September 5, 2009 archive

Crossposted at Daily Kos

Diarist’s note: I apologize for the N-bomb. I am a white male and take offense to that term as well, but as we are all ADULTS (unlike the GOP and the far right base) we should be able to discuss all matters as adults, and that means discussing any and all matters within reason.

    I imagine that every young African American who is denied the opportunity to see and hear the first African American President in America’s long, proud and sad history on the first day of the school year will undoubtably guess sooner or later; “Is it because he is black? And if so, do they feel the same way about me?”

     And my answer to that hypothetical question is Yes. It is because he is black.

     President Barack Obama, who won the Presidency in a free and fair election by the American people despite claims to the contrary, has been called a Secret Muslim, a terrorist, a Kenyan, a socialist, a Nazi, a fascist, an Authoritarian, a despot, a dictator, a liar, a crook, a crony, a cheat, a racist and a reverse racist, he has been called everything but the one word that we know is behind all of the others and is on the tip of his most rabid opponenets tongues; A N—–.

    “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country, unless the President is Black!”

    I paraphrase, of course, the late and great President John F. Kennedy, who died at the hands of an assassins bullet after being demonized by the far right and it’s John Birch Society conspiracy theory cranks.

    Of course, if these words were spoken then by an African American President, well, that would have never happened. African Americans were barely citizens, barely had the right to vote or sit in a white man’s restaurant, let alone run for or win the Presidency, but one could imagine that if an African American President at the time had said the same quote as JFK, it would be followed by the Republican addendum, unless the President is Black!”.

    In only 7 months, 7 Damned Months we have seen the following blatant acts of racism and race baiting by the Republican party, and not once, NOT ONCE, has a single adult among them stood up and said ENOUGH OF THIS, I WILL NOT ALLOW IT.

    Not once.

more evidence of the obvious below the fold.

Great Op-Ed in the Times yesterday:

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S apparent readiness to backtrack on the public insurance option in his health care package is not just a concession to his political opponents – this fixation on securing bipartisan support for health care reform suggests that the Democratic Party has forgotten how to govern and the White House has forgotten how to lead.

This was not true of Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Congresses that enacted the New Deal. With the exception of the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 (which gave the president authority to close the nation’s banks and which passed the House of Representatives unanimously), the principal legislative innovations of the 1930s were enacted over the vigorous opposition of a deeply entrenched minority. Majority rule, as Roosevelt saw it, did not require his opponents’ permission.

When Roosevelt asked Congress to establish the Tennessee Valley Authority to provide cheap electric power for the impoverished South, he did not consult with utility giants like Commonwealth and Southern. When he asked for the creation of a Securities and Exchange Commission to curb the excesses of Wall Street, he did not request the cooperation of those about to be regulated. When Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act divesting investment houses of their commercial banking functions, the Democrats did not need the approval of J. P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers.

Roosevelt relished the opposition of vested interests. He fashioned his governing majority by deliberately attacking those who favored the status quo. His opponents hated him – and he profited from their hatred. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he told a national radio audience on the eve of the 1936 election. “They are unanimous in their hatred for me – and I welcome their hatred.”

My only difference would be to point out that Obama didn’t “forget” to lead. He never knew how in the first place.  When he came to Daily Kos to chastise us for being too shrill, his big argument was that the American people don’t share our views of politics, so we need to be more conciliatory.

In my rebuttal diary, which incidentally knocked his diary off the #1 spot on the rec list, I argued that they don’t share our views because they’ve been lied to for years and someone needs to stand up and tell them the truth.

“It is not enough to take a poll and decide what can be done. We must change perceptions so that we may do what must be done. We must educate. We must persuade. We must lead.

…

Senator Obama says our perspective “misreads the American people.” I say we need a lot less reading and a lot more leading.”

Obama responded to my rebuttal with this:

I also agree that it is the job of Democratic elected officials to help shape public opinion, and not just respond passively to opinion thats been aggressively shaped by the Republicans PR machinery.  I am simply suggesting, based on my experience, that people will respond to a powerfully progressive agenda when its couched in optimism, pragmatism and our shared American ideals.

Yeah, it sounded good. But it was complete BS. Obama has had the greatest opportunity of any president in my lifetime to reform public opinion on a score of issues from the role and importance of government to the dangers of too big to fail institutions and monopolies.

Instead he sent out Larry Summers to lie about the economy and tell everyone it’s all coming up daisies.

Obama is a decent orator, though utterly and completely over-rated, but he is not a leader. He’s another Ivy League technocrat. He should have gone back to teaching, churning out more little technocrats. God knows we need more of those.

When he was asking Americans to vote for him during the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama said . . .

We’re looking to fundamentally change the status quo in Washington.  It’s a status quo that extends beyond any particular party and right now that status quo is fighting back with everything it’s got, with the same old tactics that divide and distract us from solving the problems people face, whether those problems are health care that folks can’t afford or a mortgage they cannot pay.

Before Obama appointed Wall Street insiders to run his economic policies and a Blue Dog to be his chief of staff, he told us . . .

Make no mistake about what we’re up against.  We’re up against the belief that it’s all right for lobbyists to dominate our government, that they are just part of the system in Washington. But we know that the undue influence of lobbyists is part of the problem and this election is our chance to say that we are not going to let them stand in our way anymore.

Obama’s not only letting them stand in our way, he’s helping them stand in our way.  He let lobbyists write the Senate Finance Committee bill.  He campaigned for the public option, but now he’s caving to the Republicans and Blue Dogs who are telling us we can’t have it. They’ve viciously attacked the public option from the very beginning and they’re continuing to viciously attack it.

When he needed our votes, Obama condemned the very people he’s caving to now . . .

There are those who will continue to tell us that we can’t do this, that we can’t have what we’re looking for, that we can’t have what we want.   But here is what I know.  I know that when people say we can’t overcome all the big money and influence in Washington, I think of that elderly woman who sent me a contribution the other day, an envelope that had a money order for $3.01 along with a verse of scripture tucked inside the envelope.

I’m not sure what you think you know, Obama, but here’s what she knows–she knows what Democrats used to stand for, she knows what they must stand for again.  She remembers when FDR showed America what real change looks like, she remembers him winning the fight for economic and social justice . . .  

From a wheel chair.  

FDR’s legs were paralyzed, but his moral courage wasn’t, his heart wasn’t, his determination to fight for the Americans who elected him wasn’t.  Unlike you, Obama, FDR wasn’t paralyzed by moral cowardice, he didn’t reach out to Republicans, he didn’t compromise with the liars and hypocrites of that degenerate party, he governed as a Democrat because that’s what he promised he would do.    

That elderly woman who sent you $3.01 remembers when Democrats were actually Democrats, she knows how desperately America needs another Democratic President like FDR.  She believed in you, Obama.  She trusted you.  She had faith in you.  She believed you when you told her last fall, when you told all of us last fall that . . .

We’re up against the idea that it’s acceptable to say anything and do anything to win an election.  But we know that this is exactly what’s wrong with our politics. This is why people don’t believe what their leaders say anymore. This is why they tune out.  And this election is our chance to give the American people a reason to believe again.

You’re throwing that chance away, Obama.  You’re letting the losers of that election kill reform, you’re shattering the trust so many Americans had in you, you’re giving us no reason to believe that anything will really change.

Just wrote a poem very specific to Docudharma and of the moment which means it’s a blog poem, meant for right now, I like that.

Here’s a picture I like:

And here’s the poem.  From me to you … and a happy Friday and Full Moon and Labor Day Weekend to all!

Bum’s Rush

bum’s rush, keep seeing

the bodies moved along, pushed

and shoved and moved along,

rushing me out of the

place I was headed

I’m just a bum, you know.

bum’s rush, must be somewhere

I’m not allowed, there’s a

“keep out” sign I must have

missed, and I think

of Arlo.

and that song about my land

your land, but that makes me

think of the blogger

winter rabbit and

then I have questions

about whose land

but then buhdydharma said we

don’t own the land,

we belong to the land

so who thinks they’ve

got the right to

give me the

bums rush?

Barack Obama , Feb 19, 2008

Well, The System’s Broken […] Certainly I don’t accept, in the richest county on Earth, that we should have 47 Million people without Health Insurance, and Millions of more people being bankrupted because of a Medical Bill.

[…]

As President of the United States, what I’ve proposed to do, is to make sure that we got a plan that covers ALL Americans.

[…]

The key to making this happen, is to overcome the resistance we’re going to see from Drug Companies, Insurance Companies, HMO’s. Over the last 10 years alone, Drug and Insurance Companies spent over $1 Billion, in preventing Health Care Reform from happening. That’s going to require then, a mobilization of energy among the American People, to insist on a Congress and a White House, that are actually going to deliver this time.

[…]

Someone sent me an item last week about a transitioning transwoman (video at the link), a high school mathematics teacher in West Linn, OR.  On the face of it, this wasn’t a huge story, but it struck me as a huge coincidence.

Currently I have hardly slept for two days because every time I lay down, I have to cough.  The moving that is finally over apparently left my body in a run down state and I caught something on the first day of classes on Wednesday.  So I apologize if my current delirium causes any disjointedness.

Think of it as stream of unconsciousness.