Obama Rips 'Name-Calling,' Inaugural Full of Name-Calling

In yesterday’s inaugural address, President Obama stated, “We cannot mistake absolutism for principle or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate.” But Obama was not shy about discarding reasoned debate in favor of brutal name-calling in order to ram forward his agenda. According to Obama, Republicans who oppose his progressivism:

• Don’t care about the elderly or the disabled: According to Obama, forcing a choice between “caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future” – also known as reality – is actually siding with a benighted past in which “twilight years were spent in poverty and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn”;
• Are selfish: If we worry about the future viability of programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, then we don’t want to “take the risks that make this country great”;
• Hate science: If we don’t believe Obama’s version of climate change, then we “deny the overwhelming judgment of science”;
• Are warmongers: Obama says that his agenda, and the agenda of the people, is opposed to “perpetual war”;
• Hate black people: Said Obama of voter ID laws, “Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote”;
• Hate immigrants: Obama set up a false choice between welcoming “the striving hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity” and “expell[ing] them from our country”;
• Don’t care about kids: Those who oppose Obama’s gun control agenda don’t make children “know that they are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm”;
• Hate gays: Obama said that opposing same-sex marriage means we don’t believe in equality, since “if we are all truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal, as well”;
• Are anarchists: Failing to buy into Obama’s agenda means that we don’t believe in roads, and think American soldiers “could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias.”

In other words, we’re rotten skunks if we oppose President Obama’s agenda: racist, sexist, bigoted homophobes who hate the elderly and the disabled, ignore science in favor of darkness, love war, and want to live in a Hobbesian chaos.

But no name-calling, please.

Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the book “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).