First up, Rachel explains the radical overthrow of a century of law restraining corporate power over the political system, and Barney Frank goes ballistic in his inimitable way:
Next, Obama finally - please God - takes off his Mr. Rogers sweater and gets ready to rumble with Wall Street and the banking gang, so he says:
And finally, Olbermann paints a chilling picture of what to expect in the new whorehouse of American politics resulting from this, the Dred Scott decision of our time:
Andrew Sullivan, in a post entitled "Now Fight!":
The seismic events of the last few days ends, in some respects, the phony war of the first year of Obama's presidency. As is the case in truly fracturing democracies, the opposition simply does not and cannot accept the fact that it is out of power. The incoherence of the opposition to Obama - that he is both Jimmy Carter and Adolf Hitler, as Stephen Colbert pointed out last night - reveals the irrationality of the hate. It began immediately on the FNC/RNC right. And the ferocity of the campaign against Obama, the sheer dickishness of the GOP and its acolytes, the total oppositionism to everything he has done and indeed anything he might do... suggests that any hope for some kind of cooperation from this rump is impossible.Bash back, Mr. President. As Barney said, this might be your Waterloo, for which the Republicans and the bigots are devoutly praying - but by God, you can man up and go down fighting.
But the truth is that these forces have also been so passionate, so extreme, and so energized that in a country reeling from a recession, the narrative - a false, paranoid, nutty narrative - has taken root in the minds of some independents. Obama, under-estimating the extremism of his opponents, has focused on actually addressing the problems we face. And the rest of us, crucially, have sat back and watched and complained and carped when we didn't get everything we want. We can keep on carping if we want to. But it seems to me that continuing that - as HuffPo et al. appear to be doing - is objectively siding with the forces of profound reaction right now.
Don't get me wrong. Criticism is still vital. I'm not going to give up on advocating marriage equality or a carbon tax, rather than cap and trade, or for an independent investigation of Bush era war crimes. I think pushing Obama to a more populist position on banks is well and good. But given the alternative, I am going to step up my support of this president in the face of what he is confronting, even when he is not exactly doing everything I want. In my view, you should too.
Look at what we are facing right now: a take-no-prisoners right, empowered by a massive new wave of corporate money unleashed by the Supreme Court, able to wield a 41 seat minority to oppose anything Obama wants, setting up a cycle of failure for a president whom they can then pillory at the polls, and unrepentant about near-dictatorial powers for the presidency, and the routinization of torture in the American government. These forces cannot be appeased. They simply have to be confronted. . . .
But I have come around to thinking that the one huge mistake right now would be to surrender the Senate health reform bill. . . . This is about more than health reform and we have to see it in that context. This is about a cynical nihilist attempt to break this presidency before it has had a chance to do what we elected it to do by a landslide vote. It is an attempt to destroy a majority's morale, to break a president's foreign policy autonomy, to prevent engagement in the Middle East peace process, to stop action on climate change, to restore torture, to increase tensions with the Muslim world, to launch a war on Iran. We cannot delude ourselves that if Obama fails, this is not the alternative. It is. . . .
So fight, Mr President. And to the House Democrats who won't go along with the only way to salvage health reform: this is the only sure-fire way you will lose in November. If you pass this bill, you may also go down in this climate. But you will have done something you can be proud of. Politics cannot always be about narrow self-interest. If it always is, nothing important can get done.
Do your duty. And grow some. Fight back. Explain why you're right. Tell the liberals they can always come back later to reform the bill. Just get this passed.
And as Winston Churchill said, even when overwhelmed and outnumbered by the enemy, and facing certain death: "You can always take one with you."
Fight, goddammit.
3 comments:
This is seriously fucked up. The American people have just lost a great deal. If the Republican party continues to hail this it will show just how anti-American it has become.
This was a dangerous and coldly calculated move on the part of the Supreme Court Justices who voted for this. I will not be convinced that the five Justices who voted for this are not aware of the potential consequences to our current political system. It is nothing less than a vicious attack on the way we elect leaders to represent us.
We must oppose this, not through violence, as that only begets more violence, but by standing up and making our voices heard. The time for sitting by quietly and accepting our fate is over. We can't afford to just let this one slide. It reminds me of a line in the movie, "Ghandi" where Ben Kingsley said something like, "We will not deliver blows, but we may receive them," in reference to India gaining its independence from the British.
I hate to see it happen, but I think this is going to get very ugly.
I agree, guys.
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