Obama Out Of The Closet

[Doctor_J]

Mr. Obama last week obediently recited the Chamber of Commerce's liturgy about governmental regulation being the cause of what ails the American economy in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. This public oath of allegiance signaled his now admitted complicity with those who supposedly had been his opponents. The one example of alleged bad regulation he cites in the WSJ op-ed is something about saccharin and the environment. The prospect of our corporate moguls being released from the bonds of saccharin regulation doubtless has China's President Hu and his colleagues quaking in their well-tailored suits.

Let's make one thing perfectly clear. These actions were not imposed on Obama. They are not the inescapable outcome of political circumstances. He chose this path. It conforms to his behavior from the very start of his presidency. It was a newly-elected Obama who hand-picked Geithner and Summers. Who installed as his right-hand man Rahm Emanuel from the board of scandal-ridden Freddie Mac and deal-maker at Dresdner Kleinwort. Who declared at a press conference on the eve of his inauguration that he would not seek to repeal the Bush tax cuts but rather let them drain Treasury revenues until they expired, which of course he has conspired to prevent. Who met clandestinely with Big Pharma to cut a secret deal that ruled out the government's bargaining on drug prices. Who met clandestinely with health industry giants to cut a secret deal that ruled out the public option.

This is the same Obama who does not know the main provisions of the Social Security Act of 1935 -- as evinced on repeated occasions. Who put Social Security and Medicare on the rack by rigging his deficit commission with the appointment of Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles. The Obama who avowedly takes his inspiration from Ronald Reagan; who spent his holiday in Hawaii reading an account of how the Gipper's White House office was run for him. The Obama who has reserved his harshest and heartfelt words for attacks on progressives. Political expediency is not the reason for turning his back on his supporters and on his pledges. After all, spurning his constituents and kowtowing to the entrenched interests led to the biggest off-year disaster in American electoral history. In short, all the evidence is that an old-school "moderate" Republican occupies the White House.

It's official - we voted for a Republican

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-brenner/barack-obama-out-of-the-c_b_813027.html

[Skittles]

1. um................

he was never IN the closet to those of us who always paid attention

[Doctor_J]

3. You were more prescient than I then

I actually had...HOPE

[Skittles]

4. eh, I grew up having to notice whether people meant what they said

I can tell

[jaxx]

2. Unrec for calling the President a republican.

Quit it.

[Skittles]

5. how about you quit keeping your head in the sand

[golddigger]

6. He will go down as the best Republican

President in history.

[Laelth]

8. Clinton was better. He actually balanced the budget. n/t

-Laelth

[golddigger]

10. Okay! The second best Republican in history.

[Laelth]

12. That I'll give you. n/t

:)

-Laelth

[pnorman]

17. Well, at least he didn't say: "Obeying His Corporate Overlords"!

Be thankful for that!

Proudly UN-recommending!

[txlibdem]

18. Rec to undo yours. +1 to the truth

I just wish we weren't all fooled by this person claiming to be a Democrat. Perhaps in addition to checking birth certificates next election we should require all candidates to take a lie detector test.

"Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Democratic Party?!!"

[Peace Monger]

7. the Obama presidency has been devastating to me

I've lost a lot of confidence in the compassion and values of our society over the last two years. If the actions of this president define us, we are no better than his predecessor and his supporters.

We have been taken for granted. We have been walked-on and talked-over. We deserve better.

[txlibdem]

19. Welcome to DU.

I hope things get much, much better for you and yours soon.

[Doctor_J]

22. I haven't lost confidence the last 2 years.

It was at an all-time low in 2008, so it couldn't really get any lower. But I thought we were voting for someone who would fight, expose, and thereby humiliate the worst Repukes.

[txlibdem]

23. That was what his speeches and previous writings implied

But, as others have pointed out, he never actually uttered those exact words during the election year campaigning. He did everything short of it, and gave us all a definite impression that he would be that kind of strong fighter that we all knew we needed. But he never actually said he would fight as FDR did.

Now he's looking for ways to "reduce the burden of regulations" on businesses. He's showing us all that he is a staunch proponent of Trickle Down Economics. That only by giving money to big business and the rich can jobs be created.

[Laelth]

9. k&r for the truth, however depressing. n/t

-Laelth

[TheWraith]

11. It's official: you'll spin anything to try and justify hating Obama.

Including quoting a HuffPost piece that lies as badly and as much as Fox News. Not to mention it outright repeats right-wing smears, blaming the "scandal-ridden Freddie Mac" for economic problems, repeating the LONG DEBUNKED lies about Obama conspiring to kill the public option, and more nonsense spun from blogosphere fantasies about Obama hating Social Security.

[emilyg]

13. k/r

[emsimon33]

14. I have suspected this for some time!

Our choice these days is between two Republican positions. There is no Democratic position!

[Axrendale]

15. What a rubbish article.

Anyone who seriously thinks that Obama's off-the-cuff statements about "widows and orphans" actually represents anything other than political grandstanding, and actually interprets it to mean that he "doesn't know the provisions of the Social Security Act of 1935", not only shows that they haven't been paying attention to the things that the President has been saying and writing about the subject of Social Security for years now, but additionally that they are as stubbornly and mindlessly puritan in their political ideology as the radical wing of the Republican party that they hold in such contempt.

I am now convinced that John F. Kennedy was right when he said that nothing terrifies liberals as much as the idea of being in power and actually working to achieve at least part of their goals. They would rather go down in a blaze of glory.

For the record, it was John F. Kennedy who coined the phrase "Professional Liberals" to use in a similar way to the modern adaption "Professional Left" that so many here seem to find so insulting (he was more polite than his successor Lyndon Johnson, who preferred to describe liberals as "fucking crazies" - and that was when he was in a good mood). The record might also want to note that both JFK and Franklin Roosevelt engaged a number of conservatives to appoint to both cabinet positions and to act as advisors (Kennedy's Treasury Secretary was the man who it was widely felt would also have been Nixon's choice; as late as the 1940s FDR's pick for that same position described the New Deal as a "failure"). Both of these great liberal presidents understood how effective that it can in fact be to employ conservatives to carry out a liberal agenda - as long as they are given sufficient direction.

It additionally might want to be noted that Ronald Reagan's own political hero was Franklin Roosevelt, whom he unabashedly described as having been the "greatest president" in American history. This did not detract from Reagan's own thoroughly conservative ideology one single bit.

In any case Obama's own political hero, as he has never made any secret of, is Abraham Lincoln, whose bust sits in the Oval Office - right next to that of Martin Luther King Jr. Obama has consistently spoken of Ronald Reagan always as an "effective" president who was "transformative" in the sense that he succeeded in garnering immense political success, but whose agenda Obama both viewed and continues to view as a thoroughly negative one. It speaks to the laziness of so many on the left who criticized Obama for reading a biography of Reagan while in Hawaii that they did not even bother to check which of the many Reagan biographies it was. As a matter of fact it was an excellent book (I own a copy myself) that credits Reagan with being a highly effective politician but exorciates his numerous failings as a President, particularly in his domestic policy.

Unrec.

[leveymg]

16. There's enough truth to this so that it deserves a rec and a prolonged discussion about what it

means to be a good Democrat today. Is Obama a good Democratic President? I don't think many of us really believe that. Would he make a hell of a great Republican President - now, that's also an interesting question.

[Hotler]

20. k&r n/t

[Doctor_J]

21. To those who unrec'd - I'm down with that

I guess I am using the word "Republican" in its more affectionate sense - Eisenhower, Jeffords, Chaffee... I certainly don't mean to compare him to Inhofe and the psychos who constitute the current republican party. But he's further to the right than Bill Clinton, whom most consider a "moderate" Republican. My point is that I was hoping and expecting FDR & JFK.

[txlibdem]

24. Has the State of the Union Address changed your mind?

Has anyone changed their mind about Pres. Obama now, after hearing his SOTU?