Like most Americans, I hate seeing our nation’s capital entangled in the throes of hatred and ignorance that have been plaguing it almost since the beginning of President Obama’s presidency.  At first, Republicans vowed to make sure Obama was a one-term president by refusing to approve anything the President favored.   Of course, that led to the ludicrous spectacle of Republican legislators rejecting legislative initiatives that they themselves had once advocated, e.g., Affordable Care Act, solely because the President supported them.

Not only did the R’s strategy of recalcitrance and obstruction make them look silly, it also didn’t work — President Obama is a second-term president.  And now that they’ve brought the country to the brink of economic collapse, they start complaining that the President, for whom they’ve shown such disdain and overt lack of respect, doesn’t want to negotiate with them.  Except he does . . . if only they propose realistic plans that don’t include the defunding of the Affordable Care Act or funding the government for a mere six weeks so we can have this fun all over again in time for Christmas.  As for the healthcare law, it was an issue at the core of his campaign, and upon winning the election, it’s a safe bet that a majority of Americans want it to go forward.

Of course, the flames of this crisis were mightily flamed by Texas’s junior senator Ted “Cruzoid.”  First, there was his pseudo filibuster in the Senate, then just yesterday he found another stage on the Mall.  He squished up his face and pontificated to a small throng of individuals, presumably veterans, who seemed to have emerged from under rocks in Appalachia, Georgia, Alabama, or who knows where.  As they congregated around a closed war memorial, he expressed high dudgeon that the government had closed down access to federal facilities and monuments. Makes you wonder what he thought “government shutdown” meant. Everything except his chosen stage of the day? Even so, the fact remains that we all know what kind of person Cruz is and what he is doing. He doesn’t believe what he says but he needs to demagogue somewhere about something.  After all, he has to do something more than read Green Eggs and Ham on the Senate floor to impress his tea party followers.

But as obnoxious and destructive as the Cruzoid undoubtedly is, he doesn’t bother me as much as Judicial Watch founder Larry Klayman and the crowds who seem to thrive on the hate and intolerance spewed by Klayman and his ilk. After Cruz spoke yesterday, Klayman — cheered on by crowds waving Confederate and Marine Corps flags — demanded President Obama quit reading his Quran and come out with his hands up!  And after that, then what, Ku Klux Klayman?  Were you going to lynch him?  You have no jail cell to throw him in, so what did you plan to do with him, pray tell, once he submitted to you, hands up?  Set the dogs on him?  What a sick spectacle!

I can live with this guy having his private thoughts or voicing his doubts among his comrades in Crazytown about the president’s birthplace and his religion, because it only illustrates his peculiar brand of stupid given all that we know about the Obama family. This is a free country, after all, and you can be as stupid or as uneducated as you like, for all I care, although I’d prefer your staying under the rocks you crawled out from under.

BUT, to call for the President to leave his office (and presumably the presidency) to submit to you and your mob, hands up, in front of the Confederate flag?? The flag of those who chose to secede from the union rather than admit that black men and women should live as free citizens?  To think that an American president should surrender to some maniac who has as much authority, actual or moral, as a worthless yard slug may be the height of insanity.

However measured on the insanity scale, this man’s demand of our President could not be more offensive to me and every person who believes in democracy . . . every citizen who believes that the individual who garners the majority of the votes in this country’s electoral college gets to be President for four years, barring death or impeachment. And more particularly, KKKlayman offends every one of us who voted for President Obama and believes that he has more goodness, more intelligence, and more dignity in his little finger than any human being this man and his motley crew have ever had the privilege to know.  They could learn a lot from President Barack Obama.

Which, of course, is what enrages them the most. How dare this uppity black man (I will not use the “n” word, although I’m sure they think it), be better, smarter, and more respected in the world than any white man at this point in history!!!  Was I the only one watching Klayman on television last night and thinking that this could have been a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan, sans hoods and torches? Isn’t their anger about a black man who doesn’t know his place and stay there?  It certainly isn’t about Allah because everyone with a lick of sense knows the President and his family worship a Christian faith.  That’s just pure pretext for “he’s not our type . . . he’s black!”

If only there were a way to yell them down, drown them out, drive them out of town with sounds of our screams of outrage and collective fury against their attempts to destroy our democracy, to kill this beautiful experiment in self-government called American democracy, which we, the people, have cherished and nurtured every tortured step of the way.  We even send our young men and women in harm’s way to make the world safe for a democracy such as ours.  Many die for this cause and are proud to do so.

I would also yell out that I’m proud to have voted for Barack Obama, a black man who was born in America of a Kenyan father and American mother, and frankly, I don’t care what god he worships, if any, because his values are on public display every day of his life. He cares about his fellow man and woman, about their jobs, their children’s education, their access to health care, and spends every waking moment trying to figure out what he can do to help. He has worked hard on our behalf for four years, and last year, I gave him my vote again, for another four years. I just wish you, Ted Cruzoid, KKKlayman, and all the rock dwellers, would shut up and let him do the job I elected him to do, because when you try to take him hostage, you take me and my sacred vote hostage.

And that, Sam-I-am, I do not like.