(no subject)

[sophiaserpentia]

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs let loose on leftist critics of the administration the other day:

"I hear these people saying he's like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested," Gibbs said. "I mean, it's crazy. ... They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality. ... They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president."

Frankly I think this should cost him his job, which is not something I say lightly. It won't, though, because he's only saying what everyone in the White House is thinking. But outbursts like this, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's lovely 'f*cking retards' comment last year, and so on, are going to cost the Democrats dearly on election day this year and in 2012. They can't afford to keep insulting the folks who are most likely to contribute, to volunteer, and to vote on their behalf. They may think they can rely solely on the wealthy donors who flocked to them in 2008, but they can't.

These outbursts also show what they're thinking: we're leftists, they've billed themselves as "leftists," therefore we owe them our vote, our support, and our praise. But leftist bloggers don't work for the Democratic party, and this is what really annoys them. In 2009 they established "Common Purpose," an initiative to essentially get leftist bloggers to start spreading White House talking points for them. Well, hey, it works for the Right, right? ;)

But let's get to the real meat of the problem, which is: the Obama administration is doing a lot of the same things that annoyed leftist bloggers when the Bush administration did them. Leftists complained then, and complain now, not because they are anti-Republican partisan hacks, but because they are anti-injustice.

Foremost in my mind, and the one that I think 20, 30 years from now is going to really tarnish Obama's legacy: the establishment of a permanent authority whose purpose is to imprison people -- citizens and non-citizens -- indefinitely without trial. This is an indelible blemish on the American human rights record akin to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. But they "stopped torture" (they didn't, but they said they would), and they "tried" to close the prison at Guantanamo, so we should be happy, right?

Continuing the war in Afghanistan despite the apparent absence of any evidence that it's making the US safer from Islamist terrorism? There's that, too. People can oppose the war for rational reasons that don't involve the desire to replace the Pentagon with a hippie flower garden. Then there's: appointing bankster wolves to watch the economic henhouse... refusing to prosecute telecoms for their willingness to aid DHS in their program of mass invasion of privacy without search warrants... refusing to prosecute agents who committed torture or investigate detainee deaths or accounts of torture... refusing to investigate the Katrina disaster... and these are all things Democrats did of their own free will without being able to blame them on Republican obstructionism.

So this is not, as the White House wants to paint it, a matter of being upset because the public option was taken out of the health care bill or because other legislative compromises were made to pass bills. Yes, those things suck too, but they are forgivable and they can be fixed. But it turns out we're really bad at paying no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Comments

[wlotus.livejournal.com]

After reading your post, I realize the situation is far worse than I could have imagined. The Democratic Party is wasting a hard-won opportunity to turn this country around. If they keep it up, we are looking at another 8-16 years of Conservative Republican control over the country once Obama's term is up.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

The opportunity is already gone, IMO. There is no one in the present Democratic leadership who has the will to press for anything progressive. They passed a Republican health care system into law (the personal requirement to buy insurance came originally from the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s and was instituted in Massachusetts under Mitt Romney); they let the banksters cut what they don't like from the banking reform bill; they let the minority of the Democratic party who are anti-abortion control abortion policy; on and on. Immigration reform and climate change are completely off the table now. There have been a couple of modest actual progressive changes -- student loan reform, certain aspects of health care reform, and so on. But considering the super-majority they had in 2009, they should have been able to enact much more than they did.

[lassiter.livejournal.com]

I really am having trouble seeing it any other way than the corporate, financial, and political class as a whole is working together to move the country ever more towards fascism. The role of the Republicans is to play the bogeyman archetype, and go ever more loony, scary and irrational, so panicked voters in the moderate and urban educated liberal camp will turn out to vote for any Democrat, no matter how conservative. This in turn allows the Dems themselves to move even further rightward. What Emanuel, Gibbs, Obama, Pelosi, Reid, etc. are saying is that anyone who actually wants to reverse rather than modify Republican policies, is a "f*cking retard" and that the Dems will not do anything more than slow the direction slightly from its irreversible rightward trend.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Beautifully and lucidly put. Thanks.