In politics there is always the give and take of opposing principles and approaches to common problems. An exchange of diverse views is healthy for any society but sadly the response from much of the right has degenerated to pointless name calling. Our local paper has published dozens of letters calling President Obama a socialist, a Nazi or worse names that Fox News has added to their meager vocabularies. The epithets seldom have any facts, corroborating lies or substance attached to them, just the same labels over and over again.
A favorite but inexplicable target is the President’s use of the Teleprompter. It seems that his detractors feel that using technology that allows the speaker to maintain uninterrupted eye contact with his audience is inferior to the large font, phonetically spelled cue cards favored and badly used by Bush. They maintain that the device is a crutch he can’t get by without even though we frequently hear the President speaking extemporaneously with great skill and thoughtfulness. Bush never seemed connected to the words he spoke and made his most memorable gaffes when he went off script. Bush frequently used a Teleprompter and still managed to screw it up. His delivery was so poor that no one made an issue of the tool that didn’t help him.
In an age when every word spoken by a world leader is parsed and dissected by the media and the blogosphere, it is sad that some of the people President Obama speaks for have a problem with the leader of their country wanting to get it right.
I'll bet the Teleprompter says, "Stick thumb up."