Without intending to defend WaitingPatiently in the slightest, I should correct some of you that are stating that Obama could not be a dictator on the grounds of his being elected. Dictators can and have certainly been elected to their positions. A prime example is Adolf Hitler - Hitler was legitimately elected to his position. You can most certainly be elected and be a dictator. Furthermore, once firmly in control, dictators never actually abolish elections. One of the means that they maintain the appearances of popularity is by maintaining elections, strong-arming the populace into supporting them, and rigging the vote so that they can say they are governing by the will of the people. Saddam Hussein still held "elections" up until he was overthrown. So the fact that someone is elected does not mean that the individual in question is not a dictator.
That said, it is an unbelievable stretch for these idiots to say that Obama is a dictator. Despite the unpopularity of the Bush presidency, it is a stretch to call him a dictator as well. The reason for this is that presidents in this country are still strongly limited to executive actions. They still have strong checks and balances on their power in the forms of Congress and the Judiciary, not to mention the state governments themselves.
Sadly, most Americans, Right and Left, are woefully naive when it comes to dictatorships, the means by which they gain power, and the means by which they maintain that power. The seizing and maintaining of power is exceptionally difficult and requires certain preconditions which simply do not exist in the United States - not under Bush and not under Obama.
A dictatorship is not simply something you engineer because you are evil and ambitious. It requires an environment of desperation among the populace of a nation. It also requires the presence of a strong leader who is capable of inspiring loyalty. The atmosphere of desperation has to be so great that the population of the nation in question empower that leader to do what he feels necessary to correct the course of the nation. This isn't the sort of desperation that arises from the knocking down of large buildings with planes or from a failing health care system. In a modern industrialized nation such as what we find in North America or Europe, it would have to be paradigm-shifting desperation where drastic measures are absolutely necessary to change the course of events. Dictators are most often creatures of necessity, not evil or mere ambition. They are most often highly capable and inspirational leaders who rally popular support in times where drastic and dramatic action is perceived as absolutely necessary. The "evils" of dictatorship arise because power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It's far more likely to happen here in the US than in Canada or Europe. If the sort of influential lunatics we see here on FSTDT keep having their way, the world is going to pass us by and people might feel the need to embrace drastic measures to either catch up or to maintain our sphere of influence. That is why it is so important for us to implement things like universal health care as well as other reforms- so that we never have to reach that point.
