I was going to reply to Troubadour's bravely written diary on his assertion that President Barack Obama is the 'Best President Ever' as a response in his/her diary, but it was going to be so long that I wanted to reply in my own diary. It will not be nearly as eloquently written or as long (okay maybe it will be long), but it will be sincere.
Follow me ov'r.
I say BRAVO. Bravely written. More than that -- brilliantly written. I read every word of it and I have to say that it was one of the best diaries I have yet read on Daily Kos -- not because of your position that Obama in your opinion is the best President ever, but because you so succinctly and eloquently laid out the case as to why in many ways that even I had not considered (but felt and could not articulate).
I was just prepared to say that President Obama's tenure as POTUS is too early to be judged in such absolutes, but after reading your stunningly written diary, you knock it out of the park in convincing me that you are so absolutely on target with your analysis.
I know that your diary will likely end up as one of the biggest meta battles in DK's history -- largely because many will not take the time to read the entire piece and some Progressives will gag at the block insert of the President's attributes as you see them that was listed early in the piece.
It's too bad, too, because I think that this warrants a serious, deep hearted and thoughtful discussion, even if some folk strongly disagree.
I wish I could quote the whole thing, but I thought your most superior points were the following (actually there were more, but these are the ones that I wish to respond to):
but what about a Democratic President who is literally tested in every way: What about a Congress so hostile they question your very legitimacy as an American on a daily basis, threaten impeachment as many times as there are hours in the day, and obstruct every single appointee and piece of legislation on your agenda as a matter of course even if they had previously supported it? What about managing to endure and thrive in the glare of a deranged, lying media controlled by an oligarchy of your enemies that spreads 24/7 propaganda against your administration and party? What about an opposition that has unlimited, unregulated funding not only from corporations that have accepted trillions of dollars in no-strings-attached public bailouts, but from hostile foreign countries (e.g., China and Saudi Arabia) that have a vested interest in controlling American politics through Republican corruption?
I don't know how many times I have said a lot of these things, but never have I seen it written all in one place. These things matter, especially the part about the media and 'dark matter', 'corporations are people too' funding of narratives that persist in entrenching the status quo of the 1%ers and global elitists who really run this country and this world. People are fooling themselves with idealistic grandeur if they think that these factors don't play a big part in our American political lexicon. Some of us need to wake up to this new political reality and wake up to understand that one of the biggest areas of needed reform is not SS or Medicare or even the damn tax code:
it the FCC and competition within mass media because this very outlet controls the thinking minds of the masses. This is what dumbs us down and tunes us in and out; this is the institution that seeks to keep us entertained and uninformed. It makes us lazy and it keeps us in the dark.
The media is part of the 'corporations are people too' mafia. They answer to their corporate gods and 1%ers and they are only focus on their agenda, driven by profit margins.
One of the best and prophetic movies ever made on how we are controlled by media was the 1976 Oscar winner Network. The late Peter Finch won an Oscar for his role as the TV news anchor who demanded that Americans get up, open their windows and shout to the world that they were 'mad as hell' and wasn't going to take it anymore. This character's rant hits the mark on what the mass electronic media has become:
Network - Howard Beale Rant
"....Because less than three per cent of you people read books. Because less than ten per cent of you read newspapers. Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube. Right now, there is a whole and entire generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube. This tube is the gospel! The ultimate revelation! This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers. It is the most awesome goddamn force in the whole godless worid. Woe is us if it falls into the hands of the wrong people.
And when some of the largest companies in the worid controls the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless worid, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth. Televisión is not the truth. Televisión's a goddamned amusement park.Televisión is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business.
We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true. But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colours, creeds. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning. You're beginning to think the tube is reality and your lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, eat like the tube, raise your children like the tube, think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs."
Madness indeed. Especially when we people no longer can tell the difference.
~~~
Your analysis of our past Democratic Presidents is not an easy read at best because the truth hurts and hurts badly. Your writing about them was like pulling a carefully maintained and vacuumed antique rug back to reveal the rat droppings and other pondscum matter that has collected over the years of revisionist history.
Or at least history with a more romaticized spin. There is no doubt that Obama will have his turn of having that rug pulled back (although in this media age we don't have to wait). You said in part about President Kennedy:
...Furthermore, it was his slate of elite academic wonks who had architected the economics of the Vietnam War long before Lyndon Johnson became President - it was they who came up with the "Domino Theory," and invented all sorts of elaborate nonsense to explain how perpetual war would be a good idea for the American economy, the basis of LBJ's "Guns and Butter" mentality. They decided the ideal condition would be to bring the world right to the edge of total annihilation, then stop just short and continually feed a limited conventional conflict whose main objective is its own continuation rather than any kind of victory.
Kennedy was a dangerously inexperienced and underqualified Boy King who won election by attacking Nixon from the right and buying votes through his father's Mafia friends. The whole world was quite fortunate to have him in office at that time rather than Nixon, but we still cannot overlook the absolute facts of his character and administration. Although later he became more progressive (when he discovered, to his unfeigned astonishment, that America was not populated by Ivy League prep school alumni), and as a result his assassination took on the aura of liberal martyrdom, his administration was the origin of an incredible number of problems that would explode later in history: His was the first round of tax cuts benefiting the wealthy; the first politically-motivated military buildup of the modern era; the perpetuation of nuclear ICBMs; the economization of perpetual war; the founding of the School of the Americas as a base for training puppet dictators in the arts of oppression; etc. etc. He was more of an intriguing, multi-faceted character who landed right at the crux of massive happenings on the global stage than he was a great President.
Again, bravely spoken. I was a tot when Kennedy was assassinated, so my view of this President was definitely through rose colored glasses of the Camelot kind, coupled with the realities of Kennedy's actions during the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. Still, over the years, I've often wondered how he so nearly screwed the world with the Cuban missle crisis. Now I know the rest of this story. He was far more complicated than history has made him out to be. But then again, sometimes we don't want to know or handle the truth.
Your analysis of Truman and FDR was fascinating in that you chose to focus on the environment, rather than on the deeds of these men:
Truman and FDR both presided over simpler and more trusting countries, and their power far exceeded that of a President today even while their level of accountability was much lower. This runs contrary to the ancestor-worshiping fantasies so many people find so comforting, imagining an America that was somehow freer, more liberal, and more progressive when black people couldn't go anywhere without hard stares, restaurants wouldn't serve Jews, women's only roles in society were as baby factories, and average people were expected to wear a coat and tie to get a haircut. The fact is that, although life was generally slower and more bucolic because most people lived a more rural lifestyle, it was harder - even with house calls by a local doctor, people didn't have the kind of health care that a person with no insurance has today by going to a hospital. Things are better [today] than they were - we just feel the stress more acutely because they happen faster and involve more details.
This is likened to oldtimer's memory of a simpler, easier time when life was good for them. But then again, we all tend to remember our youth more fondly because we tend to appreciate a time when much of the future was more ahead of us than behind us. That's human antedotal nature, but not necessarily the true context of history as a collective whole. Again, well done.
The money part for me were these remarks:
But, see, even the corrupt kept up appearances. They had to pretend to actually serve the country, and every once in a while, they would be put on the spot and have to set aside their agenda in order to keep their business going the other 364 days of the year. Roosevelt and Truman could count on that, and count on a public that would throw anyone out of Congress who failed to observe that minimum adherence to public trust.
This is so true. I am reminded of Rick Santorium's recent fake attempt at a
mea culpa when he first admitted, then tried to backtrack on Bill O'Reilly's show that he didn't say 'Blacks' when he was race baiting a crowd of white supporters by saying
"I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money."
Then he goes on O'Reilly's show and says the most ridiculous thing:
"I looked at that, and I didn't say that," Santorum told O'Reilly. "If you look at it, what I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of -- blah -- came out. And people said I said 'black.' I didn't."
This fool said this mess in front of cameras and all of media. There was no pretense there, no attempt of maintaining a certain decorum. Then when suddenly he is thrusted into the glaring spotlight of a Presidental frontrunner, he just lies about what we all clearly saw and heard him say.
What is worse is that the media reports on his denial as if it really has credibility.
What is more worse is that we as Americans, are actually entertaining any thought of this guy being President of the United States. The public has forfeited it's trust over to the puppet masters for convenience's sake.
President Obama, meanwhile, is basically a lone voice in the wilderness of a government that no longer even feels the need to pretend it has something to do with the United States of America. Throughout Congress and the Executive bureaucracy are people who look at themselves as just another form of entrepreneur, and are surrounded by so many likeminded people that they're almost never called upon to put in their Bare Minimum for the country. They can hold us all hostage with impunity, and not even pretend to be doing anything else. They can commit outright treason in full view of the cameras, and the people on the other end will praise them for it or portray it as a legitimate difference of opinion.
I had to really think about this one. Is President Obama really a lone voice within government that is truly broken or not? To some Progressives, Obama is part of the broken system and many lay out good reasons why that is. However what is missing from those arguments is the sheer momentum of an institution such as our government. Our government has been deliberately designed in this way as to not have some nutbag come in and trash America all to hell overnight.
Although George W Bush came very close in actually doing just that.
People on our side are hailing Obama's recess appointments while the CNN's of the world are making out as if Obama, who campaigned on reaching across the aisle in the spirit of coalition building and consensus governing, broke his pledge on January 21, 2008 by stabbing the GOP in the back. They were decrying, 'how DARE HE actually do something so.... sooo.... so PARTISAN!!!!
This is what it has come to.
It's easy to totally wreck government -- even easier than I thought possible.
It's much harder to unwreck it when you still have wrecking balls in place. In that sense, I do agree that Obama sometimes acts alone.
I would like to think that I understand a lot of things that this President has done and why, even if some Progressives think that he didn't have to do things in the way that he has. Given the extreme mitigating circumstances that he has had to deal with, I don't think that he gets the credit that he actually deserves because many want to set aside those mitigating circumstances as if they don't matter.
Yet they matter and they matter large. Secondly we Americans aren't the same people as the Americans under all of those other Administrations. We too are dealing with mitigating circumstances that others didn't have to deal with.
I think that given all that he has had to deal with and looking at his basic character that has been unflailing, President Obama will be right up there as one of the best of all time or of modern times -- assuming that nothing changes that questions his character and that things in this country continues to improve.
Again, Troubadour, well done.
Woo Hoo! Made the Rec list. Gee thanks guys!