What’s Old is New – and not in a good way

*TO PUMAs everywhere:  Please use the below images to your heart’s content!

This is why:

And this is what progressive Villager Matt Stoller of Open Left had to say about it on January 16, 2008:

There are many reason progressives should admire Ronald Reagan, politically speaking.  He realigned the country around his vision, he brought into power a new movement that created conservative change, and he was an extremely skilled politician.  But that is not why Obama admires Reagan.  Obama admires Reagan because he agrees with Reagan’s basic frame that the 1960s and 1970s were full of ‘excesses’ and that government had grown large and unaccountable.

Those excesses, of course, were feminism, the consumer rights movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the antiwar movement.  The libertarian anti-government ideology of an unaccountable large liberal government was designed by ideological conservatives to take advantage of the backlash against these ‘excesses’.

It is extremely disturbing to hear, not that Obama admires Reagan, but why he does so. Reagan was not a sunny optimist pushing dynamic entrepreneurship, but a savvy politician using a civil rights backlash to catapult conservatives to power. Lots of people don’t agree with this, of course, since it doesn’t fit a coherent narrative of GOP ascendancy.  Masking Reagan’s true political underpinning principles is a central goal of the conservative movement, with someone as powerful as Grover Norquist seeking to put Reagan’s name on as many monuments as possible and the Republican candidates themselves using Reagan’s name instead of George Bush’s in GOP debates as a mark of greatness.  Why would the conservative movement create such idolatry around Reagan?  Is is because they just want to honor a great man?  Perhaps that is some of it.  Or are they trying to escape the legacy of the conservative movement so that it can be rebuilt in a few years, as they did after Nixon, Reagan, and Bush I?

I don’t know.  But if you think, as Obama does, that Reagan’s rise to power was premised on a sunny optimism in contrast to an out of control government and a society rife with liberal excess, then you don’t understand the conservative movement.  Reagan tapped into greed and fear and tribalism, and those are powerful forces.  Ignoring that isn’t going to make them go away.

But Obama’s Reagan worship didn’t begin here, let’s take a look at an excerpt about Reagan in President Obama’s Mein Kampf Audacity of Hope:

As disturbed as I might have been by Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, [edited by me: pfft!  yeah, right] as unconvinced as I might have been by his John Wayne, Father Knows Best pose, his policy by anecdote, and his gratuitous assaults on the poor, I understood his appeal.

It was the same appeal that the military bases back in Hawaii had always held for me as a young boy, with their tidy streets and well-oiled machinery, the crisp uniforms and crisper salutes. It was related to the pleasure I still get from watched a well-played basketball game, or my wife gets from watching reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show. [edited by me: Dick Van Dyke Show? Is this why FLOTUS dresses like this?] Reagan spoke to America’s longing for order, our need to believe that we are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces but that we can shape our individual and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility, optimism, and faith.

That Reagan’s message found such a receptive audience spoke not only to his skills as a communicator; it also spoke to the failure of liberal government, during a period of economic stagnation, to give middle-class voters any sense that it was fighting for them. For the fact was that government at every level had become too cavalier about spending taxpayer money. Too often, bureaucracies were oblivious to the cost of their mandates. A lot of liberal rhetoric did seem to value rights and entitlements over duties and responsibilities. Reagan may have exaggerated the sins of the welfare state, and certainly liberals were right to complain that his domestic policies titled heavily toward economic elites, with corporate raiders making tidy profits throughout the eighties while unions were busted and income for the average working stiff flatlined.

Nevertheless, by promising to side with those who worked hard, obeyed the law, cared for their families, and loved their country, Reagan offered Americans a sense of a common purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster. And the more the critics carped, the more those critics played into the role he’d written for them – a band of out-of-touch, tax-and-spend, blame-America-first, politically correct elites.

Yep -from the Horse’s, rather Republican with Donkey-Breath’s mouth.

Like the 1980s, even though I was a tweenie then, I remember  the great 80s recession.  My mom was recently divorced from my dad, he took off to Dominican Republic with his new wife, then my mom was laid off from the factory she worked at in Massachussetts.

Whoa, wait up, am I having Deja Vu or you mean it’s actually happening again, like, right NOW?

WASHINGTON – The recession is killing jobs at an alarming pace, with tens of thousands of new layoffs announced Monday by some of the biggest names in American business — Pfizer, Caterpillar and Home Depot.

More pink slips, pay freezes and other hits are expected to slam workers in the months ahead as companies desperately look for ways to survive.

“We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg — the big firms,” said Rebecca Braeu, economist at John Hancock Financial Services. “There’s certainly other firms beneath them that will lay off workers as quickly or even quicker.”

Looking ahead, economists predicted a net loss of at least 2 million jobs — possibly more — this year even if President Barack Obama’s $825 billion package of increased government spending and tax cuts is enacted. Last year, the economy lost a net 2.6 million jobs, the most since 1945, though the labor force has grown significantly since then.

The unemployment rate, now at a 16-year high of 7.2 percent, could hit 10 percent or higher later this year or early next year, under some analysts’ projections.

Here’s the Wikipedia take on the 1980s recession:

Economic effects of the recession

The Federal Reserve’s extremely tight monetary policy intentionally plunged the American economy into a deep recession.^[9]

Employment conditions deteriorated throughout the year. The unemployment rate in the U.S. reached 10.8% in December 1982—higher than at any time in post-war era. Job cutbacks were particularly severe in housing, steel and automobiles. By September 1982, the jobless rate reached 10.8%. Twelve million people were unemployed, an increase of 4.2 million people since July 1981.^[5] Unemployment rates for every major group reached post-war highs, with men age 20 and over particularly hard hit. Blacks and Hispanics suffered proportionally greater job losses than whites.^[7]

What’s old is new, and now we have a Reagan wannabe who calls himself a Democrat running the show.   Liberals who remember Reagan, like myself, shuddered when Obama professed his Reagan Worship to the Reno paper sourced above.  That was when I KNEW I couldn’t vote for Obama, not now, nor ever.  No self respecting Liberal Democrat would ever effuse such illustrious praise for a MFer who, because of the lack of everything, made me forge my birth certificate from 12 years old to 14 years old (with the help of an ink eraser and a typewriter) just so I can get a PT job at a discount department store to help my mom pay the bills while she was laid off due to a work injury.  She worked her hands, LITERALLY to the bone and the result being multiple surgeries every few years.  The latest was last week due to the same problem.

And now in 2009, I’m the one that’s laid off.  I’m still helping mom get by due to her health and my daughter’s in her tween years.  I don’t want my daughter to do what I did in the 1980s.  I want her to become what she wants to be to her fullest potential, no matter the cost.  I want her to keep her mind on her studies, not on survival.  I can’t allow that to happen to her, despite whatever life throws my way.

Now with Universal Healthcare off the table as KatieBird reported, with the bailout only helping CEOs guaranteee their golden parachutes while the rest of us get golden showers, what is going to happen to the working/middle class of this country?

History has a way of repeating itself, but dammit, this is not the way I wanted it to be.

I know this may be futile, but f__k it:

Could Obama and Hillary trade places for like, say, oh about a year or something?

(Custom posters created on the http://obamiconme.pastemagazine.com/ website)