From across the great divide, in the distance I saw a light

rocketsjudoka · Oct 31, 2010

FranchiseBlade said:

He didn't? Then why are all the ideas in Obama's health care legislation Republican ones? Why did he call them in repeatedly and ask them for input, and the Democrats started using all the Republican ideas?

Why did Obama take the Republican ideas of tax breaks for research and development and new hiring for small businesses and extend them even farther than Republicans had previously advocated?

It may not look like he was working with Republicans in those policies because once Obama got on board with the Republican ideas the Republicans decided they were against it, but the record is clear they were all initially Republican ideas.
Click to expand...

And to follow that many of those who strongly supported Obama complained that he was giving up to much to the Republicans. A very simple search of comments here even on CF.net will show that.

Ironically if Obama had actually not wanted to work with the Republicans he probably would be in better political shape.

giddyup · Nov 1, 2010

pgabriel said:

giddyup said:

what does buckley and will have to do with the tea party? if you can answer that I would greatly appreciate.

yes, some nutty tea partier, not a sweeping generalization like you accused me of

and lastly, I said tarp was the start, not racism, hell obama wasn't even president or even elected yet.
Click to expand...

You hold up Will and Buckley as true conservative icons. Then you dissociate them from the Tea Party entirely. Isn't the Tea Party in some ways a reaction to the perceived failure of "modern" conservatives post-Reagan?

"Some nutty teapartier" comes across as an all-encompassing derision of teapartiers in the way that "some crazy loon" re-emphasizes the craziness of a loon which is already crazy. Generally, one doesn't see you using the term "teapartier" in any kind of neutral much less flattering way... which seems to be what you are claiming to have done.

I didn't read the whole thread because I got stopped by your first two posts. Maybe you finally did say something fair or even nice....
Click to expand...

basso · Nov 1, 2010

da Whopper said:

He disparaged about half the country with the bitter clinger remark.

Rev. Wright's comment speaks for itself.

Ditto for Michelle Obama.

In sum, they are part of an elite that looks down on most of America. To them, the people outside their liberal cocoon are "bitter clingers". It's the "What's Wrong with Kansas?" attitude. I have no doubt that in Obama's mind he thinks we are not worthy to have him as a leader
Click to expand...

indeed.

basso · Nov 1, 2010

ROXTXIA said:

I don't idolize Obama, but basically, he became President and tried to extend an olive branch to the other side
Click to expand...

when?

ROXTXIA said:

But at least we have basso to post a new thread, right? Other than starting new worthless threads and getting caught in mid-jerking off by his Gramma ("I thought I told you to go to bed----WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?!?")...
Click to expand...

excuse me?

pgabriel · Nov 1, 2010

bigtexxx said:

Looks like I struck a nerve with you. Many people did vote for him for that reason alone.
Click to expand...

no its just hilarious when people who claim other alway play the race card play it themselves. congrats

saintcougar · Nov 6, 2010

DonnyMost said:

I think Saintcougar (god I hope he's not affiliated with UH) has only made 8-9 actual posts, he's just fleshed out his post count by replying to the same thing (usually himself) 10-12 times per thread. Dude is either schizo or needs to donate to the tipjar so he can go back and edit his poop smears, thus sparing us all from getting buried under an avalanche of stupidity.
Click to expand...

Don, you are one of the most liberal P'sOS on here, and that's ok, I'm not too worried about it. First and foremost, I love my alma mater, UH was not your typical "college" experience but I had a good time and learned some ****, which is what you are supposed to do in college. Obviously, you were taken aback by the liberal vitriol that is readily available on any college campus like crack of Scott St. That's all fine and dandy, but to call me "boring" is quite offensive. I have called for the shooting of liberals in the head, I talked **** about the muslim religion, I have talked **** about virtually every dumbass ethnic community organization, and lastly I have advocated that we pledge ourselves to this great nation. So I don't I'm schizo, b/c I've pretty much bashed only liberal bs, and my "poop" smears are left to the liberals who disagree with me b/c I am an ignorant self centered one sided POS.

saintcougar · Nov 6, 2010

saintcougar said:

Don, you are one of the most liberal P'sOS on here, and that's ok, I'm not too worried about it. First and foremost, I love my alma mater, UH was not your typical "college" experience but I had a good time and learned some ****, which is what you are supposed to do in college. Obviously, you were taken aback by the liberal vitriol that is readily available on any college campus like crack of Scott St. That's all fine and dandy, but to call me "boring" is quite offensive. I have called for the shooting of liberals in the head, I talked **** about the muslim religion, I have talked **** about virtually every dumbass ethnic community organization, and lastly I have advocated that we pledge ourselves to this great nation. So I don't I'm schizo, b/c I've pretty much bashed only liberal bs, and my "poop" smears are left to the liberals who disagree with me b/c I am an ignorant self centered one sided POS.
Click to expand...

Wait, I almost forgot, I advocated for the deportation and crackdown of my own illegal immigrant mexican and other hispanic peeps. Come on, that's had Uncle Tomas written all over it.

thadeus · Nov 6, 2010

saintcougar said:

Wait, I almost forgot, I advocated for the deportation and crackdown of my own illegal immigrant mexican and other hispanic peeps. Come on, that's had Uncle Tomas written all over it.
Click to expand...

Donate.

SuperBeeKay · Nov 6, 2010

basso said:

but Barack was not The Maker.

One of the syntheses i've read on the great disconnect between Obama the candidate and the reality of his presidency, and why, to so many, he seems so profoundly un-American, at least as a president.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100...5578363243019000.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

--
By SHELBY STEELE

Whether or not the Republicans win big next week, it is already clear that the "transformative" aspirations of the Obama presidency—the special promise of this first black president to "change" us into a better society—are much less likely to materialize. There will be enough Republican gains to make the "no" in the "party of no" even more formidable, if not definitive.

But apart from this politics of numbers, there is also now a deepening disenchantment with Barack Obama himself. (He has a meager 37% approval rating by the latest Harris poll.) His embarrassed supporters console themselves that their intentions were good; their vote helped make history. But for Mr. Obama himself there is no road back to the charisma and political capital he enjoyed on his inauguration day.

How is it that Barack Obama could step into the presidency with an air of inevitability and then, in less than two years, find himself unwelcome at the campaign rallies of many of his fellow Democrats?

The first answer is well-known: His policymaking has been grandiose, thoughtless and bullying. His health-care bill was ambitious to the point of destructiveness and, finally, so chaotic that today no citizen knows where they stand in relation to it. His financial-reform bill seems little more than a short-sighted scapegoating of Wall Street. In foreign policy he has failed to articulate a role for America in the world. We don't know why we do what we do in foreign affairs. George W. Bush at least made a valiant stab at an American rationale—democratization—but with Mr. Obama there is nothing.

All this would be enough to explain the disillusionment with this president—and with the Democratic Party that he leads. But there is also a deeper disjunction. There is an "otherness" about Mr. Obama, the sense that he is somehow not truly American. "Birthers" doubt that he was born on American soil. Others believe that he is secretly a Muslim, or in quiet simpatico with his old friends, Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, now icons of American radicalism.

But Barack Obama is not an "other" so much as he is a child of the 1960s. His coming of age paralleled exactly the unfolding of a new "counterculture" American identity. And this new American identity—and the post-1960s liberalism it spawned—is grounded in a remarkable irony: bad faith in America as virtue itself, bad faith in the classic American identity of constitutional freedom and capitalism as the way to a better America. So Mr. Obama is very definitely an American, and he has a broad American constituency. He is simply the first president we have seen grounded in this counterculture American identity. When he bows to foreign leaders, he is not displaying "otherness" but the counterculture Americanism of honorable self-effacement in which America acknowledges its own capacity for evil as prelude to engagement.

Bad faith in America became virtuous in the '60s when America finally acknowledged so many of its flagrant hypocrisies: the segregation of blacks, the suppression of women, the exploitation of other minorities, the "imperialism" of the Vietnam War, the indifference to the environment, the hypocrisy of puritanical sexual mores and so on. The compounding of all these hypocrisies added up to the crowning idea of the '60s: that America was characterologically evil. Thus the only way back to decency and moral authority was through bad faith in America and its institutions, through the presumption that evil was America's natural default position.

Among today's liberal elite, bad faith in America is a sophistication, a kind of hipness. More importantly, it is the perfect formula for political and governmental power. It rationalizes power in the name of intervening against evil—I will use the government to intervene against the evil tendencies of American life (economic inequality, structural racism and sexism, corporate greed, neglect of the environment and so on), so I need your vote.

"Hope and Change" positioned Mr. Obama as a conduit between an old America worn down by its evil inclinations and a new America redeemed of those inclinations. There was no vision of the future in "Hope and Change." It is an expression of bad faith in America, but its great ingenuity was to turn that bad faith into political motivation, into votes.

But there is a limit to bad faith as power, and Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party may have now reached that limit. The great weakness of bad faith is that it disallows American exceptionalism as a rationale for power. It puts Mr. Obama and the Democrats in the position of forever redeeming a fallen nation, rather than leading a great nation. They bet on America's characterological evil and not on her sense of fairness, generosity or ingenuity.

When bad faith is your framework (Michelle Obama never being proud of her country until it supported her husband), then you become more a national scold than a real leader. You lead out of a feeling that your opposition is really only the latest incarnation of that old characterological evil that you always knew was there. Thus the tea party—despite all the evidence to the contrary—is seen as racist and bigoted.

But isn't the tea party, on some level, a reaction to a president who seems not to fully trust the fundamental decency of the American people? Doesn't the tea party fill a void left open by Mr. Obama's ethos of bad faith? Aren't tea partiers, and their many fellow travelers, simply saying that American exceptionalism isn't racism? And if the mainstream media see tea partiers as bumpkins and racists, isn't this just more bad faith—characterizing people as ignorant or evil so as to dismiss them?

Our great presidents have been stewards, men who broadly identified with the whole of America. Stewardship meant responsibility even for those segments of America where one might be reviled. Surely Mr. Obama would claim such stewardship. But he has functioned more as a redeemer than a steward, a leader who sees a badness in us from which we must be redeemed. Many Americans are afraid of this because a mandate as grandiose as redemption justifies a vast expansion of government. A redeemer can't just tweak and guide a faltering economy; he will need a trillion- dollar stimulus package. He can't take on health care a step at a time; he must do it all at once, finally mandating that every citizen buy in.

Next week's election is, among other things, a referendum on the idea of president-as- redeemer. We have a president so determined to transform and redeem us from what we are that, by his own words, he is willing to risk being a one-term president. People now wonder if Barack Obama can pivot back to the center like Bill Clinton did after his set-back in '94. But Mr. Clinton was already a steward, a policy wonk, a man of the center. Mr. Obama has to change archetypes.

Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Click to expand...

GladiatoRowdy · Nov 7, 2010

rocketsjudoka said:

Ironically if Obama had actually not wanted to work with the Republicans he probably would be in better political shape.
Click to expand...

No kidding. What I wouldn't give to be able to show the last two years to Obama on his inauguration day. Maybe we would have a single payer healthcare system and the restoration of Glass Steagal.

rocketsjudoka · Nov 7, 2010

GladiatoRowdy said:

No kidding. What I wouldn't give to be able to show the last two years to Obama on his inauguration day. Maybe we would have a single payer healthcare system and the restoration of Glass Steagal.
Click to expand...

I doubt we have single payer but the health care debate wouldn't have dragged on so long.

Forums

From across the great divide, in the distance I saw a light

rocketsjudoka Member

giddyup Member

basso Member
Supporting Member

basso Member
Supporting Member

pgabriel Educated Negro

saintcougar Member

saintcougar Member

thadeus Member

SuperBeeKay Member

GladiatoRowdy Member

rocketsjudoka Member

Share This Page

About ClutchFans

Rockets Content

Support ClutchFans!

From across the great divide, in the distance I saw a light

rocketsjudoka Member

giddyup Member

basso Member Supporting Member

basso Member Supporting Member

pgabriel Educated Negro

saintcougar Member

saintcougar Member

thadeus Member

SuperBeeKay Member

GladiatoRowdy Member

rocketsjudoka Member

Share This Page

basso Member
Supporting Member

basso Member
Supporting Member