I made some comment on this site today that I probably shouldn't have, because it was pissy, and it came from a man piqued at the fact that the goddamned weather men in my region cannot decide whether I need to prepare for a "light dusting" of snow, or six feet of the stuff, and because my wife stubbornly refuses to provide even the first suggestion of a Christmas gift I can get for her, which she knows drives me crazy because she is the hardest person on the face of the universe to shop for (the last gift she truly enjoyed was a yak-fur covered cooking appliance that also doubled as a Kindle. You tell me.).
The response I got was this:
Half the site has invested so much emotion in the President personally, that they rabidly savage anyone who dares suggest he's human, and might make mistakes, or have an agenda that might not be the best possible for the people as a whole. Since they can't actually logically defend some of the policy choices, they quickly revert to personal insults. It's best to just ignore the emotionally immature ones.
Well, okay, he didn't say what the other half was, but as a man who still giggles when one of my kids passes gas loudly, and as someone who professes to enjoying the chance game of flip-cup and the occasional bout of reality television, even at my advanced stage of late middle-age (I am nearly 40), I can take the "emotionally immature" jab. We are, in sum and substance, complex creatures, and one can be both intelligent and well-mannered in some situations, while at the same time crude and boorish in others. I suspect, for example, that Ghandi picked his nose at some point and wiped it where he shouldn't have. There's a lot of contradictions and grey areas in each of us. I accept that, and own my foibles.
But there is this sort of growing thing among those of us who comment on this site that tries to make everything black and white. I don't mean how David Duke tries to make everything black and white; I mean how we try and eliminate the grey shades in our opinions, how we categorize and place people into various camps here. You are either a Progressive and thus want to kill the Senate health care bill, or you are not a real Progressive, and therefore an Obamabot. Or if you voice displeasure at the President, you are a hater and spewer of vitriol, and a weakling who runs at the first sign, and a traitor and the lot.
I lack either the eloquence and evenness of a teacherken, or the patience and cunning insight of a wmtriallawyer, and I also like to cuss more than either of them. I, like most of the rest of us, fall into the shouting matches, animated by anger or crankiness, or delight, or to make an I-told-you-so-point, or whatever. I'm a litigator, which is a clear indicator that sometimes I run my mouth sometimes in an ill-advised manner, sometimes, wisely, but at all times often and loudly (It's a feature, not a bug. Alas, alas).
But I did want to diary a response to the comment, because I looked on my calendar and saw I haven't engaged in a good venting lately, and being the loquacious screwhead I am, and given my irritability today, I said what the Hell.
So, to respond to the idea that people like me don't think Obama is human, or that he does not make mistakes, or that he is not behind an agenda for the people, I offer this:
(1) I fundamentally believe that Brack Obama is human. While a slim minority of his supporters actually believe he is a Mark-V Rodenberry Nexus-6 Replicant programmed only to play 11th dimensional chess (.1% of Obama Voters, most of whom eat paste), I believe he is, in fact, a human being. When I voted for him, one of the questions I had on my checklist was, "Is he human? And not a crafty android hellbent on world destruction?" Check. And although a great majority of Republicans believe he is not proven he is human because he has been stubbornly unwilling to provide a DNA certificate (76% of Republicans surveyed, who also eat paste), I have no reason to think he is not human, and thus not immune to human failings.
(2) Related to point one, I expected, and continue to expect, President Obama to make mistakes. In a very thorough study conducted by the University of Well No Shit, historians have determined that only one President has ever failed to make a mistake, and that was William Henry Harrison, who was spared the inevitability of failure through the happy coincidence of his hasty death 30 days after his inauguration. This study was contradicted, however, by a review conducted by historians at the College of Well Hold On a Moment, which determined that Harrison did indeed make a mistake, which was also his first as President. And that, of course, was his decision to sign an Executive Order banning himself from wearing a goddamned coat on the coldest day of the year while giving a speech outdoors for 16 hours.
I also expected Obama to make mistakes because Obama warned repeatedly during his campaign that he would be an "imperfect President."
I think we can all agree that he was handed a delicious platter of shit that invited anyone to fall into error on several fronts unless the inheriting President was a powerful magician from a Susanna Clark novel, and even then I would have my doubts: an economic meltdown the likes of which has never been seen, and which was more severe than any since my great-grandmother was sucking potato peels in Derry; two wars, neither of which was good in terms of finding exit ramps; a veritable goat-rodeo of remnants of a catch-em-detain-em-and-torture-em policy that placed human beings precisely in a legal area and a geophysical location that was difficult to extract them from; debt to the eyeballs; and, in addition to the trillion specifics I could name but won't because it's close to lunch time, generally a big pile of poop that had the gangrenous smell of Bush and Cheney all over it.
Obama came to office with probably more knots to untie than anyone since FDR, but unlike FDR or LBJ -- and, if I may contradict an oft-repeated and ill-informed cry that Obama pull an FDR or an LBJ and knock some sense into Congress -- Obama does not enjoy the vastly wide majorities of Democrats in Congress those Presidents enjoyed (as George Stephanopolous noted, in some thing he blogged, when Social Security passed in 1935, there were more than 70 Democrats and Progressives in the Senate (with two fewer states!), and only 25 Republicans. Today, the Senate has 58 Democrats and 40 Republicans with 2 Independents who caucus with the Democrats...FDR's House margin was 129 more Democrats. Today, the House breaks with 78 or so more Democrats. Also, under LBJ, I think there were 67 Democrats in the Senate). Does that make the complaint that Obama couldn't be doing more to pressure Congress to act? No, of course not, you silly person.
I think Obama could have done what I would have done back in June: If I were Obama, I would have invited Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus over to dinner. Made him feel special and loved. And then, when Biden asked Max to pass the salt, I would have grabbed the salt shaker from Max's hands, handed it to Biden, and said, "I'll do it, Joe. Max can't pass anything." I would have done this in front of 30 people in attendance. And when Max went off crying to the bathroom after this colossal burn, I would have met him in the hall, handed him a napkin, and said, "You think it hurts now. Wait until I do the same thing at the Indian State Dinner." And Max would have cried and realized he couldn't deal with the humiliation, and then he would have said, "You're right, Mr. President," and then he would have quickly passed a health care bill out of committee, leaving us time to negotiate a perfect bill with Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson holding hands with us all in a circle like the Whos in Whoville, and we would have celebrated with spiral ham and sung folk songs, and then everything would be better than now, the end.
But he didn't, and he has made that and other mistakes. Should I burnish my credentials as a Not-Mindless-Obamabot by listing some of the mistakes Obama has made? Okay, then.
Not pressing Baucus to act more swiftly in June, and providing little or no pressure against Baucus's desire to tilt at windmills by foolishly thinking he could nab a Grassley or an Enzi, the sucker; slow-pacing rollbacks on the Bush-era detention policies and not pressing Congress to come up with a detention statute to allow us to deal reasonably and predictably with those detainees who are not triable in Federal courts due to evidentiary rules, who cannot be tried in military commissions for similar reasons, who cannot be returned home because their home countries won't take them, who cannot be paroled into the United States because there is too much intelligence supporting the view that they are dangerous to national security, and who cannot be kept at Gitmo forever without even a measure of due process, because that would be antithetical to our values; having guys in Treasury who may have saved the financial structure from collapse, but who have too-long ignored the needs of average Americans who don't sell junk bonds and go to the fucking Catalina Wine Mixer on weekends; foot-dragging on DADT and DOMA repeal (although I would love to see anyone show me a plan for getting to 60 votes on repealing DOMA in this political climate); and then there's that whole let's-give-Gordon-Brown-DVDs thing, which was just embarrassing. There's more. Lots more.
But I also believed him when he said the hard work would not be accomplished easily. And let's face it, with this Congress...well, this Congress is like those clown that say, "Oh, yeah, I'm on board with helping to contribute to the office holiday party! What do I need to bring?" And you tell them, "Well, you can contribute $15, that would help us buy booze and food for everyone," and they allllll say, "Yeah, okay, sure!" So then you announce it to the whole office with a set date, and you promise top shelf booze and great food. And then two days later, a guy from accounting comes in and says, "Oh, hey, I can't make it, so I won't be contributing," and then that stuffy woman from down the hall comes in and says, "You know, I'm not going to eat a whole lot, so I'm just going to give you $5," even though you know damned well she will be at the party practically vacuuming up all the Captain Morgan and eating every chip she can get her grabby little meat paws on, and then the next guy comes in and makes some excuse why he shouldn't have to contribute, and the next thing you know your office party is a case of Schlitz and a tray of Oreos, and everyone looks at you and bitches that the party sucks. That's our Democratic Congress.
Face it, Obama could be as liberal as you could ask for, as liberal as Bernie Sanders' and Dennis Kucinich's and Howard Dean's tri-partite in-vitro-cloned love-baby, and I still don't see how that gets Joe Lieberman from being a douche because the Left pissed on his 2004 parade, and I still don't see how that gets badly-coiffed Ben Nelson to suddenly blossom into a pro-choice moderate-liberal 60th vote for a robust public option or against a Stupak amendment.
Obama will make mistakes, but I'm not sure he's alone in his failings. Congress ain't exactly lighting any fires here.
(3) As far as not having an agenda that "might not be the best for people as a whole," I just don't know from where this comes. I really don't. This assumes that Obama hates people generally, which goes further than Glenn Beck, who only thought Obama hated white people; or it assumes that Obama doesn't care at all about America as a nation, which aligns nicely with Rush Limbaugh's oxy-fueled insanity. But the idea that Obama has an agenda that might not be the best for the people as a whole? I have to chalk that statement up to an expression of anger and disappointment.
And about disappointment:
I could list a lot of accomplishments in the last year that have helped to advance the ball in the direction of a more progressive America, but I don't think I need to do so (there's lunch calling again), because I think even the most ardently disappointed could do the same if he or she were honest about it.
My opinion is that the disappointment comes from Obama not doing enough, or doing things he promised to do quickly enough, or arising from broken promises. I don't think any Obama supporter could look to the campaign and say there haven't been broken promises, and shame on Obama for breaking them or making them lightly, which is about the same thing.
But I also think -- again, this is just an opinion, so don't start pinning troll labels on me -- that if he hadn't disappointed on other things, the disappointment on Health Care, and specifically the public option, wouldn't cause people to pull hair and scream about primarying the man at this 11th-month stage. Imagine if he had announced a far more rigorous withdrawal from Iraq, declined to increase troop levels in Afghanistan and announced withdrawal, immediately repealed DADT, pushed the introduction of a bill to repeal DOMA, and announced some effective plan that satisfied the Left on the resolution of detainees (I have not yet heard what that would be). I suspect that had he done those things, the disappointment in Obama over the intransigence of the Senate on health care would not have resulted in such massive Progressive disappointment in the man.
So, in my opinion, the current wave of disappointment is made greater by the other disappointments piled up behind it. And if that is the case, then I wonder how much of the disappointment is fueled by the policy of the Senate health care bill, rather than the politics of it. I wonder how much that goes to Obama, how much goes to a less than progressive Democratic Congress, mand how much is unrealistic expectation even under the best circumstance. I don't know.
I guess what I am saying, at bottom, is that you can be both disappointed in the President and still support him, as I do. He faces a lot, not much of it good. If I may quote my neighbor Lou, who mows his lawn in his short-shorts and tennis shoes and black socks and nothing else, and who blows snot-rockets out of his face when he does so, and thus can be ascertained to be less than the most eloquent person on the planet, and thus may be forgiven for the formulation of this observation, which is otherwise correct: "That cocksucker Bush and his asshole buddies fucked up this country real good." I don't expect that Obama could clean it up in a year, and I don't think he did either, because he said he couldn't ("Not one year, or even one term..."). But I still support him.
Or maybe what I am saying, at bottom, is that we all could benefit from refraining from so eagerly eating our own by realizing that there are a lot of Democrats, and unlike the monolithic, excuse me, asshole faces in the GOP, we don't require conformity of thought and action slightly reminiscent of Seventeenth Century Salem, Massachusetts ("Look! The evil witch Crist! Burn her! Burrrnnnnn herrrrrr!"). So maybe we should learn to smartly deal with our differences, rather than shattering onto a million little groups at times like this. How do we do this: I don't know, but I guess it starts with me.
Or maybe, at bottom, this is all just a stupid rant brought about by stupid weathermen, lack of lunch, and a wife who keeps her Christmas list behind a shadowy veil impenetrable by man.
Or maybe the Coen Brothers were right when they had Johnny Casper say in Millers Crossing: "Runnin' things. It ain't all gravy."
I don't know. We want all the same thing, I guess. Or, more accurately, we all want to move in the same direction.
Okay I'm spent. My rant itch is scratched for now.
Whatever happens, I do know this: I wish you all the best holiday season, and I hope -- yes, I still hope -- for a better, more prosperous, and progressive new year.
Update: Thanks for the recommendations. I just want to note two final things, and then I will let you enjoy the rest of your day.
First, there are people here who I have disagreed with at various times and vice versa, and I see comments between others that have disagreed between themselves, but I note that no one has become rude or hurled any insults in this thread. More than a few posts begin, "we have disagreed in the past, but I think..." or something along that line. When I go sit on the Fat Man's lap at the mall today, I will whisper in his ear, 'All I want for Christmas is more tone like this," and he will look at me like I am deranged because I am a grown man sitting on Santa's lap, but it won't matter, because I'll still get my candy cane, huzzah. But this would be a consistently great place if we could strive to keep it level and civil and rational in the new year. I know it's a big wish, but hey, it's Christmas time and I can dream big.
Second, not one fucking flake has yet to fall! Meterologists, you win this time. This time.
Update 2: Turkana has a diary up entitled A Hastily Composed Explanation From an Obama Supporter, a title about which he or she will be hearing from my copyright attorney, as soon as I figure out where to get one on such short notice around the holidays, and as soon as I figure out what one even is.
Nevertheless. There is not a word I disagree with in Turkana's diary, not one, and that makes me think we are ships passing in the night, but I never intended to be a ship, or to make a veddy veddy serious point, but I will say this: When I said from "an Obama Supporter," I did not mean to imply that anyone who worked for the man and criticizes the White House direction or policy is not an Obama Supporter. david mizner raises the excellent question of what it means to be a supporter.
There's not a person here who would vote for a Pawlenty, or a Romney, or a Palin over Obama (except you, over there, in the hat, and you should be ashamed). So yeah, Turkana is right: we are all, at some level, "supporters." So, yes, the choice of the phrase "Obama Supporter" is, perhaps, less accurate than the term "Obama Supporter" when it is used perjoratively, as it is, and thus the change in title to "Perjoratively-Labeled 'Obama Supporter'", which doesn't have the same zing, but whatever.
Back to "supporter". Where we fall is along a continuum. There are going to be people who would vote for, work for, give money to, or do whatever it takes to support Obama, regardless of policy. And there are people who will cry havoc and let slip the dogs of Primary Challenge at the first deviation from a Progressive Agenda (and I saw it three months after Obama took office). Both are, in my opinion, and I mean this with no disrespect whatsoever, the stupidest people on the planet Earth.
And everyone else falls in-between on one side of the bell curve or the other. What I do know is that there is an us-v-them/true-progressives v. Obamabot/whatever v. whatever thing on this site. You cannot sit there and honestly deny it. Sometimes it's so transparent, it's comical.
And I am wondering if it is reaching a point where someone saying something like, I don't think we should kill the health care bill, will lead others who disagree to almost reflexively peg that person in a way that makes future discussion possible. And vice versa.
The Left and Right has been doing it to each other for years. I have a friend who became my friend because she knows everything about pop culture, and she is funny, and in our burdgeoning friendship, that's all we talked about. And then one day we shifted to other topics, and I discovered she was an evangelical hard Right Wing Christian who thinks things that are abhorrent to me, politically. But she likes the same movies I like! And the same music! And the same jokes! And a lot of those movies and music and jokes feature dirty fucking hippies! Celebrate them, even! My mind was absolutely wrapped into a pretzel because she defied stereotyping and categorization. Had I known about her politics before I knew about her knowledge and love of pop culture, we would never have been friends, because I would have wrongly concluded that there was no common ground. It would have made discussion, let alone debate, impossible (we debate now, often, and we do it civilly).
The Left and Right has been doing it to each other for years. On this site I see the Left doing it to itself.
Hence my X-mas wish when the Fat Man and I talk tonight. The one about being able to discourse.
Because it's getting really, really hard to do here.
But I truck with what Turkana is saying.