During his first term, Obama and his apologists excused his inaction on the economy and other issues by pointing out the mess that he’d inherited from George W. Bush. (Never mind that he didn’t lift a finger to clean it up.) What will be his excuse for inaction during his second term?
New Term, New Excuses
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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Inaction? Obama kept Guantánamo open, so the US could continue enhanced interrogation, and we’ve been told that only ‘enhanced interrogation’ led Obama to Osama, who was under house arrest, surrounded by CIA agents, living in his ‘multi-million dollar mansion’ and was within days of an attack on the US that would have made everyone forget the insignificant 9/11 attack.
Obama has killed large numbers of terrorists. The liberals at Stanford say that 98% of those killed were innocent, but those are the liberals. US law says anyone killed by the US military under orders of the US president is a felonious criminal who was guilty of capital offenses, and that includes those women and babies killed. Those who were innocent were collateral damage, and so 100% of the guilt belongs to the terrorists, not to the US drones and their pilots.
Obama has guaranteed that anyone who doesn’t take out a worthless individual insurance policy will go to jail. To Republicans, Obama called this act, ‘Making the Deadbeats pay their way.’ To Democrats, Obama said it’s ‘Universal health coverage.’
Which is it? (Best guess: none of the above.)
Ted-
1) There’s a South Park video about tears that I’d love to link here, but I’m at work and they blocked You Tube.
2) For the billionth time, “not doing what I wouldve done” != inaction, and to claim it does makes you look like a biased, lying partisan hack. Oh wait- I forgot who I was talking to.
3) To answer your actual question, allow me to quote ex (and soon to be again) Speaker Pelosi- “We’ll stop blaming Bush for the mess he created when the problems go away.”
Michael-
I will correct the tired, debunked, RW talking points every time they’re used. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, Obama did NOT keep Gitmo open. In fact, he did his best to close it.
@Michael
Oh and the “go to jail if you don’t have insurance” is also debunked crap. Just so you know.
Whimsy, Whimsy, Whimsy, sit on this source … and spin:
Holder rewards DoJ teams that gave immunity to torturers and to mortgage fraudsters.
This is not merely complaining about what Bush left but institutionalizing it.
http://tinyurl.com/cjgqo9b
@ Whimsical – I studied you post for a while (“For the billionth time, “not doing what I wouldve done” != inaction, and to claim it does makes you look like a biased, lying partisan hack.”) before it occurred to me that the symbol you needed was: ≠
If you need that symbol frequently, you can copy & paste it to a “Character File” (which is what I’ve done) or make a note:
In MS-Word Type 2260 followed by ALT+X.
I’m glad Whimsical has shown himself to be a loyal Republican, one who knows Obama was born in Kenya, and so the US military, not fooled like the voters, refused to accept Obama as Commander in Chief and has been acting totally on its own since January ’09. Since the military knows that Obama is a Kenyan national and ineligible to be Commander in Chief, there is no way Obama could close Guantánamo, so he’s not to be faulted for the fact that it remains open.
And failure to buy insurance has been declared tax evasion by the Supreme Court. My father told me that, when they first made tax evasion a criminal offense, they promised that it was just a way to jail Capone, that they’d NEVER jail anyone for tax evasion who wasn’t a gangster. We’ve since seen how that promise worked out.
Of course, the penalties for not buying insurance do not start in full until ’14, so there’s no way of knowing for sure how those penalties will be implemented. But I agree that Whimsical was right about one thing: no one was jailed for not having insurance during the ’12 election year.
Not being prescient, I cannot predict what will happen when the law takes full force in ’14, but tax evasion IS a criminal offense, so we’ll just have to wait and see how things are implemented. And I’m glad Whimsical IS prescient and can unconditionally guarantee that no one will ever be jailed for tax evasion because he can’t or won’t pay for insurance. Could you please give me the winners of next year’s Derby, Preakness, and Belmont?
Maybe Whimsical is a programmer. ! means NOT in many programming languages.
@Whimsical
I agree with you that Obama accomplished things. But those accomplishments were not what the people who voted for him wanted him to do, so they don’t count as accomplishments.
I hardly think people voted for Obama so he could drop drone-assassins on two American citizens in Yemen without due process. But if you want to count that as an accomplish, okey-dokey.
The power that allows me to see the future, but not lottery numbers tells me that Netanyahu was going to bomb Iran the moment Romney was elected.
Just two points:
1. Obama DID keep Gitmo open. We’ve covered this point several times on the board, complete with links. Here’s a link: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/guantanamo-bay-open-promises/story?id=16698768#.UJ5tBWez7CY
The closure of Gitmo (or rather, its non-closure) is a moral issue. There are certain things that you do not do in our society and in our civilization. You do not murder the innocent. You do not rape. You do not throw people into prisons without trials. These are fundamental requirements for the sort of society we claim to live in and in which we claim to believe in. The test of those beliefs is not how we uphold them when it is easy to do so. The test is whether we stick to our standards when it is difficult.
Gitmo remains open. There are people in Gitmo who have been found not guilty but who have not — and will continue to not be — released. Revisit that. They were arrested, put in a little metal box, eventually it was determined that there simply wasn’t enough evidence to find them guilty, and they are STILL there. It doesn’t matter if these are Americans, Canadians, Saudis, or left-handed Dutchmen. By the rules we purport to run our government by, they should have been released. And they have not.
2. Whim, thanks for the FDR note. I started with Kennedy (50 years back) because I wanted to avoid the whole “Well, what about Chester Arthur?” effect. The U.S. electorate has changed considerably even in just the past 20 years. I also picked Kennedy because he is the first TV president, many people who voted for him and lived through his times are still alive, and he was associated (as was Obama) with “energizing” the presidency.
I think the central point still holds: In 2008, 61.6% of eligible voters turned out (according to Wikipedia), and Obama got 69,456,897 votes (52.9%) against his competitor, who got 59,934,814 (45.7%).
In 2012, the turnout was slightly lower, 57.5%-60% of eligible voters, and Obama got 61,681,462 (50.6%) votes, a drop of 8 million votes (the figures have been updated since my last post). And that is unique to two-term presidents in the modern era: a second-termer doesn’t lose votes.
Tous les excuses sont bonnes….
Henri
@Michael-
I like you, Michael, I really do. You’re one of the few progressives I’ve talked to that seems to be mostly willing to look at reality for what it IS, rather than what their ideology insists it SHOULD BE.
That said, your first paragraph is one of the biggest chunks of verbal vomit I’ve ever seen. And it’s verbal vomit with one and only one purpose- to try and distract from the fact that you don’t have an actual answer for my point.
Not only do I know you don’t have an actual answer for my point, I can prove it with a simple exercise.Ready?
Answer the following two yes or no questions honestly:
1) Did Obama sign an executive order to close Gitmo?
2) Was implementation of that order blocked in a charge led by Republicans?
And because I do like you, Michael, I’ll let you in on a secret: There is NO way to answer those two questions honestly and still make a claim that Obama kept Gitmo open that has the slightest shred of credibility.
As for the rest of your post: I’m not prescient, I just no better than to believe right wing talking points. Assume that everything you hear in the RW media is false, do your own research, and your life will run much smoother.
See, Obamacare doesn’t work the way you think it works. There are no tax increases on individuals that aren’t already wealthy in it. Here’s how it actually works:
You and I both have a tax bill of $3500.
I buy an insurance policy- I get a break on my insurance. My tax bill is now $2800.
You do not buy an insurance policy. Your tax bill REMAINS at $3500. Now, you may wish to evade that tax bill, and if you do you both will and should go to jail. But that will have sweet fuck all to do with Obamacare, mmmmkay?
@Russell
Yes, you called it, thanks. 30 years programming computers has drilled using != to represent “not equal to” into a habit that’s just way to hard to change.
@Susan
Oh, I can always count on you for a good old-fashioned belly laugh, Susan. Thank you; I mean that sincerely.
“But those accomplishments were not what the people who voted for him wanted him to do, so they don’t count as accomplishments.”
1) Yeah, no, it doesn’t work like that. Bush accomplished a lot of things I didn’t like, but that doesn’t give me the right to say he didn’t accomplish anything.
2) Speak for yourself- there are a lot of people who voted for Obama not once, but twice, that understand given the realities of the situation he got pretty damn close to what we wanted him to do.
@Alex
1)Yes, we’ve been over this argument before. And I’ve offered the same exercise to you I gave Michael. The only response I’ve ever seen on it from you is silence. I presumed that’s because you understood that honestly answering those two questions pretty much destroys the “Obama kept Gitmo open” argument. But if you want to take a crack at it, be my guest. Just remember, you have to answer the questions honestly.
Yes, Gitmo is a moral issue. Which makes your obstinacy about who is actually at fault, and therefore should bear the brunt of your anger and be the focus of your efforts to relieve from office all the more baffling.
2) Your insistence that the stat you cite actually means something put me in mind of this cartoon from xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1122/
I don’t believe your stat was caused by what you think it was caused by and I certainly don’t believe it means what you think it means. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.
@Whimsical:
“1) Did Obama sign an executive order to close Gitmo?
2) Was implementation of that order blocked in a charge led by Republicans?”
Yes.
And no.
Obama signed the order. And the GOP balked, threatening to block funding the transfer of the Gitmo detainees to the US into the civilian court system.
But you’re forgetting that Obama had options. Which he didn’t choose to exercise.
He didn’t use the bully pulpit, taking to the airwaves to repeatedly chastise the Republicans for denying justice, explaining to the American people why Gitmo was wrong.
He directed that there be no investigations of wrongdoing at Gitmo under Bush. Investigations would have led to calls for closure.
Finally—this is the big one—he could have released the detainees. All of them. Those who couldn’t go home, like the Uyghurs tortured by Bush with the assistance of Chinese intelligence agents (look this one up, it’s amazing), should have been released within the United States and given green cards.
He COULD have done this stuff. He didn’t, because he is a political coward and/or is OK with torture. I don’t know which, but the results are the same.
You should also reread the ACA. There are provisions for Obamacare refuseniks at income levels that hardly qualify as wealthy, like $40,000 a year.
@Ted-
“2) Was implementation of that order blocked in a charge led by Republicans?”
Yes.
And no.
Obama signed the order. And the GOP balked”
You’ve just hung yourself with your own dishonesty. The rules were you had to answer the questions honestly, and by your own admission you didn’t.
“But you’re forgetting that Obama had options. Which he didn’t choose to exercise”
None of which would’ve changed Republican obstructionism in the slighest. That’s what I like best about Obama- he knows when not to waste his political capital.
“Finally—this is the big one—he could have released the detainees. All of them. Those who couldn’t go home, like the Uyghurs tortured by Bush with the assistance of Chinese intelligence agents (look this one up, it’s amazing), should have been released within the United States and given green cards.”
Under what authority? Please cite chapter and verse, because I do not believe for a heartbeat he has this power.
“He COULD have done this stuff. He didn’t, because he is a political coward and/or is OK with torture. ”
Or, as you acknowledged in your column, he doesn’t have the luxury of destroying his party over an upopular, albeit it technically correct position. Very telling that you’d extend that faith towards the Republicans, but not Obama.
“You should also reread the ACA. There are provisions for Obamacare refuseniks at income levels that hardly qualify as wealthy, like $40,000 a year.”
None of which are tax increases at that level of income,; unless of course you’d like to play the semantic game that not getting a tax break is equivelent to a tax increase.