Reed Mencke, September 16 at 2:11 pm

Do you, perhaps, live in a time warp? One in which the last three years remain a mystery to you. Certainly it takes no great wisdom to rehash the horrific administration of Bush/Cheney, most here are rather aware of it , perhaps even in greater depth than you.

But you simply astonish me, at least, when you insist that another four years like these last three should be acceptable to those who want their nation to be honest, caring, aloof from slaughter and horrid treatment of indigenous peoples for ideological reasons.

Obama has had his majority in the Houses, albeit briefly. He might have attempted to push forth legislation that confirmed his campaign promises, he did not. He might have, after the GOP gained a majority in the House and increased its position in the Senate, stood up to the silliness of the extremist GOP positions, he did not.

From the first Obama has filled his administration with those who ran the financial community that helped wreck our economy. From the first he has broken his promise to close Guantanamo, end torture and rendition, continued to prosecute an endless war that cannot possibly be won, one that gains more and more allies for extremism, and on both sides. The list is rather long so Ill stop here.

You claim that Obama escapes blame because he has been unable to repair the damage of his predecessor, I say again, that he has CONTINUED such damage. ( sorry for shouting)

Your lesser of two evils political philosophy does nothing to make this nation what it should be. In fact, your position is rather ironic in that you claim that we must avoid ,at all costs, electing another republican to the White House when that is precisely what we will do if we vote for Obama.

My conscience must be remarkably different from yours I fear. It prevents me from voting for either fascist candidate.

@Reed Mencke: Bravisimo! May your voice be heard.

@hannabanana… I must compliment you for consistently posting some of the most cogent and reasonable views on this site. That said, I must also tell you that your wildly gyrating avatar is threatening to give me grand mal seizures and makes it very hard to read your important views. In fact I used to scroll past your comments along with any others on that bit of page to avoid the retina burn. That was before I stopped long enough to see what anyone with such a nasty visual might have to say. You add a necessary bit of reason to a site that often bogs down in right/left sniping, and I think it’s important that you be heard. With all due apologies and no personal insult intended, I really hope you’ll consider switching to something a bit less lively. Thanks for listening.

I wonder if EJ Dionne has not hit on what may be the most essential political
problem of all in today’s climate:  The majority of people who vote for
Republican candidates are living in a world described by civic textbooks. 
Sadly, I hope this is true because the alternative is to believe that GOP
supporters really want to destroy this country in the name of freedom. 

The question raised by the first possibility is:  how can Democrats, who have
little leverage with the average GOP voter, work to convince him or her that the
world of governance which they hold in their mind’s eye is not the world in
which their party leaders and movers and shakers are living?

The question raised by the second possibility is:  how can Democrats convince
independents that the GOP is not a party they can leverage?

A third indirectly related but important issue which I throw into the ring not
fully articulated is:
There is an emotional link between this present crop of GOP/Tea Partyers and
the pre-Civil War states righters.  What is the thinking that connects these two
and how do we go about framing that thought in a way that confronts and
challenges the GOP Tea Party?

Remember Obama’s comment during the campaign about people hunkering down in troubled times with their bibles and their guns?  That’s what he has learned - but that solves nothing and gives him NO opportunity to apply anything resembling “Democratic” or “liberal” concepts.  That’s why the first stimulus was so little and so much comprised of Repug ideas -tax cuts etc.  And that’s why the “new” jobs act is even more Repug than the first.

In fact, the Dem party itself has been swung so far to the right for so long, that most of its impacts in Congress have been tepid and right-leaning.  The conservative wing of the Dems has been chasing and bolstering the ultra-right Repugs since the 90’s as have the Dems Presidents in recent times.  Even Joe Biden is conservative on defense, in spite of being center left on social issues. 

The current crop of Dems at any level is a lot more conservative than the 60’s for sure.  Moreover, they allow the Repugs to frame liberals erroneously as tax and spend types.

The low-light of the Repug “debate” the other night was Ron Paul’s stumbling reply about the fate of an uninsured young man formerly in good health who suddenly became seriously ill. 

The fact is that in hard times, those in financial distress almost always take a hard precipitous turn to the right ..... presumably to “save” themselves and families from fiscal doom. 

People DO get selfish and greedy when threatened, in spite of their best intentions or best approaches to livelihood.

Sigh. It has become in two short years an all too familiar pattern. The President offers it up, the Republicans object, and the President collapses.

Whether as a Republican you conclude that the President is weak and ineffectual and in over his head or as a Democrat you conclude the Republicans are knee-jerk obstructionists determined to bring down his presidency doesn’t matter. In either regard it is simply a sad statement on the deteriorating condition of what once was the great Democratic Republic of the United States of America.

How Much Has Obama Learned (snip) ?

The people are the enemy. The Bankers and Republicans are his allies.

That covers it.

Awesome Comments!!! Good ole’E.J. a shill till the End.

Vets For Peace Calls for Impeachment of Obama for War Crimes

antiwar dot com

How much has Obama learned from Republicans?  He’s using their playbook, so it appears he’s learned quite a bit.  For example, Rick Perry comes out and supports the abolition of Social Security.  Obama slyly claims to want to strengthen it, but at the same time he continues to hack away at the payroll tax, the money that is paid into social security by employees and employers out of every paycheck.  He plans to simply bankrupt the system then say “Oh no, it’s broke,” instead of using Perry’s more direct approach.  Same goal, different tactic. 

He’s a pro-war president.  He will not end the wars.  That’s very Republican of him.  He starts new ones just for bragging rights.  The constitutional law professor starts war knowing full well that the president has no authority under our constitution to do so.  Constitution/schmonstitution, who cares?

He’s received enormous support (I mean bribes and kick-backs) from Wall Street.  That’s very Republican of him. 

I’d say he’s done a great job.  He’s deceitful, he does nothing to help the working people of this country, he’s sitting on stimulus money that he will undoubtedly throw out next year to help his reelection, he refused to stand beside the union workers in Wisconsin, he gives blanket immunity to international war criminals and stands up for the criminal cartel on Wall Street.  Looks like a duck to me.

To govern as a progressive would demand a consensus powerful enough to
convert or punch through Republican opposition.  The Republicans are working
on building a consensus powerful enough to punch through Democratic
opposition, so they can do away with or phase out the safety net and any other
government regulation or intervention in the “free market”. 

The Republicans right now are much closer to achieving their consensus than
the progressives are.  Obama has not tried to create a progressive consensus. 
Others have been trying, but without much success; they wind up talking and
bickering with each other while being ignored by most people and demonized
by the right. 

Creating a progressive consensus is only possible by methods we have not yet
discovered or invented.  The methods we are using are not working; the right
does all it can to make them counterproductive, and is frequently successful.

The right’s methods include simple slogans, the oft-repeated big lie, milking
extreme phenomena by taking them as representative (welfare queens, Willie
Horton, etc.), making certain words and phrases poisonous (Communism,
socialism, income redistribution, entitlements, taxes, regulation, gun control,
death tax) so that any use of the word turns listeners off so they stop listening,
making other words magic (free enterprise, defense, patriotism, property
rights) so that any use of the word turns listeners into cheering supporters
whose abilities to analyze are turned off. 

The progressives had similar methods, and they used to work to rally the
masses.  They do not work very well at the present time.

Many people who have taken a side see through the other side’s stuff while
resisting similar insights regarding their own side’s stuff.  Others look at the
struggle as a sporting contest, and can see the tactics of both sides and
evaluate chances of success of strategies and counterstrategies.  Reporting the
contest as a sport can be objective and unbiased, but it can only address the
question of who is likely to win, not whose win would be good.

Many people are turned off by the methods no matter who uses them.  Obama
sold himself as someone who would use new methods, but failed to try to
develop or use them.  His junk mail and emails are crafted according to the
same tried and true formulas that are generally used.  He will flood the airwaves
with simplistic image-creating ads to offset the simplistic image-creating ads
of his opponents.

Obama’s challenge is not to sell his programs.  Compromising his programs so
they can get enough votes to pass creates complex messes that do not make
much sense and will not work very well.  Not compromising means no
programs at all.   

What he or somebody else needs to do is find a way to get a good, honest,
fact-based discussion of the issues started, something that will attract people
sick of the usual political posturing and energize those of us looking for
something that is not the same old same old.  In such a discussion, the side
able to best use reality to make its case will win. 

An honest discussion would begin with the emperor proclaiming everyone’s
nakedness; this would free us to seek ways to make the clothes we need to
survive the coming winter.  Otherwise we will continue constructing images of
our finery and trying to destroy the images the other side constructs.

On this one bit Dionne is partly insightful:

>the GOP sees the solution to the crisis in the measures its right wing has always favored: gutting regulation, keeping taxes on the affluent low, cutting government programs, and stopping Ben Bernanke and the Fed from doing anything to put the unemployed back to work that might risk the tiniest bit of inflation and thus dilute, even momentarily, the wealth of the already wealthy. <

An additional truth is that high unemployment coupled with a low minimum wage is favored by the government as both allow for cheap labor for the ruling class corporations.  What the Dem shill Dionne outright misses is that both parties favor these policies in their actions, and each uses its own disingenuous rhetoric to deceive and propagandize the public as to their actual intent.

This article reminds me of the fifty years of research on cancer.
All elements of cancer redundantly researched, except for genuine cures.
Which, would upset the cart of the pharma, oncology & medicine industry.

Similarly, if Truthdig buys articles such as this one by Dionne, one questions if it got its moneys worth.  The several repetitions of statements that are accurate and widely known are nice to read, again, but the title and entire treatise are simply distracting, a waste, perhaps even nonsense.

The concept that Obama and his policies have changed one bit because of what he speaks is laughable.

Obama speeches during his administration have served two functions.  The first and primary function is too placate his base AMAP.  The second perhaps unintended function is to provide ammunition to the Right Wing establishment to raise money from their base since the only way to remotely link Obama to being a “commie” is to cite his rhetoric.

That all this is occurring on the eve of the 2012 election provides a gullibility test which Dionne has failed.

No more throwing good money after bad - there needs to be a full investigation as to where the last stimulus funds went to before doing another one.
Taxpayer funds bought guns to be given away to criminals in Mexico and the solar panel company that received millions going bankrupt and currently under FBI scrutiny - these things are an indications of an administration that has no idea how to recover the economy.
It would be great if this latest plan works, but based on the record it is not likely to.

Our political system is not accustomed to the kind of battle that is going on now. President Obama has been slow to adjust to it.

Slow to adjust….perhaps the biggest understatement in the history of journalism. Small fire aboard the Hindenburg, Titanic takes on a bit of water, Lincoln enjoyed the play despite small headache.

With respects to Robespierre Obama might very well be classified as a “political virgin” at least on a national stage. A partial term in the Senate and three years of floundering show a man incapable of recognizing futility in repeated attempts at compromise resulting in rebuffs each time.

A President seemingly incapable of using his office to reach out to the voter, probably because he walks the tightrope of placating the largest campaign donors rather than honestly serving the majority.

I have been convinced that, despite his incompetence and slavish devotion to the financial community, despite his breaking almost every campaign promise he made, despite his increasing unpopularity among African American voters, he would gain a second term. Yet, even though his opponents are radicals, even though they spew the silliest of political hair brainery ( sorry), I am now not so sure.

Dionne’s bullshit article assumes that Obama is some sort of political virgin who came to Washington without any knowledge of how the U.S. political machine works. Obama will never “learn” about how the Republicans work because he’s part of the same system, just look at his foreign policy, what about it differs from the overall Republican narrative or platform? To say that Obama is slow to learn about how things work in government is to assume the man is literally mentally retarded.

I was really satisfied to hear the “dismantle
government” line from the president - calling out
many on the Right - as this notion appears to sum up
a growing faction within the Republican party. Both
the left and the right have no shortage of complaints
when it comes to government. The left believes in
fixing the problem while the right believes the fix is
to do away with government entirely, well, except for
the military. In fact, the entire Republican position
on the economy can be summed up as, do nothing. Or to
clarify, do nothing other than lower taxes. They
don’t believe government has any role in job creation
outside of reducing taxes, which has shown to be
ineffective at creating jobs, particularly over the
past 10 years. But their faith in the free market and
trickle down economic theory is unshakable.