[lbo-talk] “It provokes screams from the left”

[Carrol Cox]

Liberals and despairing leftists keep trying to find some way to avoid 
facing the fact that Obama is by conviction their enemy -- not their 
weak or silly friend. Of course our enemies have many strong marginal 
differences among themselves that they can and do get very angry about; 
just as leftists can quarrel among themselves. Leftists just have to 
forget about Washington, D.C. and go to work  nursing those elements of 
a movement that have been appearing around the nation in many 
localities. Left causes are always iffy -- capital is just too strong. 
But that makes it even more insane not to put energies where they have 
some chance rather than this endless wailing that our enemies are not 
being kind to us.

This is just a footnote to  Voyou , not an argument with his post.

Carrol

On 7/27/2011 1:57 PM, Voyou wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:46 -0400, "c b"<cb31450 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> FDR had the luxury of saying to the left who met with him with good
>> ideas , "Good ideas. Now go out and make me do it." Obama is forced to
>> resort to "Go out and make me not do it" to get the lefties off their
>> duffs today.
>
> Obama is actually in very much the same position as Roosevelt - he has
> policies he wants to accomplish, and a group out there who he can get to
> raise a fuss and make him do it. It's just that that group isn't
> leftists, it's the Tea Party.
>
> Laurence O'Donnell on MSNBC has been putting forward a theory about
> Obama's plans here, which is premised on the idea that Obama thinks the
> Republicans are so opposed to him, they'll reject anything he offers, so
> he can make himself look "reasonable" and "bipartisan" by conceding
> anything at all, without having to actually go through with it. This is
> the most plausible explanation I've heard for what Obama thinks he's
> doing, but it still isn't all that plausible; it seems to depend on
> being able to predict with total accuracy exactly how the Republicans
> are going to screw themselves: not so  much "12-dimensional chess" as a
> Xanatos Roulette:
> http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XanatosRoulette