Persons of the Year? But What Year?

by Noah

This is a tale of two men, both stuck in the past, and a magazine that chose one of them as its "Person of the Year." One man's name is Mitt. The other man's name is Barack. The followers of the former think that the name of the latter is "strange." That is just one of the reasons why they voted for their man; another is that their man held out the promise of turning back the clock to at least the 1950s -- or, as comic Andy Borowitz says in this piece, 1912.

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) -- In an extraordinary gesture of recognition for a losing Presidential nominee, Time magazine today named former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney Man of the Year 1912.

In a press release explaining its decision, Time's editorial board wrote, "Even though his quest for the Presidency was unsuccessful, Mr. Romney's ideas about foreign policy, taxation, wealth inequality, and women's rights typified the year 1912 as no one else has."

In giving Mr. Romney the nod, Time said that he beat out such other candidates for Man of the Year 1912 as Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and Edward Smith, captain of the Titanic.
"It was very close between Romney and the Titanic guy, but we gave it to Romney because it took him slightly longer to sink," Time wrote.

Mr. Romney could not be reached for comment, a spokesman said, because he was travelling around the world visiting his money.

Personally, I would say that Mitt would like us to go back another 40 years or so to 1882. He is truly a man of the First Great American Robber Baron age. By any reasonable standard, Mitt is not a man of the 21st century, but neither is Barack. Barack is a man of Washington DC, and Washington DC, its politicians, its lobbyists, and its fawning conservative media such as Politico (founded by Reaganites and Bushies) and all of the local news bureaus of our major media are all obviously unaware that we have not only moved past the 20th century but are now 12 years into the 21st.

I've always worked for corporations, and I've always felt that the people who run corporations are like those who infest Washington. They are the last people in the country that know what's going on in America, or they strive mightily to ignore or subvert it. If they see movements toward progress, they will dedicate their whole being to slowing it down -- all in the service of their personal income potential, whether ethically earned or not.

To the establishment (read "right-wing") media of Washington, Barack Obama is "progressive." To us, he is a center-right politician, not even center-left, as you might believe if you only heard his words but never witnessed his deeds and his incessant desire to cave in, apparently in agreement, to the Republicans. Ask yourself why caving in so willingly comes so easy for Barack Obama.


WHAT DOES BARACK WANT?

The establishment media may sincerely believe that Obama is a progressive, but I can't see it, or they may say it with a wink and we know better. By his own admission he is a New Democrat, a euphemism for Republican. I'll give him credit for knowing or being able to project that he knows that something is going on, even if he, like all politicians, determines this by getting up every morning and sticking a finger in the wind, or consulting the latest polls.

There is a difference between Mitt and Barack. The difference is that Mitt is so arrogant, condescending and downright psychopathic that he refuses to see what we as a nation want or need or even think. Those things don't even matter to people like Mitt. They do matter to Barack, but why, how much, and how far is the riddle. Is Obama the smarter man simply because he sees those things and knows how to skillfully use them? Mitt is devoid of empathy, scarily so. Barack has empathy, but what good is empathy when it's just a marketing ploy? He may edge our society forward, but it seems that he'll do it only as a compromise with our needs, while slowing progress down as much as possible.

A good example would be Obamacare. It's got some progress in it, but it isn't the single-payer plan we need. That just would not do for the corporations he is sworn to protect. Oh wait, I thought it was us! When we needed Bernie Sanders, we got Max Baucus and Rahm Emanuel.

Barack is a man of the late 20th century. Maybe that's why, on his bad days, he so irritatingly comes across to me as a Richard Nixon with better communication skills. Yeah, even though I didn't vote for either Barack or Mitt, I woke up on November 7th relieved that President Obama had won reelection, but only because I think we can survive his faux-democrat/stealth-Republican conservatism and treachery. As he said once in a Florida Univision TV interview, his policies are those of what would have passed for a moderate Republican's back in the 1980s -- or, more accurately, back in Richard Nixon's day. Mitt? Well, he and his backers, such as Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, and the rest of the heavily-invested-in-China crowd, would have let China walk in and rule America without firing a shot.

Some choice, eh?

The bottom line is that President Obama is a bait-and-switch president. This is nothing new. George W. Bush declared in a debate with Al Gore that he didn't believe in nation-building, and it was Bill Clinton who "ended welfare as we know it." Now that President Obama doesn't have to worry about reelection, the man who talks progressive and gets called a Socialist by crazy people is moving to trim Social Security as part of a "fiscal cliff" deal while discussing raising the Medicare age, just for starters. This too should be no surprise. After all, he was the man who formed the Simpson-Bowles commission, and it's little spoken about that Erskine Bowles is a big fan of Paul Ryan. In typical Washington Bizarro-speak, Bowles calls Ryan, a demonstrably blatant pathological liar, "honest" and "amazing."

I can easily imagine that FDR is spinning in his grave at supersonic speed.


THE LAND INSIDE THE BELTWAY IS A DISEASED PLACE

Now, incredibly, Time magazine has named Barack Obama as its "Person of the Year" for 2012, saying --

He has stitched together a winning coalition and perhaps a governing one as well. His presidency spells the end of the Reagan realignment that had defined American politics for 30 years.

Right. Thirty years ago Ronald Reagan took a knife to the social safety nets; now Obama plans on achieving the Republican dream of sticking pins into Social Security and Medicare. And people are known to actually pay money for this rag of a magazine.

Are we talking about 2012, or 1980? The more things change, the more they stay the same. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Whatever. Time magazine may give President Obama credit for seeing the new demographic and societal changes of our country, but is he just the establishment media's man because he is doing a good job of maintaining as much of the status quo as possible in the face of widespread changes in our culture? What else should we expect from a magazine, and a president who still, in 2012, refer to earned benefits as "entitlements"? Sometimes the first step in taking something away is redefining it.


"PROGRESSIVE OBAMA?" CENK UYGUR'S THOUGHTS

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