Is Disrespecting the President OK? Hypocrisy Run Amok

From Reason magazine, an essay on the question: Is It Cool To Call the President a Bastard Again?

For years, we were told that criticizing the occupant of the White House was “rank disrespect,” as Jonathan Capehart wrote in the Washington Post. Opposition to the sitting president was very likely motivated by racism, Charles M. Blow mused in The New York Times. “Openly defying and brazenly disrespecting your president, while hoping that he fails, is not called patriotism … It is called treason,” insisted one particularly moronic meme by Occupy Democrats.

But a few years of experience can have a wonderfully transformative effect on political culture. One election later, and Americans who once insisted that saying mean things about an elected official was unseemly and unforgivable have rediscovered the liberating potential of dissent.

But with Trump:

And, where once Hollywood celebrities issued a thoroughly creepy “pledge to serve Barack Obama” when he took office as president, eight additional years of seeing the duties of that office exercised led us to singer Madonna saying she’s thought a lot about “blowing up the White House.”

Madonna made her comments at a massive Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration during which hundreds of thousands of regular Americans promised to resist the new chief executive before he’s even had a chance to start rivaling the damage inflicted by his predecessor.

It’s all such a welcome change.

For the libertarians at Reason, it is a welcome change, since the notion that a strong, righteous president will set everything right in the country is a huge threat to liberty. When all your hopes are invested in the president, then you’ll condone illegitimate exercises of power. Remember Obama and his pen and phone.

And the “blow up the White House” comment by the ageing slut Madonna is, in fact, no real threat to the Republic. But then, neither was the stupid “birther” notion that Obama was born in Kenya. But please, let’s just have an end to the hypocrisy.