of it, and not a symptom of a dysfunctional society.

The Left has every right to criticize even a Democratic president where it disagrees with policies - there's nothing wrong in that. And the right is always going to criticize a Democratic president, just as the left is always going to criticize a Republican president. Most of the criticism has rolled off President Obama's back, because it wasn't just.

The Left worked very hard to get Obama re-elected. It succeeded, and it now has the right and duty to clamor about its own political priorities.