Our friend and blogger Opus #6 found THIS EXCELLENT ARTICLE by Liberal Mort Zuckerman on why he's disappointed in Obama. I think it's worth reading. It's reasoned, unemotional, factual and fascinating. I PROMISE you won't be sorry. (thanks, Opus, great find)
Saturday, January 23, 2010
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22 comments:
A little more directly critical of Obama than Zuckerman's earlier laments here.
Nothing is more cold-blooded than the current "Obama should ask Bill Clinton for advice" meme stirring up in the left-o-sphere. They want him to calculate and "triangulate" his way out of making his Presidency a disaster that is taking his party down with him.
My prediction:
Obama will face Democrat party nomination challengers in 2012.
The "we'll suck less than this guy" factor will be worth the comedy gold alone.
beamish, interesting you should say that...a friend, just yesterday, said she noticed Obama's doing something with his mouth when he speaks (other than the obvious LIES!) that exactly mimics Clinton's when he was trying to appear very sincere....I'll have to look for it.
Well, heck, we might have the first ventriloquist president...did you hear him invoke MLK Jr's way of speaking during his MLK speech? The clip, precise way Obama ALWAYS talks suddenly became loooong, drawn out gospel-givin' type talk that made you want to laugh out loud.
Our CHameleon president: You want it, I'll give it to you, as long as I WANT IT, TOO.
Could be that there is a change in the direction of the hot air in the offing. Zuckerman has been guardedly critical of Obama for a while, I think. Even Tina Brown is pretending she wasn't gaga over President Obama.
But John McCain is now embracing and endorsing both Sarah Plain and Scott Brown — could it be that he'll be introducing them to his puppet masters soon? Waiting in the wings is another version of a "compassionate conservative" which should please everybody, including those that hate to admit that President Obama is very close to being called "The Black Bush".
Waylon
The irony is Obama will have to make centrist noises and largely sign on to the Republican agenda in 2011 and 2012 as Clinton did in 95 and 96, after the GOP takes back Congress this year, in order to save chances of his re-election.
The "triangulation" will come when Obama's Democratic Party challenger in 2012 is almost a parody. Maybe that Democrat challenger will assist the shoe-in of Obama getting the Dem nomination in 2012 by going way left field (i.e. "let's put Americans to work building death camps for Jews," etc.) so Obama can come off as a moderate, and the short of attention span will fall for it.
I just look at the spirit now. Republicans in polling are EXCITED about November. Democrats are dreading it. Democrats have all but written off keeping Congress this year. Obama's wheels have come off, and no one wants to try to help him put them back on.
He's a lame duck with even a year of Democrats controlling Congress still left to go.
That's hilarious (to me) and I don't think Obama's skills for loading community activist staple guns are up to the job of changing the course he's blundered into.
and this could be the best time ever to have a stronger RNC/GOP, no doubt about it, Beamish....a more Conservative, dedicated push to stop this socialist and PC junk....
maybe this could energize Steele and give confidence that he CAN go more and more conservative..i hope so
Waylon, I'm thinking this isn't the time either Palin or Brown would go squishy on Conservatism...
And, really, they're embracing HIM right now in spite of Hayworth's excellent conservative credentials for the Arizona senate seat...
BUT, I think that's promises they'd made for HIS help and, hopefully, that'll be the end of that.
WE DO, however, have to keep AZ...so I hope the Republican fighting there stops soon
Zuckerman's comments indicate that he is disappointed in Obama NOT because he disagreed with what Obama said he was going to do, or with a particular idology of Obama's, but because the President has not been able to accomplish what he said he was going to accomplish.
How John McCain still has any pull with conservatives at any level is beyond me, unless there have been some kind of quid pro quo, in which case they have all fallen prey to the whims of politicalization.
I wonder how many of BHO's former supporters feel the same way as Zuckerman.
A good find, indeed.
Read some of the comments in the article, and there are some good ones (highlighted one of them in a post).
Great find, Z!
Ducky, you can turn ANYTHING around to look like it went your way. It's a GIFT!
It's almost as funny as your trying to convince anybody Air America's demise meant nothing about liberals in America !!!!!
Well z, I'm not sure what the radio dial looks like these days in other parts of the country.
Now not all that long ago, Boston's was probably the best in the world and I mean that. I've been around and never really heard the equal.
It's not what it was but talk hasn't really consumed it and the talk is pretty evenly split between left and right. Air America was only here for a brief time, no great loss. I was much more upset when M.I.T. ("WMBR 88.1 the left most station on your dial") dropped "Democracy Now" but it got picked up over at WZBC along with "Guns and Butter".
I do notice that the left isn't as angry as the right. These far right rabies radio shows really feed into the right's anger and sense of impotence.
So, it's good here. Although I do morn the days when Beantown radio wasn't quite so segregated and we were all listening to a big mix ... jazz, country, Indian, classical, folk ... and the news was hard news and we were all listening to that ... and "Danny Schecter Your News Dissector" was over at WBCN and Matt Taibbi was on ... best in the world, oh those were good days.
Our radio isn't as good as it was for music, either, Ducky...we just lost a great classical station, too.
As for leftwingers and anger? You just can't see it because you're IN it.
The Right has more to be angry about...We think America's a great country and we're tired of seeing what the left's doing to it.
I was thinking earlier about how the media makes such an incessant stink over Blackwater, Abu Ghraib, and any other thing that makes US look bad, over and over every day until the next story comes...and does so little about publishing the good in America.
This isn't BAD NEWS SELLS, this is something that our kids are hearing....and it's not helpful.
That's your leftwing...not US
Well, at least Obama understands the limits of Clinton style triangulation. It's supposed to be bipartisan but what it means is take guff from the life and tell the left to sit on it.
So Obama, you either govern left or you hand the mess back to the right so they can really do a number on the middle class.
Option 2 is okay so long as we can recover. But folks should have about enough of the Full Ayn Rand and be ready to listen to reason.
"Did you ever stand and shiver,
Just because you were lookin' at a river"
Sorry I've got Ramblin' Jack Eliot's "912 Greens" on the iPod.
"President Obama is very close to being called "The Black Bush"."
Waylon, no way. Bush understood the advantage of lower expectations. He didn't argue with it, or fight it.
His ego allowed he'd be more successful if he was underestimated, and have people surprised or content rather than discouraged.
I'll probably get some argument here, but, Bush got the tax cut passed, The agreement to go to war, the MedicareRX (which I opposed btw), and the support of the people in his duties as Commander in Chief. The latter being the most important.
He was re-elected.
The electorate did not expect impossible achievements from Bush. He didn't promise them or overreach. He made it clear that he was an American first.
Obama's mistake was raising expectations to an impossible level. His ego was and is insatiable. He seems to have believed his own hype.
He has made it clear he is not an American first, and seems to disdain this country. His arrogance exceeds any solid judgement. His political skills are wanting. At some point, talk is cheap.
He can't sell his leftist agenda because that's not what the people thought they were buying.
The fact is, Bush was capable of being President and Obama is not. Obama's ideology does not comport with American values. He is a true believer in his radical agenda, and is swimming upstream.
Finally, he seems to me to be very immature, too thin skinned, and out of his league.
Other than that, would you like to know how I really feel?
Pris
I heard Zuckerman say that he was disgusted by the blatant bribes involved in Obamacare. He says it was Change. Change for the worse.
I was always puzzled why any billionaire would support leftists. Suicidal naivete is the answer.
TY 4 the link.
Ducky, you can turn ANYTHING around to look like it went your way. It's a GIFT!
It's the effect of taking dialectical materialism seriously. Ducky thinks the turd he's eating is a candy bar, and so to him, it is.
It's sort of like when his fellow leftists send people to "re-education camps" to die after it becomes illegal to be unhappy.
Mort nails it! As I heard one man say today, we now know Obama is not the Messiah. The Messiah came to die for other peoples' sins; Obama wants other people (Dems his foolish healthcare plan has made vulnerable) to die for his.
Pris, I agree that President Obama is running a radical agenda and it's not popular with most (at least a majority) of the people. What he's got that President Bush never had is popular support in most of the media. I don't buy the motion that the media is suddenly moving to the right — more emphasis on individual initiative and less government. What I see even in the most frothing of the rabid leftists is that Obama is not doing what they expect him to do — massive expansion of the government, and reality belies that fact since he's probably doing more government than any other president, at least that I can remember.
What I didn't like about Bush came about from his actions differing for his words and I think it was about the time of Hurricane Katrina that it became apparent to me that he wasn't the free market individualist that he presented himself to be originally.
When I use the label "The Black Bush", I'm not saying that everything he does like Bush has done, but there are more of similarities than radical differences, in my opinion. Who would have thought when Bush was elected that a fascist like Henry Paulson would take the first steps toward what a radical leftist like Obama would seize onto and expand?
I think the economic failure today is not capitalism but Keynsianism — a failure of socialism which has been in practice since the days of FDR ... and he was a charter member of the British Fabian Socialists which endeared him to FDR.
Seems like we've come to the end of the road with the failure of Keynsian socialism — so the fork we are at in the road hopefully will lead to a wholehearted embrace of capitalism and the free market — i.e. Ayn Rand!
Waylon
On the McLaughlin Group -- the original Shout Show -- the Granddaddy of them all -- Zuckerman always billed himself as "A Moderate Conservative."
If Mort Zuckerman is a liberal, then Eleanor Clift and Clarence Paige are machine-gun toting BOLSHEVIKS and man-eating MAOISTS.
U.S. News & World report has been the ONLY weekly news mag even to ATTEMPT to appear even-handed in the past two generations.
Time and Newsweek are paler versions of The Nation these days -- and going down the tubes FAST, I might add. The last issue of Time was about 1/16 of an inch thick. Puh-THET-ick!
Print media -- for good or for ill -- is MORIBUND.
So Mort supported BO? Well, I'm GLAD he was disappointed. He should also be CHAGRINED.
~ FreeThinke
FT..for heaven's sake, I haven't watched McLaughlin for a while, but you are SO RIGHT. Mort WAS a moderate conservative...I'd forgotten. Boy, did HE go off the deep end, huh?
Thanks for the reminder.
And, oh, doesn't Eleanor Clift make you GRIT YOUR TEETH!!?
Z, Eleanor Clift must be the secret illegitimate child of Eleanor Roosevelt and Joe Stalin. ;-)
You can't help but wonder if these people could POSSIBLY mean what they say?
~ FT
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