As some of you know, Press Secretary Gibbs lost it today, lashing out at the 'professional left' and accusing us of being drug addicts.
While I always appreciate honesty over insincerity, even if the honesty is ugly and unpleasant, this is yet another example of the contempt the Democratic Party leadership has displayed since we gave them their most powerful mandate in a generation to rule.
Why is your administration in trouble, Mr. Gibbs? Please read on.........
Political commonsense says you take care of your base - you know, the way your opponents do - especially in the run-up to midterm elections.
I realize you can't tell the difference between constituents and campaign contributors, so let me spell it out for you. You won by 9.8 million votes, 9.2 of them new voters, most of them poor, working class and in economic trouble. You win when you run a populist campaign that rallies the poor, the working class, people of color and other constituencies.
You lose the minute you sell them out, because these communities either show up to vote for you or they stay home.
While your political base waited patiently for you to address the economic crisis where they live, you saved the banks, the investment industry, the auto industry, the health care insurance industry, the war industry and their bloody, bankrupting and unwinnable wars and left the rest of us to drown.
How stupid are you to leave so many of us unemployed? How many teabaggers are people who lost their jobs, homes or saw their businesses, savings and retirement accounts go down the drain? More than any of us here would like to admit. How many unemployed people wasted their days watching Fox News or listening to hate radio?
By abandoning them, by leaving them twisting in the wind, you gave your political opponents a sector of your army, while you turned off all the rest who could never vote Republican.
Every time President Obama said jobs were gone and they wouldn't come back for years and then did nothing, you lost votes. By now you've lost whole communities of voters.
If you started with jobs and spent that first trillion dollars on a WPA program, instead of bailing out the very people who crashed the economy, you might have had more support when you got to something contentious like health care. And by the time you got to finanical industry reform, we wouldn't be rolling our eyes and presuming a crooked fix buried in the text of the legislation.
You might have had a more supportive atmosphere for immigration reform if you dealt with jobs FIRST, rather than pissing off all the unemployed, inflaming racist and xenophobic fears, while you tried to add 12 million more people to the job market.
You rode the back of the anti-war movement and then plunged us deeper into war. Worse still, your arrogant belief that you can actually win these wars has meant the conflict has spread to Pakistan, seriously destablizing that country in the process. You have opened up covert warfare in Yemen and Somalia and played wargames off the Korean coast in an effort to 'extend our influence' into areas that are bound to increase conflict.
If Afghanistan is your Vietnam, Pakistan is your Cambodia. Except this 'Cambodia' has nuclear weapons. So you can't blame the Republicans any more for these wars, they are yours now.
Indeed, that bump in exports you so loudly touted was in no small part because we became the world's largest exporter of weapons again, increasing the likelihood that there will be more war in the future, not less.
Instead of building a jobs program that would have reseeded this economy with cash from the bottom up and given the unemployed, the underemployed and the poor positive work that might give them a future, you warehoused them on unemployment and booted them about like a football.
Instead of addressing thirty years of malevolent, 'bipartisan' economic policy that gutted this country of living wages - outsourcing, downsizing, automation, the shift to part-time and contigent labor, mergers, etc. etc. - you actually continued to press for new free trade agreements that have destroyed living wages in this country AND undermined local economies in other countries and sent their citizens flooding across our borders to get on the safe side of American foreign/war/economic policy.
Instead of creating jobs that add to the quality, productivity or good fortunes of this country, your only real job investment has been for defense, intelligence and homeland security. 79% of all civilian jobs posted in the USAJOB database are for those three areas of government. That's up from 71% from a year ago.
Instead of freeing Americans and their businesses from the predatory greed of the health, drug and insurance industry, you saved the greedy and mandated our financial support for these craven creeps. Health care costs continue to function as a drag on employment, adding 33% to the cost of every employee, or saddling those without insurance with additional mandated costs to their already hammered personal economies.
Instead of dealing with immigration reform in such a way that it didn't backlash on that vulnerable population, you set them up to be pitted against American-born unemployed and did nothing positive for either group.
Instead of imposing a moratorium on primary home forfeiture, you passed phony mortgage reform that requires the voluntary participation of the banks. Either you were complete idiots or the fix was in. Banks just used the program to warehouse those in trouble until the market came back and they could seize their homes.
Worse still, the only people who benefited from your economic efforts were those who had good jobs and economic resources. Nobody in economic trouble has been helped at all.
For 21 months we've watch you and that dispicable mess called the US Senate boot the issues we care about until we could care less about you any more.
We waited and waited for the Rooseveltian moment when you finally addressed jobs. But the only ideas you have involve throwing buckets of cash at corporate America. But no, all you could do for jobs was to help states avoid massive layoffs - and keep their debt payments going to the banks - and throw all of us on unemployment into the political soup so you could boot us around like a soccer ball for political points. Do you really think we were impressed by that?
We noticed it took you 4 months to get 34 billion to keep unemployment insurance funded (some of that for more corporate welfare), but took only 10 minutes to find 60 billion for the war in Afghanistan.
Those of us who elected you, those who needed you to act like Democrats tried to send you a message in the by-elections, tossing corporate trash like Coakley and Corzine in the garbage, by staying home. But you didn't listen, you kept plowing on with every issue but the one that mattered: jobs.
I think your problem is that the only people you talk to, the only people you respect enough to listen to, are your private school buddies. Perhaps that's our mistake; to allow an inbred group of multi-generation, private school alumni - from a handful of schools - to be the only people making decisions in this country. Too many of our leaders were born on third base and think they hit a triple. None seem to come from my neighborhood, even when they represent me.
So its no surprise you ignored jobs. As long as your investment portfolio was doing well, problem solved.
Your neoliberal, trickle down eoconmic solutions produced a jobless recovery. That's not the opinion of a professional leftist, that's the opinion of an unemployed anthropologist, thanks to your educational policies and those of Bush and Clinton.
Every time Arno Duncan speaks, we are reminded his pro-corporate agenda is the privatization and capitalization of public education and the folly of letting businessmen have anything to do with education.
Every time Salazar speaks, we are reminded he is in bed with the energy industry.
Every time Geithner and Bernanke speak, we are reminded that these Goldman Sachs alumni are responsible for the economic disaster we have to live with.
Every time Gates speaks we are reminded you bought into Republican wars begun under false pretenses, because you are more dedicated to the American Empire than the American people.
And every time we hear Rahm Emmanuel name, its because he is doing us dirty and playing the heavy, so that Congress sells us out.
Press Secretary Gibbs blew it because told us what we already knew you believed. Don't fire him for being impolitic, fire them all because that's not what we voted for.
You all blew it because you didn't start with jobs and and you didn't get out of these wars.
You promised us change and you gave us the status quo. You betrayed your political base and you hold us in contempt.
The feeling is mutual.