Obama’s popularity on the rise
The President of The United States has a good reason to gloat nowadays.
But he won’t.
A brand new CNN/ORC poll shows that President Obama’s job approval has risen to its highest level in more than two years – 50 percent.
What gives?
It was a week in which Southern states started removing the last vestiges of a lost war, and, more importantly, a failed segregation strategy from public buildings.
The nation’s first black president, the living embodiment of that failed strategy, applauded that development.
But within days, he had lots more to applaud.
I said applaud – not gloat.
The U.S. Supreme Court had the nation’s complete attention for two days.
The Court ruled (5-4) in favor of plaintiffs who’d claimed that the Texas housing department had engaged in racial discrimination when it decided to put too much subsidized housing in urban neighborhoods, but not in predominantly white, suburban neighborhoods.
Look around Uniontown, and you’ll understand that kind of thing.
It’s one of my pet peeves.
Then, in one of the most anticipated opinions in decades, one that caused conservatives to look like they were fighting for air, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of Obamacare.
Soon, Republican presidential candidates (by now they could fill-up Heinz Field) started rushing to microphones and cameras to claim that the Supreme Court has gone commie.
Obamacare is probably here to stay. At least until Ted Cruz mounts some kind of coup. That won’t happen either, unless he force-feeds the whole danged country anesthesia.
The following day, while Fox News was still in Obamacare-paralysis, Republicans got another jolt.
The Supreme Court said gay and lesbian Americans can now marry (altogether now) EACH OTHER!
I first saw the news on CNN. I immediately flipped to Fox News, and within minutes, my TV started to melt.
According to some residents of Fox-land, the Supreme Court has never determined a case involving marriage or family law.
Even I knew that wasn’t true.
On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia, that laws designed to prevent interracial marriages were unconstitutional.
When one Fox News pundit was reminded of the Court’s 1967 ruling, he responded, “So what? They made mistakes before, they don’t have to make them now.”
Urgh!
Isn’t it funny how conservatives constantly us that government should stay out of our lives, but they turn themselves into human pretzels to explain how government should tell us who we can’t marry?
As Obama was congratulating the Court for its same sex ruling, and lighting the White House with that now-famous gay pride tint, he was headed to Air Force One.
He was off to Charleston, S.C., where he capped off what could have been his most successful week since he was first elected.
“Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound,” he started singing to the congregation at the end of his eulogy for the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney.
If you closed your eyes, I’m pretty sure you didn’t confuse him with Luther Vandross.. That didn’t matter.
It was simply a moment of pure courage, and genuine feelings that could easily find its way into history books.
I’ve read the idealized version of America in those books.
But that was the real thing.
Meanwhile, the performance artist/presidential candidate – Donald Trump – is showing that he could learn a thing or two about “grace” from the president.
When he announced he was running for president, a week earlier, he invited massive recriminations with his statements about Mexican immigrants.
“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” he told his assembled Trump-ites.
Rapists?
Did I just hear jaws drop across the Western Hemisphere?
Since then, Univision and NBC, which carried his Miss Universe Pageant, have cut ties with him. And not only that, NBC has jettisoned him from “Celebrity Apprentice.”
Trump owns the pageant, but he was merely a salaried employee of “Celebrity Apprentice.”
Meanwhile, Mexico has announced it won’t send any contestants to the Miss Universe Pageant.
What’s Trump’s response to all of this?
I don’t know, but it’s probably a “disgrace.”
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and a 20-year veteran of television news.