Article: Yellow City? Spineless Cowards Almost Everywhere in DC

Right wing pundit Mike Murphy, commenting on Obama's failed Olympic trip, "You never send the pres where you don't know the outcome."
Whatever happened to leadership, to courage, to doing the right thing. Murphy's kind of thinking is despicable. Ironically, it appears that, for the most part, his approach IS the way Obama has been operating most of the time. And sadly, the gutless cowards in the White House who live by Murphy's gutless coward model of operating have probably gained the upper hand over Valerie Jarrett, who pundits are guessing was behind the decision. Too bad. Obama needs to take more risks and do the right thing, not the safe thing.

Obama will NOT be meeting with the Dalai Lama. Apparently, he doesn't want to piss off the Chinese. Even George Bush met with Tenzin Gyatso, one of the most respected men on the planet. WTF is wrong with the White House. See the above paragraph. Nah, don't bother. I'll repeat it. There are cowards in the Whitehouse-- a lot of them. They do what is safe, or what they think is safe. You know what gets done when you take that approach? Nothing, nada, zero, zilch. Well, almost nothing. What happens, when true leadership is not exercised, is things happen that would not have otherwise happened. Injustice takes place or continues un-abated. Criminals continue their sprees. Bad wars keep killing innocent civilians and brave soldiers, corporations keep on damaging the ecology and the economy.

Let's not forget that the cowards in the White House have still failed to remove Bush appointed partisan, formerly Rove supervised attorneys in the Department of Justice. It will soon be 10 months since Obama took office and the corrupt attorneygate judiciary monsters who used the law to further GOP goals are still not only un-punished, they are still at work, free to pursue their partisan prosecutorial misconduct. At this rate, Attorney General Eric Holder will go down in history as worse the Bush's AG Gonzales. But when it comes down to it, this is the fault of the Obama administration. Why would they fail to fire these people? It's probably because they'd have to face those nasty Republicans who they are trying to persuade to support the worthless faux health insurance reform Obama is trying to sell as something substantive.

Talking about health insurance, there are a few shining lights-- Alan Grayson has shown real cojones. I'm waiting to see which members of congress will stand by his side. That's right. Who will step up next, among the Democrats, with strong, tough talk? Then there's the house progressive caucus. So far, they're holding strong. Kudos to them. In the senate, there are a handful of brave souls-- Bernie Sanders is my favorite. Then there are dirty Dems who don't deserve to be there-- Chris Dodd is a total sell out to the banksters. Baucus is owned by health insurers and probably Blanche Lincoln and all the others who voted against the public option on the senate finance committee.

There is clearly a pattern of spinelessness in Washington. It's been there at some level for a long time. The tragic thing is Americans sent an incredibly powerful message to Washington. They gave the Democrats and Obama full control of the White House, the House and the Senate. The Conservatives have been incredibly marginalized. They are so desperate they have fallen very low. Paul Krugman, today, observes,

"So what did we learn from this moment? For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.

But more important, the episode illustrated an essential truth about the state of American politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation's two great political parties is spite pure and simple. If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they're against it � ��" whether or not it's good for America."

Democrats have the power. But they have weak, cowardly, DLC thinking people in places of power. Rahm Emanuel might have been the tough guy when the Dems were a minority, but he failed the Democrats, funding blue-dogs against real progressives in Democratic primaries, castrating the party in the process. His toughness was a sellout to the populist principles the Democratic party represented with people like Franklin Roosevelt.

Obama has the first real chance to make far reaching changes since Roosevelt was in power. He needs people with courage around him. That means he needs to get rid of the Clinton people he started his presidency with. Sure, they were the only Democrats with experience in the White House, which is the usual justification. But they have hurt, not helped him. He's made too many terrible appointments-- Geithner and Summer are disastrous, even obscene examples of appointing wolves to guard the hen house. The same has been done inagriculture, food and elsewhere. We have to assume that his senior advisers played a major role in these decisions.

Maybe we should just change the name from White House to Yellow House. Either that or a lot of Americans need to get off their asses and start making a lot of noise. Michael Moore's new movie sent me a message. It's time for a revolution in America-- for people to rise up and demand change. Moore didn't pull any punches. I'm with him. It's time for our elected representatives-- the majority who were elected in 2008-- to join with Alan Grayson in speaking up and out, and using the power they were given, instead of snivellingly trying to beg one New England senator to throw her voteat a version of health care that does not deserve to be passed.

There are, as Grayson has said, knuckle dragging Neanderthals out there. But perhaps worse, there are spineless mice. Time to throw them out or morph them into fully spined beings who take ownership of their power and have the courage to do the right thing.