Somebody at the White House needs to be fired -- AmericaBLOG on the "left of the left" statement

[nashville_brook]

you've really just got to go over to AmericaBLOG and read THE WHOLE THING -- especially the part about DADT/DOMA. i had to edit this down way too far for it to be as powerful as the original. -- b



Somebody at the White House needs to be fired

by John Aravosis



snip

Read this in today's Washington Post, about the uproar over Obama caving on the public option:

"I don't understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo," said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We've gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don't understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform."

snip

You don't hear similar criticism coming out of the White House about the crazy teabaggers shutting down the town hall meetings and accusing Obama of being a socialist, and Hitler. You don't hear senior White House officials calling them the right of the right, or questioning their dedication to the cause. No, they're patriotic Americans exercising their First Amendment rights, White House officials tell the press. And Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, who's been running around the country telling people that Barack Obama plans to put millions of elderly to death - never a bad word from the White House about him either. The only people that Barack Obama's White House feels comfortable deriding and dismissing in the media are the people who put him into office in the first place. Democrats.


snip

And then, in classic Obama White House style, when you get upset about President Obama backing off a major campaign promise, you're the bad guy for expecting Barack Obama to keep his word and do the thing he promised he'd do in exchange for your vote.

To some degree, it's understandable that senior Obama advisers are giving quotes like this to the Washington Post because you'd have to be seriously out of touch, and a bit of an idiot politically, to have gotten an overwhelmingly popular president, with control of both houses of Congress, into this mess in the first place.

How many times do we have to have the same blow ups with Barack Obama's people, for the same reasons, before someone in the White House realizes that they have a serious problem on their hands? Is this what the next four years are going to be like?

[Sebastian Doyle]

1. Gotta be Rahm

This is standard DLC spin. Same broken record those faux-democrat assholes have been playing from day one.

Blame the Liberals/the left/all REAL Democrats while dragging the country so goddamn far to the right that even a traditional REPUBLICAN wouldn't even recognize it.

All in the name of the almighty corporate dollar. Specifically the insurance corporate dollar, in this case.

[nashville_brook]

4. i love that Keith led with this tonight. led with a Special Comment, no less.

Obama -- the outrageously popular new president with a mandate -- needed to be selling this, and working to counter the wailing/beating-of-breasts from the insurance companies. He didn't get in there and fight like there are REAL PEOPLE out here dying b/c they can't see a doctor. He's treated this like a negotiation between two guys on the golf course. Fuck, we don't need him to be the insurance companies' bestest friend. We needed him to get out there and LEAD the country in the right direction. Instead he kept his powder dry. Is this the result of bad advice -- the oh-so-predictable advice offered by Rahm and his kind.

[Laelth]

10. Hear, hear. n/t

:dem:

-Laelth

[baldguy]

2. Whoever is telling him to try to work with the GOP, instead of rolling over them.

Whoever is telling him to follow the lead of Congress, instead of leading them.

[theoldman]

3. Correct on both counts.

How long will it take Obama to learn that the Republicans will fight him tooth and nail on everything. Maybe he needs to talk to Bill Clinton a little longer.

[nashville_brook]

5. it's not like Senior Advisors can be too far off from where the CIC stands.

otherwise heads would already be rolling.

[rudy23]

7. Exactly. And if it is Rahm, we need to understand he was the first person hired by this president.

Rahm, or whichever "senior WH adviser" who had that much disdain for the left, and our public option, is speaking for the president, until he publicly rebukes them.

[ThomCat]

6. It has been this way since the day Obama got into office.

Pander to the right, downplay and criticize the left. Yet the Obamatons keep insisting that he's the most progressive president we've ever had. Hell no he's not. He keeps moving farther and farther to the right, and shit like this proves that the staff he chose is right there with him, pulling him to the right.

He and his administration are so-called "moderate" Democrats who never saw a corporation he couldn't "compromise" with. That's why Trillions of dollars have gone to Wall Street profits with damned near nothing in regulations or changes coming down on Wall Street in change for all that money to prevent these predatory bubbles from happening again. That's why Single Payer was never on the table in the health care debates, and Obama is meeting behind closed doors with corporate reps cutting deals. That's why they're now trying to find a "compromise" that lets them kill the public option even thought the public option was The Compromise that allowed them to kill single payer.

[nashville_brook]

8. makes me wonder where the zeitgeist will take us next -- left or right (FDR or Reagan)

[Echo In Light]

9. No "caving;" genuine reform was never intended.