Thursday, July 29, 2010

Beware the 'progressive agenda'

Since taking office nearly 18 months ago, Barack Obama has failed to deliver on his promise to close Guantanamo Bay, has expanded the war in Afghanistan, has dropped cluster bombs on civilians in Yemen, has intensified a proxy war in Somalia and is currently seeking the authority to search every Americans e-mail and web history without so much as a warrant from a rubber-stamping intelligence court. In other words, he's been successfully advancing the progressive agenda, or so liberal magazine The American Prospect tells me in a piece that notes the bulk of the professional bloggers and Democratic activists who attended the recent "Netroots Nation" conference in Las Vegas likewise believe our smooth-talking murderer-in-chief is a Pretty Swell Guy.

Take it away, Jamelle Bouie:
The Netroots Nation straw poll, conducted during the conference by Revolution Messaging, shows President Obama with an approval rating of 84 percent among the attending activists, journalists, and bloggers. Given the mostly somber mood of the conference, this is higher than I expected, but on reflection, I'm not too surprised. Among conference attendees, there didn't seem to be much disagreement with the idea that Obama has been pretty successful in advancing a progressive agenda. While I'm sure there was plenty of disappointment over the lack of a public option in the Affordable Care Act, for example, I don't think anyone challenged the notion that passing health care is a defining achievement for the administration.
I particularly like the last line: while sure the president didn't actually deliver on his promise to enact a public option, much less the single-payer system desired by much of the liberal left, passing something and calling it "health care reform" was certainly an achievement, and shouldn't we all be proud of that? Absent from the piece, you'll of course notice, is any mention of all those dead foreigners that liberal cosmopolitans purportedly care about, which I guess might just indicate that they never really cared about them. A civilian killed by a Democratic president in an unjust landwar in Asia just doesn't inflame a liberal's passions as much as when it's a nasty 'ol Republican dropping the bombs.

Beyond just the sickening partisan morality of these activists, the Netroots poll also shows that the liberal lore that the Democratic rank-and-file are more willing to stand up to their politicians than their mouth-breathing Republican counterparts -- carbon-copies, I say -- is just that: Lore. Fiction. Bullshit. The Netroots liberals are just as impressed by the pomp and prestige of the presidency, are just as worshipful of authority and liable to join a creepy cult of personality, as any conservative.

What, too much? A bit unfair? Yeah, well: 84 percent.

8 comments:

  1. Wow, now he wants to review our emails without warrants? You'd think he couldn't get worse and he does.

    Similar to the Netroots ridiculous approval of Obama, the Young Democrats association in Houston (and I'm sure if it is happening in Houston it is happening all over) is actually convening on Obama's birthday (I think August 3rd) for a Happy Hour in celebration of Obama's first 18 months. When I got that email I laughed out loud. I can't see how any progressive can be happy with Obama over his first 18 months. No F'ing way I'm going to show up and talk about how great Obama is. If I went I'd just get into huge arguments listing everything that is bad about Obama's first 18 months. It would be a long list.

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  2. jcapan11:40 PM

    Not sure if my wordpress login worked so...

    That TAP straw poll was (regarding politics at least) the most discouraging thing I've ever read. Liberalism is dead in America and the worst thing about it is that liberals dealt the death blow.

    I'm now convinced that far too many of these writers dream of being (better than) Ezra. Nothing like the warm village embrace to make up for your soul. A career peddling conventional b-s, rejecting everything you once believed in so passionately... Like musicians, that bigger label, larger exposure, the cushy tours and groupies--it's just too much to resist. One can only hope that their comeuppance, the cratering of an already failed industry, arrives ASAP.

    Additionally, in seeing 84%, I realized that I'm in the margin of the margin. That the distance between Chomsky and Digby is vast, while the distance between her and WaPo or her tribal dopplegangers on the right, not so much.

    I can hardly imagine that 84% would even enthusiastically vote for Obama's reelection, let alone approve of his job performance.

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  3. jcapan11:52 PM

    BTW, I'd add that these are the same people who laugh at how captured & enraptured MSM pundits are, vis a vis corporations and party leaders respectively. As well, Taibbi's theory about how teapartiers' ire is misdirected springs to mind as well.

    The netroots, every time they attack the loons on the right (you know, the jokers who've been out of power for quite a while), their energies/objectives look deeply skewed. If they're not doing Rahm's bidding, pray tell, whose interests are they representing?

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  4. Perhaps we should eventually stop torturing ourselves by contemplating these tools and set about organizing a third party to, if nothing else, cause their ruin.

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  5. Anonymous9:48 AM

    That's a condemnation of the supposed free thinkers on the net
    Fuck, that's pathetic. Don't drink the kool-aid or the punch at the next netroots convention ... maybe not even the bottled water. From those stats it appears that the netroots have been successfully co-opted by the obama administration. Some free thinkers! Did the obama administration treat them all to tasty macadamia nut cookies? I thought that was what separated them from the sycophantic hacks of the msm: they weren't bought off by those tasty macadamia nut cookies. But now we find out that it was only becoz they never were offered them before.

    He ought to have an approval rating of about 12 right now with only the very rich and those that can't read approving of him, but we've got a celebrity worshiping culture with a populace that has a collective maturity level of about a 14 year old which childishly has a crush on their American Idol president. Get a room!!!!! You're disgusting!!!!

    And I guess we are now applying a "no president left behind" standard and anything better than the abominable bush is a-okay.

    Z

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  6. Anonymous9:53 AM

    Well, hey, look at it this way: China does all that crap and, from what we've been told, life is getting better there all the time!

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  7. Professional bloggers in support of Obama are by definition Democratic Party activists. That's probably why their version of astroturf has long been dubbed the Nutroots.

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  8. This is not the "progressive agenda". Progressives are disgusted with Obama - at least real ones are.

    Obama is no more a progressive than Richard Nixon.

    To call the abomination of the Obama presidency "progressive" is pure sophistry. And whether intended or not, it reeks of the kind of information warfare the corporatists love to engage.

    It is true, many self proclaimed progressives are brainwashed by the Obama PR machine. And as such, they are incapable of seeing him for what he is.

    But what he is is clear to any rational person: a tool of the corporate oligarchy that runs every other aspect of this country.

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