He turned out to be something else altogether. To blame Republicans ignores a glaring truth: Obama’s record is worst where they had little or no role to play. It wasn’t Republicans who prosecuted all those whistle-blowers and hired all those lobbyists; who authorized drone strikes or kept the NSA chugging along; who reneged on the public option, the minimum wage and aid to homeowners. It wasn’t even Republicans who turned a blind eye to Wall Street corruption and excessive executive compensation. It was Obama.
But for fuck's sake, this didn't happen in the past eight years alone:
In the late ’70s, deregulation fever swept the nation. Carter deregulated trucks and airlines; Reagan broke up Ma Bell, ending real oversight of phone companies. But those forays paled next to the assaults of the late ’90s. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 had solid Democratic backing as did the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999. The communications bill authorized a massive giveaway of public airwaves to big business and ended the ban on cross ownership of media. The resultant concentration of ownership hastened the rise of hate radio and demise of local news and public affairs programming across America. As for the “modernization” of financial services, suffice to say its effect proved even more devastating. Clinton signed and still defends both bills with seeming enthusiasm.
Where was this impassioned dissent when you were cashing Bill Clinton's checks? Did you fight against both those bills and the type of triangulating bullshit for which your employer was known? Or did you figure eh, politics, whaddayagonnado, and keep on getting paid?
God, I am just so done with the "once I got my paycheck I realized everything my masters had done was horrible and wrong and I'm sorry" genre of political journalism. See also every Bush aide who has come out against the war in Iraq in recent months, saying they knew it was going to be a clusterfuck from the start but somehow just managed not to say anything at the time that would have stopped it. See also every post-campaign campaign manager confessional piece in which whoever is admitting his sins was of course the lone voice in the wildnerness, powerless to effect change in the campaign they were running.
You know what? You see something happening you know is fucked up, you either stop it then and there (COLIN GODDAMN POWELL) or you spend the rest of your life making up for your failure not in your words in some airhead thinkpiece but in your actions. Jimmy Carter, God love him may he live a thousand years, went and built houses for poor people after he screwed the presidential pooch. Everybody else needs to heed his example and shut the fuck up. Nobody cares about your guilty consciences but you.
A.
I don’t know Bill Curry from a hole in the ground. Okay, his hands are dirty just as much as Hillary, Bill, or Al; the guy who won in ’08 won partially on the basis that he supposedly had cleaner hands – and we all know better now. Al spent time in the wilderness, but never apologized, he just shifted policy. Just for that, Democrats were willing to draft him despite Al’s obvious reluctance to run. Bill never apologized either (except for the Great Penis Chase), but courted the right press to make Democrats feel as though he had.
Bill Curry is thinking of running for President – he sees the hole Ralph Nader inhabited, and which Elizabeth Warren & Bill DeBlasio could claim if they ran. The current guy got elected on a bait ‘n’ switch reasonably similar. I’m only puzzled that he invokes Nader so much after the party establishment has spent 2 decades demonizing Nader – there are Democrats that still would burn a cross in my front yard if I said anything positive in public about Ralph Nader.
Even after this weekend’s monumental shitstorm at Robert Reich I’d back him over most of the mainstream Democratic Party.
NEW LAW: PEOPLE WITH BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS DON’T GET TO PUBLISH OP-EDS OR APPEAR ON TV. YES, I AM SHOUTING.