I don't think anyone here thought otherwise. The reaction, at least for me, was, at least for me, the need to vent. I sat in a roomful of people and watched the innogural - as one facebooker spelled it. I sobbed. I clapped with everyone else when he was finally sworn in. But I had to shut my mouth when people booed at Bush and said "buh bye" and "don't let the door hitchya where the good lard splitchya". I had to shut my mouth when Obama turned war-mongerish in the speech and no one batted an eyelash. I had to shut my mouth in fact when some folks nodded in agreement and did a little quiet whoop at his tough talk.
I wouldn't have had to shut my mouth with Clinton. I think I can safely say that I wouldn't have had to shut my mouth with HRC, had she been elected. There would have been a lot more skepticism in that room. And a lot more room, in that room, for dissent.
As it stands, there is no room right now. There are people in the local GI coffee house who work with Food Not Bombs, mind, who utterly refuse to hear a critical word.
When you have to work with these folks on a daily basis -- both work for pay work,and organizing work -- you need a place to come and bitch -- beause the rest of the time, you keep your mouth shut, annoyed that, were it any other democrat, there would *never* have been this kind of stunned awe. It's as if the guy is some kind of religious figure and any realistic assessment of his actions is seen as heresy.
I mean, dude, even the HRC opponents and big Obama fans, at work, would not tolerate one even joking remark about the irony of her appointment as SoS.
So, I'd take what you read here as teacher's lounge talk -- at least from people like me who don't have the luxury of hanging with like-minded lefties all day. You know: teacher's go to the lounge and bitch about their jobs but turn around and go back to the classroom and do the best job they can, loving their students and wanting to see them do well. Not the best analogy but I'm only on my first cuppa.
>I still think that Obama's election represents a sea-change in America's
>race politics, and one for the good. Is that naive?
>
>His cabinet choices don't seem to me to say that he is right wing, but
>rather that he is trying to supercede the left-right political divide, a
>bit like Tony Blair did here in 1997. The danger in that is not right wing
>politics, but the creation of an apolitical technocratic administration.
>Seeing the popular mobilisation behind the presidency it might seem odd to
>say it, but the outcome of this apolitical administration is a retreat
>from democratic contestation, where dissent is marginalised.
>___________________________________
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"let's be civil and nice, but not to the point of obeying the rules of debate as defined by liberal blackmail (in which, discomfort caused by a challenge is seen as some vague form of harassment)."
-- Dwayne Monroe, 11/19/08
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws