Here is how Obama blew it: Many Americans who endured the pain of a rip-off recession now endure the pain of a rip-off recovery. For them, life under a Democratic president and Congress means trading one rip-off for another, giving them neither hope, nor change, nor an end to their pain. 2008 was a 1932 moment. But the power of eloquence ends when the reality of people’s lives does not change. If a president reads a book about Franklin Roosevelt and then names Timothy Geithner to the Treasury, America gets Geithner, not Roosevelt, and more status quo, not change.
Under Obama, as under George W. Bush, we will have banner headlines about historic Christmas bonuses for bankers and Wall Street that will enflame the nation, alongside headlines about 10 percent unemployment, declining home values, mounting foreclosures, skyrocketing credit card rates and a war that will require more troops without a plan for success.
Generations of Americans will pay for the bailouts, while those who took them have historic paydays and those who pay for them endure the pain under Obama, as they did under Bush.
QUESTION: are there two Brent Budowskys who worked for Lloyd Bentsen and Bill Alexander? Because eighteen months ago, the other Brent Budowsky was so convinced that Barack Obama was the man Democrats needed to put in office that he regularly accused Hillary Clinton of everything but digging up Vince Foster and shooting him again, said in February that she should drop out of the race lest she damage the Democratic Party, compared her to George W. Bush, and claimed she planned to elect John McCain and a right-wing Supreme Court unless she got the nomination.
Geithner? What part of "Larry Summers is advising the Obama campaign" didn't you understand? Apart from the FISA stab in the back, and the attendant "security" decisions, which can be attributed to, with apologies to Sudden Sam Clemens, the natural fascist impulses which have infected every President since Truman, what has Obama done as President he didn't promise to do as a candidate, back when it was so damned important he be proclaimed by acclamation in February?
I don't give a fuck if you want to bail on the man now, although I think it should be noted in your Permanent Record. I'd just like to know now why you imagined then that shutting off debate--to the extent there ever is one, granted--was such an imperative? Let alone imagining--in 2009!--that Congressional Democrats have let you down (working for Lloyd Bentsen and Bill Alexander gave you the idea that once back in power Democrats planned to storm the Bastille?). Someone who says now that Barack Obama didn't turn out to be the combination of FDR, RFK, and GOD he thought he was voting for ought to learn to pay closer attention, and temper his future words with some acknowledgement that his previous claims of omniscience were an exaggeration. And anyone who whines about the destruction of the Democratic Party one season, and jumps ship the next, is a scoundrel.
Plus he writes like a dumb Matthew Arnold who doesn't mind using literary allusions that undermine his own argument:
ReplyDelete...neither hope, nor change, nor an end to their pain.
ring a bell?
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
ice9
How th' fuck do you know who Brent Budowsky is?
ReplyDeleteOnce again, I bow down to your encyclopedic knowledge.
(Okay, in this case, you probably just Googled him. Shhh. Don't tell the children.)