Down

I have to admit I'm starting to feel pessimistic, and it's not just the latest jobs report. It's the unrelenting lying, and the torrential flow of billionaire money into deceptive ads, the nastiness of which is just beginning. And, of course, it's the constant and undisguised propagandizing by the right wing's favorite "news" source.

But it's more than that. Many liberals are disappointed with Barack Obama -- because of policies that ought to have made the RWS™ deliriously happy and because of which their claims of terrorist-loving America-hating on the part of the president ought to have disappeared in a flashboom, like the leadership of al Queda: kill lists, citizen targeting, Gitmo, detentions. The list goes on.

And that's the point: Obama is the centrist he always was, and he's doing -- legally or otherwise -- what he thinks he needs to do to protect against terrorism; and he's done what he thinks he had to do, by way of compromising on important issues like health care and taxes and the stimulus, to get done what little the Rs have allowed. And yet, the RWS™ keep pushing the idea that he's a radical socialist, a weak-kneed terrorist appeaser; and the sheep lick it up like corn sugar.

As always, the bottom-line issue remains choosing between fiscal priorities that will allow us to pay for such frivolities as education, infrastructure, health care, safety nets, environmental protection, research, alternative energy, predict the weather, etc, etc, versus ones that will preserve and increase tax cuts for the wealthy and for businesses, increase military spending, and drastically and irreversibly cut the aforementioned government functions to make the numbers work (although they don't). (It's also a choice between foreign policies in which war is a last or a first resort.) But the seriousness of that choice is lost in the din. Which is partly because the Ds, as usual, are unable to maintain a coherent and focused message, but mostly because the right-wing scream machine is so loud and well-funded, feeling no moral need to attach to reality; and because its target audience is so uninterested in and incapable of hearing truth through the noise.

I know it's too early to draw conclusions, and I know summertime polls are notoriously non-predictive; but based on what's really at stake -- as opposed to the false picture drawn and paid for by the only group that stands to benefit from a Rominee presidency, ie those that have theirs and will be fine no matter how badly the country stumbles -- it ought already to look like a landslide for Obama.

It doesn't. Deliberate blocking of Obama's jobs programs by teabaggRs, followed by decrying (barely containing their glee) the lack of jobs. Unaccounted money and unbridled lies. An easily deceived public, their prejudices and paranoia carefully (and brilliantly) stoked nonstop. Ruthless and concentrated messaging untethered by fact, opposing discohesive, disorganized and limp response.

Yes, I keep giving money, and every time I do I get asked for more. But it'd take millions of me's (does that apostrophe go there?) to counter just one of the Rovians, and I don't get the sense that it's gonna happen. Obama is the left-leaning centrist I always thought he was, a fact disappointing to the further left, and ignored by the right to advance their greedy goals. In the elation of his victory, I completely underestimated the kind of reaction, from day one, there'd be on the right, nor foresaw how far right the entire Republican party would go, how willing they'd be to wreck the recovery for their political ends, and how unthinkingly their sheep would follow.

For a realist, which I am, pessimism seems to be the only logical state of mind.