The nation must have been pretty naughty last year because all it’s getting from the Obama administration for Christmas is one lump of coal after another, be it a healthcare reform bill that is gives the insurance industry a barrel of pork or a thirty-thousand troop “surge” in Afghanistan or the ever popular bailing out of a corrupt and ineffectual banking system.
With every passing day the Obama administration morphs into an extension of the GWB administration with the only change being an increase in the level of articulation. Somehow bullshit is easier to take when it’s articulate. There’s nothing worse than a mumbling liar.
Now, according to David Michael Green, another similarity is beginning to emerge. Where Bush had to clear his every move with Cheney, Obama has to clear his every move with that master of corporate ass kissing, Rahm Emanuel. And Emanuel insists that Obama sing the Populist Rag in such a way that it doesn’t upset his corporate handlers.
The mantra that guides this administration is, “Promise everything; deliver nothing.”
Emanuel’s philosophy is that it’s okay to hollow out the country as long as those corporate contributions keep pouring into the party’s coffers.
Green says he can’t figure Obama out. Then he proceeds to answer his question by pointing out that Obama is a corporate hack. He always has been and always will be until his non-policies create such a level of outrage that he is either forced to change course or is kicked out of office. With Emanuel at the helm, the preference would be to sink the administration as long as the coffers were full. Gold is heavier than idealism.
While shopping for Christmas gifts for my grandchildren, I noticed a lot of children books that have been written about the Obama presidency. This is fitting since it is turning out to be a regular fairy tale for adults.
In “Little Red Riding Hood,” the woodsman saved Hood from the wolf. In this fairy tale, the woodsman is feeding both grandma and Hood to the beast.
Green sagely points out that by refusing to make an enemy of anyone, Obama is making an enemy of everyone, except the wolf.
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4 comments:
Fairy tales, like fables (and even biblical stories)are supposed to offer helpful (and even instructional)insight into the better possibilities we might aspire to in life. They should offer some glimmer of "hope".
This Obama administration (backstage-managed by an Emanuel who isn't)is turning out to be an allegory, depicting the ugly aspects of life that we fear most (the antipathy of hope) and wish we could "change".
Rather than evolving into something we had "hoped" for, it has devolved into a changling that converts matters of substance into nothingness. It is an alchemic axis of evil emptiness. Barack himself is become a faux wolf in sheepish drag.
Dante's "Inferno'was an allegory, too,and not a pretty depiction of an existence somewhat closer to daily experience. The smouldering heat from this administration's bonfire of the vanities (the WH garden, Nobel prize, cute kids, Air Force one, fluffed-up, elegaic rhetoric and all)is melting the polar ice caps of human resources, causing the the sea levels of discontent to rise, dangerously...and I don't just mean for his precious political career, either. Neither resultant condition is an eventuality that we had hoped for or foresaw as anticipated change. Obama has turned deception and ineffectuality into an art form.
All I know is that my vote is resulting in a big puddle of bilious vomitous.
Yay, me!
Surely there were comments like yours, Ivan's and tsisageya's after social security, medicare, child labor laws, the G.I. Bill and most other progressive legislation was passed. You forget that this is a long, treacherous battle with the forces of oligarchy, monarchy and elitism against the people. It is a battle fought inch by inch. Throwing shit as President Obama and his staff helps no one but those who would relegate most of the human race to the status of slaves or indentured servants, the republicans.
Fairy tales still depend upon the suspension of belief and the conviction that no matter what happens, they will live happily ever after.
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