So the local newspaper published another of my rants today:
It’s said, by whom I’m not sure, that the best contract is
one in which both parties think they got screwed. By that measure, Barack Obama
is surely among the best presidents we’ve had. He’s disappointed liberals by
opting against single-payer health care, not closing Gitmo, continuing George
Bush’s NSA abuses, doing too little to prevent Wall Street excess, letting
certain war criminals off the hook, drilling too much, and more. Conservatives
(nowadays I use the term advisedly) consider our president a power-mad dictator
who’s also an ineffectual coward; a diabolical America-hater whose every
action, no matter how moderate or previously advocated, deserves unrestrained,
wild-eyed condemnation. Especially when he tries to get things done while they
refuse to.
It’s hard to watch Congressional Republicans unfailingly
defend corporate interests at the expense of regular citizens, or to see yet
another expression of conspiratorial outrage at something President Obama said or
didn’t say, did or didn’t do. And it’s not because I think people never have a
point in criticizing the president. It’s that I see the mainstream anger on the
right as carefully orchestrated, ginned-up by the same people who financed the
Tea Party and convinced them to vote against their own interests. How else to
get people to look the other way while their party protects tax cuts for the
favored while ignoring the present and future needs of everyone else? The
faster they take us to plutocracy, the more they misdirect voters to shiny
objects. Prestidigitation. Worked for Houdini.
Barack Obama’s presidency has been far from perfect. People
say he’s been in office long enough that he should take full responsibility for
all outcomes. I don’t entirely disagree. But it’s inarguable that he’s faced
unprecedented and unanimous obstruction from the other side. None of George
Bush’s initiatives – none – failed to get at least some Democratic votes. Well,
you say, that just means he was better at negotiating with Congress. And I
might buy it, were it not for the fact that on the first day of Obama’s
presidency, before the words of his speech had stopped echoing around the
National Mall, even as those embarrassing inaugural balls were still bouncing, Republican
leaders were meeting to plot destruction of his agenda before they’d even heard
it, whatever it was, no matter the tax cuts he included in the stimulus, or the
conservative origins of his health care reform.
But let’s forget that. I can’t, but let’s anyway. Let’s look
at what’s going on today. The sad state of those children at our southern
border is instructive. The only thing I know for sure is that it’s horrible,
and that the solution, if and when it’s found, will involve much more than a
bunch of even more horrible people shouting red-faced and righteous at busloads
of frightened children; or Rick Perry sending a thousand Guardsmen to repel
them; or Republican leaders claiming Obama is deliberately bringing them here, nevermind
fleeing murder and mayhem, to achieve unspecified but definitely dastardly ends.
Marco Rubio says the problem is the order Obama signed delaying deportation of
some minors. Does he, does anyone who watches Fox “news” know that the order
applied only to those that have been here since 2007? Or that it was George WMD
Bush who signed the law preventing immediate deportation of children from
non-border countries? How much easier to spin conspiracy theories, to create
fear and resentment, than to do the hard work of finding real solutions. (Heroic
Sarah Palin bailed on the hard job of governing in favor of more remunerative,
consequence- and content-free bloviating and Foxidolitry.)
Legislating,
including the willingness, birthed in Philadelphia, to compromise for the
common good, happens to be the job, much as they’d prefer to ignore it, of
those legislators who’d rather rush to Fox “news” cameras than to their desks. Who
are readying a vote-shopping lawsuit against President Obama for delaying
implementation of a law they’ve voted fifty-some times to repeal, while
ignoring the fact that their previous president did that very thing with his health care law. And demanding,
without irony, that he not enforce
the aforementioned immigration law that other guy signed.
I wonder if Republican voters will ever consider why and by
whom they’re being motivated to scream at kids instead of legislators, or to
believe there’s no climate change, or to ignore our crumbling infrastructure, to
demonize teachers, demand spending on more wars, and who stands to gain from
it. Not before it’s too late. Of that I’m certain.
