(“Cream of Jesus on Toast” is Violet Socks’ invention. Read it all here.)
Why don’t we take a stroll down memory lane and revisit February 2008. That was when we found out that Barack Obama was not even original, let alone likely to be audacious:
In FEBRUARY 2008, we knew that he was “just words”. The last time a US presidential candidate used someone else’s speeches and passed them off as his own without attribution, he was disgraced and had to quit running. But you guys were cool with Obama doing it because he was such a big CHANGE! agent. He was going to save the world. He was The One.
And look what I found yesterday in Will Bunch’s Twitter stream:
@Will_BunchWill Bunch
Then do something!! RT @BarackObamaDeeply disappointed GOP senators prevented Paycheck Fairness Act from being brought up for debate, vote
All of you guys who are now screaming for him to “Do Something!” were, and still are, screaming “Racist!” at us back then for not buying the hype harshing your mellow. Gee, we’re sorry. What were we thinking?
Only that the country was on the brink of disaster and that Obama did not understand the mechanisms of government well enough to fix whatever Bush left in his wake. We needed an engineer, not a dreamer. But now that he’s wasted the tremendous opportunity he had, something we warned you he was going to do, he is shrugging off his responsibility and telling fibs about the true audacity of FDR. Anglachel has the rundown in A Hundred Days:
The combination of Hoover, FDR and Obama as a focus of analysis appears to be catching on. I just read Thomas Ferguson’s post The Story Behind Obama’s Remarks on FDR on New Deal 2.0. He starts with a quote from a transcript of remarks Obama gave to “liberal bloggers”:
“We didn’t actually, I think, do what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, which was basically wait for six months until the thing had gotten so bad that it became an easier sell politically because we thought that was irresponsible. We had to act quickly.” – President Obama
There are two things that jump out at me from this quote, regardless of the context.The first is the self-exculpation – we didn’t get all we wanted because we took a bolder path than FDR, so don’t criticize us! – and the breathtaking erasure of history.
Um, hello? The First Hundred Days of FDR? The stuff of Democratic legend and the bane of Republicans to this day? FDR moved on the FIRST day of his presidency and did not stop for 100 days, passing legislation that would become the most stunning reimagining of American society since Lincoln and possibly since the founding of the nation.
Both of these actions are part and parcel of the movement style campaign politics Obama favors and which is so beloved of the righteous Stevensonians. It is narcissistic and a-historical (We are the one’s we have been waiting for), refuses to acknowledge politics as they are, and antithetical to mundane, interest-based transactional governance. It doesn’t want responsibility, only obedience and adulation, and so refuses to take it when things go belly up.
Deep down, you knew. You had to know. You screwed us and the rest of the country over anyway. You ruined the party and its primary election season. You helped dismantle the left and left yourselves and us weak in the face of Republican winner-take-all political scheming.
We told you that nothing good ever comes of a bad seed.
If you don’t like the fruit, don’t forget that you were the ones who planted the tree.
Filed under: General | Tagged: bad seed, Bamboozled, Barack Obama, Cream of Jesus on Toast, Deval Patrick speech, Do Something!, Hoodwinked, Just Words, Malcolm X, Violet Socks, Will Bunch |
Honk, honk!
Yeah, that tweet from Will Bunch was audacious.
Last month he condemned anyone who criticized Obama as a r@ycist. Now, he are one.
The word that comes to my mind is “Bodacious”
The country will fire this guy in 2012. He’s a lame duck.
But the wunderkind will want to replace him with Howard Dean. They can’t seem to get it through their heads that what we really need is a politician who is not afraid to get his/her hands dirty. No some dilettante who considers politics low class.
They will pick some dude. White, yellow, green, orange… whatever, as long as it’s got dangly bits.
Hemorrhoids?
myiq and DT have had an unhealthy influence on you.
LOL
My mom told the neighbor kids not to play with me because I’m a bad influence.
Howard Dean got stuff done as Gov of Vermont. Got 97% of Vermonters covered under healthcare – buy in to the state plan. Made big improvements in early education. Changed home care regs so more older people could stay in their own homes and receive services from home health aides, rather than going into nursing homes, which saved the state some money too. Actually made many anti-war speeches.
Bought the Obama Teh One myth and then got thrown under the bus. If he can completely cold-turkey from the KoolAid he’d be good.
Dean would be way better than Oblameless.
Nope. Not for me. He never connected with me. And VT is a very special state.
He didn’t impress me. Not when he ran for president and not when he ran the DNC. I was never a Deaniac. The only positive thing about him from my perspective was his scream.
And anyway, if he were really all the Deaniacs say he was, he never would have allowed Obama to get ahead. He would have run a cleaner primary season. He would have been a true leader, not a capitulator or opportunist. And that would have meant telling the koolade drinkers some unpleasant truths and being hints with them. Instead, he indulged them. In 2008, he had two historic candidates and he backed the one least likely to be able to carry out the kind of liberal program Deaniacs claim they so desperately want. How do you explain that? Take your time.
My tin foil antenna tell me that Dean can’t win with the working class guys. He’s not a natural politician. Well, Obama isn’t either for that matter but he had loads of help and an almost sycophantic media behind him. Dean wouldn’t get even that. Then, there is the matter of his wife, who seems content to let him dabble in one of his hobbies but isn’t really into that whole political scene. That’s just weird and the presidency does come with a rather substantial role for the first lady.
He’s a non starter. Those who like him elevate him to heights that he can’t reach in real life. Those who don’t like him will hold him responsible for giving the country Obama. And the rest don’t know him and don’t give a flying fuck.
Stick a fork in him, he’s done.
Dean is another Stevensonian
We need a Jacksonian with competence, courage and character.
I suspect it will be Webb. He looks overqualified next to Obama. We’ll see if he can overcome some substantial liabilities.
No way, no how.
Even if there were no substantive objections to Dean, his moment is way past.
But the substantive objections are overwhelming:
Dean was one of the key players in the RBC kabuki which stole delegates from Clinton and handed Obama the nomination, and disenfranchised millions of voters from MI and FL. In other words, a cheater. Not someone you want as the guardian of democracy.
Further, he turned a deaf ear to the swamp misogyny vomiting from the Dems and fauxgressives at Clinton for months. He only deigned to take note of it when the pushback finally clued him in that Obama might be hurt by it, and then produced the sad-*ssed excuse that he had no idea (he was shocked! shocked!) about any of it because he “doesn’t have cable.”
Finally, Dean was Obama 1.0. — Obama’s Stevensonian godfather. Liberals so entranced with their lofty philospher-king intellectual elitism that they can’t be bothered to use their political juice to improve the lot of the hoi polloi. That is abso-frakking-lutely the last thing we need.
Woot.
Great rant.
The only “good” thing about this debacle is that the Dem leadership has been exposed as corporate toadies and the MSM as screaming sexists.
That video! I mean, I knew it, but I needed a side to side – and Jon Stewart missed the opportunity.
But, but – “He was holding back Tears” – the Friday edition of the DUdies where the fight between reality and koolaid gets shrill and amusing these days
http://edgeoforever.wordpress.com/2010/11/19/dudies-of-november-16-19/
Uh oh, the Rajun Cajun is in trouble again ☺
CNN: White House “Outraged” At Carville, He Responds
“If I offended anybody, I’m not sorry and I don’t apologize,” Carville told CNN.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/11/18/cnn_white_house_outraged_at_carville_he_responds.html
That’s right. Never back down. If Obama doesn’t like it, I suggest he put down the smelling salts and grow a pair.
Wouldn’t you love to be a fly on the wall in that room when Obumbles got told about Carville’s words!
Good for Carville! Screw the White House occupants- I was and remain outraged at having my vote thrown down and trampled.
Hillary/Carville 2012!
I love Carville. He didn’t get this much press for that exact joke when he told it during the campaign months. I love his response that the WH needs to keep up!
Is accusing a person of being deficient in the nut sack department considered racist?
Anything anyone says implying a deficiency in this president is considered racist. For example, what Will Bunch said in his tweet above is clearly racist. /snark.
Carville drew blood with that statement apparently.
ok, I know we are all looking for bargains these days, but ?!?!?
Black Friday deals: St. Pete family is first in nation to start camping at Best Buy
The Davenport family pitched a pair of tents Wednesday at 10 a.m. in front of the Best Buy at Tyrone Square in St. Pete to snag deals that were still nine days away.
How do they do it? They have ten family members taking turns.
Why do they do it?
“We’re here really early this year because we’ve always been second, third and fourth and down the line,” Lorie Davenport said.
“We’re tired of not being first and we figured we’ve put in six years, we want to be first.”
http://www.wtsp.com/news/topstories/story.aspx?storyid=157294&catid=250
Oo! Oo! Let me take a crack at this: were they paid by Best Buy to camp out to get free advertising? Sort of like Peggy Olsen of Mad Men paying two women to fight over a Sugarberry Ham the week before Thanksgiving?
Yeah, I’m going for the free ads.
You’re too smart RD…always catch that inside angle.
Black Friday, a chance to buy stuff you don’t need at exorbitant prices instead of ruinous prices.
I used to work for Kmart.
We normally marked up gold jewelry 300%
The day after Thanksgiving we were selling it at 50% off retail, which was only a 150% mark-up over cost.
Great post! And hooray for Carville!
***********
Of interest, but title should read “How Obama Destroyed Liberalism”:
“How Liberalism Self-destructed”
by Joel Koktin
“Today, according to most recent polling, no more than one in five voters call themselves liberal.
This contrasts with the far broader support for the familiar form of liberalism forged from the 1930s to the 1990s. Democratic presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton focused largely on basic middle-class concerns — such as expanding economic opportunity, property ownership and growth.
Modern-day liberalism, however, is often ambivalent about expanding the economy — preferring a mix of redistribution with redirection along green lines. Its base of political shock troops, public-employee unions, appears only tangentially interested in the health of the overall economy.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/45376.html#ixzz15kA4ZSR8
That’s a good read.
Thanks. I believe there is a place for unions, but it seems that union leaders today are more concerned with maintaining their positions of power than with their workers and the over all well being of this country.
Back then, I got a gung-ho Obama email from Open Left and replied somewhat harshly, questioning the big O and saying, IMO, he was not up to the job. I got a personal email back from Chris Bowers, a real nasty attack on me and my stupidity. The boy was unhinged. I wrote back asking how he intended to win me and others like me over to his side with such invective; mine was a serious query as to what the plan was to build a bridge to those of us who did not support O in any way. He never answered, leaving me to conclude there was no plan. We were expendable. Out, out, damn dried up old hag.
And we’re still out. It’s incredible to me. Stupak? Are you kidding me? Paycheck Fairness Act? That couldn’t pass? What? (And I don’t for one second think the Dems wanted that to pass either.) And the women who still try to be in with these little boys? What is the matter with them?
You cannot fix things until you admit you made a mistake. And, when the mistake is as obvious as the nose on your face, then you lose all credibility for not stating the obvious. How about stop leading and start listening to those of us who were right?
I seem to get madder the more obvious the magnitude of their error and the more unwilling they are to try to correct the error. Can’t we find some adults to run the store?
Not sure we can do much of anything with the wunderkind. They seem to be as impervious to reason as some fundamentalists I know. What they have is a belief system. A religion. This is what they believe and they are going to force their own post partisan utopia on us until they all die out. You will never get them to admit they were wrong. They don’t believe it. It’s *your* fault for not accepting. Their ideas were not wrong. They just weren’t given time enough to work. This is the excuse behind any movement that is not grounded in observation and evaluation.
They are as bad as the birthers.
So, we have to start over. The clever politician will see all of the people that the uber wealthy Republicans and the uber pure Democrats has left on the table and make a run for it. We just have to make sure that person is worthy of us.
Personally, and maybe I’m way off base here, I prefer the scientific method. You know, proof and all. That’s how I survived: rationality. My brain. That’s what they used to teach in those grand Ivy League schools back in the dark ages. Maybe logic is just an elective nowadays.
And it always comes back to Obama for me: how can this guy be so delusional as not to see he is an abject failure? How? It is so monumentally irrational.
Some “clever” politician is of course going to be able to get the workers’ vote. All Obama has done is make our plight even worse, with no relief in sight.
(Now I have to go work off my rage at the gym – by the time you’re done with me with your great rants, I’ll weigh 90 pounds.)
Some “clever” politician just needs to say it like it it is. Have a clear plan. Have a record of getting things done. Have been involved with an administration that, say, turned a deficit into a surplus. Needs to have a spine.
{{{who? she wonders…}}}
You’re talking about Enlightenment thinking – combining empirical evidence with rational thought.
Obots (including Chris Bowers) are un-enlightened.
Chris didn’t major in history, economics or political science. He majored in poetry.
Seriously
myiq – I think the Obots are still at the “magical thinking” stage, not unlike little kids who believe wearing a cape made from a baby blanket will give them the power to fly.
Kids love poetry. See? It all adds up.
Yup, too many partisans display religious-like fervor. It is creepy.
(Although, in somewhat defense of the birthers, while it’s true enough BO was born in the USA, what I think fuels them is that no one ever seemed to seriously say, maybe BO doesn’t have a core unshakable loyalty to the USA. He grows up idolizing his absent father and resenting his American mother, he gets shuffled off as an inconvenient relic of as failed marriage, he never really fits in .. it’s no wonder. He probably views himself as post-national, and has a core loyalty only to himself. And while anyone can serve their country in any capacity that suits them, I think that the person that leads the country needs to have a deeply ingrained loyalty to it. It is just something needed for the job. So the money people really picked a deeply flawed one in 2008. )
I can’t defend the birthers. Some of them used to be pumas but they let their anger get the best of them and now they’ll do anything to invalidate obama’s presidency.
He beat McCain in the general election fair and square. He’s legitimately the president. Even bill Clinton said he met all of the constitutional qualifications and I’m sure the Clintons checked just to make sure. So, we’re stuck with him for two more years.
The biggest crime happened during the primaries. But the Democratic party is a private party. They can make and change the rules whenever they want.
And I can choose not to belong to or support such a party *because* they chose to change the rules and manipulate the primaries. I also have the right to object to the way they asked my state to foot the bill for their primary if they aren’t going to honor the choice the voters made. I consider that fraud and a clear violation of the fundamental principle of fair reflection.
If Republicans were smart, and you know they LOVE to win, they would milk that primary 2008 baby for all its worth in the states where they have to pony up money to fund the next Democratic primary. I expect that it will come up again. It’s a win-win for Republicans. If the Dems run Obama again, the risk is high that they’ll lose the general. If they primary him, the Republicans will trot out primary voter resentment at a time when states are struggling to balance their budgets. All fun and games.
But the birthed thing really should die a quiet death. It’s just stupid.
Please….I’m beyond tired of Obama. Can he just go quietly away? I feel about the same way about him as I did with W. Just.go.away.
Honk!
Only 792 days. I will not even entertain the prospect of him being re-elected.
A local progressive leader here in Sonoma wrotein response
To my sending a link to this post::
It’s heartening to know there’s no dearth of employment among the anti-Obama ranks. If one could harness the energy expended in deconstructing Obama by those self appointed to the task there’d be enough gas and heat for the next few winters.
My reply:
I guess some of us find it difficult to contemplate Obama’s legacy unemotionally:
A grim indicator of growing social distress is the report released Thursday by the Mortgage Bankers Association showing that foreclosures of homes financed by prime fixed-rate mortgages reached a record high in the third quarter of this year. The trade group said prime fixed rate and Federal Housing Administration loans, i.e., those taken out by credit-worthy homebuyers, as opposed to sub-prime borrowers, now account for more than half of foreclosures started in the third quarter, compared to 39 percent a year ago.
This means that the worsening foreclosure crisis is now being driven directly by high unemployment, which is slashing working class incomes and making it impossible for families to keep up their mortgage payments.
History shows us a possible outcome:
The fatal flaw in Hoover’s approach was that, just like after Katrina, local resources were devastated, and unable to rise to the need even if they wanted to. The next month in Minneapolis:
In Minneapolis, several hundred men and women smashed the windows of a grocery market and made off with fruit, canned goods, bacon, and ham. One of the store’s owners pulled out a gun to stop the looters, but was leapt upon and had his arm broken. The “riot” was brought under control by 100 policemen. Seven people were arrested.
Similar scenarios played out throughout the country. And at the same time in California:
But in the depression years there was little market for all this home-grown wealth, and the consequent waste was appalling – especially to the hungry, who saw food going to destruction all around them every day. In 1932 in the Imperial Valley alone, 1.4 million creates of cantaloupes, 2.8 million watermelons, and 700,000 lugs of tomatoes had been destroyed because they could not be sold. In the orange groves that stretched nearly unbroken for more than seventy miles from Arcadia to beyond Riverside, hundreds of tons of unsold oranges a week were piled up in huge mounds, covered in thick heating oil to discourage pilfering, and left to rot in the full view of those who could have used them.
After reading this I’m in need of a long walk at the shots
https://riverdaughter.wordpress.com/2010/11/19/he-seemed-like-cream-of-jesus-on-toast/
Meant to end with “in need of a walk at the shore.”
(or shots)