Honeymoon's Over-- Reactionaries On The Attack

Mitch McConnell out of the closet as a full bore Limbaughesque obstructionist

The forces of reaction seem to be on the attack. I just woke up; it's around 5AM. There was no light so I turned on the TV. CNN came on. I watched for 5 minutes and it was 5 minutes of pure and unadulterated attack on Obama. When the picture came on, it was the ugly face of former Louisiana neo-Nazi politician Tony Perkins, now a propagandist for some kooky right-wing religionist front, hammering Obama as an abortionist's best friend and someone who would make the nation's economy worse by not promoting more of the same failed policies that caused it to implode. But no sooner had they swept that still steaming pile off the studio floor than some talking head was on yammering about Obama's illegal alien aunt from Kenya and how abandoning the Republican's beloved torture procedures would make us less safe-- with no less a figure than Mitch McConnell saying how the Army Field Manual wasn't good enough to prevent another 9/11. (No mention that McConnell was only in the Army himself for 10 days, being discharged from that organization under shady circumstances, most likely for grabbing a private's privates at Ft. Knox, hoping for a different sort of discharge.)

I gather that this explosion of reaction on CNN is just part of a right-wing push back against Obama, in the hope of driving his approval ratings down in front of the Stimulus Package debate. All the most devoted enemies of working families, the most faithful corporate shills serving the interests of Big Business are out in full force. NY Times resident imbecile, Irving Kristol's unfortunate son, started out regurgitating the same column he writes everyday-- "Conservative policies have on the whole worked" and "liberalism has become hardly more than a trembling in the presence of illiberalism. ... Who today is called a liberal for strength and confidence in defense of liberty?”-- and then swiftly went down the Rush Limbaugh road of hoping that Obama fail... for the good of the country, of course; or that he's actually a secret conservative. Take your pick.

We don’t really know how Barack Obama will govern. What we have so far, mainly, is an Inaugural Address, and it suggests that he may have learned more from Reagan than he has sometimes let on. Obama’s speech was unabashedly pro-American and implicitly conservative.

I forgot to mention, that was Irving's ridiculous son's last ever Times column. Elsewhere in the paper the Times warns about the dangers of nationalizing our beloved banksters, who are gobbling up more and more taxpayer dollars, stealing more and more of it as "bonuses" and goodies for themselves, and somehow forgetting the money is being lent to them to get the credit markets moving again. The Wall Street Journal reports that the banksters are loaning less money (1.4% less) than they were before Bush dumped over $200 billion in TARP funds down their unaccountable maws. The program has been another colossal failure of Republican Party kowtowing to Big Business, a betrayal of both "conservatism" and American working families-- quite a stunt! From the WSJ:

“It has failed,” said Campbell Harvey, a finance professor at Duke University’s business school. “Basically we have dropped a huge amount of money … and we have nothing to show for what we actually wanted to happen.”

...The fact that loan portfolios are shrinking at many of the largest TARP recipients underscores how few strings Treasury Department officials attached to the infusions. That has made it hard to prevent banks from using the money to pay dividends, make acquisitions and fund bonuses for top executives.

The solution is not giving them more; it's nationalizing them... now.

As for the bad faith with which Republican congressional leaders are dealing and Rush Limbaugh's infamous statement that he hopes Obama will fail (watch the video below), I spoke with a number of congressmen yesterday about it. You probably remember Admiral Joe Sestak from 2006 when he was a Blue America-endorsed candidate against a corrupt and reactionary GOP crook, Curt Weldon. Sestak beat him in 2006 (56-44%), increased his margin of victory in November to a solid 60% (far better than any of Pennsylvania's freshmen) and is now being assiduously courted to run against vulnerable Senator Arlen Specter. I couldn't get a word out of anyone on Rep. Sestak's staff about the Senate race, but this is what the congressman had to say about the reactionaries who are "rooting" for President Obama's failure:

“The future of America is about all Americans succeeding. In a time of crisis, no patriotic American wanted President Roosevelt to fail; in the Cuban Missile crisis, no patriotic American wanted President Kennedy to fail; in Afghanistan, no patriot wanted President Bush to fail. How can anyone who cares about America want President Obama to fail? Should our Commander-in-Chief fail, our nation fails. My constituents are struggling to pay their mortgages, keep their businesses afloat, save for their children’s education, and pay for their medical care and insurance as a result of a perversion of our economic system, a wrong that must be righted. It is outrageous to think that anyone would want our nation to fail at this particular time in our history.

"The success of America in our two wars overseas, as well as our economic war at home, is not about one man, and most definitely not about one party, but it is about striving, exhorting all Americans and their leaders to succeed by rising above individual interests and partisanship-- while debating about the right course to take-- wanting the course finally chosen to be a successful one for all of us in terms of peace and prosperity for Americans and the world.”

The Republican Party's loudest spokesman on the same topic: