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Monday, November 29, 2010

Choices

Obama's "tough choice" (= stupid choice) to freeze pay for Federal Workers is a pre-emptive surrender to Republican anti-governmental bullshit rhetoric, a capitulation to economically illiterate austerity rhetoric punishing mostly Democratic voters for no good purpose. Good times.

2 comments:

meat olaf said...

Pardon, but I do seem to recall that this was the same individual that put Alan "milk cow with 310 million tits” Simpson in charge of the Catfood Comission and effectively gave Larry Summers control over fiscal policy at a time when a reinjection of proper Keynesian discourse from the bully pulpit could have fundamentally changed the contours of the economic cliff we all (well, almost all of us) subsequently fell off.

Point being that something like this pre-emptive capitulation to anti-governmental bullshit rhetoric was in no small respect already determined by Obama's earlier pre-emptive capitulations to anti-governmental bullshit rhetoric. Most Progressive Evah, folks....

Dale Carrico said...

It seems to me that the two mistakes you are making, Thanatz, is [one] thinking that Obama could be as bad as you say means he can't still be the Most Progressive Evah (since FDR was my claim, and it remains exactly as true as ever) and [two] your insinuation that we are in the same situation now as we would be were the Dems under Pelosi to have kept the House.

It's no doubt true that you'll probably enjoy the militancy of my blog better now than you did over the last two years, but where you seem to taste sweet vindication I myself experience heartbreak and hopelessness.

I would far prefer to be defending ugly scarcely effectual idiotically corrupt piecemeal reforms creating conditions which could be opportunistically pushed from the left into more progressive reforms still while you and your ilk whine that Republicans and Democrats are exactly the same because neither are socialists (even when those who come closest to embracing your views on equity, diversity, sustainability all caucus with the Democrats while Republicans are all fulminating anti-tax anti-government climate-change denialists in thrall to bigots and theocrats).

I am retreating back into education, agitating, organizing from the vantage of my radical green radical queer radical democrat radical socialist because there is so no hope for change under the present conditions of GOP obstructionism.

I would far prefer to focus on the inadequate and real as before over the ideal. I never stopped being guided by the ideal even when the measure between the real and the ideal was vast -- so long as the direction and the push was in the direction of the ideal.

It's far easier to be right (however few manage even that) than to do right. I don't expect much right to be done for the next two years, at least not in the country in which I am a citizen and so have a say in what is done. I didn't expect much right to be done in the last two either, but you can be sure the next two will be incomparably worse. That actually matters to me more than the fact that dumb rich Democrats aren't as green or socialist as I am.