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Not disappointed in Obama - at least not yet. I think it's too early to come to the dramatic conclusion that the OP has come to. He hasn't been in office for even a year yet.
If you supported him at the beginning of this year and you're already writing him off as a disappointment, I think Obama would be disappointed in you.
The federal government of this country is not 1 person. There are hundreds of congressmen and a hundred senators who are the LAWMAKERS of this nation. Did you expect Obama to get elected and start walking on water? Or to somehow assume all sorts of powers that constitutionally are not his? He's a president, not an absolute monarch.
Obama hasn't disappointed me. I don't feel betrayed or sold down the river.
Am I frustrated by the minimal progress? Sure. But why would I blame Obama specifically for that? Am I frustrated by the prolonged engagement in Afghanistan? Sure, but I'm also not knowledgeable enough about world affairs and the Middle East politics in particular to know if it would serve us in the long run to just pack up our bags and come home. (One pet peeve I have with respect to the politics of the last 25 years has been that the folks in Washington focus on the short-term and disregard the long-term consquences of their decisions. Eventually, the chickens ALWAYS come home to roost...as our current economic situation is proving. Of course, by the time that happens, the politician who enacted short-term-focused legislation may be out of office. Then the consequences will be someone ELSE's mess to deal with.)
Obama didn't walk into office and get greeted with a clean slate. He walked into office and was greeted with a helluva mess. The economy, healthcare, banking, unemployment, Iraq and Afghanistan, the climate, blah-blah. He hasn't even caught up yet. He's still digging himself out of the muck that was left by his predecessor and the previous congresses. Did you honestly expect that in just 1 year, Obama alone would be able to turn the entire country around and transform all our woes? I don't know what the OP's personal story is, but I wonder if he was able, in just one year, to totally transform his life? If so, great. Good for him. But we should imagine the effort we put into the last year individually and multiply that effort times 338,000,000 (the population of the US) and ask ourselves how realistic our expectations are.
I'll say this, though: for me, he's a damn sight better than the alternative.
May I remind you the rep party cannot stop anything the dems want to do.
You certainly may, but it will only occasion my noting that it's hogwash. You have to have 60 votes on the floor to overcome the wall-to-wall Republican filibuster, and that wasn't possible at all until Al Franken was seated on July 7. But wait...it wasn't possible then either as Ted Kennedy was out enduring the final stages of his illness. Had to wait for Paul Kirk to be sworn in on September 25. But wait, you still can get to 60 only on those days when Robert Byrd is well enough to be wheeled in. So let ME remind YOU that the facts have been quite otherwise from what you so superciliously report. With their filibusters and delaying tactics, honed now through three years of relying on nothing but, the Republicans can and do keep the Democrats from doing things. The Democrats could of course have seen all that coming and just gone through reconciliation for all sorts of stuff, but they didn't do that. In the same position, the Republicans most certainly would have...
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Originally Posted by Sunny-Days90
The dems who are honest enough to see this will cost us trillions of dollars to only help 15% of all Americans are the ones who shut this down.
Read a CBO report or two. The bills they've analyzed so far are budget positive. They actually reduce the deficit over ten years. Read a GAO report or two. The current health care system is financially unsustainable. It is far more dangerous to this country than anybody in Iraq ever was in 2003. Do you simply not understand the problem?
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Originally Posted by Sunny-Days90
Maybe start blaming the American people who saw this was not reform but rather a pork barrel waste of our tax dollar and demanded they stop this train wreck.
Tea Party buzz-phrases, platitudes, and generalizations. Sadly, you don't talk about what's actually going on. Because you can't. All you can do is sit at your keyboard and play the role of right-wing harpy.
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Originally Posted by Sunny-Days90
It has NOTHING to do with the rep party. They were even shut out of any talks when Bubba promised they would be involved from the get go.
LOL. All they were shut out of were the discussions among the majority leadership over how to combine the various bills reported out of the different committees having jurisdiction. That's always a majority function. All you are doing here is looking up charges that were levelled with good reason against the Republicans in their swaggering Tom DeLay heyday and trying to respin them today. It's BS. There were more than 160 Republican amendments included in the HELP Committee draft of the health care bill. Did you know that? No. Will it matter to you? No.
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Originally Posted by Sunny-Days90
So if you are going to be mad at anyone, be mad at 61% of Americans who finally demanded their representatives do what they want, not want the representative wants. Remember, they work for us.
No, they don't work for you. They represent you. And in the House, about 700,000 others apiece. You aren't a player. You have no say. Your government was deliberately set up 200+ years ago to keep you from having a say. The founders knew well the vanities and vagaries of the populace and their tendency to be swayed unduly in their passions by the artful guiles of low-down spielers and dirt-bag demagogues. Hence they created a representative democracy, wherein lawmakers are carefully insulated and shielded from you and your disinformation. That's one of the reasons why America is a great country.
I think Obama's doing great. Couldn't be happier with him, in fact. He ran as a moderate-left and he's serving as a moderate-left.
I think a lot of far left liberals didn't really listen to what he was saying and just projected what they imagined him to be. He was always going to ramp up the war in Afghanistan, for example.
He's also turned us back from the edge of a massive global economic meltdown and is pushing through the biggest health care reform ever. Politics is a game of compromise, and if you can get 33% of the way now, then that's a lot better than getting 0% and trying for 100%.
He's not serving as anything resembling "moderate left", he is "center-right" and clearly in deep and he knows it and, sadly, he is selling out to the military industrial complex, these two failed wars along with the economic disaster the neocons left for him is a tall order for anyone. And he is doubling down on Afghanistan.
The ONE candidate who Americans thought served the best chance for Americans to finally end the twin disasters of the Bush Adminstration is now going to further ramp up the chaos and insure that the military industrial complex feeds itself with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, year after year.
Obama is a huge disappointment but I never truly expected very much change after a year. With his choice on Afghanistan he is doomed to an LBJ-like ending to his Presidency
I ask this as a liberal. I feel betrayed and sold down the river. I think he has thrown his base under the bus. I really believed in him and now look where we are at. What is most disappointing is his silence over this whole healthcare reform. Sure, he delivers speeches saying he didn't assume the job of POTUS to serve fat cats...just who he is serving?
It's not Joe six pack whose house has been foreclosed. It's not the 45 million uninsured. Etc.
Ok, this thread is designed to serve as a support thread for liberals, not as a platform for conservatives to say "We told you so." Nonetheless, I bet not a lot of support will be forthcoming in this thread. There will be the defenders and the critics, to be sure.
Oh how quickly some people forget. I can see that a little stroll down memory lane is in order here.
In 2002, after exaggerating, falsifying, or simply ignoring intelligence he didn't like, George W. Bush invaded and occupied Iraq. During the Bush Presidency, we spent about $1 trillion dollars on that idiocy in Iraq and lost over 4,000 soldiers. None of this even speaks to the social problems that may exist for decades because of returned veterans with traumatic brain injuries and post traumatic stress disorder. Nor, can we speak to the thousands of divorces and broken families the demands on our military created. Finally, many to this day don't appreciate the harm these actions caused to the reputation of the USA in Europe and elsewhere.
Its true that Democrats voted for deregulation bills as well, but George W. Bush and his buddy John McCain who sat on the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, never met a deregulation bill they didn't like over the eight years of the Bush Presidency.
George Bush began his presidency most auspiciously in 2001 by pulling out of the Kyoto Treaty talks on global warming. He than proceeded to get a series of tax breaks from the than Republican controlled Congress that gave 90% of its benefits to the wealthiest 5% of people in this country. Bush made the Medicare funding problem even worse by creating Medicare Part D (prescription drug coverage) in a way that was an absolute windfall for the pharmaceutical industry. Perhaps, worst of all in his eight years in office, Bush never once attempted to deal with the issue of healthcare reform. He couldn't even admit there was a problem.
Finally, it was Bush, not Obama, that began the series of corporate bailouts that protected AIG, the banks, GM, and Chrysler. I don't disagree with this policy though. Its one of the few things Bush got right in eight years.
I am sorry that there are those who are disappointed that Obama can't fix all this in 11 months in office. Adults understand that you don't just snap your fingers and everything magically becomes better. Those of us who were realists knew when we voted for Obama that it would take years, not months, to fix the mess Bush and his GOP buddies created. I'm sorry you are not a very patient person.
Maybe not older but a hell of a lot smarter than you.
Please... explain to me how "corporate america", aka the boogeyman, has dumbed down America.
I'd LOVE to hear your explanation.
Well for starters it has you accusing YOUR PRESIDENT of being exactly what the previous 15 presidents were...socialist. And if you ever took the time to turn off dingo news aka fox news (corporately owned by a foreigner) you would know that everybody in this country has benefited from socialism in some way or another...medicare, welfare, medicaid, veteran benefits, unemployment benefits, housing loans..etc etc etc....
I don't know why people ever expected miracles of the man. I don't understand why so many expect instant change. I am not a college graduate and hardly an economic expert by any stretch but life experience alone tells me economic recovery moves at a snails pace or slower while economic downturn can happen overnight. Recession recovery is an (educated) guessing game. One person's guess is as good as another. Far too many experts who aren't expert at much else than talk and rant. In the end tho the ranter's only clue to what they're ranting about is what they're told to rant about.
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Socialism has not and will not work in this country. We don't want to be Europe. You "intellectual" libs should know your history by now... This country was created to get AWAY from European style government.
I hate to tell you this, but Europe (as if it's just one big entity ) wasn't very "socialist" back when the United States was founded. Your forefathers broke away from a colonist, totalitarian state who cared for the rich (themselves).
Sorry to break your bubble there bud.
As for Obama, give the man his 4 years, then sum it all up, it hasn't even been a year yet.
My only gripe with Obama is the tobacco tax.[/quote]
Hahahaha. The only truly honest answer on the post--give the peasants their wine and bread, and they will forgive you any excess--a psychology the Romans understood. And I fully embrace every time I visit the Philippines, where rum is a buck a pint.
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There will be the defenders and the critics, to be sure.
) wasn't very "socialist" back when the United States was founded. Your forefathers broke away from a colonist, totalitarian state who cared for the rich (themselves).
