The republicans have decided that they are "too busy" to meet with the President on Thursday and they are putting thin veil on it saying "he didn't really ask us"!
But they are starting down the path of what they did to President Clinton. This time beginning with the pointed snub, they are trying to de-legitimize the President.
So much of what we are seeing is a rehash. This is the result of not cleaning house, not throwing out all those old shibboleths after the Bushco quietly faded away on a noisy helicopter.
We didn't have hearings on the credit crisis or the banking crisis or the bail outs that were anything but kabuki. Yes there were hearings and the bankers all paraded up and down the corridors of dc, but did you get a sense that we were getting to truth? to bedrock? to a common understanding of what was going wrong?
We didn't have hearings on the wars, on where we went wrong adding Iraq to our quiver, to where we are in the "fight against terrorism". We couldn't. There are too many people in dc who are making money from that effort. We are killing people and somebody is getting a great huge lip smacking profit and we might know some of the whos but we don't know all of the whys. So they label it all "top secret" and move on.
We didn't have hearings on the torture, didn't have any judicial action on any of that mess and it was a criminal mess. We just closed our eyes and moved on. But such a dark stain we now have collectively on our souls.
None of the abuses during the Bush years were looked at. The firing of the attorney's general was not reviewed. The imprisonment of Don Seigalman was not reviewed. The abuse of the Guantanamo detainees was not reviewed. We have yet to open the door on all the whistle-blower evidence. The politicization of the DoJ was not reviewed. We are left with not knowing if the abuses continue. And looking at Holder's lack of action, it is greatly possible that the so-called independence of the DoJ that Holder swore he would uphold during his confirmation hearings is a farce now forever.
We have had the "tarp 1 and tarp 2" the latter not even being voted upon but paper money being printed on Bernanke's say so. And, though there is supposed to be an audit of the fed's printing of money it may not include tarp 2 as that was after the fact. But the audit is yet to come and may not be very clear when it does come.
We saw in the Gulf oil spill that the repubs blocked subpoena power for the panel that was convened to look into it. So people were killed and we know that abuses occurred but we are determined NOT to get to the bottom of it.
We have people saying stuff on the "news" that is just flatly made up and never gets refuted on that same channel and nothing is done about it. No news organization wants to have their "1st amendment rights" curtailed by inveighing against others abuses. (Olbermann and Maddow do inveigh but they are not "news" programs, they are "analysts".) In order to refute that non news news, the remaining news outlets should have refuted the charges (like the ridiculous charge of how much Obama spent on his trip to India and Indonesia) on their news programs and repeatedly done so until Faux capitulated with the truth.
We have an all out effort to reduce what little safety net we have in this country, a safety net that is little understood by its recipients who alternatively hug it and condemn it. But those recipients and the protesters denouncing "socialism" are being used by conniving callous corporations and uber rich folks who have the money to promote their message on radio and tv and the connection of that money is veiled or in some cases completely hidden. The result is that we have a deluded citizenry that has no way to defend itself against the predations of an ignoble oligarchy.
So we elected President Obama as "change" and the republicans who swept in this November also did so on "change". But it appears to me that we haven't produced a drop of new wine and we haven't thrown out the old bottles. But we are swilling on wine nonetheless:
All that said, the news is broken, the country is broken and we are failing to understand that we are drunk on the bar room floor lying in puke, piss and pollution. And the cops are not stepping foot in the place. And there are no do gooders, no good samaritans, no street organizers that are coming to pull us out. We are apparently almost at the bottom. We haven't hit bottom as yet or we would actually start that movement upward having no place left to go.
We know we are not at the end of this string. We have broken the economic system of the whole world. Other countries are starting to put the heat on us: If we insist that others take their medicine with really harsh measure when borrowing money from the IMF, then the US should also take the medicine they are saying. President Obama was working to try to get some leeway since we are still in a terrible recession, but like some of the European countries are poking at Greece and Ireland to take drastic measures they are poking at us as well.
And, as Bobswern, and others have pointed out, the toxic assets are still in the system. The investors have not taken the bath that was due them nor have the bankers that created that unholy mess gotten THEIR comeuppance. Big bonuses all around boys, is their cry.
I have always been bothered by Obama's insistence that we move forward and not look backward. (Could it be that if we look back we will see the monster is GAINING on us?!!)
With that insistence:
1. we have yet to come to grips with what has occurred and is occurring in our financial crisis.
2. we have yet to come to grips with the military complexes stranglehold on our government and our policy makers.
3. we have yet to come to grips with the very real perpetrators WITHIN our system and dealt with them in such a way that they have acknowledged their culpability.
Without the latter, we can have no peace because we will remain in the victim mode with outbreaks into the perpetrator mode in order to try to bring balance to the system.
WE, OURSELVES, have to break out of this victimhood that Obama has left us in. We cannot continue in this mode and be in peace. We are not powerless and we need to require, not just remuneration from the banking perpetrators, but some kind of accountability from the neo cons who left us in several wars (we are using the drones without declaring war and using them is a war like act.), dismantling numerous treaties and violating several laws in the process and who laid us open to energy companies to pillage our coffers.
In a very real sense, the tea partiers responded in an incoherent way to all of this by becoming perpetrators themselves. And this will escalate. And we will be drawn in if only to protect ourselves.
I suggest that we demand accountability by requiring a commission that is composed of people that all of us trust, not people from either party. We need honesty and trustworthiness and we don't need another stacked commission like the 9/11 commission. Our immediate problem is that we have a dearth of people we trust and people like Ophrah probably do not have the skill set for such a task. We could, perhaps, look to the fired attorney generals. They, themselves, might have reason to correct the balance. There were some courageous attorneys working for the Guantanamo detainees as well.
(Blockquotes are cribbed from my comments.)