The worst President in the history of the US

Too Strong? Nah…

We now have two months until we know what happens in the mid-term elections. If Democrats, liberals, progressives, independents and those who voted for the first time ever in ’08 show up on November 2nd, Obama’s party will retain control of the Senate and the House. It’s that simple. If you don’t show up, then the Republicans are likely to gain one or both chambers of Congress.

Of course, I have to say Obama and the Democratic leadership certainly aren’t helping the cause. the health care and the economic “reforms” that have been passed are shams(Don’t start arguing, this article isn’t about those so-called reforms and I don’t feel like getting bogged down in that minutia right now.) The end of combat operations in Iraq is a bright spot, well more like a lighter gray spot, but if you dig beneath the surface you discover that there are still 50,000 troops in Iraq purportedly there to “support” Iraqi armed forces with another 4,500 special forces there for “anti-terrorism” purposes. 4,500 highly trained killers is a pretty strong force especially when you consider that there are another 75,000+ mostly ex-special forces personnel working for much more money as private contractors also in Iraq. Am I missing something? I thought “combat operations in Iraq ended” back in 2003. Whatever, I’m just glad no one came out wearing a codpiece this time.  The occupation still continues.

Noam Chomsky said that Obama is turning out to be either the third term of Bill Clinton or the third term of George W. Bush depending on your lever of optimism vs. pessimism. As a progressive, it does seem that Obama and the Democratic leadership are working for the exact same people BushCo was. The “clients” are definitely not liberals or progressives, as Rahm Emanuel and now Robert Gibbs have made abundantly clear. Don’t mind me though, I guess I’m just a member of the “professional left”, which in my case means that I’m freelance(code for unemployed with no unemployment insurance benefits despite paying double the FICA taxes).

Despite Obama’s and the leadership’s perceived weakness and their overt animosity toward progressives, my guess is that we’ll retain the House and probably the Senate by thin margins. Nate Silver’s, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT seems to agree. However, the degree to which that matters is up for debate. When we won huge margins after 2006 and after 2008 we did very little with them when compared to what should have been done. If fact, it seemed like we behaved as if we were still in the minority. After 2006, when we should have ended the war in Iraq which was the reason the electorate threw out the Republican majority, the Democratic leadership thought it would be smarter to triangulate and continue the atrocity in hopes of more political gains in the form of the Presidency in 2008. Thanks to the Obama campaign which actually won one of advertising’s most prestigious awards for Marketer of the Year we won even larger margins in Congress and the Presidency. The Obama campaign, or the iObama campaign as I call it because the usual winner of that advertising award tends to be Apple, was a thing of beauty that left just enough unsaid to make liberals and progressives think we would finally see a return to some form of sanity on policy issues ranging from trade and regulating the economy to health care to the end of two wars. Most serious progressives I know were slightly suspicious but we still held out HOPE for something like an FDR-style CHANGE. Clearly, the thinking went, that level of CHANGE was warranted. The feeling among young and old, first-time voters after 8 long years of the dumbest shit anyone had ever seen in the form of BushCo was near euphoria. Euphoria is fantastic when you’re selling iPads, but it’s awfully difficult to maintain. Now the euphoria among the first timers has definitely leached away. Virtually none of those first time ’08 voters showed up during the primary in June and a whole lot of liberals, progressives and Democrats failed to show up as well. If that trend continues this November, get ready for the new Republican majority with the added new fun feature – Tea Party overdrive!

Anyway, the real question is are Obama and the Democrats better than the the alternative of McCain and Palin? Probably. Bush and the Republicans very nearly destroyed this country. In fact, I’m not sure the jury is in on that yet. Of course, he started out after 40 years of disastrous free market idolatry had hollowed out our economy and eliminated our manufacturing base, off-shored most of our decent jobs and created the largest trade deficit since the end of the Ottoman Empire. Rampant laissez faire humbuggery has allowed a casino capitalism to develop that is actually worse then what existed before the Great Depression. All of this was done on a bipartisan basis with many of the worst changes coming under a Democratic President, Bill Clinton. Meanwhile, the number of foreclosures now is worse both in terms of real numbers and per capita then they were during the Great Depression. Unemployment, if measured using U6 numbers is approaching Great Depression levels, especially if one considers that many jobs considered full time now are for low wages. Wages, by the way, that have not effectively gone up since 1973.

Obama and the leadership seem unwilling to acknowledge these facts. There are policy changes that can be undertaken to fix most if not all of this mess. Of course, those are progressive policy changes which the White House seems to be allergic to. Instead of lifting the cap on Social Security, re-instating the wall between commercial banks and investment banks, enacting a Securities Turnover Excise Tax(STET) to curb speculation and eliminating tax loop holes for corporations we are actually left wondering(incredibly) if Bush’s misbegotten tax cuts on the richest people in the country will be allowed to expire!  With more then 40 million people on food stamps and 50+ million on medicaid we are being told that weak, 1% GDP quarterly growth numbers means that the economy is recovering from this recession! It’s useful to realize that these anemic “growth” numbers over the last couple of quarters can easily be attributed to the actions of just the 6 large investment banks on Wall St who are literally gambling with 0% interest money from the Fed. Worse, this incredibly weak growth in GDP can actually be attributed to the BP oil spill and the added expenditure to pretend to clean that up!

So that’s where we stand before this mid-term election. An economy still in shambles(just look at today’s unemployment numbers) Once again we’re being told that we have to turn out to vote and that we must vote for the Democrats or else the Republicans will ruin everything. Assuming that there is indeed something left to ruin, I will turn out to vote like I have for the last 23 years. If the Democrats lose the House and/or the Senate, Obama’s chances for a 2nd term drop substantially. While I am disappointed in Obama and his reliance on hacks and Clinton retreads such as Emanuel, Geithner, Summers et al., I’m not ready to hand the country back to the likes of Sara Palin. Obama has not been all I had HOPEd for(yet?), but I know where the real blame lies. There are a couple of propositions that need attention(Yes on 19 and NO on 23) and voting against Elton Gallegly for Tim Allison for US House of Representatives of CA-24 will be a great pleasure. I hope you will turn out to vote too.

If you can think of no other reason to turn out in November, then simply show up to

LEGALIZE IT!