(no subject)

[channonyarrow]

I feel compelled to make this post a good 'un because I have new people on my flist who have evidently friended me because apiphile says I'm even angrier than she is. Also, I haven't said much about politics in a LONG while (here's how long: my real political posts are on my website, which I haven't updated in donkeys. Also, they're all bitching about GW.). So politics + anger should make for some fun times.

I am blatantly cribbing some of this from a conversation I had with graeae over the weekend, but since I have the memory span of a goldfish, it's possible that I will forget things. But some of the ideas come from that convo.

I was reading spam today, as one does, when one is unemployed and single and the apartment is already mostly clean and one's issues with contacting people are making getting a new job a bitch. I've had a few emails from some group called MomsRising.org; imagine my confusion when I realised that this was, actually, a forward from my semi-pro email account. Evidently, despite not being a mother, and not giving one tiny shit that 1.2 million children have now lost their health care, I signed up for this at some point. I guess.

The premise of the email is one I've seen several times, and this is where I start to lose my shit. Tell Congress to move quickly to make this promise a reality on Day One of the Obama Presidency by a quick and fully-funded reauthorization of SCHIP.

I've seen this elsewhere on the internet. Right now, Obama is supposed to save children, Gaza, and *insert your pet cause here* by, at the latest, Day 100 of his presidency. I have actually seen someone call Obama's presidency "failed" because he's not doing whatever the fuck they wanted him to do - I don't think that was in the context of Gaza, but it might have been. Or it might have been because, yanno, he wants Reverend Wright to do his thing at the Inauguration.

This is insane.

1) Obama is the President-elect. Not the president. As such, he cannot do these things prior to taking office. Even though, as Barney Frank said recently, saying that we have only one president at a time is overstating the case on how many presidents we have right now, he cannot do anything other than what a senator may do right now.

2) There are other problems in line before yours. The economy leaps to mind. The environment needs to get started on - I say this, by the way, from Seattle, where we are completely cut off from the rest of the United States: due to heavy snowfall and avalanche danger, both US 2 and I-90 across the mountains are closed, and I-5 has at least three feet of water over the roadway south of Chehalis; it's expected to hit ten feet, even with pumping and a manmade levee breach, before it crests. Getting some of the more pernicious acts of our previous "president" out of the way leaps to mind, as well - as graeae pointed out, Bush has made it, currently, so that the documents relevant to his presidency remain secret, not only in his lifetime but may be held as secret by his heirs. Emperor Bush indeed.

3) Just because, as good liberals, we've endured eight years of the worst presidency America has had, with empire-building, a failed war, massive executive power increase and the sort of vice-presidential powers that not even Henry Kissinger dreamed of, that does not mean that it's now OUR turn and we get to fucking have ponies on the day that Obama takes office. For Chrissake, let the man figure out how to turn the phones on.

Now. Just to clarify one point: I take Gaza very seriously. I am pro-Palestine, all the way, and I can fucking back that opinion up; I did my Master's on the subject. I take health care (for ALL people) very fucking seriously indeed; as the child of a nurse, it would be hard not to. As someone who's lived for an extended period in England, it would be impossible not to. As someone who stands for everything that Reverend Wright opposes, I don't like his selection, but I'm not gonna kill anyone over it. So now you know my biases.

I drank the Obama Kool-Aid, and I drank it early and often. I was never a supporter of Clinton; while I would not have cried tears of blood at voting for her, I felt - and still feel - that Obama is a uniter, and Clinton is a policy wonk. We don't need a policy wonk right now. We need someone who can pull the two sides of this country back together and make ALL of us realise that whatever else we are, we are all Americans, and that we don't have to annex part of the county to get along. I also think that Obama is a very, very smart man who likes more than a little bit of Machiavelli in his politics; Clinton is a deal-maker who'll bargain to get what she wants, but Obama will convince you, and will make the gestures needed to get his point across: he is the president for ALL of America, not just the evangelicals (as Bush was not) or for the tree-huggers, or for the minorities, or for whatever sub-group you'd like to ascribe to him.

And now I'm watching his approval rating - 75% - with a lot of trepidation. Not because I think that Obama will do something wrong with that, but because he could. That's higher than Bush came into office with; that's higher than Bush had at any point in his presidency other than during 9/11, when he polled 90% (and let's be honest: he didn't look presidential then; it could have been Bozo the Clown in office and he would've scored that high.). He tapped 75% again with the declaration of the war, and it's been downhill ever since for ol' Bush.

Source.

Obama could use that approval rating to do anything. Anything at all. Keep the changes in executive power over the last presidency? You can have them! Refuse to reverse some of the policy decisions made by the Bush administration, such as family planning overseas? Go for it!* Want to nuke Pakistan? Knock yourself out!

I believe - because of the Kool-Aid - that Obama will do the right things with that rating, things that I approve of and can get behind. I also think that this addresses why he selected Wright for the Inauguration - if he'd not reached out to the conservatives who believe that his election mean that they're gonna get witch-hunted for not being pagan queers, he'd get nowhere. Whether liberals like it or not, there are fundamentalist conservatives in this country. And they're not going away.

But do you really think that Obama can fix everything on the first day? He's just gonna sign a bunch of legislation and that's it, we can all have a beer for the next four years? No. We did not get into these problems overnight. We're not getting out of them overnight, either. And the economy is the 800lb gorilla.

This is why all these calls for Obama to fix this on the first day/first 100 days drive me bananas. They don't recognise a basic fact. The man may be able to walk on water, without even having Air Jesus shoes, but he can't do everything. And - quite frankly - he would be fucking insane to try. Not merely because it can't be done but because he needs to do two things first: fix the economy, and unite the country.

There is no possibility that we could have a president left-wing enough for me. I am so far left I verge on communism, frankly. Perhaps that gives me some of the necessary distance here, but this pet cause business drives me nuts because it doesn't recognise reality. You are not the most special snowflake in the room. And expecting Obama to fix, in the first three months of his administration, all the things that Bush fucked up is unrealistic.

Anyway, if you didn't like it, why did you let Bush get away with it?

This is from the Declaration of Independence. Read it very fucking closely.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

The consent of the governed. It is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government.

This means that we have the right to overthrow the government if we don't like it. If it fails to provide for our unalienable rights - and certainly, I would argue that the Constitution and Bill of Rights, both of which have been thoroughly skullfucked in the last few years, posit an entire constellation of unalienable rights - then we have the right, even the obligation, to overthrow the government and try something new.

The 33% approval rating that Bush polled in May of 2006 would argue that two thirds of the American people agree that Bush was a shitty president.

Why was there no revolution?

Why did no one choose to take power back, take it away from the hands of the madmen we've allowed to run the country (into the ground) for the last four years?

I didn't, I know that. No one else did, either, though. No one figured out that we had the power, and we had the right and organised around that. Instead, we sent petitions and marched in demonstrations and protested quietly and bore witness - in a media state that did its damnedest to hide the numbers of those protesting, marching, angry. Hell, that tried to hide that such things - such dissent - was occurring.

There is a reason that we have the right to bear arms, by the way. I would argue that Bush, Cheney, et al are not necessary to the security of the state. They seem to be doing too good a job, even now, fucking us all over.

And there's the answer. Obama can't fix everything in the first day or first hundred days, or even first term, because none of us said, in any effective way, that enough was enough. None of us demanded loudly enough that our government be accountable to us again. None of us exercised our rights - so the mess got worse.

The mess, in fact, became almost im-fucking-possible to see through.

And now, armed only with the joy of some portion of the country at the fact that we have gone against type and elected a smart, competent man as president, Obama is supposed to fix this? Right now?

Are people actually out of their minds?

Evidently so.

Do not come to me with a demand for what Obama "should" do on the first day in office. Do not outline for me a plan of what you think Obama should do in his first hundred days. Do not tell me that everything will be better now.

Let's borrow a business maxim. You can do it fast, cheap, or well, and you have to pick two out of three. My corollary is that generally, fast and cheap go together. Well is the redheaded step child in this.

I'd rather he did it well. I'd rather that he, and his team, and Congress, thought about things before rushing right into the briar patch. I'd rather that you and I and everyone have to deal with the consequences of our own fucking inaction for a while longer.

Because maybe that will remind us next time: we are not obligated to sit still for a president like Bush.


* I have to note here, I don't necessarily think Bush did a bad thing with that, frankly. I am pro-choice - but I also live in a society where the value of a fetus is not, generally speaking, determined by whether or not it's male or female. In countries where that is the context, the statement of "Pro-choice means no choice" is accurate. Otherwise, female babies are aborted in vastly disproportionate numbers. Just something to think about, there.

Comments

[alasandalack.livejournal.com]

thaaaaank yooooou

i mean... really... good god. i have never been so glad not to be someone else, than i am glad not to be Barack Obama right now. it doesn't matter how well he does- his opponents will tear him down for (and you know they're a noisy minority), and his supporters will unwittingly help them by bitching right along. yes, dissent is good; dissent is necessary. but every time i see a op-ed column on HuffPost about how he should never have implemented this policy or that... for chrissake, he hasn't implemented anything yet.

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

I get that our long national nightmare is over and that people have the expectation of change - and he has the obligation of providing it - but jesus, can he actually get to office before everyone starts this bullshit?

Apparently not.

[faithinthejudas.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say you've drunk the Obama Kool-Aid, though of course you are free to. When I mention people drinking the Kool-Aid I tend to mean the very people you're talking about.

Now I supported Edwards to start with, much to the disappointment of those people I know who think they're better liberals than I am (IE: They wanted a woman or a black man) because I felt he was actually experienced enough and skilled enough to pull things together and provide at least enough of a patch to get things moving (remember this was last year, before a lot of things happened and went completely to shit). In other words I felt he could help some things, perhaps give Hillary more experience as a VP and not really make anything any worse.

Then when he fell out I supported Clinton if only because I wasn't sure I trusted Obama's experience and the fact that a huge part of his following seemed to be a cult of personality made me nervous. I knew Clinton could be decisive but when I came to it she was a bulldog over most of the things I wanted her to be a bulldog over, and around these time Rev. Wright was coming out and that just made me a little wary.

When she dropped out I instantly threw my support behind Obama, not because I really like him that much but just because I agreed with him more than McCain and then, when Palin arrived, I became a far more avid supporter. Frankly it made me start looking for things about him I could argue for, as opposed to just again McCain. And honestly I found some and by election day was actually pro-Obama and not just anti-McCain/Palin. He sealed me when he chose Biden because, frankly, I like a little bit of the shifty eyed bastard looking out for my vote. You need someone with a little experience in political back-stabbing and sleazing.

In other words: Obama can be a decent individual holding his hope for change skyward while Biden cuts people's tendons while they aren't looking. It isn't nice, really, but I think it's a little necessary in our political machine.

Anyway. Obama's cult of personality, the crazies who support everything he says and think he is Jesus come again and everything is achievable through him...those are the people I call Kool-Aid drinkers. People who are not and never were willing to admit he has human faults, like being young or having poor judgment in, say, religious officials.

Anyway, I also wanted to note your Sourcing is really the reason I read your political rants when they pop up. It makes me happy when people aren't just pulling things out of their ass.

Or, at least, it makes me not want to kill them with razor blades and lemon juice.

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

In other words: Obama can be a decent individual holding his hope for change skyward while Biden cuts people's tendons while they aren't looking. It isn't nice, really, but I think it's a little necessary in our political machine.

I think this exact statement also explains Rahm Emanuel. And I agree - I think that while Obama holds the uniting part of his job description, he's surrounding himself with people who can get shit done. That is actually one of the things people seem to want to ignore, too, which surprises me - not the fact that someone was named, but that they were named to meet very specific qualities: experience, ruthlessness, and a sense of how politics works leap to mind. I also think it's a benefit that he's drawing from experienced politicians; he's aware that he lacks experience so he's surrounding himself with people who do, and I applaud that, since I think he has the strength of thought and personality to lead them, but they have the experience and skill to give him real opinions and options.

I see your point about the crazies, though what's actually interesting is that I'm fighting my reflexive urge to argue that they're not crazy because they agree with my political ideology (so far as America ever will, at any rate) but you're right: there are going to be things that Obama does that no one likes, and assuming that he makes no mistakes is not smart, nor a good way to go into the term. Nor is it a good idea to assume that just because he's done something you don't like he's completely fucked up and the next four years will just be fail.

The sourcing - I need to do more of it; I was trained in the journalistic tradition, even though I mostly just open my mouth and let words fall out of it. *g*

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

I believe - because of the Kool-Aid - that Obama will do the right things with that rating, things that I approve of and can get behind. I also think that this addresses why he selected Wright for the Inauguration - if he'd not reached out to the conservatives who believe that his election mean that they're gonna get witch-hunted for not being pagan queers, he'd get nowhere

Well thank you. All I've seen from anyone on that subject is wrath and disappointment, and it's a bit odd considering that they were the ones cheering most loudly about what a clever sod the man is.

Poor fucker does seem to have won himself the shittiest high-profile job in the country right now, too. :|

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

I just can't understand it. I mean, I get that Wright is a reprehensible person, but...dude, the conservatives aren't gone just because Obama won. Frankly, I think the gesture is a good one, whatever I think of Wright, and I don't care who does what at the Inauguration so long as the Secret Service is on the job.

I would agree. It's not a job I would want, not even with a friendly Congress and a public mandate to fix shit.