Obama's BP response has caused his popularity to plummet amid the Bush/Katrina comparisons, no question. The ironic part is that if he were a real Progressive, he would have been all over that oil spill when it happened. Since Obama's election, while the wild eyed lunatics and tea party nut jobs yelled "Commie" and bemoaned the beginning of the Obama Socialist State, I was quietly trying to warn progressives about the guy we elected, while simultaneously telling the Far Right to shut up; with this guy, nothing much will change at all.
In fact, I told them very early in the Obama administration that they were truly WACKOS; if they liked Bush, they were going to like Obama. I wasn't happy about that, I wished that I were wrong, but based on what I had seen since the election, that's how it looked. And to my progressive friends, including some of you on this website who are certainly no friends of mine, I tried to raise the alarm about this President for the exact same reason: this guy is no progressive. Before he even took the oath of office I watched in dismay as he aligned himself with the exact same Wall Street Scumbags that just collapsed our economy. The Candidate of Change was hiring the exact people he needed to chase from the Temple to the positions of Head Temple Moneychanger. Not only did he need to purge the Treasury of the likes of Bernanke & the Goldman Sachs crew, he needed to go after them and reserve several cell blocks for them. As a true progressive, his pal-ing around with the Goldman Sachs crew troubled me a lot more than his alleged "pal-ing around with terrorists" like William Ayers, as Palin had charged.
And then came Health Care and let's face it, Obama pretty much betrayed the progressive movement here. What was needed, what was wanted, and what was promised was a Public Option health care system, if not a Single Payer system. Obama diddled and fiddled and screwed around until the best we could get was this huge insurance company give away program. And in the process he allowed the crazy people of the Tea Party to become a bona fide movement and to seize the political momentum, instead of crushing them. It was during the Health Care fiasco that we got a glimpse of Obama's leadership style and it was not a pretty picture that we saw; for progressives the Red Flags were flying high. In fact I tried to say so on this website, but was attacked by the mob of clowns who enjoy internet pissing matches and flame wars. I guess they think the internet is a perfect forum for them to impress people, something they obviously have problems with in real life. But here, in the glory of internet anonymity they are free to attack others in the bitchy, catty style that reminded me of the upper class bores led by Oscar Wilde many years ago in the London society drawing rooms. The only thing missing after some of these remarks was someone rolling their eyes or saying "Oh Snap" or "owned".
So I tempered my criticism of Obama after that; although I stopped reading these "cutting, biting and witty" replies to my diaries, I actually started feeling guilty about being so mean to Obama. In fact one idiot here even felt that I had some racial motives for disliking his moves as President, which was hilarious. My girlfriend is African American, and in fact I'm the crazy guy who openly held hands with his black and Latino girlfriends in various southern cities as far back as the early seventies, back when it wasn't very healthy to do so. But I grew up in Brooklyn, not Birmingham, so a) I couldn't care less what those redneck idiots thought and b) I was used to street fights and the like, so a part of me actually hoped that someone would say something; I actually wanted them to. So the charge of racism by the local idiots of this website pissed me off, but it also got me thinking. Not that I actually was a racist, but that maybe I was going easier on him because he was our first black President and I really wanted him to succeed. The few mild rebukes of Obama that I posted here in those diaries; if Obama were white, would I have let him get off the hook that easily? I mean come on, let's be real for a second. We started to have JFK dreams about this guy! We dared to hope that Obama would be the great Progressive President we had been longing for since November of 1963. But if we're being real, JFK, he failed us too. He got us entrenched in Viet Nam. We all wanted Obama to be a Great President, a Great Progressive President, not merely a good one. And what had he delivered that first year in office? Escalation in Afghanistan, an emasculated health care plan, and amnesty for the Wall Street & Corporate Scumbags who had just pulled off the greatest robbery of all time.
All of those things were bad, but the absolute worst thing Obama did was to become THEM. In record time, Obama morphed from the guy who was going to change Washington into the guy who represents that which needs changing! Obama came to power as one of us, one of the large number of progressive Americans who saw the problems of the past 30 years (since Reagan) and was going to change those things. Yet almost overnight he became The Establishment. Sure, some of that was inevitable as soon as he become "the leader". But a lot of it was something that he consciously embraced! In fact there are times when I wonder if we were all wonderfully duped by "Them", the Establishment, the Military Industrial Complex that actually runs things. Was Obama "their guy" all along, the way Bush was their guy? It sounds crazy, but when you consider how quickly Obama dumped the progressive movement and all the kids and non political first time voters who propelled him into office based on their HOPES that he would be different, it doesn't sound so crazy after all. Maybe he always was exactly what he is now.
So what IS Obama now? I don't know. We can certainly say "at least he's not Bush", and that much is true. But take a look around you and let me know if you see or feel that things have changed. I mean he certainly doesn't say the stupid things Bush used to say. But we are still in two wars. The Corporate Scumbags still run the show, and please, don't give me that garbage about the Financial Industry regs that Obama passed. Those "regulations" are a toothless joke. Those regs are very similar to what we got for health care, by the way. They look like change, but they in reality don't change a damn thing. All those guys on Wall Street who robbed the country under Bush, they're still in business under Obama. And why would anyone be surprised by his slow response to the oil spill? He's not a real progressive, a guy for whom the environment is a major issue, a big thing. A true progressive would have jumped on the case immediately. Instead Obama dilly dallied and true to form let the Corporations run the show, and now he comes out of this looking bad.
So what is a true progressive to do? Well, we don't vote Republican, that's for sure. We have to continue to support Obama, even though he's not the great progressive President we hoped for. We have no choice; if we don't, someone REALLY bad and possibly insane, might be our next President, someone like Palin, or another Tea Party nut job. And that would be even worse than Bush, if you can even imagine that.