When I was a kid, I used to go with my grandpa (God rest his soul) whenever he had to have his old blue boat fixed (which was pretty frequently, it seems to me twenty years later). My grandpa's repairman was Joe, a crusty old guy who lived in the country right outside our city. Now my grandpa was an extremely loyal guy, and he wouldn't think of taking his boat to anyone else but Joe. But Joe wasn't always...the best at fixing the old blue boat. And you could't count the number of times I heard gramps say "Jesus, Joe could fuck up a hammer."
Ladies and gentlemen, we elected Joe president.
I'm sorry (and please, feel free to flame away and HR while simultaneously maintaining the thunderous applause for our most fearless leader), but Obama's presidency has been an unmitigated train wreck. Never in a hundred thousand years did I think that this wunderkind, this political prodigy who motivated scores of millions of progressive minded people, could have people forgetting in less than a year how bad the right-wing and the Republican Party fucked them over. I mean Jesus, just from the purely political angle this presidency has been an absolute embarrassment.
Think about the framing. This spending freeze gives credence and cover to every right-wing idiot and Blue Dog scum that hate a functioning government, even if the "freeze" is "only" $250B. I have never seen such a bungled job of political messaging as I have seen just now, or in the last year. Letting the notion that there are "high taxes" all around without forcefully rebutting with the reality of the middle class tax cuts is mind boggling. Letting the right spend an entire month defining any reform during the most crucial part of the HCR debate was mind boggling. Not having the president front and center, using his political capital to get whatever shit he wanted passed in his first three months is mind boggling. However, the most mind boggling thing about this president is that he has literally spent every last cent of what was a fortune of political capital and he has less than dick to show for it.
The political malpractice authored by this administration has made Jimmy Carter&co. look like Svengalis, MENSA charter members. Every day brings something new. Call me a left-wing teabagger or a right-wing troll or whatever the slur of the day is from the clapping crowd, but I'm not going to stop criticizing this president until he gets it right (which I fear more and more is going to be never). This president had the chance to permanently (or at least significantly) damage and tarnish the right-wing and Republican brand in the minds of all but the farthest right kooks. He passed on that and is now paying the price. He could've (rightly) blamed the right and Bush for all of our problems for the first two years of his term, minimum, but he didn't. Now we have a fucking REPUBLICAN senator from MASSACHUSETTS and the GOP is licking their chops at ILLINOIS. It's unreal. Thinking about it makes me physically ill. I won't lie; when I see Obama on the telly I have virtually the same visceral reaction of uncontrolled obscenities as when Bush would mar my Samsung. Let me tell ya, it's taken a lot to turn a devout, leftist liberal Democrat that strongly against a Democratic president. Even a comparatively easy, harmless bone he could've thrown us, like repealing DADT, he passed the buck and hemmed and hawed and kicked the can down the road. That's what losers do. And if the shoe fits...
Folks, you can keep pumping sunshine and making excuses for this guy. I won't. Turning a gigantic, epochal victory in 2008 into a lock of losing Congress in two years requires a special kind of stupid, a special type of spinelessness. This political team, and this president who has never not failed to lead, who has not taken any potentially sticky stands, who has not jumped out on the right side of history, who hasn't been 1/10 the guy he was on the trail,who hasn't even thrown us a fucking crumb like repealing DADT, simply does not deserve the support of any self-respecting liberal. Buying into right-wing framing on spending is the last straw. I fear for our country after Mitt Romney is done with it. The sad thing is that he had such a golden chance to make this country better, and he let it go to waste without accomplishing anything that's worth a bucket of warm piss. God save us from the coming Republican tidal wave. Too bad it wasn't stopped before it even began.