Friday, January 8, 2010

BARACK OFF!

A Warning to all progressives:
BARACK OFF!
I get it; you’re a progressive, now Barack off! Start by dispensing with euphemistic words like progressive. We are L I B E R A L S and that is a word that should make us proud. Look up the dictionary definition of each word and see which one best defines your views.
To be candid, my politics are more to the left of left, but I’m also a practical person who sees potential dangers. We are being too impatient and too hard on Barack. We are ignoring the facts and the current state of affairs that he is facing. If we don’t get what we want immediately, we want to devour him. This has been a trait of Democrats as far back as I can remember. While the Republicans stick together, we eat our own and then wallow in the remains. With this attitude we risk losing it all, the House, the Senate in 2010 and the whole bowl of wax in 2012.
FDR accomplished a lot in part because he served 4 terms, 16 years. Rome was not built in a day, if history was different and the Roman Empire was saved from it’s great fall it would show it also would not have happened in a day. We live in times of excessive communication, texting before speaking, heads buried in our hand gadgets wondering why there hasn’t been a response even though only seconds passed. A 24/7 news cycle is a monster that needs to be fed constantly, it doesn’t matter what it eats as long is it gets fed, and you can be sure the cycle will beat it to death until the next “breaking news,” hits the fan.
The Internet has given us short attention spans, a level of impatience that we have never known before. So it stands to reason that we have little time for anything more than capsulized news. If we do not get what we want right away from a website we move to the next one, we simply cannot let this be the clock that we live by to achieve our ideals.
President Obama was handed the worst situation any new or sitting President ever faced. FDR was elected in 1932 to face the great depression, but WWII was not until 1941.
Minutes after being sworn in, Obama faced the worst attack from the right ever in our history. The attacks consisted not only of dirty lies but were laced with thinly veiled bigotry and racism. Their thinking was the only way to win, which is the only goal of the right, is to beat this popular fighter down to size with a series of above and below the belt body blows, until he falls. Realizing that Barack was a thinking man, not a polarizing threat, they calculated a strategy to portray him as such anyway knowing that perception is reality. It pains me to see some of our favorite and most prized liberal OP ED columnists attack Obama so viciously and then to see far right wing talking heads quoting them. The right has only one policy, take it all back at any cost because being out of power is affecting our bottom line profits from corporate donors. They counted on the left to be disenchanted quickly, when they did not get all they wanted in the first months of his presidency. The left unknowingly and unwillingly became part of the right’s plan, which is to attack Obama from the left as well as the right and hasten his demise. Please let’s not give them the assistance.
A few facts about our prized social and rights programs, they all started from much less than what they now consist of, for example Civil Rights: the first bill passed in 1957 and was nothing more than an ineffective watchdog with limited rights that later flourished under JFK and led the way for improved legislation in the sixties.
Social Security in its original form was not very social; it excluded most women, minorities, anyone who worked in agriculture, nurses, hospital workers, domestic service workers, and more. They came back several times to improve these bills as we can and will do so, with the healthcare bill, if we not only keep but also strengthen the democratic majority.
President Obama may not be all that we thought he was, then again he may be more, but he is all we have and probably the best that we will get in our lifetime. He needs our constructive criticism and our support, as he is a good man in a bad system.
If you want to attack why not go after the system itself? A movement to get publicly financed elections and remove the money from politics would be a good start. Let’s go after this 60-vote rule in the Senate that has given us a government where the majority loses and a minority of one can win.
The Rolling Stones once sang, “You can’t always get what you want, but you get what you need,” let’s not throw both what we want and what we need away.