Wow, congratulations to the whiny left.
The Republicans have only been trying to make President Obama a one-term president. The whiny left is trying to make him a one-year president.
The pathological right thinks Obama is simultaneously a fascist, a communist, and a Muslim plant. The nutcase faction of the left is issuing hysterical warnings that he's a stealth Republican: Ooooh, he didn't insist on a single-payer health plan. Betrayal! Look, look, he's sending more troops to Afghanistan [just as he said he'd do] - he's a Bushian warmonger! He didn't effect world peace in time for happy hour on inauguration day - he must be a failed, false liberal! People are still out of work - get the hook!
Grow up. this childish impatience and petulance are almost as dangerous as the Tea Party's know-nothing tantrums, and all the more reprehensible because it comes from people who are supposed to be in this president's corner. Republicans acting badly? No surprise. Democrats undercutting their own president? Like pointing a gun at your own head and threatening, ''Don't come any closer, or I'll shoot.''
How hard do you think it is for Obama to carry this nation up out of the hellhole of the Bush Administration's digging? He's got the labors of Hercules to accomplish to un-do the damages of the decade past, before he can get some traction for his own programs.
Didn't you people ever take driver's ed, and learn about braking distances? How long do you think it takes to put a stop to environmental depradation, to institutionalized business corruption, to an economy built on speculators' quicksand?
You've got some Congressional Republicans who don't mind taking the country into a nose-dive again, just as long as President Obama crashes along with it. You've got Blue Dog Democrats who rode the Obama coattails to triumph, and are now using their exalted positions to bite him. This president has a harder job than Sisyphus - the rock he's trying to roll uphill is the one his putative friends are trying to roll back down on him.
So, are you ready for the reward? It's the burden of dooming the most promising Democratic presidency in at least a generation. Because that's what your crankiness might accomplish. You could be a part of forfeiting the last chance this country has had in decades to get it right, and handing the country back to the worst of the Republicans - the repugnant, rapacious, amoral, scorched-earth, shameless GOP.
No Democrat's 100% happy with the Obama White House. Even President Obama himself. So what? Suck it up and help to get it across the finish line, and work the rest of it out in private political marriage counseling.
Or get ready to stand next to Mitch McConnell and wave bye-bye to all that. No chance at any health care reform. No shot at a solid recovery. The working class gets thrown under the bus, again. Gitmo gets a fresh coat of paint and brand-new water boards.
A Republican is about occupy the Senate seat of Ted Kennedy - the man who, more than anyone else in a generation, made health care reform his first and last concern.
The Times of London quoted some struggling Bay State lobstermen who plan to vote Republican after always voting for Ted Kennedy: "Kennedy was a good friend of the lobstermen. He would help whenever we had a problem." They sure do have problems. But Ted Kennedy was a senator for 47 years. Barack Obama has had barely 47 weeks to try to bail out the entire country's sinking fiscal ship. Does anyone really believe the Congressional Republicans are going to throw themselves into saving the working man - unless he works in the executive suite?
This country is starting to resemble Benjamin Button, the F. Scott Fitzgerald story of the man who lives backwards, born into old age and growing into his own infancy. We seem to be getting more childish, not more mature. No patience, no long-range temperament - all id-driven, bullying, grasping, instant gratification.
And short-term memory. Remember those preceding eight years, that ready-fire-aim presidency? George Bush lied and manipulated and spent recklessly on a grudge war and lied again, and got away with it for at least five or six years - he got put back into the White House in 2004. Barack Obama tells the truth - and even some in his own party are furious with him for it.
Et tu, you Brutes?
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watch for a new party forming.....read Nathan's Economicblogspot.com : the American Party
change is possible....but it's not what Obama planned.
All of America now knows that Obama is just another servant to the elite.
Left, right, center - nobody likes being manipulated with lies - that is the core problem.
"he must be a failed, false liberal!"
i know of NO ONE on the left leveling this claim,.. the PROBLEM IS.. that he is the perfect liberal,.. that he is a successful liberal,.. that he is perfectly playing out what has been the historical role of liberals.. liberals play the foil, the breakwater to contain and dissuade the leveling impulse of the general population.. they are PLACEHOLDERS who maintain the course set by business until ultimately government can be handed back to the farther 'right' wing..
the LEFT does not accuse liberals of being 'stealth republicans' .. as anyone with a radical analysis can tell you is that liberals are OPENLY republicans,.. (you all too often forget that the democratic party is an advocate for the 'republican form', for capitalism, and for neo-liberal property law.. the party was once called the "democratic republican party" and much of this business serving baggage persists.)
and;
your admission that obama is 'moving slowly' and suggestion that the left is impatient depends on a HUGE, mistaken assumption.. that his trajectory is one which suits the interests of working people in the first place.. it IS NOT! we would not be especially concerned about his SPEED if we could just see some indication that he was even headed in the CORRECT DIRECTION!
Patt - It is unfortunate when people allow themselves to get like concrete - all mixed up and permanently set.
Ha, Ha....won't work. The US people are awake, angry and making changes in their lives.
Watch the Secret of Oz....secretofoz.com for info on how to solve the money problems.
You've kicked the left out of the Democratic party. Now get elected without us. You get to enjoy your realpolitik while we dine on schadenfreude. Bon appatit.
If Obama had followed the Left's agenda and gotten out of the war profiteering business, where we have now learned that millions of dollars have been handed over to the Taliban refueling their insurgency, and called out the health care industry for their failures and destructive nature working against America's quality of care and household budgets, and allowed the mega banks to either break up into smaller entities of go out and find their own rescue packages, etc. he would not be called out for who he has become---a weak and impotent president trying to reach across the poison aisle only to have gotten a major infection.
http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com
I understand why he chose the team he did but I want an open apology for the mistakes that were made and the deals that were cut with the other corporate terrorists who still hold us hostage. He does not have to do everything he promised right away in the first year of office but unless he addresses the leadership issue, he's going to get little done for the rest of his term.
He won't even get to be the president who saved us from ourselves. He'll end up like President Carter. That's what the corporatists and the Cons want. the truth is Carter was the only president to broker a successful deal for peace in the Middle East, he bowed to the will of the purveyors of conventional wisdom and got taken down for it.
I believe in compromise in governing but at some point you've lost the deal if you get nothing good for your efforts.
No, we criticized Bush from the left and now we are criticizing Obama from the left. The louder the left, the more effective we are. It seems completely logical that the only way to move Obama to the left is to criticize him from the left.
Don't get me wrong--I'm quite willing to change my mind on this subject if offered a convincing counter-argument, but when I ask people who disagree with me on this issue to explain their point of view all I get is scorn and derision for being such a whiny idiot who obviously doesn't understand how the real world works.
But I just don't buy the claim that Obama is doing the best he can, that he's trying really really hard to be progressive but the Washington establishment just won't let him. It seems he's just been bending over backwards to the establishment at every turn, making compromises and back-room deals without ever even calling on the people who passionately supported him and believed in his rhetoric to follow him in that fight against the powers-that-be that we were so ready to have.
If he becomes a one-term president, that's HIS fault. It's not OUR fault for holding him accountable.