From slavery to deportation

Those Republicans are always outraged about something if they can stick it to President Obama.    Speaker John Boehner, a.k.a. Dr. Doom, is now accusing Obama of "not listening to the American people" - the same  people who elected Obama twice!  If Boehner has a gift, it's his ability to make up things.

But now we have a bunch of conservatives blistering the president for his remarks at a prayer breakfast in which  he brought up some  undistinguished periods in America's past to jolt us from our high horses.  The acid response from Jim Gilmore, the Republican ex-governor of Virginia,  was the essence of the misplaced outrage.

His feelings sorely shattered,  Gilmore asserted: "He has offended  every believing Christian in the United States.  This goes further  to the point that Mr. Obama does not believe in America or the values we all share."

These are our shared values, folks? Really?

Not since the Dred Scott era has a political party been so dreadfully controlled by a single phenomenon  - today, a right-wing religious stranglehold; in the  brutal days of King Cotton, the southern masters  who thrived on barbaric slave labor. It  included floggings, severe beatings, family breakups separating children from their mothers' arms, the humiliation of being sold more than once  on the auction block.

As the Scott case turned on whether he could be free from bondage after entering a slave state from a free state,  arguments turned on the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that permitted the return of slaves to their masters or "slave catchers" - an inhuman  exercise endorsed by  the U.S.Supreme Court at a time when  13 pct. of the population were slaves.

Chief Justice Roger B. Taney cast the ugliest stone in ruling against Scott's freedom. In his judicial wisdom,  he declared  that blacks possessed "no rights which the white  man was bound to respect".

And now, a Federal judge in Texas has  temporarily blocked Obama's  executive order  giving deportation protection to 5 million undocumented immigrants,including 270,000 who arrived as children. U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen,  an appointee of George W. Bush (and graduate of Denison University in Ohio),. has long been known as a critic of more elastic immigration policy, warning that it "endangered America" and invited  the "most dangerous criminals in society".

With that, I guess it would be OK if I now expressed my own outrage. Wasn't Ohio
Atty. Gen. Mike DeWine, who keeps busy with this sort of thing, among the  24  other states  in the suit against Obama? Yes, he was.