Worst President ever?
No, I’m not ready to crown Barack Obama the Worst President Ever just yet, but consider this:
Yes, George W. Bush wrecked our economy, destroyed New Orleans, turned a budget surplus into massive deficits, ignored warnings of a major terrorist attack and used that mistake to lead us into two disastrous military quagmires…
But he also pushed relentlessly for conservative policies and delivered for his base with war, deregulation, tax cuts, environmental rollbacks, and an army of right-wing ideologues embedded in the federal government and judiciary. He failed to privatize Social Security, but not for lack of trying.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, inherited a mess rather than creating one. But not only has he failed to create jobs or restart the economy, he has paid only lip service to progressive policies and betrayed his base at almost every turn.
Hmmm … so what should he have done, Eli? I mean I’m with you on the “failed to create jobs or restart the economy”. No rocket scientist needed to figure that out. But obviously, unlike W, who took every supposed opportunity to give his base those things they love – like wars (how’s it going in Libya these days, sport?) – your Prez isn’t giving you guys what you want?
Appreciate the fact you actually seem to believe the right loves wrecked economies (because you know, that’s super pro-business) and terrorist attacks (because he ignored intel? Guess Obama is the only one who inherits messes, huh?), but what should your man be doing?
Instead of using the financial crisis or the current debt hysteria to push through a progressive agenda like Bush used 9/11 to push through a conservative one, he’s using them as an excuse to capitulate to Republican budget chickenhawks, and even to cut Social Security and Medicare.
Ah, he’s violating the “never let a good crisis go to waste” maxim, eh? Good lord, yes, we should have spent gobs more money on, well, only Sheriff Joe knows, and he should have insisted on the public option, no wait, single payer, and on “teh ghey” issue, well he’s just been horrible. Right?
And he had that pure liberal Democratic Congress for how long? Yeah, 2 years, and what came out of there? *Sigh*. What’s a liberal to do.
So which is worse? The president who serves his base and sets the country on fire, or the president who stiffs his base and fights fire with gasoline?
Mmmm … I’ll have to think about that a second. Nope, don’t need too – the last guy. It explains why “Miss me yet?” t-shirt sales are booming.
John Cole, however, is having a cow stating sarcastically:
Any good liberal in the year 2011 would be confused when choosing between Obama and Bush for the title of “Worst President Ever.”
He seems to think FDL is effin’ “clinical”.
It’s tough when the blinders finally come off, isn’t it? Unsurprisingly, they’re still firmly in place at Balloon Juice.
BTW, read the comments at FDL – they’re equally as entertaining as the article.
~McQ
Twitter: @McQandO
The bigger story about the Murkowski defeat
You remember Ned Lamont, don’t you?
You don’t? Well Ned was the posterboy for the Kos Kids effort to change the dynamic within the Democratic party. They wanted “progressive” candidates and Joe Lieberman of CT just didn’t fit the bill. So the Kossaks and others like FireDogLake, backed their candidate, raised money and did their best to oust old Joe. And they had some limited success. I say limited in that they beat Joe in the Democratic primary, but then independent Joe whipped Ned’s rear in the general election.
Now, it’s not clear that will happen in Alaska. Rumor has it that Murkowski, sensing defeat to the Tea Party backed Joe Miller, reached out to the Libertarian Party of Alaska, wondering if they’d be willing to adopt her as a candidate. The libertarians said, “no way, no how, Lisa”. She might be a viable candidate, but she’s no libertarian. But that caused some to believe she’ll run now as an independent.
And, in Florida, you see the same sort of scenario being played out with Charlie Crist and the TP backed Marco Rubio. Crist, the establishment GOP choice has been reduced to running as an independent – and he is.
The whole point of course is getting establishment candidates ousted in a primary is only Step 1. As Ned Lamont and the Kossaks learned, the important step is Step 2.
If the Tea Party is to be taken seriously as a force for making the GOP more fiscally conservative and Constitutionally aware, it has to win the Step 2 contests as well.
~McQ
Liberal Blogger: Slavery and the Health Care Crisis
If ever there was a text book example of a false premise wrapped in an absurd ‘moral’ analogy, Glenn Smith at Firedoglake provides it:
The gravity of America’s health care crisis is the moral equivalent of the 19th Century’s bloody conflict over slavery. This is not hyperbole, though the truth of it is often lost in abstract talk of insurance company profits, treatment costs, and other cold, inhuman analyses.
Today’s health system condemns 50 million Americans to ill health and death while guaranteeing health care to the economic privileged. It cannot stand.
About 18,000 Americans die each year because they lack health insurance. That’s more than a third the number of lives lost in battle during each year of the four-year Civil War.
Heh … you have to love the attempt to wave off this hyperbole by simply declaring it isn’t hyperbole. But I would hope that it is evident to any rational thinker that the attempt here is to equate those who resist the intrusion of government into the realm of health to those who fought to retain the institution of slavery.
This is, instead, a plain old rant against capitalism and the free market cloaked in this absurd moral equivalence Smith invents. Seeing the liberal goal of government run health care being battered by real world realities, he’s decided he has to turbo-charge his argument for such change by defining down the horror of slavery in order to find a moral equivalence he can use as a bludgeon on the dissenters.
Don’t believe me? How about this:
Members of Congress without the moral clarity to recognize this equivalence will be condemned by history. Their spinelessness and lack of will when confronted with the power of the insurance industry is just as morally bankrupt as the American congressmen who bowed to Southern slave-owners.
The morally compromising efforts to pass health care reform that insurance companies might like is as insane as the compromises over slavery.
Or this:
The health insurance industry earns its profits from the denial of coverage and benefits. It’s not so different from the Southern plantation owners who earned their profit from slave labor. The latter had their economic justifications for their immorality. So do the insurance companies.
Of course, this sort of nonsensical thinking muddles important concepts that underlie the inalienable rights of man. Slavery was a violation of man’s right to his own life. Health care insurance is nothing more than a tool that helps pay for a person’s health care. Health care is not “unavailable” to those who don’t have it. More importantly, health care is not a right.
Whereas slave owners physically denied slaves the freedom to pursue their lives, insurance companies do not stop anyone from pursuing their own health care.
But – they have to pay for it because it entails the use of the time, abilities and services of others. That is what people like Smith really object too. Read the nonsense in the paragraph above and that’s clear. And, as many extremists like to do (like those who claim, for instance, that those who don’t agree on AGW are akin to Holocaust deniers), he chooses the most inflammatory but false “moral” example he can choose to demonize his opposition, counting on the dearth of critical thinking these days to win their point.
Unfortunately, it is more successful than I’d like to admit, which is why it is important to refute it immediately when it crops up.
~McQ