Roll film - Star Trek III, The Search for Spock
"Come on aboard, Klingons," said Captain Kirk as he and his skeleton crew prepared to beam down to the Genesis planet, but not before setting the self-destruct timer. He'd already done the math, and figured about 2/3 of the Klingons on the Bird of Prey off the Enterprise's bow would be on the boarding party, giving him a sliver of a chance to kick the Klingons' asses as the film came to a climax.
Republicans don't have to wish failure on President Obama - deliberately or not, they've already set booby traps, monkey wrenches, and time bombs all through the machinery of America. Funny how as soon as one massive mess has been kinda, sorta cleaned up, the fire mostly put out, or whatever, another catastrophe happens that just adds to our collective misery, that gives the Obama Administration one more massive pain in the ass to deal with on top of everything else. No wonder people still think the country is going in the wrong direction - it is. It's been set to self-destruct by the same people in the Establishment who saw the writing on the wall in the fall of 2008 that the gig was up and they were about to be turned out on their asses. Maybe, just maybe, they can get some of it to stick to the new guy.
It kind of reminds me of the endgame of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, where Saddam Hussein, knowing he's about to get his ass kicked, starts setting oil wells on fire. Of course, I have zero proof that the Republicans, or just Dick Cheney, or John Galt, or whoever, deliberately sabotaged the economy, the environment, and the national mood on their way out, but it looks that way to me.
Consider this article at Gawker, titled, "Who do you hate more, BP or Goldman Sachs?" I mean, really. We're not even finished with the people on Wall Street who've been stealing our money, and now we have to deal with BP as well. When is it going to end? When will we finally have all the fires put out and be able to finally begin to put policies in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening again?
Want to know why the MMS was still chock full of oil industry sycophants a year and a half into Obama's presidency? It's not like President Obama hasn't been doing his job; he's had his hands pretty full, and the MMS is but one relatively low-level government agency that wouldn't ordinarily show up on anyone's radar. It's the perfect place for Bushies and other assorted hacks to hide and draw paychecks, but who would have guessed it would bubble up to a top-tier concern? Show of hands - how many of you have even heard of it before the oil spill. I thought so.
So the oil spill, with the "army we have" (thanks, Dr. Rumsfeld), will take the whole summer to fix, at best, and we have to enlist the services of the people who caused it to fix it because nobody else knows how or has the resources to do it, which has got to piss people off. When is the next crisis, the next pot left by the previous administration to boil over, to reach the critical stage? My guess is late October, just in time for the midterm elections. What will it be next time? Another stock market crash? A McVeigh-style terrorist attack? The collapse of the tulip bulb futures market? A product recall of Coca-Cola arising from a tainted batch of high-fructose corn syrup? What other crisis is just waiting for the leaves to change so the howling tea-monkeys can start screaming again about how the whole world's gone to Hell in a handbasket since January 20th, 2009?
You know, some of us talk a lot of smack about how much President Obama has disappointed them. He's paid scant attention to this pet issue of yours. He's only given lip service to such and such. He's broken his promise to do whatever. The way I see it, the Obama administration had some rather pressing priorities coming into last year, which can generally be listed thus:
Fix the banking system.
Get a handle on TARP before the crooks run off with all the money.
Stimulate the economy somehow before it jumps over a cliff.
Try and unravel this business with housing and mortgages.
Iraq/Afghanistan
This first group is in no particular order. You can probably add a few things to this list that I forgot about. The truth is, only a few people knew exactly how fucked up things were, and none of them were talking. "Let the new guy figure it out for himself, they were saying to themselves, "and look like an idiot while doing it. Then we can laugh at him."
After the high-priority items, there were some more proactive things going on that required a lot of time and energy, some of which got done, some not:
Lilly Ledbetter, and other relatively low-hanging fruit, like the CARD Act
Health Care/Insurance Reform
Finance reform
Immigration reform
Energy policy
DADT
And you can keep adding onto this list of second-tier items, some of which have been done, others still working their way through the sausage factory in Congress. Somewhere, in all that mess, you have re-regulation of all these bad actors like BP whose asses the Republicans (and some Democrats) have been kissing for years. The nifty thing, from the Republican perspective, is that the more the Obama Administration has to keep putting out fires, the less time gets devoted to doing the stuff they got elected to do.
Which leads me to the classic excuse presidents since Truman have offered, that I think is fairly valid - Congress is dragging its feet. Congress is screwing with everything. The minority party in the Senate is holding such-and-such up. Valid, on all points, although that's a harder sell because, unlike in 1948, the Democrats are supposedly in charge of things on Capitol Hill. The point is, still, the President of the United States of America is not a king. He can't just wave a scepter say, "make it so," and expect shit to happen. Our government doesn't work that way.
Oh, and here's a cartoon I swiped from another diary. I find it apt here:
http://img704.imageshack.us/...
So you can keep complaining about what a biiiiiiig disappointment BHO turned out to be, and we'll get somebody else in 2012. I guarantee you won't like him. Not one bit. It'll keep the left blogosphere going for another four years, but that's about the only good thing that can come from doing to Barack Obama what we did to Jimmy Carter in 1980. Or we can be patient. That's kind of hard to do when you're hurting, but think of how much more things would suck if John McCain and Caribou Barbie were in the White House right now. You made the right decision in 2008. Remember that the next time shit happens and the President isn't immediately flailing around throwing a shit-fit like the last idiot.