I am tired. And annoyed. And tired.
In Crack Den comments, res ipsa responded to a commenter saying, “they’ll still call you a liberal, Barack,” with “twice as often and twice as loud.” Which, yeah. I’m not denying there have been times in the past when I’ve critically underestimated Obama, when I’ve considered him to be making some incredibly boneheaded centrist blunder when actually he was doing something smart, but in this case, if this was an attempt to seem reasonable, I don’t think it’s descending into the madness of “woe is me” ism to say that it ain’t gonna work, it’s never worked, never ever ever. You are a liberal terrorist-loving gay-marrying pussy no matter what you do, because that’s who you are to them, and it’s not dependent on your actions. It’s dependent on their need for an enemy. And a cheap joke. And some fucking Wiz wit or whatever. It’s not about you. Get that through your skull. To the right-wing bullies who have run and still run our politics, you barely exist except as a target.
With regard to the practicalities at hand, I want to believe something else is going on here, that Obama will in fact translate his statements of opposition to the immunity provision into action in the Senate, but I’ll have to wait and see on that one. For now let me say that the talk of heartbreak and OMG OBAMA SUXXORZ NOW and who is disillusioned and who told you so just intensifies the exhaustion this campaign has instilled in me. I never was all that wrapped up in the idea of Barack Obama as a new kind of politician. His message was new in many ways, exciting in many ways, the man is a stone fox who’s done some good stuff for Illinois and he can bring me to my feet cheering but he, also? Is a Democratic senator who has run a phenomenally successful campaign and he’s probably going to be president, and if anybody thinks for ten seconds that means we get to, like, take a break or something, finally lay down and nap, keep dreaming. President Obama is gonna make us happy, but he’s also gonna piss us off and we’re gonna have to yell at him a lot, because I think I can safely say that even the most liberal of our Democratic politicians is not liberal enough for the majority of the people who call themselves Democrats, and those same politicians are cowed by decades of being told acting conservative was the only way to win.
Remember that. Decades. We’ve done a good job in the past five or so years of trying to get them to at least recognize they don’t have to hump Bush’s leg in order to look good to the Heartland, but it’s been the past five years or so. And it’s been people on the Internet, while every newspaper editorial board and every TV talking head tells them to be very Sensible and Serious and Slow. Meanwhile, those people protesting are carrying Bush puppets and some of them talk about Cuba, so let’s make it out to be their fault we won’t listen to them, and tell them they ought to wear ties. We’ve raised some money but we haven’t raised enough to be AT&T, and we simply haven’t hurt them enough to make them love us. Let’s be honest about this. It’s a game of masochism, this is, and we aren’t whipping them hard enough. I would love to say to you that after November we can all chill for a bit because Barack will have it in hand, but come on. Even giving his statement up there the most generous possible read, which is “I have hidden your keys, chill, Russ Feingold texted me a minute ago saying he’s gonna chain himself to the Senate door so this isn’t gonna be a thing after all, at least not a thing I need to be involved in,” he’s still gonna need us shoving him in the right direction. And I intend to shove.
You can throw the right-wing all the bones you want. They’ll still snarl around your ankles, because it isn’t bones they’re after. And if Obama doesn’t know that now, he’s very soon going to find out.
A.