Obama-backing actor Don Cheadle stepped into hot water for telling the black magazine Jet that Barack Obama "inherited an impossible situation. I wish he had not been so much of a consensus-seeker. I just wanted to see a more ‘gangsta’ president." He took to Twitter to step back from the G-word. "I wasn’t talking about pants sagging and forties and “hoes” or any of that other nonsense."
But he still wanted at least rhetorical violence from the president, a man "riding roughshod" over his opponents: "I still have a fevered dream of the POTUS smacking up John Boehner in a public forum in middle America and making him defend support of tax cuts for the super rich," Cheadle wrote. "I want to see somebody go to jail over the financial crisis and not just black, brown and poor whites over humbles and minor drug beefs. I want the president to bail out homeowners who fell for the okey doke from predatory lenders and are two seconds from living on the streets or are already there."
He added:
...I want to see industrial polluters who are killing all of us slowly by poisoning our fragile environment swap places with the kid doing 15 years in Chino for shoplifting shoes. I want him to stand in front of the haters and go all Bill Duke on them and say, 'You know you done f---ed up now, don’t you?' I kinda want a gangster president. I was about to write that in the future I would chose my words more carefully but I’m sure I won’t.
He offered the usual excuses, but is still unsatisfied:
Coming out of eight years of a president who I believe in many ways took us as dangerously close to the brink of destruction as any before him, I was hoping for a seismic shift in the other direction. I don’t think we’ve had that. Many of my friends and family are scratching it out somewhere decidedly south of the ever widening gap between the haves and have nots, looking at losing their homes, colleges they can’t afford and healthcare they can’t avail themselves of. They’re the ones I’m thinking of when I say gangster...
President Obama inherited a broken country mired in two wars, a financial crisis, a mortgage mess and more than we all probably even know about and has in my opinion brought us back from the brink. But I still see my friends in no better shape and the gap widening.
The actor concluded with violent thoughts, and then peace: "I’m glad he’s at the wheel and not me – I woulda swung at somebody by now. I wish you all peace in the New Year and let’s keep on keeping on."
