Yes We Can has now devolved into No We Won’t.

The Presidential election of 2008 gave a sound repudiation to the right wing methodologies of governance which have absolutely gutted this country. A preceived liberal politician was given an ample mandate to govern from the left. Our priorities were well known to this President: we wanted the stranglehold of health insurers to be broken once and for all, we wanted the costly and needless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq brought to an end, and we wanted to see a return to policies that favored America and Americans, instead of the Chimpy years when a few rich people prospered unbelievably while vast swaths of the country were sent to a third world status.

It has been nearly a year, and some good things have undoubtedly happened. But the President never even scratched the surface of the mandate he was given. When you contrast how this President, with an overwhelming electoral victory, has governed in comparison to Chimpy, it makes you sick to your stomach. Chimpy had no mandate to govern when he was appointed to the Presidency by the Supreme Court. It didn’t even slow him down; he got Congress, which was much less skewered towards the Rushpubliscums, to go along with just about everything he wanted-and that was BEFORE September 11th. This President, instead of staring down his opponents in the idiotic right wing, has bent himself like a pretzel to accommodate their every wish and whim. He didn’t need to do this; he could have charged ahead with his promised healthcare reform and gotten it done, and the healthscare cretins and FOX “News” wouldn’t have been able to dent him. Indeed, I think that most of us remember the President promising to do exactly that, when he told us that liars and obstructionists would be called to account. As you know, quite the opposite has happened; the liars and obstructionists have been allowed to frame the debate, and their notion of “healthcare reform” is largely what we wound up with.

Well, you know, the House of Representatives proceeded as if they took the President at his word. As much as I dislike Nancy Pelosi, she delivered a decent healthcare reform bill to the Senate. I am sure she’s been both shocked and disgusted as she sits and watches health insurer whores Holy Joe LIEberman and Ben(edict) Nelson just pick it completely apart. She put a lot of muscle into getting the damned thing to the Senate, and the President just let her twist in the wind for her efforts.

It isn’t wise to do that to someone with the power Nancy Pelosi assuredly has. I don’t blame her a bit for the stance she’s taken in regard to the President’s plans for Afghanistan. In order to get his Afghanistan plan through Congress, he is going to have to rely on the Rushpubliscums and “blue dick” dems who have destroyed any chance for meaningful health reform in this country.

I’m sure that if the President had showed us a spine on the healthcare issue, Pelosi-and the American public as a whole-would be far more likely to help him with Afghanistan, even if we had misgivings. As it now stands, the President will have to rely on a bunch of people who have called him a Communazi Socialist Kenyan and vowed to deliver him to a “Waterloo.”

Good luck with that, Mr. President. Let’s see how much good they do you in the upcoming year.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday that it’s up to President Barack Obama to persuade reluctant Democrats to fund his Afghanistan troop buildup — his most important foreign policy initiative — because she has no plans to do so herself.

Pelosi’s reluctance to lobby for an Afghan surge appropriation reflects the deep divisions within the Democratic Party over Obama’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan.

That, coupled with lukewarm public support — in the latest Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey, only 51 percent of the respondents said they support the surge — suggests that support for the administration’s Afghan policy is brittle, at best.

Facing re-election next year, dozens of Democrats in the House of Representatives already oppose additional war funding, and earlier this year, Pelosi, D-Calif., assured them that they wouldn’t have to vote on another emergency war-spending bill.

The issue has put Pelosi in a delicate position. Her congressional constituency includes a sizeable number of Democrats who want the U.S. out of Afghanistan quickly, but she also has a close working relationship with Obama, as well as Democrats who support the president’s plan, and hardly wants to anger them or the president.

“What I’ve told (House) members is give the president room,” she said during a meeting with reporters. “Listen to what he has to say. This for members is a vote for conscience and constituents.”

Pelosi, however, wouldn’t say how she might vote. “The president is going to have to make his case,” she said.

The White House is expected to ask Congress early next year for $30 billion to $40 billion to pay for an additional 30,000 to 35,000 troops in Afghanistan.

Yes, there is always more money for war, always more borrowing that can be done. Just ask Mikhail Gorbachev how that works out.

I’m not a tin hatter, but I swear, I look at this Presidency up till now and I have to wonder if the President isn’t some kind of right wing sleeper agent sent in to deliver Congress back to the Rushpubliscums. And I really and truly cannot see any chance of him pulling these irons out of the fire. He has more or less completely alienated the one constituency he had to keep on his side.

I think I know what the President is counting on. He’s counting on us all being scared shitless of the return of Chimpy-style governance to Washington, and he’s banking on that to save him. Not this time, at least not for me; I did not vote for Bill Clinton in 1996, and I won’t be bullied into casting another vote for this President. Since 1980, there has been some kind of unwritten rule in Presidential politics that says that an incumbent President need not worry about challenges from within his own party. I say that’s a crock of shit, and I am all ears for whoever might like to challenge his renomination in 2012. The simple fact of the matter is that I don’t think we’d see much difference in policy between Barack Obama and present Rushpubliscum front-runner Mitt Romney, and that ain’t exactly change I can believe in.

So let a challenger with a plan-and the backbone necessary to carry forth with it-put up a challenge in 2012. I’ll certainly be tuned in.

Tags: afghanistan, healthcare, obama, pelosi

This entry was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 12:47 am and is filed under AfGONEistan, Healthcare Crisis, Jolly Roger. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.