Things are Radically Influx (Obama, the Democrats, Bush, & WikiLeaks)

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Forums > All Posts > Things are Radically Influx (Obama, the Democrats, Bush, and WikiLeaks)

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2010-12-04 12:42 PM

CARLITOS BAM-BAM
Dallas, TX
Posts: 897

Ho-hum,
Well my Democratic friends, it's patently clear that we are not on the same page anymore, not only on the wars, but on The President, himself.

The left is ready to primary The President; while the right remains poised to make 2012 ulgier than ever. Democratic unity is eroding and The President remains embattled on all sides.

Meanwhile, the left's contempt for the war and the former president is growing by day, as his rehabilitation tour has the likes of Noam Chomsky to your average democratic voter in fits. I vomitted 3 times reading (Deception) Points; the customer service people at Barnes and Nobles were pissed; and security led me out on two of the four occassions that it took for me to finish the novel. I will bring a pale bucket with me when Cheney releases his.

In any event, I can swear to you, that I fundamentally loathe the BushCheney&Co. with every ounce of my Liberal-Democrat soul.....
....I am way beyond the point of showing anyone of them any respect in the language I choose to use to describe them, short of calling them actual Nazis, and/or Hitler.

Now, despite this, I was willing to support Dem. Congressional Leadership......and even Obama....in their refusal to blacken the eye of the country.....and open up even deeper rifts and political combat in the pursuit of some type of investigation, with possible sanctions or punishment for Bush administration officials....primarially in regards to torture and other wartime related violations of federal law.

The Civil Libertarian wing of the Democratic Party is on fire (to which I remain a member).....Now more than ever, it is the Democrats who are the true defenders of the American people from Big Brother......sadly the Tea Party mob doesn't seem to recognize the value of the ACLU in restraining the size and power of government...or of protecting constitutional liberties.....or possess any bipartisan respect for the only Senator to vote against the Patriot Act, Sen Russ Feingold (D-WI), because the Reptile mob threw everything they could at him......
I keep telling you people.....The Civil Libertarian Liberals are now the true conservatives: we have absorbed the facets of the American traditions of liberalism and conservatism into one whole body of thought called Progressivism.....and our own left-right divisions are the most relevant towards public policy. The Reptiles are just a bunch of crazed&delusional fascists promoting a fascist-authoritarian police state for the benefit of their side.

In any event, the Democratic Party remains divided unto itself, and the Obama Presidency is the only thing holding it all together (for now), with the liberals taking a back seat to the centrist Democratic establishment, and the conservative BlueDog Democratic wing, who possess major veto points over anything liberals try to accomplish.

Now here's where I depart from many liberals.....ultimately, going after Bush for war crimes would have been a bitterly divisive distraction and overwhelming polarizing negative variable on the tough work that laid ahead for the Democratic Congressional leadership, once we took power in Congress in 2007, and the WH in 2008. So, I did not recoil in horror when Pelosi and Obama refused to investigate the Bush presidency for "high crimes and misdemeanors," however, things have fundamentally changed.

In large part, like many, I find it incredulous that some moderate Dems think the Reps are bound to reciprocative norms.....that is fundamentally naive, but in the end, I don't believe that's the intention of Obama's bipartisan efforts....I believe it's a stopgap measure to prevent them from going even crazier.
For example, notice that Congress and Obama didn't bring the national guard out to stop the mob of Tea Party supporters when they decended on Capitol Hill during the Healthcare debates.
Given the times we live in...such security might have been in order.
Indeed, if student protestors had acted that unruly, we would have been beaten in the streets, that sadly is to be expected.
But if the Washington Metro Police or National Guard..turned their riot gear on Tea Party supporters for running amok, threatening violence, openly calling for rebellion and killing Democrats....it would have started a Civil War
For good of Union....sometimes we have to bend....but there is a point, when bending any further...defeats the value of Union...
we are not there yet....but the Edge is out there.

With Bush's Rehabilitation Tour in full swing....I no longer feel the same resolve to bend any further on letting the man walk....
Despite, the importance of Obama's presidency to foreign policy....I fundamentally believe that Bush is only screwing those interests further by continuing to tell lies ..
(Deception) Points has done way more to imperil our strategic position than WikiLeaks and because of Bush, and not transparency, I am losing faith in the strategic gambles that I have supported, since 2006, in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars (both of which I was against from the beginning); while Obama's position on the leaks (transparency) does not help alleviate my fears.

see: Pres. Obama failed in convincing Spain not to prosecute Bush for war crimes?
check out the end of the video where they broadcast an audio recording of LBJ and Sen. Dirksen (R-IL.) discussing Nixon's "treason" in 1968.

Nixon did far worse to our strategic position in Vietnam than the Pentagon Papers.

Mahalo,
El Prezidente Kaboom

2010-12-08 08:26 AM

Schmidt
Colorado Springs, CO
Posts: 1058

EPK...you and I are in agreement on most points. I'll comment.

As I have said in many other postings, when people are mad or hate or are fearful, they don't think clearly. This applies to both conservatives and liberals...Senators and Representatives...Democrats and Republicans and Independents...and yes ME! Sometimes that fear or rage is manufactured or hyped...issues are cherry picked and mountains are made out of molehills. The news media is in the entertainment business and is only too happy to sensationalize those issues that give them ratings. Often it's politics, but they'll also drop everything to cover something ad nauseum...like balloon boy. Many times political issues are first hyped by Fox News and lo and behold, MSNBC and CNN pundits follow suit...along with the Washington Post and others. I wonder sometimes, what is the true reality??

So now we have the most intelligent and cool President in my lifetime making well thought out decisions, not out of rage or fear or hate or ratings...but out of what he analyzes is ultimately best for the American people, especially the middle class workers. Yes he compromised by necessity with the Republicans on a whole host of issues during his first two years, the health care legislation being the most prominant, but now also giving up tax cuts for the rich for two years. What did he give away and what did he get in return? Many of my fellow progressives in their frustrations are only focusing on what he gave away...just like when he gave away the public option on health care. It makes them boiling mad...it makes me mad. But at times like these I appreciate having a President that will divorce himself from the emotions and do what he can with the hand that he has been dealt. I certainly wouldn't want a President with John McCain's temperment making those kind of decisions, nor a President like Bush who was intellectually lazy, self serving and easily manipulated.

There's a lot that Obama has done that many of us progressives don't like. Many want retribution for the past eight years of Bush, and maybe they have a valid point. But Obama is looking to the future instead of the litigating the past, and he wants to accomplish what we elected him to do. You can have one or the other but probably not both. Obama has chosen the future.

And we forget that he is dealing with obstructionist Republicans whose admitted first priority is to see him fail. I do not understand the "unAmerican" motives of those Republicans. I think I understand McCain...he scares the crap out of me. But for the others it must be a combination of greed, hate and party loyalty that drives them to put party politics first....ahead of our great country. Obama understands this, plays their game and gets things done. Just look at the list of his accomplishments and one has to admire him...unless you are a progressive that wanted NO COMPROMISES. Without compromises Obama would have accomplished nothing. Everything would have been confrontational. And yes...many more Republicans would be running crazy with rage mimicing Beck and Limbaugh. They love confrontation. It helps them with their voting base.

The direction our country is headed is worrisome, and I'm not talking about just our economic or foreign policies. What worries me is the shift to the right...the shift towards fascism...driven largely by fear and hate...and anti-intellectualism. It's not apparent to many...just a little more each year. Progressives are now the only ones standing in their way, but now we too are divided and have engaged in the populist rhetoric of blaming Obama. Obama right now is the only person capable of saving us from ourselves. I'll stand with my President, and I hope my fellow progressives will do likewise. The alternative is just very, very bad for America.

2010-12-08 04:54 PM

CARLITOS BAM-BAM
Dallas, TX
Posts: 897

Ho-hum....great stuff......

My head is spinning these days.....

Just what is a progressive?
Just another name for liberal? Booo! I will not settle for retreat-semantics as a means of forming a definitiion, and if that is the case....I am not going to just call myself a progressive to make my views more palatable.

My working definiton is that progressivism is dissent within the modern liberal tradition.....not necessarily a thirdway...but a new form of American liberalism that transcends common ideological convictions.....indeed, I believe you can be a Republican and a conservative....and a progressive.....that's the beauty of it.....we operate under a new framework....of loyalty to Truth, Justice, an American way of life that doesn't kill us all.....that's what progressivism is... making democracy and capitalism work for the people...maybe that's an oxymoron....but I dream of things that never were!

I believe progressivism is something that we service.....
I am a Liberal Democrat, progressivism is my cause.

P.S. I am not bad mouthing anyone who calls themselves a progressive. I just think we can be both Liberals and Progressives....and that mean two different things.

Some lunatics do make sense,
El Prezidente Kaboom

2010-12-08 05:55 PM

Schmidt
Colorado Springs, CO
Posts: 1058

EPK, you're right about there being a lot of confusion about liberals versus progressives. I call myself both, but kind of think of progressives in today's context as the really energized liberals.

Wikipedia had this to say: "Today, most progressive politicians in the United States associate with the Democratic Party or the Green Party of the United States. In the US Congress there exists the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which is often in opposition to the more conservative Democrats, who form the Blue Dogs caucus. Some of the more notable progressive members of Congress have included Ted Kennedy, Russ Feingold, Dennis Kucinich, Barney Frank, Bernie Sanders, Al Franken, John Conyers, John Lewis, Nancy Pelosi and Paul Wellstone."

I like all those guys and that's why I call myself a progressive...but I'm also very liberal.

I suppose as soon as Glenn Beck started bad mouthing progressives, that's when I started calling myself one...whatever Beck thinks a progressive is, it must be something that conservatives despise. Good enough for me. See this article in Salon, Glenn Beck and the War on Progressives.

2010-12-08 10:49 PM

CARLITOS BAM-BAM
Dallas, TX
Posts: 897

I just don't like using the term progressivism as just another word for liberalism....
it reeks of defeatism....
Progressivism is something more....
It's a new way of framing the issues....demonstrating the captibility of liberal ideas with the Anglo-American conservative tradition...
I believe capitalism is a balance between socialism and anarchism....
What modern free market conservatives call capitalism....I call a crime....this Hobbesian Free For All that they seek in economic matters....is pure and deliberate anarchy....it's Zero-Sum realism....somebody has to lose, in order for anyone to win....yada yada yada....and it will only empower a BiG GOVERNMENT police-state to protect the gains of the powerful....

We are the defenders of the U.S. Constitution....We are the literal conservators of the American Dream....
Oh its getting weird....Are liberals actualy closer to real conservativism than the Republicans and the Tea Party hooligans? I say absolutely..
I mean Thomas Jefferson would not support leaving a police state to reinforce the results of a largely anarchist marketplace to fix the 3rd World Mess that we have made for ourselves....neither would Adam Smith or Edmund Burke....or Winston Churchill. They would support socialistic remedies to cure the excesses of capitalism.

2010-12-09 06:14 AM

Zach F
Denton, TX
Posts: 938

I've always disliked grouping people. For one, I have always felt that it restricts the flow of ideas. For example Beck dismisses an idea simply because it is 'progressive.' Secondly, groupings seem so restrictive. Left/Right, Black/White etc. What if I want up/down or purple/orange. So whenever a new group gets formed they are immediately lumped in with a familiar group. The Tea Party is often lumped in with Republicans, but they have very different ideas in many aspects. I feel the same is true with the liberal/progressive issue. A progressive most resembles a liberal. They are the same.

While I do dislike it, I also understand the need for groupings and that human nature likes to categorize the new with the familiar to help our brains comprehend and cope with the new addition. And I can could probably write an entire thesis paper on the subject of the complexities of grouping simplicities, but I don't wanna. I'm just not a fan of groupings.

As for the Obama issue, I think Frank put it very well when he replied to a very good post by EPK when he said that its very easy to focus on what has been given up in the interest of compromise than what has been gained. I've noticed that liberal media outlets will focus on what Republicans are stopping, while conservative media outlets will call the compromises failed campaign promises. Its very easy for the positive to disappear into the background in out media.

Another point I would like to throw in there is the difference between Obama on the campaign trail and Obama in the White House. What many many people overlook or fail to understand is how little information Obama had while campaigning. (And this is true for any presidential candidate, not just Obama.) Positions that he took while running for office may need to be reevaluated once he became briefed about what is really going on. I would expect a few stances to be shifted with the addition of new information. It might not all be compromise. Some of his "failures" may just be him saying,"This little piece of intel changes things."

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