Obama Has Destroyed Democracy
Obama has destroyed democracy. Just like President Dubya who campaigned on one set of promises and did the exact opposite when he got into office, Oh!bama campaigned on promises we could believe in (now THAT took audacity!) and has reneged on the most important ones. Public Option for health care?1 That’s gone. Standing up to the big corporate interests? That’s gone. Putting financial regulations in place to protect the consumer? That’s gone.
So after the eight year nightmare of the Cheney-Dubya administration2 in which the future of this country was destroyed through the systematic dismantling of the essential apparatus of government3, aided and abetted by a sycophantic (and psychotic) Republican party that has propelled us so far into debt that we have been reduced to being a banana republic, we voted for someone who, yes, provided audacity and hope. But the REAL audacity is the way he has used his intelligence and his ability to put together coherent sentences (contrast that with the illiteracy of Dubya and his female doppelganger, Sarah Palin) to take advantage of a nation that was in shock at the arrogance and incompetence of an eight-year administration that ignored all warnings of an impending attack4, that ignored all predictions of what would be needed for an Iraq war and that ignored all the warnings about Hurricane Katrina.
Oh!bama has destroyed the Democratic party, turning them from the party IN power and WITH power (they DO control the White House and Congress) to the party of pusillanimity. But even worse, he has helped to destroy the political process in this country. Whereas the Republican party, beginning in 1994 with Newt Gingrich (now THERE’S a liar extraordinaire who is so high and mighty and moral that he delivered divorce papers to his wife while she was in the hospital with cancer)5 showed that they can shut down the Federal government whenever they like by not approving a budget (or by impeaching a President who dared to have sex and not tell the truth about it) and the Cheney-Dubya regime showed that you can hand over the reigns of power to big business, after all of this the nation – the ENTIRE WORLD – thought that Oh!bama would right the wrongs, would stand up for the principles of this country. But what has he done? He has left in place much of the Cheney-Bush apparatus. We still have Gitmo. We still have the most egregious aspects of the so-called Patriotic Act. We still have economic foxes (Larry Summers…Tim Geithner) running the regulatory hen house.
Oh!bama and the entire Democratic party was handed a golden opportunity to put into place a new New Deal. Nearly the ENTIRE COUNTRY was behind him and, yet, he sang the nonsense of compromise. Compromise with whom? An obstinate, obstructionist party? We did NOT vote for “compromise we can believe in.”6 We voted for real change. We voted for the ideals of this country. Once again, we have been hoodwinked. And this opportunity to undo the damage of the past has been lost, squandered.
But you’re still optimistic, right? Great! Then who will you vote for next time? The Democrats were given their chance and they have blown it. Will you vote for the Republicans? The Teabaggers? Or maybe it is time to face facts: the great experiment of democracy is over. Best to get used to this fact. Nothing more to see here. Move along. Take your iPhone, sit in the bathroom and twitter your life away. Change the channel. Watch your football game. Eat your chicken wings. Drink your beer. But don’t worry. Just be happy.
- “Any semblance of a public option has disappeared“; “The Republicans simply don’t want to pass comprehensive health-care reform“; If journalism was run like our health care system.↩
- Now that Cheney is in the hospital…I hope he’s not sucking the public teat and taking that communistic health care that he gets from the government.↩
- You think all the E. Coli just dropped out of the sky like manna from heaven? You think that Bernie Madoff got away with his shenanigans because he is brilliant? Think again. You starve the beast of government, you hand over the reigns of control to the “free market,” this is what you get. Unfettered, deregulated capitalism with a boom-bust cycle that destroys more of the middle class every time it goes bust. Ask anyone who thought they had a nice retirement nest egg. All they have left is broken egg shells. Friedman wrote in a recent column (quoting Michael Mandelbaum): “…now it feels as if we are entering a new era, “where the great task of government and of leadership is going to be about taking things away from people,” said the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum.” Source: The Fat Lady Has Sung.↩
- The Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, 2001 had the catchy title, “bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” “…in April 2001, [Richard] Clarke [counter-terrorism expert] strongly suggested that the U.S. put pressure on both the Taliban and Al-Qaeda by arming the Northern Alliance and other groups in Afghanistan. Simultaneously, that they target bin Laden and his leadership by reinitiating flights of the MQ-1 Predators. To which Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz responded, “Well, I just don’t understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden.” Clarke replied that he was talking about bin Laden and his network because it posed “an immediate and serious threat to the United States.” According to Clarke, Wolfowitz turned to him and said, “You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don’t exist.” Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Clarke; Wait…it gets better.
“On June 25 [2001], Clarke warned [National Security Advisor] Rice and [Deputy National Security Advisor] Hadley that six separate intelligence reports showed al Qaeda personnel warning of a pending attack. An Arabic television station reported Bin Ladin’s pleasure with al Qaeda leaders who were saying that the next weeks “will witness important surprises” and that U.S. and Israeli interests will be targeted.”
“On July 2, the FBI Counterterrorism Division sent a message to federal agencies and state and local law enforcement agencies summarizing information regarding threats from Bin Ladin. It warned that there was an increased volume of threat reporting, indicating a potential for attacks against U.S. targets abroad from groups “aligned with or sympathetic to Usama Bin Ladin.” Despite the general warnings, the message further stated, “The FBI has no information indicating a credible threat of terrorist attack in the United States.” However, it went on to emphasize that the possibility of attack in the United States could not be discounted.” [Emphasis Added] Source: The System Was Blinking Red (Chapter 8 of the 9/11 Commission Report). ↩
- “Former House speaker and potential presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has confessed, telling conservative Christian leader James Dobson that he was cheating on his wife at around the same time the House was impeaching President Bill Clinton over his White House affair with Monica Lewinsky.” Source: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/03/09/gingrich.schneider/index.html ↩
- Someone said that bipartisanship for a Democrat is for both Democrats and Republicans to work out a bill that they can both wholeheartedly endorse and sign. Bipartisanship for Republicans is to write the bill themselves and have the Democrats sign it.↩
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