After eight horrid years of Bush Jr., it is sad I can only admit Obama is "micro-stepping" in the right direction.
My main point is what is the alternative? Obama is pressurable and has demonstrated so. This in and of itself is an improvement but I recognize your desire for something much more. But we are not going to get anywhere if let the (far) right wing have any semblance of control because we are unwilling to accept anything less than for the country to do a political 180.
Obama is a corporate tool.
All politicians are. This is another BIG problem that isn't going to be solved by even just 1 GENERATION. We are about to be dealt a HUGE blow to campaign finance by the supreme court and I think that may be the nail in the coffin for getting out from underneath this. The only thing we will have remaining is the fact that corporations cannot vote. As long as the progressive movement continues despite the money interest in campaigns, there will have to be at least some accountability to listen to what we have to say. The other answer is to get local which is happening somewhat. Local politics are capable of being immune from national money interests and they can be a bastion for growing progressive politics. No matter how you cut it though, we are about to be f'ed in the a' by Roberts.
Keep in mind, one child's death negates a million good things Obama has/will supposedly do. Perhaps that is why the Afghans are now choosing the Taliban.
While I may agree with you philosophically, "goodness" and "badness" do not consist of a single value by which one can be reduced by another. LBJ is a great example. Would you proclaim the Civil Rights Act to mean nothing because of what happened in Veitnam? I'll repeat my assertion that reality is more complicated than our individual morals. It does not mean that we should sacrafice them or water them down. We just need to be aware of it and realize that we can both be outraged and hopeful at the same time. Part of being a progressive is being a multi-issue voter. This is in stark contrast to conservatives who are very often single-issue voters like in the case of pro-life/guns anti-gay/immigrant.
I am not going to disagree with you on anything you said about Afganistan and when it does not work it will tarnish him just like Veitnam tarnished LBJ. I'll just repeat don't think it is honest to pre-claim the failure or say that this wasn't something that should be surprising to us about Obama based on what he said in the campaign. That was my whole motive for getting into this dicussion and I think that has been demonstrated amidst the tangents we have gone on.
In the end, we are going to get a handful of things that we can build on for the future. An imperfect health care bill will be fixed later when the parts of it that we know don't work actually don't work. An imperfect climate bill will be strengthened once we are unable to compete with the rest of the world. This IS the pace of change if you look at the history of our country. We get this small windows to do something and the future is just tweaks to improve upon it. To try to expect that we are going to do better than this is commendable but ignores history and the processes we use to do things. As much as I would continue to hope that we can do things better, so many things have to change for us to get to that point.
Dispair is not an option! Change will only happen if we keep at it.
Edited by Jazzns, : No reason given.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. --Thomas Jefferson
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