Frank Rich Blows the Smoke Away from Washington

[kpete]

Op-Ed Columnist
They Sure Showed That Obama

By FRANK RICH
Published: February 14, 2009

Just as in the presidential campaign, Obama has once again outwitted the punditocracy and the opposition. The same crowd that said he was a wimpy hope-monger who could never beat Hillary or get white votes was played for fools again.

"This town talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking," ... For Axelrod, the moral is "not just that Washington is too insular but that the American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think."

Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/opinion/15rich.html
via:http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/2/14/221927/556/988/697709

[FrenchieCat]

1. How sweet it is! The article goes on to read......

"The G.O.P. doesn’t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started. That obliviousness gives the president the opening to win more ambitious policy victories than last week’s. Having checked the box on attempted bipartisanship, Obama can now move in for the kill." :rofl:

[FrenchieCat]

2. Boy, that was a really excellent Column!

[FKA MNChimpH8R]

3. I've said it before

but it is increasingly clear that Barack Obama is Bugs Bunny and the Repukes are, almost literally, a collection of loudmouthed, incompetent Yosemite Sams and cretinous Beaky Buzzards. They will NEVER outsmart him and O manages to tape "KICK ME" signs to their backs and they don't even realize it.

[gristy]

4. "Having checked the box on attempted bipartisanship, Obama can now move in for the kill."

Rich nails it. Lots of good points.

[Peace Patriot]

5. Well, don't count the two chickens in the pot just yet...

Puke corporations control our voting system, with 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, with virtually no audit/recount controls, so they can keep Pukes and "Blue Dogs" in office, increase their power and Diebold Barack Obama out of office in 2012, so the barricudas of the international financial world can return and loot us once again--or what's left of us, and any little economic progress we manage to create between now and then. The 'TRADE SECRET' voting corporations have the easy--EASY!--capability of doing this, while we stand helplessly by, wondering how Jeb Bush and Sarah Palin could conceivably have been elected, after all that has gone down. I think they already significantly and fraudulently shaved Obama's mandate and gave him a Congress that is by no means a true reflection of the American people. I think about half of them weren't elected at all. And none of our public officials--including Obama--can prove that they actually were.

That is the possibly fatal difference between 1932 and now. You wonder why Bush/Cheney seemed so oblivious to public opinion. This is why. They had guaranteed re-election, by fraudulent means, in 2004, and the 'TRADE SECRET' code played an important part in that election theft. There is no other justification for non-transparent vote counting except fraud. That is what non-transparent vote counting is for, and why it was fast-tracked all over the country, during the 2002 to 2004 period, at great expense (a $3.9 billion e-voting boondoggle passed by the Anthrax Congress in the same month as the Iraq War Resolution--Oct. '02).

We may enjoy seeing Obama punk the Pukes. And, really, it is quite show. I love it, too. But I see how easily it can all be undone, and how shattering that would be. The best thing that we, the people, can do for Barack Obama is to insure that we can re-elect him, by restoring transparent vote counting, and that means more than a paper trail (absent right now in half the systems in the country) but a minimum 10% audit of the ballots, as a check on machine fraud.* And don't expect Congress to do this (and beware of their further meddling in our election system). We need a grass roots citizen movement at the state/local level, to demand transparent vote counting.

----------------

*(Venezuela does a whopping 55% audit--five times the minimum needed--and they have OPEN SOURCE CODE programming--code that anyone may review.)

[applegrove]

6. That explains a lot.