Apologies for beating on a supposedly dead horse but took me a while to find the words to express what I feel.
- When most of America was clapping for "Mission Accomplished" , I felt that the war was far from over and couldn't get myself to clap.
- When all America was clapping for the "purple fingers of Victory"s I could not get myself to clap.
- When the housing bubble was burning bright, I could not bring myself to clap.
I got accused of having Bush Derangement Syndrome, that there was no pleasing we radical left. I was called traitor, insane, naive...
I can't help but fell like "Deja vu all over again", now that I'm hearing the same from Gibbs and others. Let me make this clear: Obama is not Bush but a lot of people on Obama's side are as vicious to critics as Bush lovers were during the Bush years.
And Gibbs is one of them. I called him Scott McClellan because Scotty was the most honest of the bunch. I think Gibbs is being sincere, but using a GOP trick, in an effort to tone down criticism won't make me go away. I learned to not go silent when I think something is wrong, during the Bush years. I am going to trust my instincts and say/do what I think is right, no matter what names I get called. Bring it on.
Posted this as a comment on Balloon Juice, thought it would be good to expand it here. Here is the original comment.
@DougJ:
It's not just Gibbs. Is just the eerie feeling that I've seen this before. When this blog, and most of America was clapping for a President prancing in a flight suit saying "Mission Accomplished" , I felt that the war was far from over and couldn't get myself to clap.
When all America was clapping for the "purple fingers of Victory" of the first Iraqi elections I could not get myself to clap. To me those who clapped had a simplistic view of the problems in Iraq and the tensions between factions were not going to get fixed by a photo op.
When people said "look at the 500 schools we built" and "we turned a corner", "3,000 Iraqis have been trained", and all other milestones that supposedly proved victory was just 6 months away (a Friedman Unit) , I could not get myself to clap.
When the housing bubble was burning bright, I could not bring myself to clap for the "great economy".
Sure, building schools, training Iraqis, fostering elections were good things . But not good enough and to me, it all seemed like window dressing. I could see a lot more important stuff was NOT being done.
I got accused of having Bush Derangement Syndrome. I got told that if Bush cured cancer and resurrected Jesus I would not be happy. I got told over and over again that there was no pleasing we dirty hippies, that we were whiny worriers, that we could see nothing good . Krugman and others got told over and over that their dire predictions were absurd and we were on our way to Down 36,000.
And now... I can't avoid getting the feeling of Deja Vu. I am being told the same things I was told during the Bush years.
Obama is not like Bush but the way people treat Obama critics is just like they treated criticism during the Bush years. Reduction to absurd. Distort their motives. Call them drug addicts, psychotic, infidels who never like the president anyway..
I'm not saying I'm correct on my criticism. Maybe you guys are right and I am asking too much. But I got told the exact same thing about the Iraq war. That I was too negative, that the casualties were just like murder statistics on a large city. That I could never ever see a positive.
And I was right.
So now, I trust my instincts a lot more than I trust people who can't bear to hear criticism. Gibbs is just the latest of them, using the same methods Rove et all used to silence Bush's critics, on his own base. Obama is not like Bush but Gibbs is acting like Ari Fleischer and Dana Perino. And so are a lot of people on the Dem side.