By James Donahue

President Barack Obama is probably among the bravest humans to step into the American political scene in a very long time. He is extremely popular with people not only in America but all over the world because he is boldly shedding light on a lot of ugly secrets left buried for the sake of great wealth and power for far too long.

That obviously takes courage and a commitment by a man who is demonstrating by his deeds his love for his country and the people he serves.

Not only is Mr. Obama exposing graft and corruption in high places, he is proposing in plain view to do something about it. He wants to provide health and quality education for all Americans, build public transit systems, finance a quest for new and inexpensive green energy as well as medical cures and get Americans working again.

He wants to pay for all of this by shutting down America’s military adventures on foreign soil, trimming the massive military budget as well as the general budget of obsolete programs that needed to be tossed years ago, cutting taxes on lower and middle income wage earners but hiking taxes on the individuals and corporations that have pocketed the wealth of the nation.

And this has stirred the ire of some very wealthy and consequently powerful people who would like to put the Obama Administration out of business as quickly as possible, push the nation back into the state of secret control we are emerging from, and try to make it all go away before the people discover that they like Obama’s new way of doing things.

Something magical occurred during the 2008 presidential campaign. Perhaps because the blatant graft expressed by the Bush gang pushed the pendulum about as far to the right as it could go, there was a mass awakening. Obama, the Democratic Party’s “dark horse” who was never supposed to have had a chance for the nation’s top job, fooled everybody. He emerged as a smart and brilliant orator who did and said all the right things to win the heart of the voters.

The job was supposed to have gone to Vietnam War hero John McCain who has been marching in lock step with the Republican Party bosses and enjoying the comforts of power for a very long time. The black young senator from Illinois, after only one term in office, was considered too green behind the ears to have won the election as handily as he did.

Once elected the strategy shifted to a daily barrage of verbal attacks by the talking radio and television heads like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, representing the voices of the extreme Republican right. Then the Republican legislators ganged up on the stimulus plan, trying in vain to find serious flaws that would open the plan up for hard public debate. There were none.

This was not an issue that could be successfully stalled. Because of runaway unemployment, crashing home values, and a block on the flow of cash that was affecting the entire world, everybody knew something had to be done and done quickly. Also Obama was too fine an orator. He put that silver tongue to work and the bill slipped through even the Senate, where the votes of at least three Republicans were needed for passage.

After delivering his arousing non-State-of-the-Union address to the House, Congress, the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his top administrative staff, something new and ominous has slipped into the picture.

Perhaps it began with that vicious cartoon in Rupert Murdock’s New York Post, depicting police gunning down a monkey. The caption was that someone else was going to have to write the next stimulus bill. The cartoon has triggered a storm of protests, especially among Black organizations, who are accusing Murdock of comparing President Obama to an ape, and promoting the image of treason and murder as something funny.

It did not stop there. This week Hannity posted a public poll on his web site which asked readers to choose their preference for getting President Obama out of office. The choices were by military coup, armed rebellion or a war for succession. Hannity, a spokesman for Murdock’s Fox News, also appears guilty of attempting to incite an act of treason.

John Bolton, a former Bush appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, long-time supporter of neo-conservatism, and said by many to have been an architect of the Iraq War, this week in a speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, said he sees President Obama as “the most radical president we have ever elected” and that because of Obama, America’s national security is at risk. He told the group it is now too late for the United States to deal with Iran and suggested that we may pay the price if Iran nukes Chicago. Chicago, for those who don’t know, is Obama’s home town, thus we have yet another veiled threat.

Once we began to notice them, the subliminal messages also have been popping out at us. Be watchful when surfing the web, especially on those public message boards.

One of the most blatant messages was a one-liner posted on a very active board. It came from an anonymous source and simply said: “God send the shooter.” It does not take a genius to understand what the author of that wicked suggestive statement meant.

Then there was the arrest of Saad Hussein, an Ethiopian man charged with sending an envelope laced with his own HIV-positive infected blood. Hussein said he cut his finger to make sure the document was smeared with the tainted blood before sending the letter.

Special web sites calling for Obama’s impeachment have already appeared on the Internet. Radical Christian prophets are saying our new president is the antichrist.

And in Los Alamitos, California, the town’s mayor Dean Grose is resigning after admitting he mailed out racist postcard images of the front lawn of the White House filled with watermelons. The words under the image read “No Easter Egg hunt this year.”

After only a few weeks in office, this man does not deserve the abuse now flying his way.

President Obama is America’s last hope in this time of extreme crisis, brought on by radical right-wing religious-oriented people, some of whom are now staging this twisted, perverse front against him. This is a racial-oriented hate movement, obviously representing a minority in a nation where polls show Mr. Obama is getting a 70 percent approval rating for the way he is running his office.

We understand that in a democratic society there always will be differences in political ideologies and this is healthy. Our system of government is designed so that these opinions and viewpoints can be fully debated and the wording of legislation altered to the best interests of the majority before actions become law.

If we allow ourselves to stoop to the kind of malicious verbal and physical assaults demonstrated in recent days, however, because a few people do not agree with the opinion of our elected leadership, America is in more serious trouble than anyone ever realized.