Republicans have been very reluctant to attack Obama for the whole of the past seven years. Whether it is the courtesies of the American system or Obama has the photos I don’t know. But now we shall see since he has moved to attack Donald Trump himself. This is from the NYT and featured at Drudge: Obama Accuses Trump of Exploiting Working-Class Fears.

President Obama said in a radio interview airing on Monday that Donald J. Trump, a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, is exploiting the resentment and anxieties of working-class men to boost his campaign. Mr. Obama also argued that some of the scorn directed at him personally stems from the fact that he is the first African-American to hold the White House.

That Obama reached for the race-card is disgusting and despicable but par for the course. Since nothing anyone in any leading position has said has referred to the President’s racial background – half white, half black – that he grabs for it in every controversy he is part of has degraded the American political system since it allows him to ignore the substantive parts of any criticism. But lets get to this business about resentment and anxieties, which are not just held by men, and not just held by members of the working class. Let us go on to what he had to say:

“If you are referring to specific strains in the Republican Party that suggest that somehow I’m different, I’m Muslim, I’m disloyal to the country, etc. — which unfortunately is pretty far out there, and gets some traction in certain pockets of the Republican Party, and that have been articulated by some of their elected officials — what I’d say there is that that’s probably pretty specific to me, and who I am and my background,” Mr. Obama told Steve Inskeep, an NPR correspondent. “In some ways, I may represent change that worries them.”

I just think he’s a far-left loon, and that pretty well covers the kinds of change he represents. If his standard of concern is whether something might “destroy the United States”, as he says below, I’m not sure short of a nuclear war what he would include. This is truly disturbing:

“This is a serious challenge — ISIS is a virulent, nasty organization [!!!!!] that has gained a foothold in ungoverned spaces effectively in Syria and parts of western Iraq,” Mr. Obama said, referring to attacks the group organized in Paris and apparently inspired in San Bernardino. “But it is also important for us to keep things in perspective, and this is not an organization that can destroy the United States.”

As for destroying the United States, there are other nations along the pathway to the US that might find things have deteriorated to a very considerable extent because of the American President. Think about this, a reminder of where things have gone with Iran:

The Iran deal isn’t merely sub-par diplomacy, it is a scandal. I don’t see how a president who took seriously his duty to preserve American security could have entered into it. There is another scandal, too: a journalistic one. Here, as in so many instances, reporters have covered up for the Obama administration by deliberately failing to report the facts surrounding the Iranian nuclear debacle. It would be interesting to compare the number of minutes that network news broadcasts have devoted, over the last few months, to the fulminations of Donald Trump with the minutes they have devoted to the crumbling of the Iran agreement. Likewise with column inches in our supposedly sophisticated newspapers.

But Obama has now taken on Donald Trump who will or will not react and will or will not reply directly to what has been said. This really is a moment of truth. I don’t know why it has taken so long for such a showdown to have occurred, but the time has now arrived. Is Trump up to it? We are now about to find out.