Thing One and Thing Two, to Movement Progressives: “Grow Up!”

Obamelot is boring, Seussville is better: Thing One and Thing Two

I wrote much of this a day or so ago but didn’t have time to post it until now. On the completely off chance that someone reading this post hasn’t already heard about the sloppily choreographed one-two punch from President Obnoxious and Vice President Noxious by now, here is a brief replay of their antics.

Let’s start with Thing One’s “Buck Up” lecture from the end of his latest interview with Rolling Stone entitled “Obama in Command” (I’ve pared it down to its nasty essence for brevity’s sake):

We have to get folks off the sidelines. People need to shake off this lethargy, people need to buck up. . . . But if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren’t serious in the first place.

The supporting punch from Thing Two (via CBS):

Biden said Democrats can win both races if they draw clear distinctions between themselves and their Republican opponents, and he urged Democrats to “remind our base constituency to stop whining and get out there and look at the alternatives. This president has done an incredible job. He’s kept his promises.”

The strategy here is pretty obvious, and naturally the puppies who have been kicked have that kicked puppy look on their faces. This reaction takes the cake (via Politico):

“It’s idiotic is what it is,” says Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, one of Obama’s most pointed critics on the left. “If Democrats, with the White House and Congressional super-majorities, had delivered on what they had promised, and if people had jobs, no one would be whining. They have reaped what they sowed. They haven’t delivered on what they’ve promised — and instead of making the case as to why they would do if they are reelected, they are insulting people.

“It’s a far cry from Bill Clinton’s ‘I feel your pain,’” he added

Markos 2010 is reaping what Markos 2008 sowed. (See youtube of Markos 2008).

Furthermore, Markos (any year’s version of him) isn’t much of a lefty, though he has tainted the left by his poseur alliance with it. He’s a former Repub-turn-“progressive,” a la Arianna. Opportunists both. They came over to my former party to destroy it.

Markos isn’t much of an Obama critic either, let alone one of his strongest critics.

Case-in-point: Kos’ idea of pointy asshat criticism during the HCR debate was to put up that pathetic/progressive banner of “Let’s get reform done right” (or whatever the exact wording of that BS was) at the top of his website. The problem? Reform was already way past being done right and was actively being done wrong. The writing had long since been graffitied on the wall that the public option was a bait and switch and the only “reform” that would be “done” would be a junk insurance mandate. So, all Kos did by chanting “let’s get reform done right” is to get it done wrong.

At every key juncture, Kos has enabled O when he should have put pressure on him to “deliver” on what he “promised” or else he can count on someone else to vote for him come election time. Kos and his Comatose Band of Frickin Soldouts are only whimpering now because Obama took the tops off their sippy cups.

Besides, whence this current temper tantrum, Kossacks? You’re just being called whiners. Get over it, sweetie-dahlings. Whiners is pretty mild. It’s not like you’re being called vagina-voting racists.

Oh, and what pain of ours did Clinton feel again? Our pain of being racists? ‘Cuz it’s not like he can feel our pain of voting with our vajayjays.

Since when did the Daily Kos become the Daily Clintonista anyway ?

It seems like just yesterday that Kos gleefully posted** that “Too bad for Bill, and Lincoln, no one gives a shit about them anymore” memo. (Say it with me now…”I’m no one, and I give a shit about Bill Clinton!”)

**I didn’t provide a link because I don’t want to link to the Great Orange Satan, but if anyone needs to look it up, the “no one gives a shit” quote went up on May 28, 2010. Kos wound up with the usual egg on his face on June 8, 2010.

Oh, and:

To wit: Grow up. Nobody ever accomplished anything in politics by not participating.

That’s Matt Yglesias in December 2009, and it’s an argument that more than a few creative classers were making back then. It’s the same argument Obama and Biden are essentially making right now. Buck up. Quit whining. Grow up. (Say it again…”I’m nobody, and I accomplished a great deal by not participating in the bread and circuses of Rs and Ds.”)

To wit, here are the Creative Class Commandments I came up with back when Matt told us all to grow up. It’s Obama Farm (O-baaaa-ma):

1. Whatever bears the name Clinton is triangulation and the enemy.
2. Whatever bears the name Obama is 11 dimensional chess and a friend.
3. No creative class-er shall protest vote.
4. No creative class-er shall vote third party.
5. No creative class-er shall write in anyone’s name.
6. No creative class-er shall abstain from voting for Obama.
7. All creative class-ers are equal.

Number 1 is temporarily disabled because O is in the middle of a Hail Mary pass trying to draw a subconscious line between himself and all things Bill and Hillary (click on that youtube, it’s an unintentional hoot.)

The Obama Left needs the mommy and daddy of the party to fix them dinner right now and kiss their booboos away. (Tomorrow they’ll stop talking to daddy and burn mommy at the stake again. Soylent-hope. It’s not just people. It’s mommy.)

Anyhow, the creative class progressives didn’t mind when they were asking US to grow up and obey all those commandments, but now that O has asked them to buck up, their poor witto feelings have been hurt. Well, that’s just too bad. Karma is a Shrieking Band of Paranoid Holdouts that is Mad as Hell, Growing in Number, and Doesn’t Give a Shit about Your Missing Sippy Cup Lids.

BTW, just curious. Is there any one-liner that Palin says that does not seep into O’s rhetoric? Be it lipstick or buck up, he’s still copying off ShakesPalin’s paper.

I can understand why he copies off Hillary’s paper, because his campaign’s attack on her wasn’t so much that she is incompetent (though there was some of that too, since 2008 was a misogyny free-for-all). The Obama Left’s overall character assassination of Hillary was more based on the idea that she was a monster of ambition and of scary, scheming neurons that must be thwarted at all costs. So his copying off Hillary’s paper doesn’t entirely contradict that.

But, why continually copy off the paper of Palin, the woman your permanent campaign and its allies have been trying to paint as a sexpot airhead not fit to govern the White House sandbox?

And, he’s not even copying properly off Palin, either.

Sarah P’s “buck up” was to Turd Blossom. She was telling it to the GOP establishment turds (that’s an FU from the bottom-up. Sarah gets an A on that.).

As usual O has got his asshat on backwards. He’s saying “buck up” to the Dem grassroots (that’s an FU from the top-down. Obama gets a big red F.)

I still wouldn’t vote for Palin, because she flunks at standing up for an idea of government I can embrace, but the above is just Politics 101 here. Sarah Barracuda bothered to actually shoot this time, and she scored. Obama just handed the ball over to the other team.

And, I haven’t forgotten the style-over-substance top-down bottom-up gobbledygook that flooded the mainstream and progressive media during ’08, either. Obama was propped up falsely as the candidate of “yes we can” and of “you” messaging and Hillary was smeared viciously as the miserable quarrelsome woman always shouting “I”? (Link goes to Huffpo, where the blogger on that piece inexplicably calls Hillary a fighter like it’s a bad thing. Gah.)

Trivialities of this nature weren’t backed up by anything other than Obama’s cellophane “Yes We Can” but nonetheless were routinely trotted out as evidence of Obama’s most awesome ever bottom-up campaign.

Hillary meanwhile was the Cruella Deville of Top-Downistan — well everywhere except for where she was on the bottom, like Bill Maher’s Misogyny Rules (from the 5 minute mark to the end) or that Mad TV Rihanna/Umbrella parody that always pops up as the first hit when you run a youtube search on Hillary and Obama.

Funny how the hip youthful Obama Left loved eroticizing Hillary what with that fast-rusting vagina problem of hers that the oh so investigative Matt Taibbi reported on in 2008 (naturally there’s another Hillary sex graphic at that Taibbi link.).

He was against the voters before he was... against them some more. (I don't regret voting against Bush, but boy does the guy above make it hard sometimes not to second-guess holding my nose to vote for him.)

Speaking of people who treated Hillary like crap in 2008 for no reason, I’d like to bring up a little bit of what’s coming out from the towering intellect of the talking tree that is John Kerry these days. Because the Obama-Biden one-two punch isn’t happening in a vacuum here. Kerry is doing his part to help destroy the Democratic brand, too. (Just like he did in 2004 and in 2008.)

At the end of May, Kerry, citing a “comprehension gap” on the part of voters, was calling the electorate hypocrites for being frustrated with DC (via US News & World Report). Here at the end of September, Kerry’s condescension and tonedeafness is completely in tact (via Boston Herald):

A testy U.S. Sen. John F. Kerry yesterday blamed clueless voters with short attention spans for the uphill battle beleaguered Democrats are facing against Republicans across the nation.

“We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s happening,” Kerry told reporters after touring the Boston Medical Center yesterday.

Does this guy look like he should be lecturing us about being out of touch with what's really going on? I'm just saying. Glass houses.

Simple slogan? Isn’t this the same John Kerry who said he was “Reporting for Duty” and had his keynote speaker spouting some pablum about “blue states” and “red states” and “the politics of Hope”?

Isn’t this the same “serious” “John F. Kerry” who went on Larry King and wasted time obsessing about Sarah Palin, calling her infotainment in his final analysis? (Would you rather be an infotainment trainwreck or be John Kerry with your foot on an everyday collision course with your mouth?)

Democrats and progressives always do this. They think that calling disaffected voters stupid and any other number of names will somehow motivate them to vote (saying FU to the customer, how in the world could this strategy possibly go wrong?). Of course when people fail to be wooed by this pitch , the left will come back with the old people “voting against their own interests” canard.

No, Democrats, people aren’t voting against their interests — they are voting against YOU.

We don’t have to vote for the evil of two Lessers. We want a Leader, not a Lesser.

There is a comprehension gap alright and there is a group of people who are very out of touch, but it’s the other way around. The electorate is Mad as Hell, and DC just wants to play the old game of sticking their fingers in their ears and “Nyah Nyah can’t hear you.”

How is that Indifferent Kind of Politics that Obama ushered in to DC working out for Generation Obama?

Over at the University of Wisconsin on Tuesday, we got a hint. Poor Oprecious had trouble filling up the seats and OFA had to send out an e-mail blast (via icky Fox News):

President Obama campaign found plenty of enthusiasm among students in the 2008 presidential race, but 2010 is another year — and with seats to fill at a Tuesday rally at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Obama team took the step of sending an e-mail message to supporters in search of an audience.

The president is headed to Madison as part of a series of rallies in swing states leading up to the election. But where he drew a crowd of 17,000 at the University of Wisconsin in 2008 during the presidential race, crowds are expected to be significantly smaller this time around — so much so that the president’s campaign team, Organizing for America, sent out RSVP requests for Tuesday’s rally, featuring musician Ben Harper.

That sure sounds like an emergency. Glad OFA is on top of everything. How ever could the Empty Suit manage to say “I love you back ” to those empty seats?

Bottom Line: Progressives are having done unto them what they did unto us Hillary holdouts and they are not finding it so “inspiring” and “hopeful” anymore.

It’s not so fun to be told to “Get Over It” and to “Grow Up” “Sweetie.”

The progs aren’t likely to stop spinning in their hamster wheel any time soon, but I think the last decade of Faux Cowboy W. and Faux Philospher King O. may just push the broader electorate outside of the spinning wheel dynamic.

I suspect there might be a message sent to Washington in very “loud” braille this election cycle to get around DC’s hearing impairment. I think the pundits are going to have a harder time than usual in their efforts to try to box off the results into neat and tidy little narratives or to categorize the trends in strict, mindnumbing terms of “Ds bad, Rs good” or “Rs bad, Ds good.”

And, remember Democrats:

You told the base to stay home (c/o Donna B), you told the electorate to grow up (c/o the creative class), pay attention (c/o Kerry, who didn’t even pay attention to his own presidential campaign), stop whining (c/o Biden, who won’t stop talking while boozing), buck up (c/o someone who passes the buck), and get off the sidelines (c/o Beerpong WH who stayed on the sidelines for most of the healthcare battle and delegated to an Infantile Congress).

The 2010 midterms may very well be the Election of Be Careful What You Wish For.

The electorate may just grow up yet and figure out how to give you everything you have had coming your way for some time now. You have sent so many mixed messages and bad faith signals over the last 10 years to your grassroots base–to do this, that, or the other thing, etc.–that if people really “pay attention to what is going on” and give you the various gibberish you say you want, you will no longer have any control over any of it.

“Party of Asshat and O-Hole, your November is almost ready.” (Cold comfort, I know.)