(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette
In his speech Monday, President Barrack Obama actually started to sound like a president. His threat to veto any deficit cutting legislation that did not include revenue producing tax increases was praised by everyone left of Attila the Hun as “progressive”. It gave these critics some kind of new “hope” that Obama had finally drawn a line in the sand with the “my way or the highway” tea party Republicans.
Really? Were any of them listening to what he did say? What did most everyone from Michael Moore on Rachel Maddow’s show to Markos Moulitsas and Move-On.org miss? Anyone with half a functioning brain can see that what Obama offered was just more of the same insanity, piled higher and deeper that and was being covered with his new found veto power.
What should have caught their attention was what Jon Walker at FireDogLake pointed out:
In fact, in his only veto threat Obama made it clear he would accept Medicare benefit cuts if they were accompanied by new tax revenue from the rich by saying, “I will veto any bill that changes benefits for those who rely on Medicare but does not raise serious revenues by asking the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to pay their fair share.” That “but” is a very important clause that means there are scenarios in which Obama would sign a bill that significantly cuts Medicare benefits.
Hello? Did anyone besides a very few of us on the left not hear this?
Obama’s communications director, Dan Pfeiffer said, “we are entering a new phase.” And just what “phase” would that be? “Chief Negotiator” to “Chief Hostage Taker” to get his right wing Republican agenda past this extremist congress?
Obama is now using the social safety network that protects our most vulnerable citizens to con the electorate that he has changed and to reelect him.
What bilge.
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that he’d just downed a fifth and was fucking with his credulous readers because he’s a mean drunk. You mean he was genuinely lauding Obama’s “genuinely progressive”
flat taxdeficit plan that had and has no chance in hell to begin with, which Obama knows damned well? Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. One would think Kos would know a campaign stunt when he sees one.(To paraphrase Happy Rockefeller, “Obama is not running a campaign for 2012. It’s an IQ test.” Balloon Juicers are just as bad, or worse. Of course, they also get pissed at people for having chronically dropped jaws. It’s getting harder to tell the left and right tribes apart on principles, and I don’t mean that hyperbolically.)
I can’t take what passes for politics these days seriously. I’ts all show biz 24/7. It could be worse. There’s relative peace–no one is shooting when I go off on errands, I can buy my food and go about my business, sleep and live in relative peace. What’s really going on? It’s a very complicated puzzle. And that’s the point. Its complexity is intentional. The more confusion and misdirection the better it is for the politicians who, after all, are just brokers for various members of the power-elite. This is why there is order and no shooting in the streets. America is ruled by lawyers and politicians who buffer conflicts.
What about democracy? Forget about it. We’re lucky to be at least a nominal democracy–keeps things from getting too far into tyranny. But here we are human beings being ruled by our betters. So it is and so it will always be, I suspect.
The idea of America as a vigorous democracy was that there would be a public that would be educated and informed. We don’t have any such thing. The public is, if anything, misinformed and too stupid to comprehend it because our educational system is set-up, frankly, to produce morons, so to speak, at least in the majority of the population.