Late Night Thoughts: It’s Getting Ugly Out There

I’m not sure if this is going to give the President Republican or Independent creds or not but check this out.  I guess the hippies are bashing back.  First, the AFP is reporting that Peter Fonda is calling President Obama a “traitor” for his handling of BP.  Fonda is a big environmental activist.  He basically accused the administration of gagging scientists and the press and threw in some anglo-bashing while he was at it.

“I sent an email to President Obama saying, ‘You are a f(expletive) traitor,’ using those words… ‘You’re a traitor, you allowed foreign boots on our soil telling our military — in this case the coastguard — what they can and could not do, and telling us, the citizens of the United States, what we could or could not do’.”

The DC village is responding to the Cornel West hooplah with more hipster bashing.  Jonathan Capehart has upped West’s ante  by saying the West is no better than a birther.  The Washington Villagers are hammering back on both the Chris Hedges Truthdig interview and the Ed Schultz interview last night.

Anyone who knows me, and knows me well, knows that I have little patience for the “Blacker than thou” crowd. These are the self-appointed guardians of what it means to be black — a decidedly limited and ignorant perspective that has more to do with the accuser’s insecurities than the alleged transgressions of the accused. And the leader of the pack these days seems to be Dr. Cornel West. In an interview with the Web site Truthdig, the brilliant Princeton professor took off after President Obama in a manner that was myopic, offensive and embarrassingly petty.

Capehart reports on the Schultz interview as follows.. Be sure to check out this verbal body slam.

Challenging the president’s progressive credentials in that Truthdig interview, West slammed the president as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.” And then there was this:

“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” West said. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. . . . When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening.”

“Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive,” West said. “He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.”

Asked by MSNBC’s Ed Schultz last night to explain this, West doubled down by saying, “Obama has a predilection much more toward upper-middle-class white brothers and Jewish brothers.”

Okay, I’m just gonna let y’all discuss this.  It’s a free-for-all-late-night open thread.