Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Obama finally coming to grips with the truth?

This interview with David Axelrod reveals that perhaps now--finally--the Obama Administration realized the idiocy of working with Republicans. Unfortunately, this top advisor/insider (at least) doesn't seem to quite get what a lot of us wanted. “I don’t regret his making the effort because I think people elected him to get things done. They didn’t elect him to wage a partisan war . . ."
David, David, David. (And should I add: Barack, Barack, Barack?) How can I parse this complete whiff?
1) "People" never elect a President to "get things done." They elect a President to get what they want done. That you (two?) still believe this is just plain ignorant and has destroyed the best, last chance this country had of halting its decline into probable Third World status. The voters spoke in 2006 and 2008 to get rid of as many Republicans and all of their ideas, because after a quarter century of getting shafted by them, the majority of voters, at least, finally figured that out. By providing the Democrats their largest majorities in Congress and a Democratic President--one who was noticeably of color at that!!--in quite a few generations, our voters spoke in as loud a voice as it is possible in our political system for what we wanted, and it wasn't "bipartisanship" or "compromise" or "incrementalism" or whatever mealy-mouthed garbage you guys thought. It was, to not coin a phrase, for "hope and change." And the "change" part of that phrase meant change in direction and policy. Not change in tone or tenor of debate--who the fuckety-fuck-fuck-fuck cares about that? Jebus!
2) How in all the gods' names do you know that the 2008 voters didn't elect Obama to "wage a partisan war"? I doubt I was the only one to do so, given that the other side of this supposed "war" declared it against us starting in 1980? (I put "war" in quotation marks not because it isn't one, but because you can't have a war when one side--ours--never fights back.) In point of fact, I would argue that is indeed why most people voted for Obama; they finally came to understand that there was a war going on, and those in the bottom 99%ile were losing it and needed/wanted/desperately cried out for someone who would fight for them. Instead, we got you clowns. Since the other party stands rock solid for that top 1% in word and deed, the majority of voters put in power the other party everywhere they could. How and why was that so hard for you bozos to understand?
One could argue, if one were so inclined, that we now have a "better late than never" situation, but I think what we really have is a "too little, too late" instead. We lost the House in 2010, and the demographics and logistics of our system make the Senate likely to go Republican in 2012. So even if we take back the House, we're staring down the barrel of losing the Senate; even if we keep the Senate and retake the House, there is no way on earth we will have anything close to what we already had in 2008-2010! Perhaps this new attitude of Obama's (and the loss of many of the Blue Dogs/centrists from 2010 to now) will help, but unless we keep the Senate and retake the House and rewrite the filibuster rules for the new session of the Senate starting in 2013, we will be in a weaker position than we had back then. Color me doubtful.

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Wednesday, August 17, 2011

2012 Presidential election--meh.

I'm almost literally of two minds on whether I want to vote for Obama or not in the general election. I am 100% sure he is not going to do anything in a second term differently than he has done so far in his first, especially given the very real possibility that the best Congress he will ever get to work with left the building after 2010. However, I am also 100% sure that any Republican will be worse. So, do I go with the concept of voting for "the lesser of 2 evils", or do I instead act on the truism that "the lesser of 2 evils is still evil" and not vote for one of the two major candidates at all? At this point, I really am torn. Some have tried to tell me that in this event, it's all about the Supreme Court and nominees thereto, but I don't think I have to consider that. I think that no rightwing justices will ever again retire during the Presidency of a non-Republican, so the odds of us steering the Court back to sanity are nil. Conversely, I think the "liberal" justices won't retire if the President is a Republican, either, if at all possible. None of the justices are going to be as old as Stevens was when he left after the next term is up, so here's how I see things. If Obama wins, maybe Ginsburg steps down, and Obama names another justice positioned where his first 2 nominees were. A wash, maybe, or even slightly worse? I don't see anybody else leaving voluntarily. If a Republican wins, maybe Kennedy steps down (I think Scalia will have to be dragged off the bench in a bag) and we get a showdown between a complacent Senate and a crazy President for his replacement, who will probably be a wash at best. So either way, the best we can hope for is a wash.
Of course, there is always the possibility that a judge will die in office unexpectedly, but other than Rehnquist, you have to go all the way back to the early 1950s to find another judge who did so, and Rehnquist had an active cancer. While Ginsburg has had both colon and pancreatic cancer, there are no known reports that either are still active. She recently had surgery for the pancreatic cancer, and the doctors have said that they caught the cancer "early." Unsurprisingly, nobody's talking beyond that. (There are no reports on Kennedy's, or Scalia's, health that I can find.)
I guess the questions about Ginsburg's health, and the possibility that Scalia or Kennedy, who are both going to be in their late 70s by the time of the election, could keel over suddenly, will push me to vote for Obama, but my reality is that I am relatively unconcerned about the Presidential race, for the most part. Retaking the House and keeping the Senate are by far more important to me than whether Obama gets 4 more years to disappoint and aggravate me.

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