Preaching At The Choir
Or "A Rolling Stone gathers no votes".
This is what happens when arrogant despots fail. Since they cannot acknowledge their failure, they have to blame everyone and everything else but themselves.
And the bigger the failure, the more ludicrous the fingerpointing:
When you came into office, you felt you would be able to work with the other side. When did you realize that the Republicans had abandoned any real effort to work with you and create bipartisan policy?
Uh-huh. Fact is, Republicans were irrelevant for most of this 111th Congress, and at its start the White House and the Pelosi/Reid Politburo treated them as irrelevancies. Why? Because they didn't want to share the "credit" when excreting a trillion bucks down the ol' turd hamper brought the economy roaring back. They actually thought that blowing the debt sky-high without the slightest private sector economic underpinnings was going to generate a "historic" boom, and they wanted to hog all the "glory" (and political hegemony for generations to come) for themselves.
And it worked - the country definitely sees what's been done to the economy in the past nineteen months, and they definitely associate it with The One, Wrinkly McFunbags, and the Evil Barney Fife clone. And that's all the Republicans' fault for not volunteering as Donk human PR shields.
Oh, yes, and their megaphone, Fox News:
Look, as president, I swore to uphold the Constitution, and part of that Constitution is a free press. We’ve got a tradition in this country of a press that oftentimes is opinionated. The golden age of an objective press was a pretty narrow span of time in our history. Before that, you had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition — it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. It’s a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world. But as an economic enterprise, it’s been wildly successful. And I suspect that if you ask Mr. Murdoch what his number-one concern is, it’s that Fox is very successful.
That "golden age" being from the end of World War II to the rise of mainstream media like talk radio and, yes, FoxNews in the late '80s and early '90s, when the entire media was monopolized by the folks who ran the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBCCCP, CNN, et al who used their press platforms very intentionally to promote viewpoints that Barry O does agree with. Which is why he calls it "objective," because libs are so sold out to their worldview as religious dogma any challenge to or dissent from which is a functional sin deserving the harshest possible punishment that they're incapable of tolerating any other point of view. "Objectivity" thus becomes conformity rather than professional neutrality between multiple legitimate governing philosophies. Fox News' genuine objectivity is "destructive" not by any rational measure, but because they tolerate the opinions and ideas of his political enemies that he has ruled intolerable because they are, in his zealot's mind, evil.
Why King Hussein would want to go back to Fox-bashing after the beating he gave himself a year ago in his heroic crusade against "destructiveness" that came right out of the Hugo Chavez playbook is mystifying, until you remember that he really doesn't have anything else to say. He's a zealot of ideological extremism who got elected in the midst of a financial panic perpetrated by his own party after a decade-long media propaganda war against the opposing party. It was the perfect political storm and he was the right candidate in the right place and the right time, the "other guy" at a time when everything was going wrong and the voters blamed George W. Bush and the GOP for it. It enabled The One to be the unscrutinzed tabula rasa on which da sheepul could write their "hope" for "change," without ever questioning what that "change" would be.
Now we know. And what he delivered is not what the public wanted. But he forced us on it anyway, and keeps doubling down because....he really is incapable of doing anything else. He's a Marxist-Alinskyist True Believer. Given the choice between committing ideological suicide and winning a second term and committing political suicide by staying his detestable, discredited course, he'll take the latter option every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
It's why he and his party are trapped on this lazy Susan of futile propaganda memes -demonize Bush, demonize Boehner (who?), demonize the voters (i.e. Tea Partiers), demonize Sarah Palin, demonize "the rich". It's like bringing a minigun to a knife fight and discovering it's full of blanks.
And, let's not forget demonizing his own base (i.e. the "blanks"):
One closing remark that I want to make: It is inexcusable for any Democrat or progressive right now to stand on the sidelines in this midterm election…
Everybody out there has to be thinking about what’s at stake in this election and if they want to move forward over the next two years or six years or ten years on key issues like climate change, key issues like how we restore a sense of equity and optimism to middle-class families who have seen their incomes decline by five percent over the last decade. If we want the kind of country that respects civil rights and civil liberties, we’d better fight in this election…
We have to get folks off the sidelines. People need to shake off this lethargy, people need to buck up. Bringing about change is hard — that’s what I said during the campaign. It has been hard, and we’ve got some lumps to show for it. But if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren’t serious in the first place.
I could quibble about why only "middle class" families deserve a "sense of optimism," how their "sense of equity" will be standing in the unemployment line together the harder he socks it to the "rich" (i.e. job-creators), or the war the Regime has been waging against civil liberties via ObamaCare, "Net Neutrality," the "Fairness Doctrine," suing Arizona, the racisizing of voting rights by Eric The Red's Injustice & Revenge Department, etc. Instead I want to make what might be seen as a surprising comment, with a big, honking caveat: I understand his frustration at base motivation.
I've never looked at voting as something to do "when I feel like it". It's both a duty and a privilege. I've cast my ballot in every election since 1982. I've voted in spectacular cycles for my party, in so-so cycles, and in disastrous cycles where I knew my chad wasn't going to make a damn bit of difference (like....2008). I do it for the same reason a lion licks his balls: because I can. And because I take seriously the old adage that if you don't try to do something about a problem, you forfeit your entitlement to complain about it thereafter.
It's like when the coach tells his players to give everything they have on the field/diamond/court: You may still lose, but if you do, at least you do so with no excuses. There's no dishonor in being beaten; there's plenty of dishonor in beating yourself. And in elections, not bothering to vote is beating yourself. That's what the Li'l President was saying here, and in principle, I agree with him.
Of course, in practice I hope that every Democrat shows up to vote on Wednesday, November 3rd. But you get the idea.
There's just one little problem with coming out and saying it - he came out and said it:
CBS aptly describes it as a “stern, lecturing tone,” which is always attractive in a politician, and Tapper has taken to openly snarking about it in his blog posts per the last line here. All in all, it’s playing about as well with liberals as you’d expect, with the head of the Progressive Congress Action Fund calling it “a remarkably condescending message.” Keep up the great work, champ.
That's Lucifer's achilles heel: His base is demoralized for the same reason HE is, they're both scrounging around looking for scapegoats, and they've found each other. They blame him for not communizing the country fast and massively enough, and he blames them for their roaring ingratitude.
I don't know if Sick Willie himself could generate enough base enthusiasm to blunt the megadisaster that's coming (look how successful HE was deflecting The Wave in 1994), but there may be no other human being on the planet less equipped to make the attempt than Cap'n Awesome. So, by all means, keep these tongue-baths coming. Who knew all-Obama, all the time would actually become entertaining?
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