Jerri-Lynn here. This post includes a nice selection of tweets responding to the effort to direct the Democratic Party back towards policy positions favored by wealthy donors.
I include another notable tweet, missing from the litany below:
One thing I appreciate about Obama is how he insists on proving Matt Stoller right. https://t.co/SvMEYRLX7s
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) 16 November 2019
By Jon Queally, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams
If you want to see the hashtag #TooFarLeft go viral, just get a former world leader—preferably one who is a Democrat—to denounce Left Twitter.
After it was reported Friday that former U.S. President Barack Obama told a room full of “wealthy liberal” Democratic Party donors that voters ultimately won’t go for candidates offering political visions he suggested were too ambitious and radical, progressives online reacted critically to Obama advising the party to sideline “certain left-leaning twitter feeds” and what he termed the “the activist wing of our party.”
According to the New York Times, which first reported on Obama’s “too far left” advice:
While Mr. Obama did not single out any specific primary candidate or policy proposal, he cautioned that the universe of voters that could support a Democratic candidate—Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans—are not driven by the same views reflected on “certain left-leaning Twitter feeds” or “the activist wing of our party.”
“Even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision we also have to be rooted in reality,” Mr. Obama said. “The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.”
Specifically not mentioned by name but clearly a target of the comments was Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has made the phrase “political revolution” central to his 2020 primary campaign. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, also running for the nomination, was likely another candidate the former president had in mind as she, along with Sanders, has used her campaing to argue that the U.S. political and economic systems are rigged against working people in favor of the wealthy and corporations—a dynamic that is going to need massive “structural change,” the U.S. senator from Massachusetts says, if it is to be undone.
Sometimes called “Left Twitter” as shorthand, the broad moniker is characterized as Democratic Party members more in the vein of Sanders or those who represent a progressive flank of the spectrum that identify as democratic socialists, progressive Democrats, or left-wing independents. Not an official club that has a membership, any influential—or possibly strident—voices on the progressive left who use social media to share viewpoints and engage with the latest political developments, appeared to be the target of Obama’s warning.
In turn, many who fit the description were not going to let the former president—especially a Democrat who swept to power in 2008 on the campaign promise of “hope and change”—get away with the comments without a characteristic retort. On Saturday, the hashtag #TooFarLeft was trending on Twitter.
Political operative Peter Daou, who took credit for launching the hashtag, said: “I launched the #TooFarLeft tag because I’ve had it with Republicans, media elites, and corporate Dems enabling fascists while denigrating those who seek economic and social justice as ‘too far left.’ I’d like to ONCE hear them complain America is too far right.”
And so, a brief sample of reactions:
TOO. FAR. LEFT.
I launched the #TooFarLeft tag because I’ve had it with Republicans, media elites, and corporate Dems enabling fascists while denigrating those who seek economic and social justice as “too far left.”
I’d like to ONCE hear them complain America is too far right.
— Peter Daou (@peterdaou) 16 November 2019
When the Founders called for revolution they were #TooFarLeft.
When Harriet Tubman fought for her freedom she was #TooFarLeft.
When unions demanded an 8-hour workday and weekends off they were #TooFarLeft.
When women demanded the right to vote they were #TooFarLeft.
— Richard (RJ) Eskow (@rjeskow) 16 November 2019
Obama believes the lesson of his presidency is that he tried for too much radical change too quickly and it caused a backlash. That is objectively wrong but it’s what he believes.
— ‘Weird Alex’ Pareene (@pareene) 16 November 2019
*thinking* is my Twitter feed “left leaning” enough to be hated on by obama?
also, this is typical of the “pull your pants up, don’t boo…vote” presidential paternalism that defined his posture towards young black people expressing very HUMAN anger and disappointment. https://t.co/6uJt4O3nDm
— phillip agnew (@iPhilSomething) 16 November 2019
#BREAKING:
Obama calls out @MSDNCNews, warns Americans of the dangers of listening to “certain left-leaning twitter feeds” or “the activist wing of our party.”Are the 1,000 State House seats lost under Obama proof that he knows what’s best for the party?https://t.co/dh9B0aOwjL
— MSDNC ? (@MSDNCNews) 16 November 2019
Oh Barry ? https://t.co/STiiXpi533
— Cynthia Nixon (@CynthiaNixon) 16 November 2019
I'm #toofarleft because I trust scientists when they say we need "transformative change" in "all aspects of society."https://t.co/9zfoe4KFVT https://t.co/zjHWgJ5U4k pic.twitter.com/WO4A2jRL15
— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) November 16, 2019
Obama speaks to club of “wealthy liberals who donate hundreds of thousands of dollars a year” and says things like universal health care are too leftist. Can we finally end the bullshit of Obama being anything other than a weak, status quo centrist? https://t.co/LaHE3lp5Sf
— Christian Christensen (@ChrChristensen) November 16, 2019
I’m #TooFarLeft because I don’t wanna pay premiums, a co-pay, AND out of pocket costs, as arbitrarily determined by an entity who wants to profit off my sickness.
— BernieBih (@2020Blurbs) 16 November 2019
lol I might actually be #TooFarLeft for this hashtag. ?
So I’ll keep it basic. The military budget needs to be slashed, billionaires need to pay taxes, climate change is going to kill us, and everyone deserves healthcare
— phoenix co-hosts your favorite podcatsers podcast (@uppittynegress) 16 November 2019
These are great. I’m #TooFarLeft because I believe no one should ever lose the right to vote. Ever. https://t.co/Eevp2WcWPs
— Aaron Huertas (@aaronhuertas) 16 November 2019
There is no such thing as #TooFarLeft.
— Walker Bragman (@WalkerBragman) 16 November 2019
“Obama telling a room of wealthy donors to support candidates that protect their wealth, which comes at the expense of helping everyday people, is [heartbreaking],” tweeted Melanie D’Arrigo, a progressive activist currently running for U.S. Congress in New York’s 3rd District against a more centrist incumbent. “This is exactly why everyday people want a political revolution. Government isn’t working for them.”
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Unabashedly I would state that Obama is an elitist buttplug on command control, every time there is a disturbance in the neoliberal force someone hits the “remote” control for incensed sophist rhetoric leveled at the unwashed aka not in the club.
BTW the ears are ribbed for pleasure …
Re. “..the ears are ribbed for pleasure…” So, you’re onboard for the CT Michelle smear/theory???
Boy, do I love this. Politics as it was played back in the 1850’s, ’60’s and into the Gilded Age.
Next up; Anarchist Direct Action Comics!
i thought it was a Ferengi reference.
“Uumoxx…..”
Ha! More likely, “Aoxomoxoa.”
” … someone hits the “remote” control for incensed sophist rhetoric leveled at the unwashed aka not in the club.”
JLS, you been holding out on us! LOL … You never told us the #Obamamometer came with a remote!
So someone is “neo-liberal” anytime they disagree with free healthcare.i’m probably going to vote for sanders,warren or gabbard,but there is a point to the critique that the “average” american does’nt prefer free anything.they tend to prefer “extremely affordable” by my experience.raising taxes by fiscal necessity going into an election cycle is just red meat to republican strategists
If your going to be relativelu progressive why not advocate for greater acceptence of mmt for financing domestic spending as opposed to raising taxes.
Free is usually cheaper than extremely affordable. Extremely affordable means you need to run a whole administration system to run it. Whereas free cuts that out. Same principle at work in buffets – you will note that there are fewer serving staff.
After much thought, I have decided you were using metaphor and humor, and not speaking literally.
Which means the ears are probably not ribbed for pleasure.
Obama squandered the greatest political opportunity of my lifetime. His administration ended with a whimper, and Obama has shown himself to be utterly blind to what the Democratic voters really want–or somewhere along the line Dr.O. took the Oath of Hypocracy, and is still living up to it.
Obama got what Obama wanted…
mega-millions and a Martha’s Vineyard estate…. what’s not to like?
So true.
Indeed he did … with all the powder, rouge, and IC moles to make up that pretty (usless) mug of his ….
An orange wig would too good for the likes of he !
Did he? Or was one-man-as-president not able to deliver what “the Democratic voters” wanted because they did not all want the same thing? At the same time? Not one at a time? Any president is bound for failure to deliver to someone.
No vision but suck up to the banks. Yearning for their approval and acceptance. Biden all but called Obama the house negro, which he was to PMC liberals, who swallowed his act whole. Clean and articulate.
The Dems held the House and the Senate with a larger majority than Trump’s Republican Senate, even with illness and the Franken Coleman recount.
Why did they even try to negotiate with Republicans about ANYTHING? Why wasn’t the very popular young President out working the ‘refs’ by using his bully pulpit? Why when it was becoming clearer and cleared that ACA was going to pass using reconciliation did they not put back anything left out to appeal to Republicans and strengthen the bill? For instance that much vaunted Public Option we keep hearing about was part of the House bill, so it could have been in.
Why did the AG, who serves at the pleasure of the President, choose to go after medical marijuana dispensaries in CA and brothels in New Orleans rather than bankers who committed multiple criminal acts in the lead up to the crash and even more after? Why did his people, headed by Tim Geithner, design a relief program for home owners that was designed to foam the runway for the banks rather than help them actually keep their homes? Why…why…why…
I can keep going. If Trump has proved nothing at all he should have made it clear to the Democrats that all the excuses given Obama for not doing diddly were empty. That the presidency has massive power not dependent on Congress and he left that power laying out there in a heap in order to make sure he upset no rice bowls for anyone who might be able to help him, i.e fund his desired post Presidency lifestyle, in order to effect change and help build on that hope that got him elected. We had no hope and any change was largely for the worst because he wanted it that way.
> If Trump has proved nothing at all he should have made it clear to the Democrats that all the excuses given Obama for not doing diddly were empty.
Right there, great point.
+100
Oh, come on. You have blotted out your memory of what winter 2008 was like, assuming you were old enough to have been paying attention. People were terrified and looking for leadership. Obama could easily have done a Roosevelt 100 days but chose not to.
Long form discussion here:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/03/the-empire-continues-to-strike-back-team-obama-propaganda-campaign-reaches-fever-pitch.html
President “No Hope and No Change”.
Worse than no hope. It was false hope.
President False Hope and More of the Same.
The 21st Century is really starting to be a bad century of Presidents. Only #TooFarLeft is going to change that.
Unfortunately there was change but most of it was negative. More wars, more spying on Americans, more rich people tax cuts (this time permanent unlike Bush) ,outlawed GMO product labelling and tried to cut Social Security and Meficare. Obama was a main reason I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton other than herself. I won’t be fooled again by these centrists.
Add the brutal elimination of “Occupy Wall Street” which was a brave answer to his administration bailing out Wall Street but not homeowners. OCCUPY was a brave answer to the right of people to exercise free speech and occupy something called public space or what’s left of it. Add not standing up for the union protests in Madison Wisconsin. A terrible legacy but one he was willing to do from the get go. He’s a Hamiltonian thru and thru. His speech in 2004 with a little help from Deval Patrick was a poke in the eye to John Edward’s Two Americas. Oh, no, John. There is only one lovely America where we all get along and everything is cherry if you just stop eating badly and get up off the couch.
Don’t get me started…..
All he did was peddle hopium and gave his Democratic followers what they wanted to hear with a shuck n’ jive.
President Smug ‘n Shrug
Saw this in @samseder’s tweets – “The Audacity of Nope”. I do remember 2008 – a heady, hopeful time politically, soon crushed.
Obama didn’t prevent another Great Depression. He prevented another New Deal.
-Matt Stoller
Right.
spot on
Feature not a bug.
Obama didn’t “squander” it.
Obama killed it on purpose. That’s what he is now being repaid handsomely for by his owners, groomers and patrons.
His present fartulence on this topic indicates that his owners, groomers and patrons expect him to keep working for his payoffs. Obama represents the filth which will have to be purged and burned out of the DemParty just as much as Clinton represents it.
He could have been FDR. He chose Caspar Milquetoast instead.
No . . . he chose Vidkun Quisling in Caspar Milquetoast disguise.
Thanks Obama, for siding with bankers and taking down Occupy. And for destroying Libya. And for the Individual Mandate. And the war on whistle-blowers. And cash-for-clunkers. And Syria. And the coup in Ukraine. And for reigniting the cold war. And doing next to nothing on climate change. And fracking. And for Trump…
As we approach the season of Thanksgiving, let me add mine to your list:
Thanks Obama for Your stellar cabinet w/ Geithner, Emanuel, Gates, Clinton, Biden, Duncan, Holder, Panetta, Hagel, Petraeus, and the rest of the neocon/neolibs you stacked it with.
Thanks for gutting the 50-state Strategy.
Thanks for that photo-op in Flint, MI where you said the water was fine.
Thanks for helping rehabilitate George W. Bush’s public image.
Thanks for caving to Breitbart and throwing Shirley Sherrod and Van Jones under the bus.
So much to be thankful for!
You are somewhat incorrect here, he did do something on climate change. If I recall US oil production was at record highs during his administration, and he pointed out to his wealthy Texan supporters “that was me”.
Sorry, I must have had a Corexit moment.
Sad part is that oil is still there, just no longer floating on top thanks to corexit. Outta sight outta political concern.
I just remember when he made a big deal of taking his daughter to swim with him in the Gulf (with heads held stiffly above water) to supposedly show how safe it was. They were rushed away afterwards with no words to the press because… well… guess they had to get into decontamination quick, dontchaknow. He lost me forever with that stunt.
Ever since he got elected his favorite pastime has been “hippie punching”…
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/whats-behind-obamas-hippie-punching/#
Makes one wonder what happened. Was this 2006 Obama boosting Bernie and speaking about the importance of mass movements and systemic change real?
https://twitter.com/carlbeijer/status/1195788710136205312?s=21
I swear, it’s like the Dems pulled a “Get Out” (the movie) on that Obama and swapped his brain with some lab grown DNC brain. You’d think a guy who got hoodwinked on the Merrick Garland “compromise”, the grand bargain “compromise”, the ACA “compromise” and all his other “pragmatic” attempts at incrementalism would consider that maybe his approach wasn’t effective?
That said, he lost me with the Telecomm Immunity vote and I went for Cynthia McKinney in ‘08. No regrets. I’m definitely #toofarleft by today’s Dem standards.
Napoleon Obamaparte couldn’t negotiate his way out of a paper sack, I started calling him ‘the Great Spelunker’ as he’d cave on anything.
Going back to his Harvard Law Review title, his shtick has been to advocate for conservative positions or let the right wing run the place while putting a fantasy liberal face on the effort then moving on. The Paris Accords, though insufficient, we’re negotiated into meaningless voluntary targets by Obama.
His values are just wildly different than yours, and his rhetoric is the fast food of oratory. It’s bland, won’t offend, and is bad for you in the long run.
In retrospect, he was of classic book-smart intelligence, with little practical experience.
Made for a perfect empty vessel of a vassal…
Did you forget that Obama had the US sign the Paris Accords only months before he left office, for presumed Post-Prez image burnishing purposes, which made it procedurally easy peasey for Trump to back out? Obama “accepted” it by Executive Order in Sept 2016.
I don’t think he was hoodwinked at all. He was smart enough to see that change vs more of the same was his ticket to the top, and once he got elected, he did exactly what his donors paid him to do.
Warren is trying to pull the same trick but a) unlike Obama, she has had a long career and plenty of history to delve into, and b) for some reason, while she is willing to be glibly disingenuous when it comes to her personal history, she seems unwilling to be quite so bald faced on policy. It’s like she we wants an out so that, on the off chance she actually wins, she can point to each reversal and say she didn’t actually promise to do that.
It took me too long, unfortunately, to see Obama for what he was. I credit NC for my deprogramming.
Agree that Warren is Obama 2.0. I wonder if she has a plan to get out of this race?
I disagree on this. Warren is conservative but she is fundamentally a small “republican”. She believes in the rule of law even if her proposed laws are fundamentally inadequate or belong to two or three decades ago. Obama is more of a kleptocrat and believes government exists to enrich the powerful.
Obama’s idea of good government is trust the oligarchs and the meritocracy.
The “meritocracy?” You are being facetious, right?
I see warren as more like Hillary than Obama in most ways… doesn’t want to commit in black and white… prefers vagueness, granted she’s being forced into a corner on healthcare.
Would allow deep and mil to confront Russia a la Hillary, whereas Obama threw them the Libya bone instead… ok, you can have a little war… no aircraft carriers in danger… nobody will care about the fact that women there get as much Ed as men do, unusual in the Arab world, free healthcare, prosperous, peaceful little country… granted, Reagan did put the fear of paradise into ghadafi…
Hippie punching from mr. Choom Gangster .. so rich, so velvety .. glove like !
No, Obama has always been a talented, cynical, shapeshifting broker for big money interests.
He left his Asia-American girlfriend before heading to Chicago, telling her he needed a Black companion for the brand-building exercise otherwise known as his cup-of-coffee stint as a community organizer. He was from the first aligned with real estate interests in Chicago – the Valerie Jarrett-represented interests that have literally been pushing African Americans out of the city for thirty years – and was involved with the Joyce Foundation, which funded school privatization efforts years before they infested other cities.
Adolph Reed’s prescience about Obama was uncannily on the mark; the Overclass never needed to perform a brain transplant on him; he was always theirs.
The moment of truth with Obama was probably when he selected Biden as his VP. Up until that point it wasn’t clear if he was going to go left or center-right.
On the other hand, I think there were warning signs when he was a senator; Joe Lieberman was his “mentor” and the press were really promoting him. When the press promotes something, watch out. My feeling is that Obama was selected by some interest groups to give lip service to progressive politics while implementing a corporate/imperial agenda.
Wasn’t He the one that toured an Amazon warehouse and declared good middle class American jawbs were being created right there, yet never walked a yard in those shoes, while shovelling billions of tax dollars into Bezos pocket?
The whippings will continue and continue and continue . . . so Bezos can sell enough grossly overpriced stawk every year to fund his WaPoo Poo, space and football fantasies.
Bezos can’t sell what buyers won’t buy.
We can thank anyone who ever bought something Amazon, or who ever buys something Amazon in the future , for Bezos’s wealth and power. If they buy a little from Amazon, we can thank them a little. If they buy a lot from Amazon, we can thank them a lot.
I buy from Amazon, I have an account at Bank of America, I shop at Walmart and when the time comes I’ll get a bank loan to buy a home and escape continual rent increases and to please the wife, should my heart’s desire ever consent to marry me.
I was also left some bank stock which I plan to keep because I need the dividends.
Am I a hypocrite? Or am I merely trying to survive in a system I:
1) Did not design
and
2) despise and hate
and
3) am trying my best to abolish?
So pardon me if I do what is in my best interest (so long as it is legal) to survive in a system I LOATHE.
And I suggest you adopt a better strategy than shaming victims of the system – as if they are to blame rather than wise-heads who, for example, thought the government insurance of private, including privately created, liabilities was a brilliant idea.
Amazon is not Bank of America, Walmart, a source of bank loans, etc.
Amazon is the uniquely dangerous vehicle of a uniquely evil black hat perpetrator and wannabe-World-Ruler.
Your survival does not depend on buying something from or through Amazon. Every something that you or anyone else buys through Amazon helps exterminate every non-Amazon business which still survives.
I survive in the same system you do. I have never bought a thing from or through Amazon.
That shows it can be done.
If you choose to collaborate with the Bezos Enemy, don’t expect to be praised and congratulated for that conscious and deliberate un-necessary choice on your part.
But at least you are not pouring out streams of scriptural sewage, like the one-time “F Beard” used to do. So thank you for that.
Sorry, not sorry but I’ve found Amazon to offer excellent service and will continue to use them because my energy and patience are limited and better spent trying to abolish the SYSTEM that ENABLES the exploitation of workers.
Besides which, which company shouldn’t I boycott since they are all exploitative, even co-opts, if they as much as take out a bank loan and thereby use the PUBLIC’S credit but for private gain?
I’m tired of playing along with the Progressive game of supporting privileges for the banks and the rich and then complaining about the resulting rat-race to the bottom.
Too bad if your own petty business or whatever is suffering because someone plays the rotten game better than you. Live by the sword, die by it.
You go, girl! Uh . . . I mean, You go, F Beard!
Why in the hell would subject themselves to the abuses of shopping at Walmart just to save eight cents?
Is the answer to ensure thousands of Americans can have “jobs” and be so poorly paid that they still qualify for food stamps?
Giving your money to Bank of America is also against your “best interests.” There are credit unions that would be a better choice to serve your banking needs.
What a great way to start my day. It’s really hard to choose a favorite but this certainly is one of my top 5:
“I am #toofarleft because although I prefer moderate policies, I am sick and tired of Democrats negotiating from the center. With a radical Republican party, policy always gets dragged to the right. Enough. Opening offer to billionaires: we’re taking your [family blogging] money.”
Barry seems to have touched a nerve.
Also, someone responded to Melanie D’Arrigo’s tweet with quite the bill of particulars on Obama, most of which are probably not news here.
I think that list if particulars is something to be read regularly.
They used to have “points of light”
Obama gave us 35″ piles of poop”
After two years of trump…. The lists of abuses against the world and all its inhabitants.. gets dizzying.
You start to forget the sins of obama… the sins of bush..the sins of clinton.. the sins of bush… the sins of reagan… and on and on… They kinda run together..
“too far left” was what was needed. and the only respectable place to be. Then and now.
Jack Nicholson as the Joker was correct, this town needs an enema.
Trump, the carnival barker is that enema we need to release all the sh#t backed up in DC.
Or as I suggested a couple of years back – like magnoplasm on a carbuncle.
The alternative medical treatment is the scalpel.
Trouble is the bugs actually causing the carbuncle may be becoming antibiotic resistent .
Those are all the Free Trade Presidents. From Carter onward. We could call them the Carter-Reagan Clintobusha Presidents.
Hopefully we don’t go back to that after the Trump interregnum.
Almost like it *doesn’t matter* who gets elected™…
The organizing’s the thing
It mattered that Trump got elected. It matters that Trump is President instead of Clinton.
The Trump election has blasted the ice cap and the ice floes are starting to grind around. We have to keep blasting to keep the ice floes grinding.
The Clintonite Sh*tObamacrats know it matters. It matters to them that a real Democrat never ever be permitted to get the 2020 nomination.
Hopefully we understand how much it matters that no Clintonite Sh*tObamacrat be allowed to become President ever . . . ever . . . ever again.
Advice from the man who put Tim Kaine and then Debbie Wasserman Schultz and yes Tom Perez in charge of the DNC…who oversaw the loss of the House, the Senate, multiple state houses and governorships – 870 leadership positions in all is not someone interested in winning elections except his own.
Of course when you realize that he is not and never really was interested in the good of the American people, never the betterment of US only him and his, you understand that this latest pronouncement was not advice but admonishment. He is attempting to shame and scold those who are demanding more and undercut the politicians who see the position as PUBLIC service not a high end call service for donors. This prostitution has paid off well for Barry and Michelle so far and he doesn’t want the $20s to stop coming so here he blows the wealthy donors once again and hopes the public lets him spit out on them.
To summarize, when you think of Obama as anything other than a moderate right-wing Republican who sold himself the day he sold Jeremiah Wright down the river, then there are multiple bridges for sale, starting with the one in Alaska (offer good in one state – Obamaland).
Aside from anything else, Obama has always been a self-righteous scold. This would be bad enough coming from someone who we admire and would want others to emulate, but it’s really tiresome coming from someone who did so much to hammer the US population in the aftermath of the 2008 meltdown, whilst simultaneously bailing out and fawning over the rich who made it happen.
Barry, go back to Martha’s Vineyard and stay there.
And drown beneath a rising sea.
“Grand strategy, according to John Boyd (arguably America’s best military strategist), is a quest to isolate your enemy’s (a nation-state or a global terrorist network) thinking processes from connections to the external/reference environment. This process of isolation is essentially the imposition of insanity on a group. To wit: any organism that operates without reference to external stimuli (the real world), falls into a destructive cycle of false internal dialogues. These corrupt internal dialogues eventually cause dissolution and defeat.”
John Robb on Boyd.
so, what have they been doing that for a hundred years now….. The “current” group in power .
The anglo-american establishment
Hi, rob, I have to disagree, at least to the degree about isolation. From the 1940’s to the 1960’s, there were policies enacted for working people. The split is verifiable from the ’70’s and metastasized during the last generation.
Now, wow. I guess the inside of a mirror box looks like a mansion.
Janet and I were discussing where the great advances have come in the last generation. We got tech, understanding bias, and physiology. But the tech is being used to heighten biases, to set people against each other with outrage silos.
Robb writes about media (MSM and social media) being weaponized. We’d like to blame Bernays, but Munger noted he couldn’t stop himself from succumbing to what he called false models. There’s so many we can’t track them all, and our brains get hijacked. The more powerless people are, the more they seek patterns, something understandable to believe in. That need to believe is contradictory to critical thinking.
The mountain is the degree to which people believe their own bs. Whether othering the “47 percent” or “deplorables”, at least some of them really believe that crap. But the dogs aren’t eating the dog food. Boyd talks of the “dissolution of the moral bonds that permit an organic whole to exist.” Trump was the message, trumpets ringing from places that switched from Obama. Pearls used to be thought a cure for poison, and Obama was the pearl that elite liberals were clutching. They dropped it in the cup, and now it’s bubbling like bicarbonate. I really think they had no idea.
re: tech, I’ve been thinking about boeing lately, mostly from the perspective that they switched from being an aerospace company into a management firm arbitraging their various assets. This led them to be focused on moving to chicago, wichita and south carolina. That became their business, not planes. This thinking then led me to the why of the 737NFW. Techies will tell you basically everything can be done better with computers, ai etc…, my question then, why is it not the reality that boeing designed an extremely easy to fly aerodynamic plane (they could have used computers to make it sooooooo perfect), then added robotics to fly it? Why is it that they put a dog in the air and corrected it’s design flaws with computers? I mean, I know the answer, but the triumphalism re the fabulous new world is a little hard to bear sometimes, and rhymes with your boyd quote “dissolution of the moral bonds that permit an organic whole to exist.”
Techies will tell you basically everything can be done better with computers, ai etc..
I beg to differ: One cannot fix hardware problems with software.
As evidenced by the MAX, sorry if I over generalized (there’s a pretty wide universe of “techies”, I should be more careful with that)
I have a “picky asshole gene.” Which I suspect is not unique.
A lesson Boeing actively refused to heed.
and, one cannot fix software problems with better PR.
You ain’t seen nuthin yet – wait for the “collateral damage” from 5G rollout, especially on those pesky insects ( which annoy most people, but are an essential part of the food chains that we depend on.)
“Death-ray vigilantes” should make themselves ready to destroy every 5G
transmitter every time they see one. Hopefully in stealthy ways which prevent their being caught.
Search on Gimli Glider a Boeing 767 that ran out of fuel at 40,000 feet near Winnipeg Manitoba. Two highly experienced pilots safely landed at Gimli Airport which was an ex military airport no longer in use as an airport. Boeing in my opinion has become fixated on keeping its stock price up and instead of designing an aircraft capable of gliding to a landing without power it has kept costs down by designing an aircraft that was unsafe at any speed and totally dependent on software to keep it airborne. Its competition Airbus to my knowledge are not taking unsafe shortcuts and thus are ensuring long term profitability. Boeing launched a legal attack on the Canadian Bombardier Class C which was very well designed to glide even with loss of computers. If you cannot compete you are reduced to relying on lawyers and governments to keep you in the air. The results speak for themselves. Clearly the US regulator has been neutered by a Congress in thrall to big business.
And, given Boeing’s importance for US balance of payments and overall technical/manufacturing competence, a catastrophic example of the craven short-sightedness of the company’s misleaders.
that quote is a great description of hubris
and it scales, from individuals on up
Wit all due respect (none), has anyone ever told him to just STFU? I can’t think of anyone besides BillClinton, and Obama, who have done more to completely screw over Main Street, USA
when will that become a hashtag? #justSTFUObama #justSTFUClintoons
or my personal favorite: #DropDeadNancy*
*not stated as a call to violence nor an exhortation to do violence. retirement and permanent silence on public matters would be just fine. don’t these people have grandchildren to play with?
He’s showing his true colors and hoping to cash in some more from his rich friends. He doesn’t know when to STFU. And he’s not a centrist but a right wing repig with a dark skin. Hope and Change, my a$$. I wish for him a reservation in the deepest part of Dante’s hell.
He’s not hoping… he was in the right place, a room full of rich donors, so he of course said what they wanted to hear. All people who had given him checks before.
Sure he’s got the 20 mil Martha’s Vineyard mansion, but he hasn’t yet funded the French chateau.
Ease off here.
From many miles away I believe that not STFU could be quite a big mistake by the “centrists” that migth end fueling progressives. Don’t you? Go Obama, Go, Go!
A good hashtag might be . . . #BlowMeObama.
If twitter hashtags are permitted to be long, one could be . . #WhatDidTheyPayObamaToSayThat
Mr. Obama said. “The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.”
And he’s right. If that is the platform then the Democrats will be just handing the Presidency to Trump again. That will be a disaster for the country.
Mr. Obama is strawmanning you, James. How is Medicare For All, to take one example of left policy focus that Obama objects to, “tearing down” anything? It’s about building onto an existing system of making medical costs public for seniors, and extending it to everyone. Free public college just builds on existing traditions like the wildly popular and successful california system of free college for all state residents. Also the tradition of very low cost state universities, all across our country just a single goddamn generation ago can be built upon.
The only thing being torn down in the case of m4a is an extremely unpopular, gangster capitalist entity whose pitch is “I’ll bet you you never get sick!”
And to add to our litany of bad faith argumentation, Obama is also gaslighting you. M4A is very popular already, and no dem will ever be hurt by promising to enact it. I’ve seen polls where a majority of republicans support it, and depending on the framing of the question, it gets around 2/3 support overall. Free public state universities, immediate debt relief and many other left policy positions also enjoy broad and consistent support over time. This is after being lied about forever in msm. Imagine where the numbers might be where $ didn’t equal speech!
Barry is telling you it’s raining outside, but I’d open the curtains if I were you.
“Tearing down the system” = providing citizens with medical care and a slightly better social safety net, like one any dozen of European capitalist countries already enjoy.
Sure.
Oh c’mon folks. He is right in many ways – a huge percentage of the American people have no idea how their livelihoods and jobs were stolen, and they will not be able to learn because they lack the analytic skills and background. Immigrants make an easy target they can understand. For the uninformed, the basics are what matter, as per Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: jobs, healthcare, pensions, and less taxes that eat away fixed or low incomes.
Let’s be serious about candidates too. The “free stuff” meme renders Bernie not electable. Biden is toast due to older age, Ukraine, etc. There is hope for electing Liz Warren. Mayor Pete might be a veep.
The “free stuff” meme is only good for anxious downwardly mobile middle class Americans. The ‘lower class’ Americans already are at the point where ‘any stuff’ is an improvement.
Warren has atrocious political skills. Mayo Pete hits too many buttons. Gabbard would be an excellent Veep pick for Trump. Keep it simple stupid applies to political campaigns especially.
Leaders are elected to lead, not mouth status quo platitudes while New Rome burns. Obama, despite his shortcomings, did lead, only in the opposite direction to the one he campaigned on. Weasel is the nicest thing I can call him.
>a huge percentage of the American people have no idea how their livelihoods and jobs were stolen,
I don’t agree. And even if I did – maybe somebody should stand up and tell them? Actually there is a party that does – they have the Presidency and the Senate and just finally lost the house. Because, again even accepting your misunderstanding, the R’s have failed to change anything.
Bernie is the most popular politician in the US in any poll anywhere but you say “he’s not electable”. Actually he’s been elected numerous times….
But it’s us “folks” – jesus, can’t believe you actually said “folks” the Obama runs deep in this one – who are wrong.
The “free stuff” meme only works on the professional and upper classes who don’t want anyone else to have any free stuff like they got. Those who shout about “nobody owes you a living” are usually the ones ripping you off.
BTW you need to be careful with that analytical skills stuff — I’m very blue collar and have never made more than 16/hr in 35 yrs of work. The lower classes have plenty of brains and they know what is going on. They simply don’t have the resources or energy to do anything about it. Too busy trying to stay alive.
What are discussions like with your work buddies?
Those discussions a remarkable like this place — almost identical in fact.
I’m upper-lower class (snicker) and the only free thing I would like is to be able to go to a state park again without having to show the rangers my papers (seasonal parking pass).
Why was such a thing possible when I was a kid, but too far left now?
They may not know exactly *how* their jobs and livelihoods were stolen, but they are starting to zero in on *who* did the dirty work.
Really? Then why did they vote for Trump instead of Clinton?
hey kirk,
if by free stuff you mean something like immediate debt relief
the truth is that it’s overwhelmingly popular (duh)
and trump is scared shitless over it
Bernie will 1932 him
thanks for offering us warren and buttigieg though
mighty kind of ya
> a huge percentage of the American people have no idea how their livelihoods and jobs were stolen, and they will not be able to learn because they lack the analytic skills and background
“It’s just so complex™!”
No, it’s not.
“Mayor Pete might be a veep”
Yeah, someone lacks analytical skills…maybe the last couple of Presidents have been oddities, but the mayor of a city of 100,000 under a country board of supervisors will never be President.
What’s gotten into Peter Daou? His tune has really changed from three years ago.
Also, these comments should lead to an existential crisis for the Daily Kos, if they weren’t so distracted by their favorite soap opera, The Days of our Trump.
I don’t remember, what did he say when Hillary’s response to Medicare for Everyone was “Never ever”?
Yeah, I was really surprised to see that Daou started this thing. Well, keep an eye on things for fishiness, but give people a chance to evolve, that’s my motto that i just made up
Maybe he’s just just trying to get ahead of the growing rowdy spark of a mob.
a perfectly reasonable bertie wooster sort of thing to do
and daou really owes me one for that comparison
because bertie is a tiny bit lovable
>Well, keep an eye on things for fishiness
Oh, yes. Remember Brock’s kiss-and-make-up letter to the Sanders campaign, post-2016?
As far as you can throw them.
Yeah I was wondering that too, since his former dominatrix was saying that exact same thing as Obama when he was shilling for her. I sense another David Brock-type “conversion” here.
Beware of tweets bearing grifts.
Peter Daou has had an awakening. He “confessed” his ignorance and askd for forgiveness.
He is now in on “the revolution”.
Seems for real.
shame?
Having the Jackie Robinson of Presidents tell you how to play the game would make sense, that is if our ersatz slugger’s stats after 8 years in the league hadn’t included a batting average hovering @ the Mendoza Line, 14 home runs, attempted 39 stolen bases and got caught 22 times, and a propensity to make unforced errors all over the field.
Obama was a basketball guy. As a baseball player, he was Michael Jordan, not Jackie Robinson.
And he avoided any attempt to steal a base, for fear it would launch a meme.
No plate discipline either for Obama (no whipping his own party with enticements and threats, as with health care reform, where he could have written off the repubs from day 1 and simply worked within his own party, that had a super majority, for a better outcome)
654 plate appearances
only 14 walks
Strike thirty, Barry!
I recently re-watched Obama’s Flint performance, and it was probably as/more despicable than anything Trump has put out.
The dishonesty, arrogance, condescension and contempt for regular people was bursting out of every pore of his body, and the only redeeming thing in the room was the dignified outrage of Flint residents as it became apparent to them that they were being played. You can see their increasing awareness and anger as his smug, hustler’s self-satisfaction was on full display.
He must have been very pleased with himself.
But this anger at Obama will pass.
Many innocents died and a country destroyed after the “Saddam has WMDs” was used as an excuse to launch a war.
But Bush the lesser was willing to be filmed “looking for WMDs” in the Oval Office waste basket for a White House Correspondents’ Dinner skit..
He should have been refused to participate in the skit.
Now Bush Jr. is being rehabilitated, with Democratic support.
I hear local liberals mention that “Trump is worse than Bush” as they seem to forget all Bush’s wars, torture and illegal surveillance.
Obama is a far better con man than Trump as many he conned are still unaware that he conned them, while being suspicious of “con man” Trump.
It works for Obama as the Benjamins keep rolling in.
I am so glad you pointed this out. You describe O perfectly. And this is what I saw after he won the 2008 and walked out on stage with Michelle and his 2 girls. Immediately after achieving his electoral goal he dropped the activist mask and had a look on his face like – Man, these people are easy to manipulate. But we weren’t. So many people, in their disappointment, have turned hard against Obama that it has become an undercurrent the democrats cannot dispel – they can’t just wave it off anymore. “Never Again” would be a good political slogan for anyone with the honesty to go long. I think it could be Liz – but I doubt she’ll get the chance. She just hedges way too much.
I’ve told (liberal) friends about that, and had them not believe me
that’s how well managed the liberal truth bubble is
not much is going in
Yes, ask liberals or even leftists with TDS to compare Bush’s first three years in office – a literally stolen election, The Patriot Act, Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, etc. – with Trump’s, and they’ll be briefly chastened. I’ve witnessed the actual confusion on their faces as they ponder it, seemingly for the first time…
Then they revert right back to the false comfort of their moral superiority, something which is what helped give us Trump in the first place.
That’s not fair to Michael Jordan. If you ever saw Obama throw a baseball, he was more like Hillary Clinton than MJ as a baseball player. :-)
There is good news and there is bad news about all this. First, the good news-
Finally people are seeing him for who he really is and this whole edifice of St. Obama is starting to crumble. He is no longer the untouchable one who is beyond criticism. If it keeps up, it might just spike that ugly-a** building that he wants to build to himself in Chicago’s park-lands.
Now the bad news-
At only 58 years of age, you can expect to hear this sort of crap coming from him for the next coupla decades as he defends the rights and privileges of the 1%. Especially as he becomes one of the “respected elders” of the Democratic party over time.
The resemblance of the Obama Presidential Library to a circa 1944 Germany flak tower is uncanny, I wonder if any of the brain trust noticed it, and if you were to put armaments on top of said edifice, would they be Rocket 88’s?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbfnh1oVTk0
“Call for Mr. Ozymandias on line one. Call for Mr. Ozymandias on line one.”
It’s a neoliberal necropolis, not a library ..
Too many elite rice bowls in Chicago will be filled by the Obama occupation of Jackson Park so it will never be spiked. Chicago’s Machine is notoriously corrupt, and there are simply too many millions at stake, contracts to be handed out to favored donors, sinecures to be secured, black people to price out of their homes in South Shore and Woodlawn, developers to enrich once the neighborhoods have been emptied of the dark-skinned hoi polloi. Plus, a Tiger Woods golf course where one will be able to go to and hammer out the next scam during a leisurely stroll to the 9th green.
I live very close by, Jackson Park is one of my favorite places to enjoy and find some peace in the city. It sickens me that that eyesore will be menacingly towering over the formerly peaceful Osaka Japanese Garden and Wooded Island, just a few hundred feet away. Somehow the fact that Michelle will finally get that sled hill she dreamt of as a child is not any consolation.
You’ve been away for a while. Glad to see you back.
Thank you Yves :) I am lurking and reading every day, dealing with depression makes it hard to contribute regularly however.
Perhaps people could use powerful slings and slingshots and so forth to fling loads of dog poo and human poo and etc. at the walls of that building, once it is built. At night, wearing black ninja suits, so as to evade detection.
Perhaps fling dead rats into the grounds.
Perhaps keep dumping garbage on the grounds.
Make it a monument to Obama’s true self.
Re post POTUS photo’s, I think Obama does have a conscience, no matter what he mouthes.
He looks like a haunted ghost.
Granted, he hasn’t come clean with his schtick. And I doubt he will. He has achieved his ambition of hanging in the 1% tribe.
“I think Obama does have a conscience, no matter what he mouthes.”
It is because you are a decent person. This is the thought fallacy decent people fall into when thinking about our misleadership. Our misleadership have no conscience at all and do not think twice about killing us and making us suffer any way they can. The sooner decent people will understand this, the sooner we can all stand up and take the fight that is needed.
“At twenty, you have the face you’re born with. At fifty, you have the face you deserve.”
– Nelson Algren
IMO he’s crumbling fast. People I know who loved him are disenchanted. And this latest is backfiring specifically bc m4a has become popular everywhere, even among reps. Bernie would be the guy bringing in poor reps dying for m4a in a general, no doubt shocking Schumer and pelosi.
And a Bernie pres would show any remaining Obama believers he never had any clothes.
Sad disclosure; I voted for him at every opportunity. But I finally learned that the lesser evil is still evil.
Setting aside Obamacare where he didn’t resist being held up by Max Baucus with the result being the shabbiest possible reform, and a couple of wars that Hillary wanted that he didn’t go along with, Obama’s political cowardice, there’s no other name for it unless you want to call it innate timidity in which he allowed himself to be immobilized by McConnell [consider How do you think LBJ would have dealt with McConnell on the Supreme Court nominee? Ever federal project involving money spent in Kentucky would be backburnered until the screaming was too loud. Obama is in the crude, accurate, though now forbidden vocabulary from the 50s a “pu**y”] Add to this essential “puss*ness” his defacto pardonning of Bush War criminals and the Wall Street/Bank Street Criminals and you have someone with no standing to give advice on anything involving politics if you believe that politics is about change. Obama gave “good speech” in the Monica sense of “give good”. Without Obamacare, the weakest possible, he’s nothing. Or am I being unfair to someone who really was cut from the FDR, LBJ [domestically only] cloth?
for all his flaws, LBJ is one of my favorite politicians…his “Treatment” was wonderful.
I live in LBJ Country(stonewall is about 60 miles to my south) and , coupled with the legacy of the German Freethinkers, LBJ is in the marrow out here…which is sometimes hilarious during a righty uprising like the teaparty.(“the Cognitive Dissonance!!! It Hurts!!!”)
rural electrification, a phone system(party line where i live until the early 90’s), and especially paved roads and farm subsidies. the word “LBJ” is left out in common usage(like FDR), but reverence for the works is there, and offers a crack in the wall through which to enter.
Correction, Obama and Rahm made deals with all the healthcare and insurance financial stakeholders before Baucus got in on the game. Get it straight that shabbiest reform was the full extent of reform he wanted. No mitigation of this should ever be allowed.
Isn’t obama saing something is “too far left” like a badge of honor.
Any idea that is not “too far left” for obama, isn’t even in the running for being a good idea.
Obama has been the same , his article he wrote in foreign affairs back in 2007, was perfectly honest as to what he wanted to do. He made no pretense of being anything but an establishment tool.
And now the former first couple soak up the riches and the fame and the historical revisionism that all the leaders get… so they can go out and pretend they are not the scum they really are.With all their brethren at the club.
#TooFarLeft indeed
Anyone who’s anyone knows the poor and middle class aren’t paying their fair share, our military vendors are underfunded, and that our health care is too cheap.
But the former Pres. is forgetting the tried and true strategy of politics.
If you wanna win, you gotta have #BaitAndSwitch
Could it be that Obama is actually an android that is running a version of Artificial Intelligence? No, seriously. We already know that when you put AI in one of those self-driving cars, that it has difficulty with left hand turns. Obama’s AI version may also have an incompatibility with turning left. But like that self-driving car in Arizona, it knows what to do when there is a poor person in front of it.
No he’s not a Bot. He’s bought.
But yes, in a sense. Because he comes by his mindset naturally. His grandparents, whom he loved and admired, worked as shadow agents for the State Department. Everybody employed to perpetuate Empire America had one goal. Keep America the only superpower. Which we have been since WW2 – propaganda about those evil Ruskies notwithstanding. And Superpower meant money-power; the dollar, more than any other single thing. It shouldn’t surprise any of us that when our imperial financial system imploded in 2007, they found the perfect schmoozer to ease the misery. There was no way we were going to get the society we all wanted – it was in direct conflict with neoliberal cutthroat profits and ragtag races to the bottom. Everything was up for grabs – especially poor homeowners in this country. But now that we all understand this unfortunate dynamic, it might become clearer sailing. Bec. if not, then society truly collapses. I’d actually like to hear Obama apologize.
“Obama believes the lesson of his presidency is that he tried for too much radical change too quickly and it caused a backlash. That is objectively wrong but it’s what he believes.”
No, it’s not what he believes, but it’s his story and he is sticking to it.
I assume this Is his justification for his memoir. Obama cares about Obama. My guess is the book isn’t shaping up to be the litany of accomplishment and change worthy of the imperial presidency.
“In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.”
–Adolph L. Reed, Jr., The Village Voice, 16 January 1996.
Obama was only one thing! He was the face of the marketing strategy used by the 1% to stop the political pendulum from moving back to the left in 2008. 2008 should have been a shift to the left like Reagan’s 1980 shift to the right but Obama and his handlers killed that shift. Obama is the most effective Republican in my lifetime :(
Reagan was his hero.
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2044712,00.html
adding: this is a March 2011, official White House photo by Pete Souza.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Ronald_Reagan#/media/File:Barack_Obama_confers_with_Chief_of_Staff_William_M._Daley,_2011.jpg
Who invested in Obama’s Candidacy – big time? Bankers..
Who stole by the trillions with impunity after Obama was in office? Bankers.
Obama was elected by the bankers to the wonderful profit of … bankers.
How many bankers went to prison for their criminal thievery?
Was Obama a capitol/capital investment for the bankers?
I think the person who had the last tweet in the article was being polie when they said:
It is not that gov is not working for them, the gov is actively working against them. If you are not in ‘the club’ you are viewed as an enemy, an obstacle, or you don’t register at all. Death by government!
Neoliberal Rule #2: Go die!
I dunno, a dead nobody can’t be used as collateral. Better to insert probisci for continued extraction. “Every citizen a sardine can!”
Okay, ICE just told me non-citizens can be desanguinated also.
No, but it can be used for organ harvesting.
Consumers ARE the commodity… just like bankers have been manufacturing their own commodity (money via credit per Ann Pettifor), so has tech and fashion by creating planned obsolescence for fun and profit. We don’t even need 95% of the shit we buy.
I had a bunch of fun with that hashtag yesterday!
If #toofarleft Americans spent some of their energy trying to build a grassroots political movement and making serious demands instead of passively putting all their hope into an electoral politics that, by design, always upholds the status quo…maybe something might actually change.
There is something desperately masochistic, even insane, about playing the same game of charades over and over again (“this time it really will be different!”) knowing that in the end the same scammers and grifters will still be in power…as they always are.
It’s a truism that only the threat of annihilation or losing privilege and status can dislodge entrenched power…and that takes a united front making demands they are prepared to risk something for. But Americans seem to be stuck in an endless Groundhog Day reality loop that they can’t break loose from.
Even worse, an identity politics that divides people along race and gender long lines and increasingly requires one group to self-flagellate and admit that it is inherently bigoted and the root of all evil is just mind-numbingly crazy. Forcing shame on people is asking for the worst kind of trouble. Yet in 2019 American the dominant media gleefully pushes this racist narrative day in day out.
I really do think the insane weirdness that has taken over western society, complete with (appropriately secular) doomsayers predicting imminent apocalypse, suggests a civilization in serious distress. For all the violence and tension in the 60s and 70s there was a sense that society was improving, that things were getting better. Or so I’m told. Today it’s relentless gloom and serious dysfunction combined with hardcore reality evasion.
But I’m sure Bernie has a secret plan so I’m not worried. Honest!
lucy and the football.
hope springs eternal.
good people cannot fathom how bad people think, or what motivates them.
unfortunately, it takes trying to think like a sociopath to outwit them. and then you become your enemy, so what was the point?
a conundrum
a conundrum anon y’mouse
Not so since:
The rich man is wise in his own eyes, but the poor who has understanding sees through him. Proverbs 28:11
Here’s what Bernie Sander’s co-chair Ro Khanna had to say:
The responses to chameleon RO are worth the read alone.
More vetting should have been done on Ro Khanna (yet another California Bay Area Presidential Striver), whose allegiances have always been – and will always be – for Obama and Nancy Pelosi at the end of the day. Hell, Peter Thiel and other Silicon Valley Billionaires were his first supporters. The people rapidly falling through the cracks in his Silicon Valley District (I know very well, and have met, a good number of them) should have been asked their opinion of him. He’s far more dangerously opaque and clever than Gavin, Kamala, and Eric could ever be.
Agree, big time, on Ro Khanna™: slippery as all get-out, and seeing him become
Sanders’s co-chair really set me wondering about some things..
Yes, Carey.
Unfortunately, the ‘little people’ are never asked, or allowed to speak, until it’s way too late.
I will bet my life that most aren’t even aware that Khanna married into the Multimillionaire, Rust Belt Ohio Republican Family of Monte Ahuja, and that Khanna’s campaign advisor, Steve Spinner, wooed Hillary. Not all that long ago: October 24, 2016 Campaign really wanted Hillary Clinton at Ro Khanna’s wedding in Cleveland
The filthy rich are always BiPartisan [Republocrat ]™ , behind tightly closed security doors. They have utterly no loyalty to any of the millions of impoverished: laborer; disabled; minority; or so called ‘retired’ residents of the country they’ve made their fortune in, even if it’s the country of their birth and initial support system.
Disclosure: I didn’t vote for Honda either (didn’t vote for anyone, haven’t for a while, when my only choice is Republocrat/Technocrat), I was shattered at a response I received from Honda’s office regarding a vital issue, though I will say he’s most likely a far better human than Khanna.
Well, I may not be the average American, but I really do think we now have no choice but to “completely tear down the system and remake it.” I just don’t see any other way.
As early as December 2008–the moment Obama began appointing all the Clinton people to his cabinet–I knew we’d been had. I didn’t even bother voting in 2012, seeing no substantive difference between him and Romney.
I still believe Obama had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to right the ship of state, but he didn’t want the risk, so he punted. So sad … it may be a while before we get such a chance again, if ever.
I LOLed at that whopper, “Even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision”. Because the only way the first part would apply to Obama and the Corporate Dems is “push the envelope in small spirals around an ever-rightward-moving center”, or perhaps “push the envelope of corporate bribe money deep into our jacket pocket.” And the only way the latter part makes sense is if Obama is using “vision” as a euphemism for “lies”.
Interesting and troubling framing by Obama. Reveals the depth of concern among the elite about the traction being gained by Sanders and Warren despite the placement of many impediments. They sense power is slipping away as a result of their policies over the past three decades. Obama’s reaction leads to questions about whether the published polls are being gamed. Also opens the door to sanctioning a reaction by the usual suspects, much as with Occupy. I would much rather see the former president counter the candidates’ arguments on their merits rather than unilaterally dismissing particular candidates as simply unacceptable under his worldview. But then he’s not running for office, is he?…
The responses to chameleon RO are worth the read alone.
Much more vetting should have been done on Ro Khanna (yet another California Bay Area Presidential Striver) as one of Bernie Sanders Co-Chairs , whose allegiances have always been – and will always be – for Obama and Nancy Pelosi at the end of the day. Hell, Peter Thiel and other Silicon Valley Billionaires were his first supporters. The people rapidly falling through the cracks in his Silicon Valley District (I know very well, and have met, a good number of them) should have been asked their opinion of him. He’s far more dangerously opaque and clever than Gavin, Kamala, and Eric could ever be.
Sorry to have to bring the “H” word into this conversation, but when Obama is mentioned then visions of H*** are invading my head. And, the ending of the season for Bill ( not that Bill ) was predictably nauseous in its kissing up to the likes of DNC madame Donna B. Bill looked her in the eyes and told her she was…wait for it,.. the ultimate compliment for the shallow, !ambitious! Sold out woman: she was looking younger every time he saw her! She gave him a good doggy smile. He then doubled down and said: I don’t know how you do it! She gave her most fake innocent smirk. Then said something like: well, I am turning 60. Later called herself the silver fox…when Mahr played up her going on Fox. I have no reason to watch this disgusting show, except to see what the not too far left “woke and progressive ” Dems and their sycophants are spewing out in the ether. Also, we like to laugh at how awful he really is as a human being with a band box to sell venomous oil.
Bringing this back to Hills.
Donna and Bill played their big duo finale: Can not remember exactly the introduction of Hills as they discussed Dem candidates…but, Bill played smart sceptic: no ,Hills, no! Donna played progressive open minder: I Think anyone who wants to run in our party should have that opportunity. This is at the end of their “panel” having played the good, the bad and the ugly on other ones’ “attributes “. Of course, I can’t recall Bernie even mentioned at all. I am starting to think they are going to do it again. Hope I am wrong!
I worked with an editor who had a standard critique of book designs that didn’t work well: Clowns in a blender.
And here from that supposed master of rhetoric, a quadruple-axel of mixed metaphors, swirling away:
“Even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision we also have to be rooted in reality,” Mr. Obama said. “The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.”
Aside from the lack of that vaunted elegant thinking that David Axelrod thinks that Obama is capable of, we are also seeing the Democratic Party in shambles. The mainstream / liberal wing is planning on losing the 2020 elections. Meanwhile, the impeachment testimony seems to consist in trotting out a series of liberalish Oliver Norths… patriots on a career track.
Simpering, arrogant, careerist, hippie-punching IDpol phony that he is, Obama’s entire “career” was scripted from unopposed, staged selection to election (with the exception of his defeat by Bobby Rush in his only actual campaign) by his handlers, burnished with a patina of “community organizer” leftish street cred and crowned with Advertising Age’s Marketer of the Year Award.
His 2004 Dem convention keynote speech told us everything we needed to know that this cipher was going to be installed as president in 2008 to carry water and block pitchforks for the 1%.
Then I read Adolph Reed’s takedown.
Then he stocked his cabinet with Wall Street re-treads and a hotline to Jamie Dimon to get his instructions.
I lost a job in the nonprofit industrial complex because I failed to render unqualified veneration to that POS.
I still can’t fathom why anyone on the left was taken in by this stinking, lying fraud then, or now.
Obama has always equated ‘realistic’ with Establishment. His legacy is pretty much bait-and-switch.
Golly gee, I’m just so glad we’ve got someone to tell us what we should and shouldn’t do!
Yeah, right, like I would ever listen to someone who sold me and all the millions of other homeowners out for those handy Benjamins from the wealthy bankers. Think maybe he and all his miscreant friends should maybe think about actually going out and – gasp! – talking to the average american to see what they want. Think they might be surprised to learn that while we don’t necessarily think we need to remake the system, we do want all of the things the progressives are talking about. Housing, healthcare and a quality education free from lifetimes of debt definitely are human rights and he and his miscreant friends had better get their a***s out of our way!
Adolph Reed had this huckster’s number a quarter century ago (1/96 Village Voice):
In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.
Obama goes on Jimmy Dore to defend his actions-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fylrEUs8bR0
Stop Slouching! That “interview” was hilarious.
No useful comment from me but just wanted to let you all know how much I needed to read this awesome comment thread.
It is reassuring to know much smarter, more articulate people than me in the commentariat here see things as I do and flesh out those thoughts better than I can.
I am surrounded here in SE PA by right wing nuts and Obama DNC groupies… It gets lonely sometimes…
Don’t feel too bad, its the same up here by Buffalo.
Not too many right wing nuts here in NYC (though still probably more than we think), but a huge surplus of liberals with TDS, incapable of reasoning about Trump, and quick to attack you with their NPR totes bags if their moral vanity is disturbed.
I knew somebody attacked in that fashion, with the pain coming in monthly installments…
I wish something like this had been wisely publicized BEFORE Obama became President.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/exclusive-how-obamas-early-career-succes-was-built-on-fronting-for-chicago-real-estate-and-finance.html
Oldie but goldie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98Jmw5o9ulA