(I'm bloodlessly and painlessly beating my head against a brick wall which is some poor, deluded bastard on Facebook who still insists that Obama is the only alternative and perhaps the greatest thing since sliced bread. He keeps screaming about right wing death squads and concentration camps and has actually accused me, if you can believe this, of being an unwitting tool of the Koch brothers. He keeps accusing me of being too hard on poor Obama and insisting on ideological purity. I think I'm a little more politically pragmatic than that. Even Kennedy and FDR weren't perfect. But to say that there's potential for a shitload of improvement in the Obama administration is the understatement of the century. What follows below is my last contribution to the thread. Keep in mind, also, that this list of indictments is far from exhaustive.)
OK, I'm only going to contribute to this thread one more time then I'm out of here. Obviously, in your hoarse bloviating about right wing death squads and detention and concentration camps, you're completely losing sight of what I'm saying. #1, I am not an unwitting tool of the Koch brothers. If more people like me were concerned about what they were trying to pull through SuperPACs and ALEC, they'd have a much bigger headache than they think they do. Obviously, I am diametrically opposed to what those bloated world-eating fucksticks are doing to our nation and our world. #2, I am not insisting on ideological purity. I'm well aware that FDR was not perfect and overreached on occasion (Manzanar, certain unconstitutional parts of the New Deal struck down by the Supreme Court, etc.). Yet when you compare FDR's record with Obama's, that still leaves enough room for improvement to march the entire DoD and its contractor Doppelgangers through. I do not know why you keep insisting that Obama is the answer to the alternative when it's screamingly obvious to me that Obama IS the alternative, he IS the dreaded Bush 3rd term. He kept us in Iraq for 3 more years for no apparent reason, is keeping us in Afghanistan and even did his own little surge and there's no end in sight. His last two Chiefs of Staff are bloated refugees from Wall Street and his first one was a nasty little ambitious dick-twisting prick who helped cut that $80b Medicare drug reimbursement deal. Goldman Sachs and other banksters are allowed to rotate in and out, with them getting jobs in Treasury so they can soften up regulations for their buddies back home and to get even richer when they slide back into their old offices. His economic recovery team was rotten with some of the biggest fuckups from Clinton's administration (Summers, Rubin, et al). His jobs czar is Jeff Immeldt, a job-killing, tax-dodging creep who's also coincidentally the CEO of GE. Every significant promise Obama ever made on the campaign trail 4 years ago was broken: Getting us out of Iraq and Afghanistan in a timely fashion. Releasing the torture photos and videos. Closing Gitmo. Getting a public option to a health care reform bill on the table. Going after the tax-free status of corporations HQ'd overseas and outsourcing US jobs. None of these things ever materialized. What has he done instead? Took the public option off the table. Gave himself the latitude to designate us as terrorists, including detention and prosecution behind closed doors. Gave himself the power to assassinate US citizens w/o due process. Kept Gitmo open. It took him 3 years to get rid of DADT. DOMA still in place. USA PATRIOT Act still in place. NAFTA still in place. Homeland Security still in place. Kyoto Protocol: Still unsigned by us and he has made no move to lower greenhouse gases (if Copenhagen was any indication). Continued extraordinary rendition. Surged in Afghanistan. Without consulting Congress, needlessly invaded Libya while standing behind a cardboard cutout of Great Britain and NATO. Violated the terms of the SOFA agreement by simply redrawing the city lines in Baghdad. Murdering thousands of innocent civilians with unmanned drone strikes in central Asia and the Middle East. Undermined unions. Sniped at his base for criticizing his policies. Kowtowing to AIPAC and to the Israelis. Froze pay for federal workers for two years while simultaneously giving more tax breaks to the least deserving. Bailed out the auto industry without first setting preconditions. Signed into law a watery "regulatory" bill in Dodd-Frank. Signed into law a laughingstock of a health care reform bill designed solely to keep the HMOs on the playing field and forcing us to buy insurance at prices they get to arbitrarily set.
Listen up: We didn't elect Obama to sandbag until 2013 before we get to see the good stuff. We elected him to do the good stuff NOW and with few minor exceptions, he simply has not done that. There is no change whatsoever and the only hope to be had is from deluded idiots like you who insist on looking at Obama through navy blue-tinted glasses. Obama is the worst president on record. We can do better. Much better.
