Sometimes I really wonder about myself. I have not been paying super microscopic attention in the past 24 hours, like I’d like to. Like I used to. Like I would if I could. But… sometimes, I wonder if that doesn’t make it a little easier to actually hear & see through all the alarms and smoke better.
Think about this and tell me what you think, dharmadears.
UPDATED with Daily Show Video link, Jon Stewart… below.
Earlier in the week, Health Care Reform was scrambling. Okay, maybe not a full halt, but certainly a battling.
The People wailed.
Congress is gonna go golfing… aka “vacation”, as per the usual August Recess schedule.
The People moaned and signed Petitions and hollered No, not while we’re dying.
The Prez holds a very much planned ahead Press Conference on Prime Time TV, Wednesday night.
The People hold their collective breath and watch and listen and HOPE that Our Hero will whip this thing into the frenzy it deserves.
Does he deliver? Hmmm, the pundits seemed to say he was lukewarm and lackluster. I’m not sure (I didn’t see it all, I confess.) But I guess it was… okay.
Up until that last, toward the end, that curve ball Q about the Harvard Prof arrested on his front porch … whoa … huh? … wtf? Mr Prez takes it, the questionable Question, and offers his thoughts and opinions on a topic that is completely left field and irrelevant to the current fires… but he takes it.
His answer was fine. It was satisfactory. I was satisfied. Satiated. Next question?
Of course, all of you folks reading this, I know you heard or read all the subsequent uproar. The pundits were all over it. The bloggers have not shut up yet about it. Debates and blockquotes and yes it is and no it isn’t … Racial profiling. Krazy Kops. Black Professor. Door jammed, NOT lost keys. and on and on.
More blogging… Why did he even take that Q? How did they approve, pre-approve that Q anyway? Oh its the Rethugs, they’ve infiltrated. Oh it’s a shiny wild Race distraction-Object. The Evil Ones have taken hold and hijacked our agenda… AGAIN!!! OH NOES!
You know, few things get people whirled up into a frenzy than a big race Big Deal. So, now, right on cue, The People are in a frenzy. Over Race. Not Health Care. Not Torture. Not Afghanistan. Not Banks. Not jobs. Not… {sigh}.
Uhm… what?
I think Team Obama (i.e. BHO, Axelrod, Gibbs, the rest of them) are pretty damn sharp. Rarely have I seen them get taken off guard or stumped. Including Wednesday night. Gibbs was on msnbc, right after the Presser, and he was well prepared when he was asked about the Race Q and Obama’s response to it. He knew it was comin’.
Here’s what I think.
I think the tail is waggin’ the dog.
USA is not supposed to be a government Of The RepublicansDemocrats, For the RepublicansDemocrats, and By the RepublicansDemocrats,… it’s supposed to be Of The People, For The People, and By The People.
The. People. Get it? We. The People.
I don’t know, and I’m not really sayin’ one way or the other, exactly WHO commandeered this thing, this Race story, and fashioned it into a Front Page Headline, but it sure does seem like The People aren’t YELLING very LOUD right now…. about Health Care Reform, or about anything. What I am hearing (reading) is more like… “Quiet down, now, people, slow down, calm down. We will get it done by the end of the year.”
“We just heard today that, well, we may not be able to get the bill out of the Senate by the end of August, or the beginning of August,” President Obama said. “That’s OK. I just want people to keep on working. Just keep working.”
Well. That’s all. There is some real news going on, you know, the usual suspects… Common Dreams often has a good selection, if you have to speedblog, like me. Oh! Or this essay from MOC. (on my way now to that one)
I rented Slumdog Millionaire, I’m gonna try to go watch it now.
Please share your observations here. Feel free (lol not really!!!) to tell me I’m nuts or way offbase. Guess I mostly needed to vent a little.
Your thoughts?
Jon Stewart… darn, cant get the embed to work right.
heres the link anyway
http://www.thedailyshow.com/wa…
Bonus …here’s this instead…
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Nothing… repeat, NOTHING… is actually unscripted these days. It’s a diversion, and I am just as sick of it as you are. Luckily, I have a nifty antidote that grows nearby, and will proceed to imbibe some of it so I won’t go too crazy.
One of these days they’ll wake up. Or maybe not, since their dream of a completely fucked up Amerika is just what they always wanted… [gag]
The same people who make fun of people with ADHD – you know, all those “normal” folks – are the ones who go Leeroy Jenkins-ing off into the middle distance when the last question asked creates a diversionary shitstorm.
I mean, yeah, it’s a shitstorm, and needs to be addressed, but we need to ummm… focus.
they do something about it.
There must be 2-3 million progressives who live within a 2-hour drive of Washington D.C. If they filled the streets of D.C. a couple times a month demanding single-payer, we’d get it.
There should be a million people surrounding the Senate office buildings right now. They should be telling those senators, “You want to go on vacation? You’ll have to get past us first. Good luck.”
Change is up to us. Progressives should be the tip of the sword, we should be in the streets, but all most of us do is blog, make a phone call now and then, and sign petitions.
If we want real change, we’re going to have to get in the streets of D.C.
priorities of our “public servants”.
Some of these “public servants” use their jobs to serve themselves to all available money:
While today’s peek under the “public servant” rock shows some especially disgusting bugs and almost unbelievable moral bankruptcy–IMHO, it does show how low some politicians are willing to go to enrich themselves. Now the Congressional “public servants” don’t have to engage in such outrageously creative criminality in order to enrich themselves–they just have to accept donations from health care lobbyists in return for political favorable legislation for the health care industry (and other large corporations, like Goldman Sachs, etc).
The Gates story is just the most recent time the vast US populace broke its seeming attention on HCRA and fixated instead on something else that was more fiery, more dramatic, and yes, simpler. I’m not really surprised. How could I be? It’s nothing new
I’m afraid we’re going to get exactly the health care system we deserve. Put another way, our apathy, our silence, our willingness to be distracted, our relentless search for entertainment, our letting the elected officials off the hook, our letting them bloviate on and on and on and then go on vacation are signs that we don’t have the juice to get what we need. And because we’re weak, and easily misled, we’re going to remain a laughingstock. The health care system we get is going to reflect our epic fail.
Obama missed a golden opportunity,
to draw in, and hook the general public
about the need for the Public Option.
Obama’s “tonsil story” was pathetic —
didn’t make sense, and didn’t draw in the Audience.
(sore throat, tonsils, dishonest doctors? allergies? Jeesh!)
The rest of the time, he was way too geeky, imo;
and just not enough “plain talk”.
(like something my Mom could understand.)
and then Obama went and “big-footed”
his own HC press conference,
by picking a side in the Gates case.
Great Communicator — he’s not!
The News Cycle for real Health Care Reform,
was stepped on and squashed,
by the Presidential Umpiring on a hot Wedge issue.
Hard to see how this was by design?
Unless Harry Reid, sent the Prez a memo,
saying forget about it Dude,
it ain’t happening!
The Obstructionists and the Lobbyists
are just TOO Powerful.
Could be, I guess ?
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very very funny…
…I just want to say that I really appreciate the way one can go directly to ones’s comment page on this site as oppose to dKos where you first have to click to your diary page and then to your comment page…I’m just saying…especially after complaining about that feature at dKos for ages (I’m a very early registrant there).
And I also think speed blog reading is a good way to catch alot more info. Me, I’ve lost steam lately, I think because I’ve made up my mind and am frustrated so many people will not open their fucking minds. But I keep reading because knowledge is power and my power is growing baby!
…I disagree with the “nothing unscripted” take on it. I think the question and response make sense because Gates is who he is and it was and is just that outrageous. But Obama seemed to know he’d slipped and walked it back fast, in the clip I heard.
Where I sort of have to rock back on my heels and go whoa is that during this entire election, one kept waiting for an event which would allow the loud and relentless racists among us to cut loose. And he was just too good. But the racism really is in the system, it is an assembly line and eventually something had to happen which was just so creepy and so deniable that the divisions would show. And it did…
Maybe I’ve just listened to too many otherwise sane people go off on Obama for reasons which are obviously based on race, but I don’t think this is just a distraction. I mean, sure, yes, there are plenty of smart people who will use any distraction and especially one they can poke a president for, and they are mostly the right at this point, doing it their way. But I think this is more like a fault line, with tremendous energy behind it, and this is a little rumble.
You know when you’re a kid and you join a club and everyone is following the rules and being nice but they really, really don’t like you and half of them want to beat you up and then one day there’s this reason they have to start doing bad things, and it makes sense to all of them? Heh. Maybe not. But that’s how this feels as an observer. Like they’ve found their dog whistle and are blowing with all their might.
I probably liked communist theory too much as a child but that whole dialectic internal contradictions thing is just too easy. We have these huge racial and associated economic and legal injustices that we just don’t talk about and they are all around us happening every day. Obama until now hasn’t talked about them without immediately dragging everything into the “we’re all Americans” frame. He actually, if briefly, called out a crying example of how institutional racism works. Authenticity always changes things :}
Can’t we be dharma tigers?