All Very Predictable

Today, Atrios wrote:

I imagine I’ll write a version of this post a million times, but the people in charge are failures. If, in January 2009, I given a rough outline of what would happen in policy, the economy, and the financial system over the next 3.5 years, people would have thought I was crazy. No one would have believed that the people in charge would tolerate such sustained high unemployment. And yet they have. It is indeed a choice. They can make things better but they have chosen not to.

And on December 20, 2008, I wrote:

Face it, Obots.  Obama is the biggest triangulator we have ever had.  We know this because he has already won the election but he acts like he’s scared of his own shadow.  He has plenty of backup in Congress and an angry constituency that is ready to tar and feather any Republican that gets in his way.  What is stopping him from promising to rescind “don’t ask, don’t tell”, the Conscience Rule and Gitmo?  What is stopping him from loudly demanding that the Treasury account for every penny right this minute?  What is stopping him from getting ahead of the game on HOLC?  He’s not in office yet but there is no downside to adjusting his rhetoric so that he can ask and demand anything he wants.  He ran like Genghis Khan but if he wants to be a real Messaiah now, there is nothing Hillary or Bush or Rove or the outgoing Republicans can do about it.  He is *not* operating in the same environment as Bill Clinton.  In fact, everything has changed.  Everything but Obama’s approach to politics.

HE seems to be stuck in the triangulating past.

Why is that Glenn?  I’ll tell you why.  It’s because Obama has been bought and paid for.  And not by you.

It wasn’t that hard to figure out.  Everyone was hoping he would do the right thing.  But the writing was on the wall early in the primary season and it only got clearer as the year went on.  It was the way the campaign operated, who was giving him money, the propaganda and screaming at Hillary Clinton to get out of the race after she had racked up big wins on SuperTuesday and then Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, the misogynism directed at Hillary and Palin, the telecomm immunity bill after the RBC hearing forced Clinton to suspend her campaign.  If you weren’t smitten with Obama, it was a lot easier to read.  I suspect that women and working people (low and middle class alike) were a lot more literate with that kind of stuff.

I keep circling back to the primaries not because I am *trying* to be annoying but because it was all right there, staring us all in the face.  Everything you needed to know about Barack Obama and who he was really going to represent was right there. He wasn’t even hiding it all that well.  It’s just that if you were already infatuated with the guy, nothing he said or did was going to make you abandon him.  The dude was a nasty piece of work, his whole campaign was scripted and he reeked of corporate ladder climber.

The damage the primaries had on the political system is incalculable.  The primary votes were compromised and redistributed, the convention was rigged and now, we are stuck (I’d replace him but that’s just me) with a candidate who is not the Democrat he ran as.  The party has a huge wedge driven between its major constituencies.  The whole damn caucus doesn’t operate like it’s a Democratic caucus. How will we ever be able to piece all of this back together and make the nomination procedure trustworthy again? You can bet the Republicans are going to use this as a model for future electoral skullduggery.  All this sacrifice for the self-actualization of one man who hadn’t earned all of the support he was getting.  Was it worth it?

Of course, there was nothing to stop Obama if he’d wanted to be the biggest M&^*(F^()ing liberal this country has seen since FDR.  But right off the election, he was already lowering expectations because he never had any intention of being the reformer the left wanted or that the country desperately needed.

And, yes, Atrios, people thought I was crazy.  Being prematurely correct is a surefire way to get yourself banned from all the A list blogrolls so, you know, I’m not surprised that the left blogosphere is having a Condi Rice “no one could have imagined” moment.  The truth hurts and no one wanted to hear it in 2008.  I’m only relieved to see the people I respected the most finally coming to terms with it.

And now a message to the left blogosphere

It’s probably dawned on you that Obama and his recruits are not the ones you thought they were. I’m going to cut Obama some slack here and assume that he looks like he’s caving to the right because he’s part of their milieu and he really thought he could reason with them. That’s because he’s never had to struggle with success and has never met an obstacle that he hasn’t been carried over. Magical things just *happen* to him. There is not doubt in my mind that he has gotten everything he has ever aspired to. He played the game and kissed the asses of the people who could grease his way to the top and now he’s there.

He’s not a politician. He’s a CEO. He was groomed to handle a difficult transaction. Maybe at the time he started to run he didn’t think he’d have to do anything too onerous. I don’t know. But I do know that like many men whose ambition take them to the top, he is a ruthless campaigner, not above intimidating, bribing and bending the rules to win. He doesn’t play fair. That was your first clue that you should have been paying attention to what he was doing and not what he was saying.

In any case, the right is already spinning this vote as a liberal victory when we know it is anything but. So, if I were you, I would do as Ian Welsh suggested a couple months ago and distance yourself from him as far as you possibly can. That goes for Democrats in Congress as well. Put as many miles as you can between yourselves and the White House.

Democrats, you have lost all credibility. First, you shoved off the “old coalition” for this man in 2008. That gave those voters no one to appeal to. Then your party proceeded to capitulate to the Republicans on everything. Now, their lives are a mess and they are blaming YOU. You can blame Fox and Wolf for part of that but mostly, you have to blame yourselves for not being seen to be fighting more aggressively for them. And the first place you screwed up was not controlling the message. Actually, the first place was when you voluntarily divided the party. The Republicans were probably gobsmacked that you made it so easy for them.

This is the time, left blogosphere, to get rid of Obama and find a challenger. You know my preference and you really should consider it. I don’t think she’s anything like Obama. If you want to hang on to your CDS and Big Dawg Urban Legends, go right ahead. But there are few Democrats in the party today who could generate any kind of enthusiasm as well as she would.

But whatever. It is only August. There is still time to turn this thing around. As we said in 2008, it ain’t over until the balloons drop at the convention. Whoever you pick had better be a red meat eating, unibrowed, man or woman who can actually relate to the average American working person of any class. That will not be Howard Dean or Dennis Kucinich or Elizabeth Warren. Bless her heart but she’s not a politician. And this time, you want a *politician*. You know, someone who knows how to negotiate and manipulate the levers of government to get what he wants?

And you’re going to have to stop talking down to the rest of us. We’re not stupid. After all, *we* didn’t vote for the Lightbringer. We come in all ages, genders, education levels, sexual orientations, shapes and sizes. You can either join with us or sit it out for the next four years. It’s up to you.

Obama is no friend of the New Deal Democrat. He’s not a liberal. We reject his candidacy because he does not represent our values.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

One more thing: I’d like to thank my Senators, Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg, for voting No on the bill.  Any senator in a northeast state where the R&D industry is being decimated knows that this bill is going to cut like a knife.

And kudos to Kirsten Gillibrand as well.

WTF?? Another example of how sexism costs all of us

So, I was reading Elizabeth Drew’s article in the New York Review of Books titled “What Were They Thinking?” that recounts how we got to this messy stage of impasse, political grandstanding and Obama’s inflated self-image when I came to what I think might be a hidden gem on two points:

Finding a solution to reducing the deficit that was agreeable to Boehner, to Cantor, to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and to the President was no small task. The men, who had rudely and unwisely excluded Pelosi, now the minority leader, from their deliberations, could no longer avoid dealing with her. They’d considered Pelosi a bit of a pain, insistent as she was on standing up for liberal principles.

Are you f^&*ing kidding me?  These GUYS excluded the former speaker of the house and now minority leader from the negotiations because she sticks up for liberal principles?  I’ll be the first one to say that Nancy shouldn’t be surprised and is paying royally for the mess she made in Denver in 2008.  But Jeez, it is completely unacceptable that there wasn’t even one woman in the room when these assholes met, not even the House Democrats’ minority leader.  It happens in the business world all of the time.  Women don’t get the email, are conveeeeeniently left off the meeting list, their phone calls are ignored.  And THIS is womens’ issues are never considered in the final bills.  If you’re a liberal woman, you’re doubly screwed.

And Barack Obama was OK with this?

You betcha.

#fuckyouwashingtonguys

Update: Craig Crawford says that Congressional leaders have decided to cut Obama out of future negotiations.  Here’s what he’s been hearing:

It’s no surprise that Republicans, led by House Speaker John Boehner, went out of their way to insult the president but remarkably Democrats also went forward over the weekend with Capitol Hill debt talks that did not even include a symbolic emissary from the White House.

[…]

While the GOP obviously would savor a solution to the debt-ceiling crisis that gives Obama no credit, why are Democratic leaders so willing to cut him out?

The answer might be found in growing concerns among veteran Capitol Hill Democrats that their president is a lousy negotiator.

Although they see him as a talented public communicator, his short time as a senator and painfully slow learning curve as president leads congressional Democrats to think it best to take over and provide cover for him once the deal is done.

Wow, just wow.  Um, would giving him cover really be the best idea?  Maybe they’ve been too permissive.  They provided him with a lot of cover in 2008 and carried him gently over the threshhold of the nomination.  In retrospect, that was a bad idea.  It could explain why he’s painfully slow to learn his job and why he’s so fricking clueless about legislating with Congress. He’s never had to do it before.

After this is all over, the Democrats need to have a heart to heart with President Mashieniblick.  The idea that they can foist him on the rest of us and give us no Democratic alternative is unacceptable when they don’t think he is capable of doing his job.

Reward Good Behavior- Al Franken

Al Franken has been busy, busy, busy this week!  Just look at all the stuff he’s been up to:

• Al Franken spoke sternly to David Axelrod (does anyone else think that Axelrod has the profile of a rat? Raise your hand).  Where is the leadership from the White House?  LOL!  That’s a good one, Al.  I’m sure that was meant to be a rhetorical question.  See, Obama and his droogs handlers don’t think they *have* to lead.   I guess the White House figures that either the Senate forces the health care insurance reform bill on the House as is and makes the whole Democratic party look like they are capitulating to the right, thereby alienating their base, possibly permanently, or the Senate grows a more liberal spine and gets blamed by the media for capitulating to the extremist left.  Ooooo, Tea Partiers!  BOO!  It’s not like the media and its superultrauber wealthy, ruthless authoritarian owners like the Rupert Murdoch and Jack Welch proteges don’t have a vested interest in turning up the volume on those tea partiers.  Whatever, is the attitude the White House is projecting, with Obama doing the “And that would affect me how…?” posture of the smartass teenager.  Everyone ❤ Obama, or so Axelrod thinks.  But my momma told me that “Looks don’t last, cookin’ do” (It’s probably Pennsylvania Dutch).  I suspect that a lot of people in those polls say they like Obama because they’re sick of being called racists if they say they don’t like his poor presidential leadership.   Obama might need his party someday.  Better make friends with those senators and stop being so coy and ethereal about his political philosophy.  Sink or swim with your party.  Solidarity should mean something and besides, we’re losing patience out here.
• Al Franken gave a speech to NARAL on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.  You can read the whole thing here.  Al’s got our back on the Choice front but I would like Al to think bigger than Roe v. Wade.  After all, we wouldn’t need a Roe v. Wade if women were truly equal persons under the law and were able to exercise their unalienable right to decide for themselves whether or not to become parents.  Or their unalienable right to worship as they please or not please.  Or their unalienable right to determine their own morality about their reproductive decisions as women in many developed countries around the world are able to do.  The time has come.  Roe v. Wade was never our ticket to equality.  Let it die.  Bring on the war.
• Al Franken takes on media giants Comcast and NBC.  He’s absolutely right about one thing.  You can’t trust the media.  They are not on the side of a free society.  They on the side of those maintaining a carefully controlled underclass.  Hey, if Democrats want to vote for this merger without closing all of the loopholes and strengthening the anti-trust protections, who are we to stop them?  They’ve never wanted our input on anything anyway (but they call our houses incessantly for money and our votes).  On the other hand, I can see no logical reason why any entity would consciously participate in its own demise, content with a few weak promises of restraint from the guys who potentially have Democrats’ balls in their hands come election time.  If Comcast and NBC REALLY, REALLY want to merge, now is the time to extract that pound of flesh, like reinstatement of the “fairness doctrine” or painful concessions on net neutrality or new rules regarding competition in townships like mine where Comcast practically owns the high speed internet market, keeping out competitors like Verizon FIOS.  This is a no-brainer to those of us out here watching.  But Democrats have been winning a lot of Darwin Awards for the past several decades so expect them to screw it up.

The Al Franken Decade was a classic.

I’m happy to say that Al was one of my better bets in 2008.  He’s turned out to be pretty much what I expected: an assertive, principled, liberal Democrat who is a royal pain in the ass to the Republicans and some Democrats alike.  He opens his mouth and shameless liberal ideals come out of it.  Watching him go after insurance companies that cut people off at their sickest, defense contractors who force rape victims into mediation and Joe Lieberman’s endless monotone bogarting of the Senate mic has been a joy and a pleasure.  This may be the “Al Franken Decade”.  It’s 30 years late but I’ll take it.

In the meantime, I propose we show Al some appreciation and demonstrate to the other “anonymous Senators” who are secret liberal Al admirers (that means YOU, Bob Menendez)  that good behavior will be rewarded.  You can make a contribution to Al here.

$25 per Conflucian adds up to a lot of reward.

Obama Defines Obama

“Ich bein ein New Democrat.”  “I am a New Democrat.”  That’s what President Black Obama said at a meeting of New Democrats.  Of course, unlike John Kennedy in Berlin, he didn’t say it in German, though, had he been at a gathering of chicken dippers, he probably would have amended his declaration to profess his unambiguous affiliation with…chicken dippers, whatever they are.  Thus, the self-proclaimed “blank screen” that is the Obamessiah assumes a Paulian characterization for himself.  From the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 9:20-22:

²⁰And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain them that are under the law;

²¹To them that are without law, as without law, (being not without law to God, but under the law to Christ,) that I might gain them that are without law.

²²To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.

Politico reports the surprising declaration with the appropriate sense of awe it deserves, given the Artful Dodger’s previous reluctance to be as labeled, be it as liberal, Socialist, centrist, whatever:

President Barack Obama firmly resists ideological labels, but at the end of a private meeting with a group of moderate Democrats Tuesday afternoon he offered a statement of solidarity.

“I am a New Democrat,” he told the New Democrat Coalition, according to two sources at the White House session.

Pin The Tail On Obama

Amidst the sturm und drang that is the nascent Obama administration, pundits, analysts, talking heads, blogger boyz and other professional bullshitters are running amok, racing each other to see who can be first to bang his/her head into a brick wall trying to figure out just where the Spokesmodel-in-Chief is coming from, and exactly where he might think he’s going.  Needless to say, none of them seem to have a freaking clue.  Is he too tired, over his head, fiendishly Machiavellian, liberal, centrist, Socialist, Marxist, fascist, or, just,  as Mickey Mouse allegedly said to the divorce court judge about Minnie, fucking Goofy?

The New York Times, in an interview aboard Air Force One, tried valiantly to pin the Teflon TelePrompTer Reader down about his overall philosophy of governance, to little avail:

Q. The first six weeks have given people a glimpse of your spending priorities. Are you a socialist as some people have suggested?

A. You know, let’s take a look at the budget – the answer would be no.

Q. Is there anything wrong with saying yes?

Obama then goes on to give a classic 4-paragraph, professorial ObAnswer that didn’t come anywhere near to answering the question.

Q. So to people who suggested that you are more liberal than you suggested on the campaign, you say, what?

A. I think it would be hard to argue, Jeff. We have delivered on every promise that we’ve made so far. We said that we would end the war in Iraq and we’ve put forward a responsible plan.

Q. In terms of spending.

Obama then goes on to give a classic 3-paragraph, professorial ObAnswer that didn’t come anywhere near to answering the question.  Which of course, prompted the interviewer to again ask the president if he was a Socialist:

Q. Is there one word name for your philosophy? If you’re not a socialist, are you a liberal? Are you progressive? One word?

A. No, I’m not going to engage in that.

No wonder the pundits, analysts, talking heads, blogger boyz and other professional bullshitters are all having such a hard time sussing out where he’s coming from; they’re using yardsticks to measure water temperature.  The only logical answer to the “where’s this guy coming from?” question is, “someplace only he knows.”  He fits no known description, he is an Obacanacratist.  He fully intends to “change” the “old ways of Washington,” just like he always said he would.  What I can’t understand is why so many people find something so obvious, so hard to comprehend.

Until everybody, on both sides of the aisle, and down the middle, wraps their heads around the fact that he’s not a Democrat or Republican, Socialist, Marxist, or any other -can,” “-crat,” or “-ist” you can think of, they’ll never be able to answer the only pertinent question, which is not, “what’s he up to?” but, “are we going to let him get away with it?”

Cross posted @ Cinie’s World