It's not just nonsense, it's egregious nonsense which has no connection to reality.
Since when are these issues connected? Where have you seen anyone on the left saying 'Aw hell I just watched a cop beat someone up - but in the the light of our new constitution and the strength of corporate personhood, I'll write an angry diary on dKos instead.'
I mean - what on earth are you talking about here?
and the response was -- Starting with granting total impunity to the telcos that collaborated with Bush the Lesser's criminal eavesdropping activities...
Oh, and what happened to closing Gitmo? -----
My interpretation is that the argument is that the civil rights enforcement actions of the justice department are to be considered unimportant.
By refusing to "look back", as Obama likes to call it, he has tacitly approved of some of the most egregious abuses committed by his predecessor. Absent even token prosecutions for disdainful abuses of wiretap laws by government agencies and Bush Administration officials and absent vigorous investigation and prosecution of fraud on Wall Street and the condonment and involvement, if not orchestration of this fraud by the Federal Reserve, why should anyone not expect this behavior to resume and then exceed what was done under Bush when we get the next government elected upon a "national security" platform--probably in three years. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
Why indeed? It took 3 years after the prosecutions of Nixon's henchmen for Ronald Reagan to put many of them and their protegees back in business. If you relinquish power, precedents make no difference.
Why? Because they were not prosecuted hard enough, or high enough.
The precedent that was set (rather, reinforced) in the Nixon case is that current or former cabinet members will never see the inside of a prison cell.
And yes, precedents do matter.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
What the other half might have though in that event is, of course, speculation.
http://www.queerty.com/shock-obamas-doj-jumps-into-effeminate-teen-boys-school-bullying-case-2010011 8/ http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-09-02/civil-wrongs/?cid=hp:beastoriginalsR2
http://www.conservativenc.com/index.php/conservativenc-voices/Charlotte-Federalist-Society-Has-Obama -Politicized-the-DOJ-Civil-Rights-Division.html (HA HA )
http://www.acslaw.org/node/15066
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/3/11/173258/057/509/707341
And just read this back over the last few months
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/Month/index.jsp
I'm not seeing any game plan for how supporting Obama and the rest of the blue dogs will do any good. I can see a game plan where primarying the lot of them will do some good.
Now, primarying people carries a certain inherent risk, as does all forms of factionalism. So if you can point me to an actual game plan that doesn't involve factionalism, I'd be happy. I like low-risk operations as much as the next guy.
But "wait and hope" is not a plan, just as "I'm not Bush" is not a programme.
I'm for primary challenges for blue dogs. How one gets to that by calling Obama a fuckup is the part that eludes me.
Obama is a blue dog?
Geithner, Clinton, Summers.
Prosecution rests.
This is not blue dog http://detnews.com/article/20100108/BIZ/1080414/White-House-announces-green-job-tax-credits
You sound like the idiots like me who said Humphrey was the same as Nixon. Some of us learned better though.
So I hope you'll excuse me if I take his heel face turn with a rather heavy dose of salt.
Even Marx distinguished between the interests of finance capital and production capital. All these people are not the same.
Summers is not a dummy or a tool either. Just was very wrong on some very big things, like most of those in his trade. Not sure he's so much of an indictment of Obama as of his trade.
Geithner is a tool and, apparently, an idiot, on the other hand. The best and the brightest economists and finance professionals of his generation did not go into public service. He did. Case closed. Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
As for Summers... if this had been an academic discussion where he had to eat crow (not that he ever did eat any crow, mind, in the official version of history it was all Yeltsin's fault), that would be one thing. But it wasn't. For that matter, if he had yanked the emergency brake on his little experiment when things started going apeshit, it would have been a different matter. But he stayed the course, until he'd accomplished in the space of less than a decade for Russia what it took his friends on the other side of the Pond three full decades to do.
And it's simply not the case that these people are the best Obama could have picked. Just off the top of my head, Bair and Stiglitz have a distinguished history of public service - if not precisely one of stellar accomplishment, then at least one of not fucking things up with such dreary regularity.
No debate from me on Summers, he is detestable for the reasons you have mentioned. Obama went for the safe, Democratic establishment hands, with him. One gets the sense economics is not Obama's strong suit and he probably relied on Emanuel (the other stiff who isn't mentioned here) to help him through those ill-considered appointments.
But Geithner is in another league. A full-on Wall Street catamite.
Personally I step away from this a bit perhaps, because I am not a democrat, so I think more in terms of the democrats looking out for their party interests, not mine. In that sense, Clinton's appointment still makes sense. Summers no longer does. Geithner and Emanuel never did. The latter three are, today, huge political liabilities to the president.
All four are moral liabilities to me, of course, but then, the party they represent isn't mine...
Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
Congresspeople are infinitely more vulnerable, and state legislators even more vulnerable than congresspeople. City councilpeople are still more vulnerable, as are a whole plethora of other non-legislative local and state positions like school board members.
Attacking the low-hanging fruit, while still bitching about the president, will have a heck of a lot more influence than will simply bitching at the president. Obama might not be the most progressive person around, but it would sure help if congress was pushing him to be more progressive, rather than less.
No comments though, assume that's what the Ha Ha is for... Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
