Maybe, if I keep blogging about politics, I’ll eventually learn something about politics.
I don’t think Obama’s a bad person, whatever that even means. I don’t doubt that he wants to do good and believes that he can.
But in a way, that’s even more distressing. The current system imposing itself on America is such that someone with sincere intentions can end up with the kind of track record he has.
I supported Obama’s Presidential campaign, breathed a heavy sigh of relief when he won, and continue to find Republicans utterly repugnant by default. But I’m finding it harder to identify as being part of the Democrats’ “team”, even though they’re ostensibly on the side of reason and good these days.
Sometimes, I look at a funny and well-delivered speech given by the President, and wonder if we wouldn’t all have found such light-hearted self-deprecation to be frustratingly lackadaisical if it had come from Bush.
And sometimes, the standard liberal position needs a reality check.
[O]ne can still be a “liberal or a progressive with a broad sense of the common good” if you support a guy who blows up little children with cluster bombs, as Barack Obama has in Yemen. You can still be a liberal or progressive in good standing if you support a man who has killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Pakistani civilians with flying death robots. And you can still be a liberal if you back a guy who has shown not the slighest inclination to reform, much less do away with, a war on drugs that has led to 2.3 million Americans being placed in cages, the vast majority minorities.
That the president has doubled the number of troops in Afghanistan, ordered more drone strikes in Pakistan than his predecessor did in eight years, and launched another war in Libya without so much as getting a rubber stamp from Congress is of no concern to the good party-line liberal. The president, after all, is a Democrat.
And if you think someone like Ron Paul is just an extreme nutcase outsider, consider it in context.
The easy way to feel like a member of the Democratic team is to imagine what it would be like with Sarah Palin in the White House. I’ll give you thirty seconds… wait, I guess just two was enough?
OK, good.
“Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
I would love to have a more Progressive president, but for that to happen, we would have to have a more progressive electorate. Blaming Obama for not forcing the entire state of Texas to love gays, learn evolution, give up guns, and stop thinking of brown people as targets, is just silly. He can’t do it on his own. Progressives need to stop whining about Obama’s failure and start delivering some elections if they want change.