My local paper ran a Kathleen Parker commentary on Michelle Obama's vacation in Spain this morning. My first thought was dismal - OMG, here's a woman who has exhibited symptoms of Obama Derangement Syndrome from time to time and she's sounding more measured and reasonable than a lot of what I read on my progressive blog. Fuck a duck.
It wasn't the lowest moment of the last couple of days by any means. The low point so far was the realization that scores of Kossaks enthusiastically rec'd a diary that advocated not voting in 2010 as a way to punish Robert Gibbs for criticizing the professional left.
I started to question my own sanity. I'm fairly content with what the man I helped elect to the White House is doing. I rarely wake up wondering what fresh horror will be revealed. It's been months since I had that "under siege" sense of impending doom.
I'm plenty frustrated that governing is damn near impossible for President Obama, but until this morning I didn't realize it's All His Fault. Silly me, I thought it had to do with the Republican Party, a bunch of spooked Blue Dogs and the near impossibility of being heard in a country with a corporate-controlled media.
It turns out, however, that my problem is that I'm not paying close attention to how incompetent this man is or how profoundly non-Progressive his agenda is. If I wasn't an Obamabot I'd be livid at the myriad ways Barack Obama disses Progressives.
This reality requires that I rethink my scorn for the Tea Party patriots. I guess it's possible that they're just a loyal and passionate base that is rightfully enraged over being ignored by their party leadership. Maybe it makes sense to win the small battles and lose the larger war. Who am I to judge?
If what I'm reading here is reality, it doesn't really matter who sits in the White House. The corporate overlords have succeeded already, there's no way citizens are going to impact policy in any event. The reason for blogging at all escapes me, if this is true, but maybe if I continue to ruminate I'll understand.
It seems that in spite of small victories in his first 20 months, President Obama is, in fact, not supportive of any of the programs he's sponsored or spoken in favor of.
He never wanted to reform our healthcare debacle - er, system. If he had he'd have mounted the Bully Pulpit and forced single-payer thru Congress. When people oppose your plans to fix what's broken there's no reason to worry about why, or to be concerned about their concerns. You ignore their fears and force them to accept something they don't understand because one day they'll get it. People who were stupid enough to be brainwashed over the last 30 or 40 years into fearing big government and the loss of their inalienable right to make peculiar decisions don't deserve respect anyway. The way to govern a large country is with an iron fist and a solid conviction that you know what's best. Hubris and ego always get the best results. The last few decades have proven that, right?
If President Obama was interested in the plight of Main Street, why the hell did he give Wall Street multiple hundreds of billions of dollars with no oversight? They've never repaid a penny of it, and they won't. They have bigger company jets and fancier executive bathrooms, and that was the whole point of bailing them out. He could have let Wall Street fail and given that money to Average Americans. We're good at managing money, and we'd have spent it on American made goods in locally owned small businesses and we'd have gotten the economy back on track in no time.
If President Obama was really winding down the war in Iraq, why is it that the soldiers returning from Iraq are actually holodeck creations? It seems far more likely that we've increased our presence, built more bases, and Halliburton and Friends are now profiting from the Iraqi oil reserves. After all, if what the White and the Pentagon say about SOFA is true Progressives should be cheering. They're not, so something's clearly fishy.
And I'm quite sure Guantanamo has been expanded, and countless American citizens have been wiretapped warrentlessly and then scooped up by assassination squads in the middle of the night and imprisoned in tiny, lightless cages. They're only removed for waterboarding twice a day.
I can also now state without fear of contradiction that a careful examination of the legislation passed to rein in the excesses of our financial sector will reveal invisible ink that clearly states that the free market shall never be enjoined from indulging in wretched excess, and any regulations that appear to be in place will not be enforced.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I've actually read that all these things are happening, not here, not anywhere on the Google, but I'm a bright woman and I can extrapolate conclusions from what I have read. It's mathematical: multiply the level of angst by the number of angsters and you get a reasonable facsimile of reality. Simple.
People wouldn't be apoplectic about Guantanamo remaining open just because Congress won't cooperate in relocating prisoners, foreign governments won't allow their citizens to return, and there's no place to put people who have been destroyed by Dick Cheney's torture fetish but remain too dangerous to send to Kansas. That's not reasonable. The level of fury can only indicate that evil continues to be done by the President and his minions.
Progressives wouldn't be foaming at the mouth about our continued high level military presence in Iraq if those pictures of returning soldiers were taken at real American military bases. Clearly there's an effort being made to trick us. Who's to say we don't have holodeck technology? Look what can be done with Photoshop, for the love of FSM. If Obama didn't want to hold Iraq he'd never have gotten us into this mess in the first place! Nuff said.
And another thing - no one in their right mind could claim that President Obama was secretly holding control of military bases in Iraq while pretending to turn them over to Iraq's army unless they were sure his true agenda was a desire to control Iraqi oil reserves and enrich Exxon, Halliburton and BP. I mean, really, why else hold on to cheesy real estate in a desert?
And those idiots who mistakenly applauded financial sector reforms, the ones who were amazed that the final product was actually better than anyone had expected? - fools, tools, gullible children. There was nothing there that could hurt banks or Wall Street. At first glance the writing sounded pretty good in some ways, but once you revealed the invisible ink part of it it became crystal clear what was really happening here. Tim Geithner and HIS band of evil minions saved the day for the top 1%.
It's clear that once you start looking beyond the simple laundry list of sins committed by this President his real agenda begins to be revealed. Progressives are simply not capable of believing partial truths or outright lies. Unlike Republicans, we have a deep awareness of history and a healthy respect for the complexities of modern living and modern governance. Unless there were some truly Machiavellian plots afoot in the West Wing you'd never see Progressives jumping on every half-baked revelation that floats around the intertubez. We'd never continue to repeat those things until we've convinced enough people that they must be true. It. Just. Doesn't. Happen. Trust me, we're too smart for that.
Now that I've learned how to see past the Presidential window dressing - increased VA funding, protecting the legal rights of GLBT's who work for the government, strengthening the EPA, equal pay for women, keeping teachers and other public servants employed and dozens of other phony attempts to brainwash progressives into thinking they helped elect a decent man to the WH - now I'm able to ferret out the dirty truth. Trust me, reading carefully and using my mathematical formula faithfully will reveal the truth to you, too.
I don't understand why my newfound cynicism and angst isn't making me feel better. Maybe I need to find me a mega-church and see if I can't get raptured outta here.