Shame on anyone who thinks this post is about Obama. It's about the country, the direction we're going and whether it's too late to make the near impossible decisions that need to be made to prevent a complete collapse.
The post is about who, if anyone, has got the balls to do what's right for the country versus what's right for the candidate or party. Someone, some party, has got to step up and act like adults while being surrounded by those acting like children.
Obama is not that person. He had his chance and instead chose the selfish path. The path of milk and honey for everyone funded by vapor. He could have cut up the credit cards and had us hunker down and watch every penny. Instead, he went on a massive spending spree with no concern for the future. Some think it was planned.
If not for the change in control of the House, he'd have changed nothing. Now, he's going to be forced to. Will he seize the opportunity for his legacy, for history, to laud him as the President that made those hard choices, who rallied the people behind him to bring us back from the precipice? He has neither the ability nor the interest in doing so. He'll be whining for the next two years. Like a child, he'll be blaming everyone else. He's done it for the first two, I can think of no reason he'll change.
Barack Hussein Obama is no leader, he's just another in a string of incompetents who rose to the highest position in the land for reasons historians will ponder for centuries.
Support him at your own peril. In doing so, you will help seal our fate.
There's a certain amount of truth in what you say, that we have serious fiscal issues and that we aren't addressing them enough.
You make some big errors in not recognizing the Republicans are far worse for the country; not recognizing the qualities of the progressives; in underestimating Obama.
Some of Clinton's balanced budgets was based on abberations, like the tech bubble, but he was still a lot better than the Republicans the last 12 years who skyrocketed deficits to win elections and reward the rich while harming the nation and thenext generation of average tazxpayer, beginning a massive transfer of wealth to the most rich - and than the Republican after him. That's 'socialist' Clinton, Democrat Clinton, better than 'conservative' leaders.
And it wasn't 'the Republican Congress' or 'gridlock', he cut the deficit the same each year his first two years with a Democratic House and Senate.
Obama IMO will retun to fiscal conservatism as fast as any major candidate, faster than most. He is keeping the economy from disaster, or trying to and has so far.
We can't afford the corrupt right-wing agenda, money for the wealthy, tax cuts for the wealthy, bankrupting the country and breaking democracy by fiscal crisis.
'Pass entitlements now, you sleazy masses - you are out of funds'. That's the old radical anti-public pro-rich Grover Norquist 'starve the beast' plan.
Is the problem that Obama isn't doing enough - or that the rich are so politically strong that only someone who does things for them is viable?
That things like calling for the end of their extra tax cuts is the pro-public policy, but the propaganda steers voters to the Republicans who are the servants of the rich?
Your post has little constructive on these issues, implicitly endorsing the party of the rich and the continuation of the bankrupting policies, even as you demand radical cuts.
Until you get the rich curtailed in our elections, how are you going to do that?
Which political faction is least beholden to the rich and most to the public: Republicans, corporate Democrats, or progressive Democrats? The latter, but don't see you for them.
The propaganda - Republicans are for you the little guy against limousine liberals - seems to have done well on your opinion.
You accuse Obama of being childish, but use naive and ineffective rhetoric yourself - 'someone has to step up and do these things', to 'have the balls'.
You call serving the agenda of the rich 'incompetence' which greatly misrepresents the problem. Look at how the most rich are doing, and they're competent - for the rich. Theft without 'revolution'. Presidents have their hands tied even if they want to do something else, their fates tied to the economy that Wall Street can affect. Clinton was informed in no uncertain terms at the beginning of his presidency that his options were limited this way, and he understood and compromised. He got some good done - and some bad.
No one can 'step up and do these things' in a system rigged for the rich. Bernie Sanders would - is he a viable presedential candidate? You may as well tell the KKK it's time for someone to step up and be a ciivil rights champion. But you won't support the people who are the best for fighting the corruption, the progressives.
Which means you will just rant as Rome burns, which is just what 'they' want you to do as they pillage the country and reverse the middle class liberal advances since FDR.
Ever notice how during all this 'bad fiscal policy' since Reagan, the higher the income and wealth, they better they do, down to the top 20% getting all the economic growth and the bottom 80% none, and the top 1% getting a lot more than the rest of the top 20%, and the top 0.01% getting a lot more than the rest of the top 1%, and the top 500 getting a lot more than the rest of the top 0.01%? Think that's a coincidence?
Go look at the radical billionares who fund the country's leading 'think tanks', which are really propaganda machines for selling the public on a radical right-wing ideology.
Are the likes of Coors, Scaife, Olin the sort who should determine the nation's policies? Who lead the nation to the point 20 of the 20 top viable Republican presidential canidates - putting Ron Paul aside who is a quirky figure and not the answer to these issues - are all servants of the radical pro-rich agenda, as well as too many of the Democrats? Where former Wal-Mart board member Hillary, or top private donor Goldman Sachs Obama, are the 'left'?
You are not helping get 'change' by not supporting the progressives who are the political group strongest for the public against these rich interests.
They're not anti-rich, they're anti-radical moving the nation to plutocracy, to bankruptcy that bankrupts everyone but the top, returning the nation to their serfs.
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