If ever we needed a prime example of how the 2012 election is about the hatred of America's first black President, Barack Obama, and not politics and issues that matter to most Americans, this certainly fits the bill.

I don't doubt that many conservatives disagree with President Obama's policies and harbor legitimate criticism. I also don't doubt that many would vote against him this year just as they did in 2008, simply because he's a Democrat. But ever since the racist birther movement came into being, it's been clear that many Republicans hate Barack Obama because of who he is, and that hatred is reaching a boiling point. Some of that is because he's black. Some of it's because he's a liberal or a Democrat. Much of it is a combination honest disagreement, ugly irrational prejudices, and near sociopath fantasies (socialism, treason) that reveals a dominating psychology of deep seeded hatred for people who look, think, and act differently, and the tendency to dehumanize and demonize those people.

Looking differently has become a crime in America, in the minds of many conservatives. Just ask any Muslim, or African American for that matter. It's a crime to think differently. Just ask the woman at a Mitt Romney campaign event who suggested that President Obama be charged with treason (punishable by execution) for supposedly increasing the size of the federal government, even though he's overseen one of the largest decreases in the size of the federal workforce in decades.

Ask the conservatives that have told me in recent years that liberalism is be "vanquished" and that liberals are worse than al Qaeda.

Some people have become so warped by their extreme hatred, fear, and intolerance of different ideas and mere dissent, that one Newsviner said this afternoon that they didn't care if Mitt Romney's campaign got its money from Russia (recently described by the right and Mitt Romney as America's #1 enemy), China, or Iran -- a country that conservatives say we should devastate with a nuclear first-strike, slaughtering countless millions of innocent civilians and creating millions of new terrorists overnight.

They hate him so much that federal laws can and should be bent, ignored, and outright broken. A chief birther criticism of the President is that he magically somehow raised most of his money from foreign countries, which is illegal (for the moment, Republicans are surely working on that as well after Citizens United), because he's a foreigner, and you know, that just makes sense to them.

Obviously.

But on the (only) slightly saner scale of Republican, they are perfectly willing to have American elections influenced and even bought by foreign powers -- supposedly our biggest enemies in the world -- if it means getting rid of Barack Obama. (Maybe we should have seen that coming, given their eagerness to have our elections bought by corporations.)

Think about that for a minute. Obama is on the campaign trail talking about his plans for jobs and the economy, while Republican voters wouldn't care if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- who has called for the destruction of the State of Israel -- wrote a $150 million dollar check to Mitt Romney's campaign in order to get rid of him.

Some have proposed that Republicans aren't fit to govern anymore, based on arguments such as this. Is such a thing really in doubt? Republicans want their own President arrested, charged with treason, and presumably executed for something that's not even a crime when the President did the exact opposite of what they believe. Some would have no problem with the holocaust denying, Israel destroying President of Iran (or the state) directly funding Mitt Romney's campaign. And those are the rational ones. Many, at times as much as 50% of all Republicans, still think the President is a Kenyan.

Don't think this is conspiracy theory cherry picking. There are plenty of liberal truthers out there, but there aren't any in the House of Representatives, or Senate, or running for President. There are many birthers in both houses of Congress constantly trying to pass their racist legislation, many more doing the same at the state level, and even birther GOP presidential candidates.

Politics has ceased being about issues but not because of some bipartisan breakdown. Democrats are still talking about jobs and trying to pass jobs bills. Republicans are trying to pass pseudo-abortion bans. Democrats are on the stump talking about the economy. Republicans are talking about birth certificates, treason, and Iran funding Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.

Here are some salient facts about our socialist, Kenyan, traitor President. Here's why it's so important to get rid of him that even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and China should be able to fund Mitt Romney's campaign.

Between May of 2007 and January of 2009, unemployment had already increased 3.4 points. It would continue climbing until October, topping out at 10%. That all came before President Obama was sworn into office. After that, unemployment increased another 2.2 points. Those are some ugly numbers, but only the a dishonest hack could blame the President for unemployment getting that high in the first place. Since October of 2009 unemployment has fallen 1.8 point, almost as much as it had risen post-Bush. Another drop of 0.4 points it unemployment will officially be lower than before President Obama took office.

Those are the undisputed facts. The why and how are debatable, but for me, what matters is that rising unemployment stopped, then fell, and by most private and government projection will continue to fall. Mitt Romney claims due to his policies, unemployment will drop below 6% by 2016, the end of his possible first term. Funny enough, the federal government also projects unemployment to drop below 6% by 2016, under President Obama's policies.

Is it what we'd like? Of course not. There's nothing partisan about hating 8.2% unemployment today and 6% unemployment four years from now. But 8.2% today is better than 10% 2.5 years ago. 6% in four years (under either candidate) is better than 8.2% today.

But there's something very partisan and ugly when a Republican voter sees that, and thinks this President has to go so badly that Iran and China should be able to pay for the GOP's general election campaign. Perhaps Ahmadinejad can score a sweet keynote address at the Republican National Convention later this year, too.

The job figures look pretty much the same. The economy shed 741,000 jobs in January of 2009, the month of Obama's inauguration. It was the worst of the recession in this area:

Credit anyone you want with that, the issue as raised by people like the Newsvine user I'm talking about is that it's so horrible that America's enemies ought to be able to fund Republican political campaigns. I just don't see it. I see a turnaround that's not as good as most people would have liked, but it's still a turnaround. 3.3 million jobs as of March.

There are so many legitimate debates to have here. Did Obama's policies turn the economy around? Did he hinder it somehow? Who knows. What's not debatable is that we had a turnaround and that anyone who thinks the last three years have been so bad that it's cool if Iran, that supposedly wants to enact a second holocaust (not really true, but that's what *these* people think), fund Mitt Romney's campaign. And China. And #1 enemy Russia.

Professional Republicans are no longer fit to govern America, and increasingly, conservative voters aren't sane enough to cross the street without someone holding their hand, much less vote.

This article is Copyright © 2012 Paul W. Tenny (license). The author can be found on Twitter or contacted via email.