DBM, you’re an eternal optimist.

DBM, I can’t argue with your points which are well taken. In any event it’s going to be ugly.

Bogi666: “WE should just vote for Repubicans and get the demise of this country on a fast track rather than voting Democrat and ending up with Repubican lite”

As soul destroying as the corporate focused Democratic party may be the “demise of the country” will unfortunately destroy the lives of millions of people (and that won’t include the “pigs at the trough” who have enriched themselves for the last 25 years).

Better to fight every step of the way to avoid or delay the demise ...

President O’Bushama being a disappointment is not surprising which is why I didn’t vote for him. If he thinks placating the Blue Dogs and the Repubicans well he’s sadly mistaken because Blue Dogs get bigger bribes from Repubican if they vote with them. This is how Reagan was able to get their votes as well as Nixon. Liberals need to bolt the Democratic Party and vote Democrats out of office. WE should just vote for Repubicans and get the demise of this country on a fast track rather than voting Democrat and ending up with Repubican lite. Democrats are just a branch of the Pepubican Party’s. Just why is it so hard to just say to the American people that the Repubican Party’s solution is EAT SHIT AND DIE AMERICANS, NO HEALTH CARE IS BETTER THAN ANY/ALL GOVERNMENT OPTIONS.

Whoops! My mistake - TruthDig is the WaPo! NO!

Avoid Truthdig if they continue to publish Eugene and anything else form the WaPo. WaPo is attacking on behalf of big insurance, they have lost all credibility and still haven’t been punished for supporting Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq.
Show some spine Robinson, and tell WaPo, “I QUIT!!”

Obama has been playing on the defensive ever since he became senator. All throughout the campaign, he folded like a tent issue after issue. Obama was never meant to be a leader. He’s just a corporate puppet and he makes no bones about it. However, I will note that Obama has been instrumental in bullying his own party into voting for the Wall $treet bailout package last year and this year even more on war spending and that phoney Raygun/Dubya-lite “stimulus” package. At best, Obama is a MISleader ! That’s why I’m glad I voted for Ralph Nader ! He’s a strong progressive and not a rollover dog. Unfortunately, Nader was PERSECUTED by the Obamabots, the media, and the two-party duopoly.

Day after day here there is a heterodyne whine about (and a long litany of indictments against) the effects of a psychotic “dominance” paradigm not only failing miserably to respond to actual Living conditions, but actively destroying the Natural Living Arrangement apart from which none of the chronic complainers can live at all.  Yet nothing much is offered by way of remediation except pie-in-the-sky “political action” slap-happily expected to somehow wrest a little of the command-and-control apparatus from the plutoligarchy so ruthlessly profiting from their “global” gangbangers’ rule-of-fear.

Eugene Robinson declares pedantically that Barack Obama was elected to be “....a great president.”  Even taking that term “great” at its most complimentary (and least self-serving), it has always been plain here in Indian Country that no “leader” will be “great” who has been raised-up by a “people” that is anything but.  The CONstant barrage of mass-mediated mutually-masterbatory propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, theamericanpeople everyday fall further and further short of their grandiosely idealized collective self-image….and deeper and deeper into the toxic cesspool of mass delusion from which there may be no escape short of terminal oblivion.

Just how deluded are they already?  Where in the deafening din the talking-heads call “the healthcare debate” is any recognition of the simple fact that genuine HEALTH costs absolutely nothing at all (Well, the purveyors of a Pandora’s Box of sickening “products” would certainly take some massive ‘hits’ to their ‘bottom lines’.)?  Where is the acknowledgment that much of what’s killing them people could avoid by simply refusing to ingest poisonous junk?  Think of the “money” to be saved right there. 

It is, rather, this pandemic of profit-motivated “....industrial disease” that is driving its self-inflicted sufferers relentlessly into designer-drugged poverty and permanent despair.  Barack Obama doesn’t “get” that any better than his CONstituents.

So once again theamericanpeople, as such, have saddled theirselves with “....the president they deserve.”  Maybe everybody here whose “individual” IDentity includes their american-ness should just quitcherbitchin’.

Of course there is still the real Medicine for what ails homo domesticus….and there is nothing ideological/institutional/electro-mechanical about it.  It is altogether FREE, too….taken all together. 

HokaHey!

Obama is and will continue to be “an absolute failure of the highest order.”  He is not only unqualified to be the President of this country but is totally dishonest (an absolute lying “sack of shit), suffers severe mental problems, and an all around perfect example of a person who stands for absolute nothing.  The hopes Progressives had for this “wimpering, cowardly POS” have indeed vanished, and Obama will certainly pay the ultimate price when this is all said and done.  I personally believe he is much worse that Bush and certainly leaves Clinton in the dust, who was an absolute disgrace not only to his family but to the country.

Folktruther, Excellent analysis, thanks!

As to “Clearly, the White House feels itself on the defensive. But why?”
  Isn’t it too obvious! They know the people want a single payer system and the shit will it the fan if we don’t get it.  They also are scared shitless of losing their meal ticket, ie. the payola from big Pharma and the insurance companies that they are addicted too. 
  Eugene perhaps it time to write a novel, perhaps fiction. You seem to arrive late in realization to everything and end up apologizing for getting it wrong the first time. In so many ways you are like your man Obama.  You lack vision to see ahead and courage to tell the truth and you are shackled by your dependency on your corporate supporters. 
  I believe many people elected Pres. Obama because of his brilliant public speaking ability.  Unfortunately he doesn’t have the courage or leadership skills that we desperately need at this moment in time.

In this piece Robinson is trying to recoup his ‘things counld be much worse’ piece, since with Progressives truthers like him, they soon will be.  However the TD comments, with the exception of Ardee’s and others, appears to lack a firm sense of power relations.  Granted that for Progressive rank and file, Obama is cooler than Bush, the power relations and policies remain the same.

It isn’t possible to pass progressive legislation without increasing progressive power relative to the insurance and medical companies.  This can only be done by progressive leaders mobilizing the population against them.  But Obama can’t do this because they will oppose him in the next election along with the banks and financial ageniecs who sympathize with them or are involved with them.

Americans have been audiencized by TV to become truth consumers that can easily be emotionally manipulated by the ruling class, the owners and managers of the corporations, including truth corporations.  Instead of being participatory truthers who answer back,  from their own truth consensus, we are separated, isolated and alienated by power.  So we are demoralized and easy prey for corporate power and their advertising.

We are demoralized by truthfear.  We are afraid to tell the truth when this truth is unpatriotic or subversive.  I.e. when it opposes neoliberal power.  We want a reasonable medical program but are afraid to form power relations necessary to get one, because we are afraid of the reality-based power truth.

A governement single payer program has been attacked as Socialized Medicine.  This is quite true, that is what it is.  But Americans have been indoctrinated to be scared of the words, and this extends to all US policies.  When a legislator questioned his constinuents and asked how many were for Socialized Medicine, no hands went up.  When he asked how many were for the governemt runung and funding the program, all hands went up.

Americans must be able to not only see this but resist this kind of bullshit because that is what manipulates us at election time.  And Obama and the Dems know it.  So if they have enough money, they will win elections no matter what their policies are, because Americans are so easily manipulated by modern advertising techniques.

Americans must be taught to resist the mainstream truth, since the truth industries are owned or controlled by the ruling class and their lobbiests and corporations.  And Progressives like Robinson. 
there is no alternative to this historical strategy of teaching the population the reality-based truth about people and power.

Unfortunately, this is a historical strategy, because the emotional truth is what must be changed, and Americans have been indoctrinated to identify with power delusions that legitimate our own exploitation and opppression.

Obama says to the liberals, “You heard what you wanted to hear…”

He is just repeating the same pathetic syndrome of LBJ and Clinton. Both presidents were slick triangulators who immediately shifted to the right, after being elected by people looking for change, after seriously devastating presidencies that preceded them. LBJ, after the assassination of a real progressive president (in war and civil rights), and with the depraved Vietnam war, and Clinton after the sick, sick presidency of Ronald Reagan, Iran Contra and the like. Perhaps LBJ was afraid of being killed himself by the CIA or someone, and Clinton, turns out, was just a slime ball in general.

Obama has combined these mistakes, a bad, bad war and terrible triangulation on domestic problems. Why? Perhaps just a huge ego. He will either be a one-termer or hand the legislation over to the conservatives like Clinton, or both. He is already a lame duck of sorts. He seems to like it that way.

Both LBJ and Clinton screwed the left as soon as they took office, and thought they were real cute doing it. It wasn’t that they were TOO far to the left, they SCREWED the left. In Clinton’s case, he virtually went over to the neocons by deregulating the financial markets. We are still suffering today from that.

I believe this president will not be able to pass another thing. Maybe that’s good, with the way things have been going with the bailouts and his Wall Street buddies. Perhaps that will keep him from causing more damage, like the trillion dollar porkulus.

But, because of his cynical, depressed, give-up-before-you-try mentality, in trying to “preserve himself” he will lose himself. Already has. Everyone, at this point, hates him. I’ve never seen anything like it. All his critics need to do is whisper “boo” and he goes running. And his press buddies are fixated on making Sara Palin, and everything she stands for, heroic by constantly speaking of her.

Nice job.

Well folks, the political pigeons of the infantile US “left” are coming home to roost. This is not really a betrayal as Obama was always a creature of the establishment, as we used to say in the ‘60s. All you had to do was to listen carefully and not wishfully to what the man was saying during the campaign. Failure to recognize yet another shill for the corporate structure has led us into yet another blind alley. Dennis Kucinich was the only real progressive and the left and the labor movement deserted him in droves because “he couldn’t win” even though his program was the most popular. Imagine what he could have done with the hundreds of millions the left and labor lavished upon Obama. All for nothing. Well, not nothing actually. He is kind of cool. He is not Bush, and I guess that’s something.

Probably true, Godistwaddle ... but someday, a major politician will lose despite a massive funding advantage and then we will know that the population has finally had enough and is starting to really engage in politics to try and change things.

Mr. Robinson is a one note author who refuses to let go of his allegiances apparently and Obama a fraud and a liar. This attempt at reform will be no less a debacle than was the Clinton effort, and for the same reason; the money flowing from industry to politician.

Barack Obama has failed to lead, the Democrats have failed to make a stand and to combat ,with any degree of success, the propaganda from an increasingly extremist GOP. Not that either cannot, its the money after all.

Glutted with cash from grateful insurance companies,no congressman who votes against the people will lose his/her seat.

Hmmm and I came to this article for the wrong reason ... this healthcare objective looks easy - trivial even - compared to the big elephant in the government room:  Massively Excessive Military Spending. 

Given the Dems are falling over on this ... good luck on the big one - they’ll need it!

FINALLY finally finally, the real answer to the Spine Problem, the Wealthcare Problem, the Whole Bloody Shameful Mess:

“Put a bill out there, make them filibuster it, make them be what they are, the party of no,” James Carville said. “Let them kill it. Let them kill it with the interest group money, then run against them. That’s what we ought to do.”

Obama was going to “revolutionize” “US policy on energy and education”?? Says who?

Everyone seems to have just tacked on what they HOPEd for with Obama—he is surely not going to “revolutionize “anything with that crappy Climate Change Bill and Arnie Duncan is clearly not going to “revolutionzie” education with charter schools and NCLB!!

“Revolutionary” clean coal and oil subsidies?? It reduces carbon emissions by what,  17% by 2015?? Revolutionary? Nuclear power plants? “
Cash for clunkers”?

The “public option” was a sure-to -be-watered-down compromise for progessives anyway—they never should have agreed to keep HR 676 off the table.

The civilized world does it—maybe we could bring in a French or Danish Ambassador.

True progressives will flee from these Dems in 2010 and a historic opportunity comes and goes once again.

Gee, what a huge surprise.

“Blue Dogs” may find themselves left out in the cold if a healthcare bill is not passed which includes a public option. In fact Politically speaking, These ‘Dogs’ may face the fate of Ol’ Yeller- Putting them out of misery and Us!
Blue dogs may be worried about their re election, when they should be worried about Re call campaigns.