At last seeing through Obama's lies

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Idiocy

Editor’s Note: Markos Moulitzas’ Daily Kos is crammed with schizophrenic “Kossacks”. Indeed, improbably, the vast majority of the audience in this gigantic “netroots” site is curiously to the right of the blog’s founder, Moulitzas, and many Democratic party hacks (including Hillary Clinton) regard the site as a quasi-appendix to the party itself. Proof? Until recently, any post presenting the slightest criticism of Obama–no matter how factual– was viciously denounced as the work of “rethuglicans,” “trolls’ or worse, and dismissed with all the imbecility of which ignorant, mean-spirited knee-jerk liberals with an overabundance of “Obamaniacs” are capable of.  Considering the site’s founder’s positions, we only wish this crowd paid more attention to what he is saying. On this one, for example, rebuking a fundraising note from the DNC, he’s spot-on.  His rage is our rage. Unfortunately, the DNC is not the only shameless (or clueless) outfit sending these letters. Practically all the main “liberal netroots” orgs are on the same wavelength: MoveOn.org, Truemajority, etc., as well as The Nation magazine, which should know better.—Eds.

Dateline: December 9, 2009  [print_link]

DK's founder Markos Moulitzas.

By Markos [DailyKos] Moulitsas

I get spam:

We will not back down

From: President Barack Obama to Markos

Markos —

As we head into the final stretch on health reform, big insurance company lobbyists and their partisan allies hope that their relentless attacks and millions of dollars can intimidate us into accepting the status quo.

So I have a message for them, from all of us: Not this time. We have come too far. We will not turn back. We will not back down.

But do not doubt — the opponents of reform will not rest. So I need you to fight alongside me.

We must continue to build out our campaign — to spread the facts on the air and on the ground, and to bring in more volunteers and train them to join the fight. I urgently need your help to keep this 50-state movement for reform going strong.

Please donate $5 or whatever you can afford today:

http://my.democrats.org/…

Let’s win this together,

President Barack Obama

Really? All we have to do is send the DNC $5 and we get ponies? The same DNC that is enabling corporatist Democrats to water down and destroy any hope for health care reform? That DNC?

This is so freakin’ obnoxious I can hardly stand it. We are about to get a turd of a “reform” package, potentially worse than the status quo. We have the insurance industry declaring victory, Republicans cackling with glee, and the administration is using that piece of shit to raise money?

Obama spent all year enabling Max Baucus and Olympia Snowe, and he thinks we’re supposed to get excited about whatever end result we’re about to get, so much so that we’re going to fork over money? Well, it might work with some of you guys, but I’m certainly not biting. In fact, this is insulting, betraying a lack of understanding of just how pissed the base is at this so-called reform. The administration may be happy to declare victory with a mandate that enriches insurance companies, yet creates little incentive to control costs or change the very business practices that have screwed so many people. But I’ll pass.

Democrats are demoralized, and have little incentive to turn out next year. The teabaggers will turn out. If this is how the Obama camp thinks we can energize the base — by promising them a health care pony for $5 to the same Democratic Party that is home to the likes of Baucus, Nelson, Lincoln, Lieberman, and the rest of the obstructionist gang — then we’re in for a world of hurt in 2010.

Author’s Website: www.dailykos.com

Author’s Bio: blogger founder of DailyKos.com

Another case of liberal exhaustion with Obama: Robert Scheer

Dear Barack, Spare Me Your E-Mails

By Robert Scheer

Barack Obama’s faux populism is beginning to grate, and when yet another one of those “we the people” e-mails from the president landed on my screen as I was fishing around for a column subject, I came unglued. It is one thing to rob us blind by rewarding the power elite that created our problems but quite another to sugarcoat it in the rhetoric of a David taking on those Goliaths.

In each of the three most important areas of policy with which he has dealt, Obama speaks in the voice of the little people’s champion, but his actions cater fully to the demands of the most powerful economic interests.

With his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, he has given the military-industrial complex an excuse for the United States to carry on in spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined, without a credible military adversary in sight. His response to the banking meltdown was to continue George W. Bush’s massive giveaway of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street, and his health care reform has all the earmarks of a boondoggle for the medical industry profiteers.

Health reform was the subject of Obama’s Tuesday e-mail, which proclaimed in its heading, “We will not back down.” Addressing me by my first name, which I assume is in acknowledgment that I, like the millions of other suckers with whom he so intimately corresponds, had contributed to his campaign, he began with a clarion call for yet another contribution, this time to donate.barackobama.com/FinalStretch.

“As we head into the final stretch of health reform, big insurance company lobbyists and their partisan allies hope that their relentless attacks and millions of dollars can intimidate us into accepting the status quo. So I have a message for them, from all of us: Not this time. We have come too far. We will not turn back. We will not back down.”

But we, following him, have already backed down. Does the president not recall that he began his health care reform effort by ingratiating himself with the insurance lobbyists in taking “single payer” off the table on day one? The insurers are not really upset with what may survive as a minuscule public option, for they have won the big prize: Everyone must buy insurance from them under penalty of law, and there will be no built-in requirement for cost control. Their so-called opposition to the current plans has to do with fine-tuning the president’s guarantee of their future profits.

The same contradiction between progressive rhetoric and big-business giveaways was on display, also on Tuesday, when Obama addressed the economic crisis. Speaking at the Brookings Institution, an Establishment think tank that helped craft the radical financial deregulation of the Clinton years, Obama blamed Republicans for the mess. He thundered against “an opposition party, which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that led to the crisis, decided to hand it over to others to solve.”

Rubbish. It was Bill Clinton—in his trademark triangulation of progressive rhetoric with the big-business agenda—who presided over the passage of banking deregulation that led to the mess. Obama knows that full well because he laid out that sordid record in a major speech on economics during the primary campaign, in March 2008 at Manhattan’s Cooper Union:

“Under Republican and Democratic administrations, we failed to guard against practices that all too often rewarded financial manipulation instead of productivity and sound business practices.” He specifically cited the New Deal protections of the Glass-Steagall Act and other legislation that Clinton’s radical deregulation legislation had swept away. Inexplicably as a matter of logic, or all too predictably given the political power of Wall Street, Obama as president turned to the same pro-deregulation Clintonistas to run his economic “reform,” led by Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.

As for “solving” the banking problem, Obama simply followed the lead of his Republican predecessor. The throw-money-at-Wall-Street solution for which Obama takes credit is the one crafted by Bush’s treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, and it was fully endorsed by then New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner, whom Obama named to replace Paulson. The buying off of the financial hustlers was blessed by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who has been renominated to that position by Obama.

The solution that Obama boasts of has left us with trillions more in debt, one out of four children poor enough to qualify for food stamps and, as Obama conceded in his Tuesday speech, “more than seven million fewer Americans with jobs today than when this recession began.”

I do agree with one line in Obama’s e-mail to those of us who hoped for the best from his presidency: “the opponents of reform will not rest.” But I didn’t expect him to be one of them.

ROBERT SCHEER is a longtime liberal writer and activist who’s apparently drifting left on account of Obama.