But speaking of liberals, do you remember them ever clamoring for more war? Remember back in the Nam days. Weren't the liberals on the side of ending the war? Remember in 2003. Weren't liberals trying to block the Bush thugs from invading Iraq? This president has massively escalated the American military presence in Afghanistan, while also significantly increasing the use of drone missile attacks in Pakistan. Maybe I need to lay off the Boone's Farm for a little while, "cause I'm feeling kinda confused. I always thought the liberals were the anti-war crowd.
We could go on and on here, folks. The current Democratic government in Washington bears no resemblance whatsoever to liberalism. We know this, because we know what a real progressive government would actually do. It would spend a pile of money to create jobs and stimulate the economy. It would regulate economic actors so that they served the public interest or were instead promptly disappeared. It would create a universal, publicly-funded, national health care plan. It would launch a major initiative to create a new alternative energy industry. It would resurrect the Bill of Rights and restore human rights to the American legal system. It would act immediately to guarantee that all people were subject to equal treatment, regardless of their sexual orientation. It would be searching for political solutions to the conflict in Afghanistan and bringing troops home, rather than escalating the war.
This is what real liberalism would look like in America today, and this is not remotely comparable to what the so-called liberals in Washington are actually doing. None of it is, let alone all of it.
It's really quite amazing. First, because of how regressive Obama has turned out to be. In all honesty, I cannot think of a single serious policy or action by this president that could be genuinely called liberal, with perhaps the possible exception of reversing the Republican clamp-down on stem cell research and on overseas abortion counseling (yet he's also been simultaneously selling out abortion rights at home in legislating the health care debacle). I mean it. Obama may be a stylistic breath of fresh air after Bush (but, then, a rotting corpse would be, too) but substantively, he's little short of W's third term. In fact, Bush was even more progressive than Obama if you compare their two signature health care initiatives. One of those two guys came up with a plan to massively increase government-provided benefits to the public. (Shhh! That's called socialism.) Guess, what? It wasn't Obama.
But what's really amazing is how Obama is broadly perceived as being a liberal. This is just yet another framing victory by the right, and one of stunning proportions. By erroneously tagging Obunkster with the bleeding-heart liberal moniker, they manage to simultaneously tear him down, make liberalism unpalatable to the public, and shift the center of political gravity so far starboard that even a right-wing president like Obummer and his band of Democratic merry men become unacceptable because they are insufficiently regressive.
Like I said, you have to admire these guys for their craft. You know. Just like you have to admire the Holocaust for its good ol' German efficiency.
Meanwhile, though, it's scary that America has so little in the way of a real progressive option in our politics.
It's scary that those politicians who are today widely considered to be liberal are in fact mostly deeply regressive.
And it's scary that we keep following the same right-wing prescriptions, decade in and decade out, even though they have done nothing but wreck the planet, wreck the country, and wreck the lives of individual Americans.
But what is really scary is that we are now losing the capacity to even contemplate what a progressive set of politics would look like. These ideas are now so marginalized that people increasingly can't even conceive of them anymore.
Orwell would be horrified.
Comrade O'Brien would be very proud indeed.
We could go on and on here, folks. The current Democratic government in Washington bears no resemblance whatsoever to liberalism. We know this, because we know what a real progressive government would actually do. It would spend a pile of money to create jobs and stimulate the economy. It would regulate economic actors so that they served the public interest or were instead promptly disappeared. It would create a universal, publicly-funded, national health care plan. It would launch a major initiative to create a new alternative energy industry. It would resurrect the Bill of Rights and restore human rights to the American legal system. It would act immediately to guarantee that all people were subject to equal treatment, regardless of their sexual orientation. It would be searching for political solutions to the conflict in Afghanistan and bringing troops home, rather than escalating the war.
This is what real liberalism would look like in America today, and this is not remotely comparable to what the so-called liberals in Washington are actually doing. None of it is, let alone all of it.
It's really quite amazing. First, because of how regressive Obama has turned out to be. In all honesty, I cannot think of a single serious policy or action by this president that could be genuinely called liberal, with perhaps the possible exception of reversing the Republican clamp-down on stem cell research and on overseas abortion counseling (yet he's also been simultaneously selling out abortion rights at home in legislating the health care debacle). I mean it. Obama may be a stylistic breath of fresh air after Bush (but, then, a rotting corpse would be, too) but substantively, he's little short of W's third term. In fact, Bush was even more progressive than Obama if you compare their two signature health care initiatives. One of those two guys came up with a plan to massively increase government-provided benefits to the public. (Shhh! That's called socialism.) Guess, what? It wasn't Obama.
Like I said, you have to admire these guys for their craft. You know. Just like you have to admire the Holocaust for its good ol' German efficiency.
Meanwhile, though, it's scary that America has so little in the way of a real progressive option in our politics.
It's scary that those politicians who are today widely considered to be liberal are in fact mostly deeply regressive.
And it's scary that we keep following the same right-wing prescriptions, decade in and decade out, even though they have done nothing but wreck the planet, wreck the country, and wreck the lives of individual Americans.
But what is really scary is that we are now losing the capacity to even contemplate what a progressive set of politics would look like. These ideas are now so marginalized that people increasingly can't even conceive of them anymore.
Orwell would be horrified.
Comrade O'Brien would be very proud indeed.
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