Blog entry, redux

Okay, we posted an excerpt from the Times the other day, but it’s been going around in my mind and I wanted to add a note besides “cue barfing noises.”

Meet the New Boss….

“Similarly, the White House mostly has sought to stay out of the fray in Madison, Wis., and other state capitals where Republican governors are battling public employee unions and Democratic lawmakers over collective bargaining rights. When West Wing officials discovered that the Democratic National Committee had mobilized Mr. Obama’s national network to support the protests, they angrily reined in the staff at the party headquarters.

Administration officials said they saw the events beyond Washington as distractions from the optimistic “win the future” message that Mr. Obama introduced in his State of the Union address, in which he exhorted the country to increase spending for some programs even as it cuts others so that America can “out-innovate and out-educate” its global rivals.” (Source: nyt, via michaelmoore.com)

cue barfing noises.

Let me lose some radical cred by saying that I think the Times can do some honestly good reporting occasionally, but they have the same crack stenography skills with the White House that the Pravda offered the Kremlin. So this article might as well have come on Obama’s personal stationery: “Let’s be clear, I’m too busy pushing my “Win the Future” slogan to do anything to help the workers in Wisconsin, and I’ll be damned if I permit anyone under my control to mess that up.” Note that “Win the Future” has to be pronounced with a silent suffix of “2012 Election.” (As an aside, this marks the second time in her life that Palin has been right. She referred to Win Th Future by its deserving acronym. The first time she was right was when she refused to call the “mainstream” media by anything other than the “lamestream” media. She’s basically said 50,000 things in the last two years and been wrong on 49,998 of them. Still, credit where credit’s due.)

When Obama ran, progressives across the country thought he was “winking” at them. In the same way that W. Bush used dog whistle language to mobilize his conservative christian base (sowing in obscure biblical references), Obama said a lot to give progressives hope. But W. was no more a Christian than a cowboy, and Obama has given us a laundry list of terrors:

  • ignoring the workers in Wisconsin and offering no solid labor reform
  • sold out his own weak healthcare reform while calling it a “Big F’ing deal”
  • torturing Bradley Manning
  • continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
  • supported the coup in Honduras
  • waffled on net neutrality
  • supports nuclear power post-Japan
  • cozies up to wall street while telling the rest of us to sacrifice

That list is just off the top of my head. But with all of this, he has a powerful tool and vulnerable fools: the republicans and the liberals, respectively. The republicans have played a villain pitch perfect (I keep expecting Rick Scott to sprout a thin mustache to then twirl as he announces his next scheme) and the liberals, who are defined by their own flaccid pragmatism, will vote for Obama and seethe that there is nothing else that can be done. If there was ever a time for the Left to offer a clear vision of an alternative, it is now. As we can see from Wisconsin, regular people are ready to rise up. And as we can read in the Times, loud and clear, nothing positive will come from him. It’s not a dog whistle, but a bullhorn. And we need to get some bullhorns of our own.