Furthermore, you refuse to acknowledge that - in fact - a large number of facts about public opinion in 2008 and early 2009 have been presented to you, facts which you reject as suggesting that alternative realistic policy options were available to the Obama administration.
And then, you refuse to acknowledge that facts presented to you about who Obama appointed as his advisors and what their factual histories tell us about the kinds of programs they'd reasonably be expected to advance - Rahm Emmanuel was surely going to side with the DLC and Blue Dogs over Progressives, Larry Summers was surely going to side with Wall Street over the public and there was no one appointed to develop, promote and defend a partisan health care bill like the one American's supported in remarkable numbers.
We are not saying they are evil, though the fact is that it doesn't seem to matter to you that the fact of the matter is that the facts are that we often repeat that we are not saying this, we are saying that Obama's proclivities are neoliberal, and not even progressive within a neoliberal context since a large portion of the Democratic Party's constituency and a good number of members of congress are to the liberal left of him - no one thought they were lefties - and that any calculations the Obama Admin made about having to be bipartisan and on the conservative side of the reasonable range of neoliberal reform was a miscalculation that came back and bit them on the ass in this election. You keep lumping us in with idiots and our arguments show that we're not. Pay attention. Just because we disagree with you doesn't mean we're engaging in "gutter populist attributions of stupidity, treachery or ill intentions", that we're unaware of how government works (duh, appropriations and courts matter - shocking insight, I'd never thought of that in the thirty years I've watched decent EPA, Civil Rights or other regs be unable to be enforced because Congress wouldn't appropriate the funds... I guess you are so much more realistic than me), nor that we're claiming Obama is an alien (where the hell did that come from relative to us, jeez!?).
Finally, the idea that this stuff is 20/20 hindsight is predicated on a careful refusal on your part to pay attention to the fact that many of us - and many people to the liberal right of us who write and comment for HuffPo, MoveOn, the NYT (even Krugman, Kristoff, Rich, Dowd, etc.) have been saying exactly this same stuff since January 2009. Start taking your own advice and try and pay some attention to the facts associated with this list rather than your fantasies about who we are, what we think, and the kinds of parallels it's materially legitimate to draw relative to our positions.
On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 8:04 AM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Marv: "only last month you were puzzled and dismayed that the Obama
> administration wasn't "bashing" its enemies on the right,"
>
> [WS:] Yes, indeed, and I am still puzzled by it. However, I do not assume
> that these are stupid or treacherous, evil people - as some on the more
> loony fringes on the American right and left claim. On the contrary, I
> assume - unless proven (by facts, not opinions and interpretations)
> otherwise - that these people knew what they were doing and if they did
> something that baffles me, they probably had a reason for it that is not
> apparent to me at the moment. While of course none of us knows for sure, I
> think that my conjecture of O's administration pursuing what they saw as a
> realistic course of action and settling for what they saw as achievable
> under the circumstances is far more rational than gutter populist
> attributions of stupidity, treachery or ill intentions that the loony
> American government haters love to circulate.
>
> Just one thing to consider - legislative process is not the end of a
> political reform. The fact that a legislation passes the congress and is
> signed into a law does not mean that it will survive court challenges. So
> if you seriously consider passing a reform - instead of engaging in
> grandstanding buffoonery of "making a statement" not followed by any action
> - you would take the potential judiciary challenge to your reform very
> seriously, and you would not expend the political capital you currently
> have
> on something that will be likely killed by courts later. Instead, you
> would
> go for what you see as having a better chance of survival - even if it
> falls
> short on the ideal. This is called realism.
>
> This is what I think happened during the two years of O's administration.
> Of course, I could be proven wrong and Obama may turn out to be an alien
> implant to subvert this or that aspect of America - as the loonies on the
> right and the left claim - but I do not think it is likely. A more likely
> alternative is that O's admin misjudged their opposition - as you claim -
> and they could have gained more had they been more aggressive. Or not.
> But
> then, everyone has 20/20 hindsight vision.
>
> Wojtek
>
>