From UK Daily Mail:
Responding to an angry constituent’s letter about the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama allegedly used a sexually charged derogatory term referring to members of the Tea Party movement.
Thomas Ritter, a fifth-grade school teacher from Irving, Texas, has sent the president a note criticizing Obamacare – the controversial law offering health care to the uninsured, which has become the butt of jokes following a disastrous launch last month.
‘This bill has caused such a divisive, derisive and toxic environment… The reality is that any citizen that disagrees with your administration is targeted and ridiculed,’ the Texas man wrote to the commander-in-chief.
“Allegedly”… in his own handwriting:
There are a couple things here to really look at.
The first is that he casually tosses around the term “teabagger”, because as Mary Katherine Ham at HotAir notes – he’s either using it to annoy the guy who wrote the letter further, or Obama’s in a bubble where everyone uses it, so it means nothing to him.
The second is that he equates “teabagger” as being on the same level as socialist as name-calling. “Teabagger” is a pejorative description given by leftists to Tea Partiers, referencing “teabagging”, which if you don’t know what it is, well, here’s a hint:
Because people who want limitations on government, less government spending on wasteful programs, reduction of regulation and government interference in business and private life, and in general prefer a government that respects the individual and leaves them alone are of course synonymous with this:
Socialist isn’t an insult, yet the president puts it in quotes to imply that it is. It’s a description of an ideology and political philosophy. It’s what someone who favors more government and more government interference in private life believes in. Things like government controlling certain aspects of the market for “the greater good”, and government “spreading the wealth around” are all socialist ideals.
Of course the president knows this, but much like Hillary saying in 2007 or so that she didn’t thing of herself as a liberal but as a “modern progressive”, it’s because the American people understand on an intrinsic level that socialism is bad – it’s anathema to the American way of life, and people who live under socialist rule quickly find out it’s not something they like. (The same is very true of Progressives, but most folks don’t think of Progressives as the vile war-mongering alcohol-prohibitionist eugenicists they were – it’s a name game.) People who on the surface are socially lefty and like the idea of government doing one thing or another rapidly get sick of it when they find out they can’t buy raw milk, or can’t order foie gras, or find out there are regulations on their own behaviors that they object to. There are those who really are socialists and believe that “the greater good” means restricting people from 20 oz sodas, but even the brainwashed modern liberal begins to see that this stuff is tyranny. And the casual modern liberal suddenly sees that socialism isn’t liberal at all.
Which all goes to why Obama is mocking the term socialist. He puts it in quotes and equates it to “teabagger” because he’s trying to maximize criticisms of his critics while walking himself towards the middle by saying his own socialist policies aren’t “socialist” and those are just names thrown around by partisans. Saying he’s a socialist isn’t namecalling – it’s looking at his history, statements, policies and deeds and saying he is what he is.
That’s why to him, it’s okay to force people to buy health insurance, and for government to create winners and losers – because socialists believe that some people shouldn’t win and other people shouldn’t lose – so they’ll use the government’s gun to the heads of the successful to pay for the mistakes of the unsuccessful – thereby harming both parties by subsidizing failure and disincentivizing success.
Everyone loses except the socialist, who is the fair redistributor. If you’re a socialist, it’s much more convenient to use Alinksy’s rule of mockery to make fun of people for calling you a socialist – so they won’t recognize you for what you are.