Boy, this “Obama Derangement Syndrome” really has gotten out of hand. Why, just this past week the decreasingly popular president has been called a “bald-faced liar,” “an executive who can’t bring himself to lead,” and even an “Uncle Tom.”
And that’s just by liberals.
The progressive crack-up, before Obama even reaches the end of his first year, has been an awesome and occasionally humorous sight to see. Undead ’60s warhorse Tom Hayden got the ball rolling in early December with his dramatic announcement in The Nation that, with the president’s decision to increase troop levels, “It’s time to strip the Obama sticker off my car.”
Liberal historian Garry Wills joined the anguished chorus. “My wife and I had maxed out in donations for him. Our children had been ardent for his cause,” Wills wrote. “And now he betrays us.”
Obama’s intention to double down in Central Asia was no secret in 2008—it’s right there on his campaign Web site: “Barack Obama will refocus our efforts on Afghanistan. He has a comprehensive strategy to succeed in Afghanistan with at least two more US combat brigades.”
But the Democrat’s strongest supporters had their eyes glued on the twin prize of repudiating George W. Bush and electing the nation’s first black president. Intra-party policy disagreements just weren’t a part of the conversation.
That began to change with the steady drip of minor disappointments early in the new administration: delaying closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison, writing a brief in support of the odious Defense of Marriage Act, ridiculing questions about legalizing marijuana, promiscuously invoking state secrets privileges, breaking campaign promises about transparency, and so on.
Meanwhile, with the economy continuing to spit blood, liberals became increasingly aware of—and irritated by—what libertarians could have told them all along: You can’t credibly claim to be cracking down on Wall Street “fat cats” in one breath while in the other shoveling hundreds of billions into their pockets and letting industry insiders write financial policy.
The bailouts have never been popular among any political grouping, and the cognitive dissonance they represent can only be tuned out for so long. As H.L. Mencken wannabe Matt Taibbi put it in the subtitle of a recent controversial Rolling Stone piece, “The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway.”
But the real dealbreaker for many progressives was a health care reform package that lacks a public option, blocks the importation of cheap drugs from Canada, doesn’t expand Medicare, and forces Americans to purchase plans from hated insurance companies. That spurred consumer crusader Ralph Nader last week to call Obama “an Uncle Tom groveling before the demands of the corporations that are running our country.”
Less hysterical but no less disappointed was former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, who wrote in the Washington Post Thursday that “Any measure that expands private insurers’ monopoly over health care and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real health-care reform.”
When finding themselves on the opposing side of the president’s policy, his former admirers on the left are discovering something that the right has known for a while now: Obama will look you in the eye and lie. When the president said last week that “every health care economist out there” agrees that the reform package includes “whatever ideas exist in terms of bending the cost curve,” it wasn’t just free marketeers who cried foul.
“You know it is a lie,” thundered health care writer Jon Walker at the popular progressive Web site FireDogLake. “The PhRMA lobbyists you cut the secret deal they know it is a lie, health care reform experts know it is a lie, and the American people should know it is a lie.”
http://reason.com/archives/2009/12/22/obama-left-behind/
Boo fucking Hoo.
I posted the following piece back in June of this year. Everything I predicted came to fruition.
They served as an Obama campaign wing. They got him elected based on his radical socialist agenda and that “change” they desperately wanted. He’s grabbing private industry, corporations, and banks in accordance with his socialist policies. Isn’t that what they wanted? A government crackdown on ‘evil captialists’? Instead of letting the free market determine who was financially fit to stay in business, they wanted a dictator to take control of even the most unworthy—as long as it benefit the disenfranchised poor—in the name of ’social justice’. He’s shredded the Constitution without so much as a peep out of the Left.
They wanted a ‘president’ that would improve America’s ‘image’ by presenting a conciliatory posture towards the offended world; for all past transgressions, real or imagined.
He schmoozed with Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and Evo Morales on his Latin-America apology tour, only to get lectured on American “imperialism”. He’s trying to ‘make up’ for the Great Satan’s insolent reprisals for the atrocities committed by Islamofascist countries on our soil. He bowed to the Saudi king and plays patty-cake with Iran, which might content his adoring hometown crowd, but the goons in the Middle East aren’t satisfied yet.
He did backtrack on GITMO. Even an idiot like Obama has second thoughts about releasing unremorseful jihadist cutthoats back out into society. He’s also reneged on the “immediate pullout” from Iraq and Afghanistan, because he doesn’t want to fold the winning hand passed to him by George Bush.
And for that, the Left is perfunctorily outraged.
He ran as the ‘people’s candidate’; a ‘community organizer’ with a Leninist ’spread the wealth’ agenda. Having that kind of political package wrapped in dark skin was a plus for the fawning Left.
On the other hand, Republicans prefer substance over pigment.
Save for a few glitches, the Left basically got what they demanded. They have a majority in Congress and Senate, as well as an apparatchik in the White House.
I said at the beginning of Obama’s regime that they will only get their panties in a wad if he doesn’t fulfill their leftwing expectations. All of them.
We have about 3 1/2 years remaining to see how many more of Obama’s worshipers turn apostate.
http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/leftwingnut-cartoonist-ted-rall-laid-off-from-job/
I must be a fucking psychic.
