The Pandemic of Foot-in-Mouth Disease

Politicians have always been susceptible to foot-in-mouth disease, but we appear to have reached a pandemic since Barack Obama became President. Nearly every day, some Republican, or one of the party’s erstwhile supporters, comes down with the disease. Instead of seeking treatment for the affliction, each compounds it by claiming that the illness was misdiagnosed by others.

For example, Mark Halperin was infected on national television, making a scatological reference to the President. He later offered an unctuous apology. In Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the disease manifested itself when he proclaimed:

“Everybody goes to clinics, to hospitals, to doctors, and so on. Some people go to Planned Parenthood. But you don’t have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your cholesterol or your blood pressure checked. If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.”

When told that only 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s work involves abortions, Kyl proclaimed that his statement was not meant to be taken as fact.

Halperin and Kyl are not the only ones. There have been countless other instances in which Republicans have either used racially charged language only to claim it wasn’t meant to be racial, or have made blatantly false statements only to claim the statements were not meant to be taken as facts. The most recent example of this is Rep. Doug Lamborn, a conservative Colorado Republican. Last Friday, Lamborn went on the radio and proclaimed that working with President Obama would be “like touching tar baby.”

“I don’t even want to have to be associated with him,” Lamborn said in an interview on the Caplis and Silverman radio show on KHOW 630 AM in Denver. “It’s like touching a tar baby, and you get it – you know, you’re stuck, and you’re part of the problem now, and you can’t get away. I don’t want that to happen to us, but if it does, or not, he’ll still get – properly so – the blame, because his policies, for four years, will have failed the American people.”

The “us” Lamborn is talking about are Republicans. The person who will be blamed for the problems is of course Obama.

Lamborn’s comment raised the ire of numerous people, including the heads of the local NAACP, the Urban League of the Pikes Peak Region, and the El Paso County Democratic Party. Each decried his comments as racist because the phrase "tar baby" has been used to denigrate black people.

“The world already views (El Paso County) as ultra conservative, ultra-right-wing, Tea-Party-loving, gay bashing, an epicenter of hate,” Rosemary Harris Lytle, president of the Colorado Springs chapter of the NAACP told The Gazette newspaper. “With two vitriolic words, our own Congressman again sealed our fate.”

Lamborn’s people denied his comments were racial in nature. Instead, they said the reference was made because working with Obama created a sticky situation, a quagmire. The dictionary does indeed define tar baby as “a situation, problem, or the like, that is almost impossible to solve or to break away from.” But if Lamborn only meant to suggests a sticky situation, then why use a term that could so easily be seen as racially derogatory? Why not just say quagmire? Why liken the President, instead of the situation, to tar baby as was the case when the fallout from the Iran-Contra affair was dubbed George H.W. Bush's tar baby?

The reason, I believe, is simple: He knew what he was saying (“and you get it”), and he knew that he could cite the folktale “Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby” for cover. Lamborn also may have made a Freudian slip, giving away more about how he and the Republican Party view the President.

Allow me to elaborate in a conspiratorial way: Brer Fox (the GOP) hates Brer Rabbit (Obama), so Brer Fox creates a tar baby (the debt ceiling crisis) in order to trap Brer Rabbit and destroy him. Why? The answer may be as simple as Brer Rabbit is to sassy, to uppity for Brer Fox. Brer Rabbit eventually was able to trick Brer Fox, who threw Brer Rabbit into the briar patch. Brer Rabbit, sullied by the tar baby (debt ceiling debate), was able to escape.

With the debt ceiling debate over for now we have irrefutable proof that the role of the GOP (Brer Fox) is to destroy Obama (Brer Rabbit) by any means necessary. Now Obama has to figure out how he will deal with the GOP from this day forward. No longer can he look to them to make compromises that are good for the country. He has to understand that from now on, he must seek the support of his party faithful and any moderates on the other side of the aisle.

While many Republicans, especially those buoyed by the Tea Party, see their roles as burning down the house that is the federal government, polls show that many supporters of the Tea Party (57 percent in some polls) seek compromise. They supported the Tea Party not because they wanted to destroy the government or Obama, but rather because they wanted a government that would work, that would no longer follow the status quo.

Instead, those people helped to create more dysfunction than ever. And now it is up to Obama to remind them of that mistake so it can be corrected in 2012.