In his column posted last night, New York Times editor Andrew Rosenthal asserts: “There is a racist undertone to many of the Republican attacks leveled against President Obama for the last three years.” Rosenthal maintains “you can detect the undertone in the level of disrespect for this president that would be unthinkable were he not African-American.”
Apparently, Mr. Rosenthal was out of the country during the Bush presidency.
Nonetheless, Rosenthal’s charge concerning the unthinkable “level of disrespect” resonates. Republicans haven’t comported themselves well around someone who is “sort of a god” and can lower oceans and heal the planet. For someone like that, anything short of uncritical support is necessarily disrespectful, and probably treasonous.