Mitch McConnell lied.
The biggest priority of the men who pull the strings of the Republican party is not to make Obama a "one-term President." It is to guarantee precisely the opposite.
This of what the Republicans have accomplished in the last four years, and what it means for the next four:
* Not one tax has gone up. Corporations sit on 1.5 trillion dollars in profits.
* Union rights are being rolled back. As a result of extended long-term unemployment, a huge pool of cheap labor is emerging, guaranteeing continued high profits and increasing wealth disparities.
* Health care 'reform" was a sweetheart giveaway to private insurance companies, giving them 50 million new customers. Corporations will keep cutting back on their health care coverage, using "Obamacare" while denouncing it.
* Cutting Social Security benefits is no longer the "third-rail" of American politics. Defending the utility of government has replaced it.
* Environmental "regulations" are, for all intents and purposes, toothless. Drilling, and now fracking and oil shale extraction, proceed with impunity. (North Dakota burns off a quarter of their natural gas, spewing untold tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.) Meaningful climate change legislation is dead, and millions of Americans have bought the "hoax" narrative.
* The military/industrial complex is thriving. Defense spending is higher than ever. Potentially insurrectionist poor and working class men are safely controlled by warehousing them in either the armed forces or the prison system.
*Dodd/Frank was so watered down Wall Street operates virtually as before. There is still no functioning Consumer Watchdog Agency.
*Abortion rights are being rolled back in virtually every state.
* Not one gun has been taken away from anybody, and there is no prospect of gun legislation in the wings.
* A Republican President would inherit an economic mess they are still largely perceived as owning... All they offer are the same "solutions" that created the current disaster. They are petrified of overseeing a Depression they will take the blame for. (That's why Christie is waiting for 2016, when there is some hope of a resurgent economy to take over from Obama that he can reframe as a Republican recovery.)
* The Tea Party base is full of angry, fearful, uninformed people who don't like government. They much prefer to be in opposition to it, while wielding as much power as they want using the Republican Party to obstruct all meaningful change.
The big money that pulls the strings of the Republican Party sees no benefit is mucking with the status quo. They are doing superbly well under Obama. If they wanted to win in 2012 with a perfectly viable candidate who could court the socially liberal/fiscally conservative moderate middle, they would have coalesced around Jon Huntsman. But he is at 1 percent in the polls.
Granted, they may not be completely aware of what they're doing. But every new "Great White Hope" reveals himself to be fundamentally flawed. These power-brokers are not political incompetents. There is a method to their madness, even if none of them is honest (or politically brave) enough to admit it.
Think about it: Four more years of a black guy with a funny name to blame for everything going wrong with the 99 percent, while your 1 percent constituency continues to rake in more cash than they could ever spend? Wouldn't you want more 4 more years of the same?
Follow Mark Olmsted on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MarquisMarq
You bring together a list of everything wrong in the world to put it on Obama's head.
Obama speaks and governs by his values. I agree with this values. Case closed.
This article, on the other hand, is a load of manipulative BS.
It gets worse.
There is no guarantee that the GOP will retain control of the House or increase their Senate numbers.
Once reelection is no longer an issue, the President and his team might be more aggressive in their efforts to fight the GOP.
Of course one can't be too sure...just sayin' -- What a country!
I am happy to see Obama at long last taking on Republicans, but his poll numbers don't seem to reflect him gaining much traction. Lord knows if he wins without getting back the House it might be a Pyrrhic victory. If the Republicans induce a double dip recession (which they look to be about to do) we might wish they'd win 2012. President Romney or Perry's utter inability to fix the economy with more tax cuts and less regulation might finally put the nail in the coffin of the utter toxicity and uselessness of rightwing economic theory.
Although I never underestimate the capacity of the American electorate not to learn any lessons from history,