A tried but not so true strategy

The Grand Old Tea Party (GOTP) probably never had any idea that someone named Barack Hussein Obama could ever be elected President. President Obama explained it this way: “…my second name came from someone who obviously never thought I’d ever run for President.”

Once the unthinkable happened, though, the GOTP came up with an ambitious goal ably enunciated by Kentucky’s Senior Senator, Mitch McConnell, who said it should be the aim of the GOTP to limit President Obama to one term.

And the GOTP had some good ideas as to how that could be achieved. One way was to play on the fears of its base by playing up the scarier aspects of the new President and what better way to do that than to concentrate on that scary middle name that even the President didn’t seem too willing to embrace publicly; yes, Hussein, as in Saddam Hussein. Oh, there was a good guy named Hussein; the one-time King of Jordan-Hussein bin Talal-who was nothing if not a strong ally of the U. S. But let’s face it, the bad guy Saddam left a far stronger impression, even though he, too, was an ally of the U. S. in the early years of the Reagan presidency.

Then there was that similarity of the name, Barack Obama to that of Osama bin Laden, and anyone with such a name had to be a Muslim. And we all know Muslims is the bad guys, even though we buy a lot of our poison of choice from them; petroleum.

Included in the scare campaign, too, was the idea that the President wasn’t even an American citizen; that he’d forged his Hawaiian birth certificate because his real place of birth was Kenya.

Well, we all know how that turned out. Everything the GOTP used as an assumption to promote ill-will towards President Obama has been disproven. More importantly, even the assumptions that he couldn’t handle the affairs of his office have been shown to be wrong as well, as the survivors of many an Al Qaida official could tell you.

One joke told by Obama supporters goes something like this: How would life have been different if Obama had lost the last campaign? Osama bin Laden would still be here and General Motors and Chrysler wouldn’t.

With all that, you’d think this plan of attack would have been dropped by now. But that isn’t so. Here in Coal Country, where Obama was beaten badly every time his name appeared on the ballot, the various coal associations are going with their first plan; identify Obama with a war on coal purportedly being waged by the EPA.

Explicit in this attack is the idea that the war on coal has cost the area jobs. But according to a couple of stories in the Appalachian Express, the number of jobs in the coal industry is at its highest level since 1997.

Now that had to be explained somehow, so in the second story, some coal officials explained the extra jobs were necessitated by unnecessary federal regulations, forgetting that ignoring “unnecessary federal regulations” was what cost 29 miners their lives in Montcoal, WV.

Not that anything would actually get Obama any more votes here in Coal Country, though. We don’t want any outsiders telling us what to do, unless they are coal producers. Them we’re okay with.