By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver pronounced the debt deal a Satan Sandwich. The CBC is conducting its own “jobs tour,” without any government jobs, and the House progressive caucus is denouncing the series of rolling raids on Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security that the debt deal sets in motion. But will this, or anything stop progressives from re-hiring Chef Obama again in 2012?
Liberal talk show host Thom Hartman [2] was a textbook picture of the confused and persistent state of denial among progressive Obamites on live TV earlier this week.
Hartman agreed with Kansas City congressman Emmanuel Cleaver that the deal following the debt hoax was “a satan sandwich,” forced upon the nation by President Obama’s refusal to stand with and for the tens of millions who elected him. The debt deal was sure to result in waves of further cuts, deepening poverty and greater unemployment, while safeguarding the profit margins and tax immunities of corporations and the wealthy. It was the shortest route to a new Great Depression.
Republican Speaker John Boehner, Hartman said, got 98% of what he was after. “98% of the blame,” Hartman then declared, for the unfolding spectacle of hunger, want and poverty, a new Great Depression bearing down upon us belonged to the Republicans, with 2% accruing to the White House. Hartman’s progressive arithmetic, which blames Republicans for what a Democratic president does and doesn’t do, is the norm among a class of political progressives whose careers and livelihoods depend on the patronage of the Obama administration and the Democratic party.
The debt ceiling hoax has made a gaggle of Democratic party “progressives” nervous enough to begin to put some temporary distance between themselves and Barack Obama. The Congressional Black Caucus is holding a series of town hall meetings and job fairs around the country over the next couple weeks, including events in Chicago, Atlanta and Los Angeles. Pitifully, CBC members calling it their “Jobs Tour,” though they appear to have no more than a few hundred jobs —- all from private employers — to give away nationwide. After all, their own president, from the moment he walked into the White House, has told us that only the private sector can create jobs, despite the fact that another Democrat three generations ago created hundreds of thousands of jobs as part of the New Deal.
Professional Democrats — including almost all black elected and appointed officials on local, state and federal levels, and a class of wannabees a layer below them — have tied themselves to this president, no matter what he does or doesn’t do. They have become his indispensable enablers, shields and apologists. It is they who are accountable to the president, rather than the president being held to any meaningful accountability by those that elected him. Accountability, they say, is seriously overrated. After all, he’s black, not white, and a Democrat, not a Republican. That’s all we need to know. It’s almost a foregone conclusion that the elected officials and other political figures, the Tavis Smileys and the Cornel Wests who are edging away from Barack Obama now will beg us to circle the wagons around him one more time in 2012.
Rep. Cleaver got it right….. the deal coming out of the debt hoax IS a Satan Sandwich with a side order of Satan Fries. But the master chef in that kitchen, the man who put “entitlements on the table” in the first place is President Barack Obama. The Satan Sandwich could not have been created without his willing, even enthusiastic cooperation, and it’s just the first course in a loathsome banquet.
Thanks to chef Obama, a “supercommittee” of a dozen members of Congress has assumed the power to repeal decades of progressive legislation by simply cutting the funds for it. By 2012 all the prattle about “hope” and “change” will ring hollow for millions. We’ll be chowing down on that second course, with a new pretend-crisis debt ceiling upon us. The progressives and Congressional Black Caucus members who are edging away from President Obama now will be reminding us that after all, he’s black, not white, and a Democrat, not a Republican. Republicans are white supremacists, remember?
The progressive Democrats will be reminding us that we have no choice — not because we have no choices, but because they have already made theirs. Political progressives are, after all, married to their careers, not to the people. As long as our vision stretches no further than the next election, they almost make sense.
But if we take the view of the historic Freedom Movement we know that the next election, or the next three don’t tell the whole story. Limiting our own vision to what elected officials and their consultants deem “polticially possible” is always a dead end. Fifty and fifty-five years ago all the demands of the Freedom Movement were “premature”, “unrealistic” and “political suicide” for so-called progressives already in office.
It’s time to get unrealistic and unreasonable again.
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and based in Marietta GA, where he serves on the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. He can be reached at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com.
[3] Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/baracks-satan-sandwich-only-first-course-will-we-re-hire-chef-2012-anyway
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