It is at once infuriating, hilarious, heartening and painful to watch The Obama Administration slowly figure out -- in public and in real-time -- that, once again, the fucking Liberals were dead right all along:
From "Talking Points Memo":
Golly....“There’s oftentimes the impulse to suggest that, if the two parties are disagreeing, they’re equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle,” Obama cautioned the room full of reporters. “And an equivalence is presented, which reinforces people’s cynicism about Washington in general. This is not one of those situations where there is an equivalence.”The president noted that a similar theme has played out on other key issues, including cap-and-trade and Obama’s own health care law, both of which were first proposed as conservative alternatives to liberal approaches to environmental and health care reforms.“Suddenly, this is some socialist overreach,” Obama joked.“It is important to remember that the positions I’m taking on the budget and a host of other issues, if we had been having this discussion 20 years ago, or even 15 years ago, it would have been considered squarely centrist positions,” Obama said. “What has changed is the center of the Republican Party.”
Also too, no one could have predicted.
Also too, if this goes on, who knows? Next month, the President may be writing guest op-eds in the "New York Times" daring to call into question the Very Serious Reasonableness of David Fucking Brooks.
8 comments:
Obama is at best a centrist in the form of a 1970's era Democrat or Republican. You're absolutely correct.
I'm less worried about the authoritarians and their fascist enablers calling him a socialist, as much as I'm worried about what it means when the current Democratic president is, at best, a centrist Republican from the 1970s.
If our options are a 1970s Republican or a 2010s Republican, sure, I'll pull the lever for the 70s version. But man, are we sincerely screwed. If it takes half as long to get the Democratic party back to 1970s levels of liberalism, it's going to be 2025 before we can start solving any problems.
Personally, I don't think we've got that long.
Wow. "...slowly figure it out..." You still peddling that stuff, huh?
Yep, them darkies are always a little slow to catch on. Clearly someone named Barack Hussein Obama being elected President of the United of States of America. and the first with his skin tone, just happened by luck - not by his own ability to read situations and develop plans of action. And the fact that he's going to win reelection easily this fall despite all his naive slowness, well you already know...because of luck. Hell, he'd be winning Mississippi if only he'd listen to us white liberal bloggers!
And the fact that he was loudly denouncing the invasion of Iraq while it was happening and a proponent of single-payer for years leading up to his time on the national stage means nothing, or even worse, he was simply pandering to us so he could become a trojan horse for Wall Street and do their bidding once in office. Never mind the fact that it was members of his own party, like Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and so on stopping everything he tried to do from the beginning. Nope, no difficult dynamics at play there at all. All he had to do was talk tougher to them, duh.
I learn so much reading white liberal blogs!
Anonymous - Pretty breathtaking to make DG's post look like a nail, you there with your hammer (and presuming you're not a troll). Basic proposition of empirical science: you need a plausible hypothesis before you examine the data. You think the best interpretation of the post is a racial assumption that Obama is stupid? Here's a plausible hypothesis: no one can become a major party candidate for President without the comfort of an adequate element of concentrated private wealth (CPW) that he/she will not disserve its interests. DG did not refer to "Obama" being slow to figure it out, he referred to "the Obama administration." Observing the fecklessness of the Democratic establishment over the past three decades, again one must choose among competing hypotheses: is that collection of elite-educated folks just stupid? Or is it just the challenge (that the Republicans do not face) of trying to always keep CPW happy while convincing a reasonably thoughtful party base that you are concerned about the general welfare? And PS you ought to spend a little time learning about the difference between redistributionist liberalism and the analytical left.
Anon-
I fail to see where in DG's post there exists any semblance of racism. I'm going to sound like a conservative here, but you're the one bringing up race, hotshot.
Also, take a good, long look at Obama's rhetoric on the campaign trail. It's pretty fucking clear that he had no idea that Republicans would do whatever it took to make him a failure.
You should seek counseling. You're clearly caught up blaming race on everything. And by the last line of your comment, it appears that you're the racist here, since you're assuming that white liberal bloggers are all racists by default.
Please. Seek help.
And WHY did Obama have "no idea that Republicans would do whatever it took to make him a failure" given the treatment of our previous "progressive" president - after he essentially gave them everything they wanted legislatively?
Was Obama too young to notice what came down in 1998?
Let us give him a pass in that.
Why was he unable to hear (starting, officially, one day after his inauguration) the persistent public proclamations of the radical reich that their common goal was to crush his presidency?
John Puma
John-
Either Obama is a total corporate shill, which he may very well be, or he's incompetent.
You pick.
As much as people may hope and pray that there are political solutions to our problems, there isn't. I'm fairly certain if we don't rid ourselves of our oligarch owners, neo-feudalism it will be.
I've never listened to an Obama speech, because I came to this conclusion years ago. I don't expect Obama or any Democrat with actual power to fix things. At best, they can slow down the descent into hell. I thought Obama might be able to do it, but alas, he wasn't.
So, you decide. Is he a totally 100% purchased corporate stooge, or 100% incompetent?
Because if Obama isn't one of the those two choices, then he thought he had a chance at "changing" things. In which case, I'm not sure what your asking me.
It's not a matter of either stoogeness or incompetency.
The sense of betrayal is hard to overcome. The same man who got us "all fired up" for the campaign in 2008 "sold us all out" on nearly every issue since then.
I just don't know if he can get a necessary percentage of those "fired up" 2008 voters back for this fall.
To casimir: whatever support must be gotten from this CPW, it's still a matter of citizens voting.
What a paradox, huh?
Basil-
I'm just responding to someone who quoted me.
I don't think Obama is incompetent or a shill. I do think that he probably believed that with the economy taking a massive dump and the support that he was getting (along with Dems who rode in on his coattails) that he probably could introduce a few "centrist" policies and get some support.
So, in that case, I think Obama had "no idea that Republicans would do whatever it took to make him a failure" because of what he said, and the circumstances of the time.
The person who quoted me brings up Clinton and 1998. Well, it's fine to point to impeachment of a president in the middle of his second term to show Republican bullshit, but that is why I gave him a couple of choices.
-Obama is a shill and knew but didn't care about Republicans wanting to make him a failure.
-Obama is incompetent and didn't know the Republicans would do anything to make him fail, since EVERYONE knew otherwise.
-Obama didn't know Republicans would do anything to make him fail because he believed that at the time, they at least a few Republicans would try to help.
I'm not trying to intentionally limit choices here, and shit, it could very well be a little of all 3 and another 42 factors...but MY opinion is that Obama probably thought he could do more than he could, and now realizes that he was screwed from the start.
Notice, of course, that this all started because some anonymous poster implied that DG is racist and that Obama wasn't slow to catch on to Republican intransigence, which is why I originally made the statement that Obama didn't appear to understand that Republicans wanted him to fail...which is all DG said, which somehow became racist. Ugh.
This is my fault, and I apologize. I fed the racist anonymous troll, so now I'm stuck making and defending positions I'm not even invested in.
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