Bad Ronald
The Fly
in american politics it's best to have each party share in the power structure........that way neither one can screw things up at an accelerated rate.......mcuh as they all do anyways
update: holy crap he's really pissed at liberal Democrats.
“Mark and I just had a discussion about it; we don’t see eye to eye”—Kushner married Mark Harris, a journalist who sometimes writes for New York, before a rabbi in Manhattan in 2003 and then legally in Massachusetts before a “lady motorcycle cop,” in 2008. “But I feel that after Obama’s inauguration the left immediately settled into our very familiar role of being the backseat drivers or principled opposition, and have expressed volubly every disappointment. Not even after the inauguration. The minute they heard that Rick Warren was speaking at the inauguration, LGBT people were saying, ‘It’s over, he’s just like all the others.’ Let alone those who say there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats, which I think is glib and profoundly dangerous. What frightens me is that I feel that we’re in the process of dismantling the coalition of constituencies that brought Obama to the White House.
“My feeling is that there are too many of us on the left who believe that politics is an expression of personal purity. Because of our divorcement from electoral politics and abandonment of a belief in the possibility of radical change through participatory democracy, we have become profoundly uncomfortable with, and ignorant of, the complexities and discomfort of making change in a democracy. I’m guilty of this in some of the earlier things I wrote, too. I have no illusion of being able to change Rush Limbaugh’s mind, or of being able to make John Boehner anything other than a profoundly indecent person, but what makes something happen in an electoral democracy is compromise, negotiation, and strategizing, and to a certain extent even what in the Clinton era became fashionable to call lying. There are lies, and those should not be tolerated. But there is a degree of rhetorical finesse that’s required to maneuver through very treacherous waters. I’m willing to believe that this man who got himself elected president is actually a very skilled politician and is negotiating imponderably difficult conditions.”
[...]
"And the LGBT community, what are they, we, looking for?” Kushner continues. “Yes, we’ve been asked to wait a very long time, asked to eat oceans of shit by the Democratic Party; we’ve been 75 percent loyal for decades without a wobble and without a whole lot of help from these people. And it’s important that somebody keeps screaming; the trick is how do you scream, and who do you scream to? If we’re dissatisfied with these Democrats, let’s get better ones instead of fantasies about mass uprisings that are going to resemble the October Revolution. Yes, it might sometimes feel good to throw the newspaper across the room. There’s much criticism of Obama that’s legitimate. He backs down on things, he waffles, like on the mosque, and you wince. And I consider his decision to appeal the Federal court ruling abolishing DADT to be unethical, tremendously destructive, and potentially politically catastrophic. But is Obama really supposed to say, as the first African-American president, that same-sex marriage is his first priority? Clearly he believes in it; he’s a constitutional scholar. It’s not conceivable to me that he believes that state-sponsored marriage should be unavailable to same-sex couples, even if he has religious scruples. But do I think he should have lost the election for the chance to say he supported same-sex marriage? No. Given that we would have had John McCain and Sarah Palin, I would have said, ‘Say anything you need to.’ So if he’s moving very cautiously, with two wars he’s inherited and a collapsing global economy and the planet coming unglued—Okay!”
Why Tony Kushner Is One of the Last Intellectuals Left Standing in Theater -- New York Magazine
The guy really just wants to legislate, and slowly roll the massive stone forward even if it's an inch or two. The times when his advisors have had him lash out at the GOP he has just looked bitter and silly. He's just about legislating as much as he can from the center, even to the extent that the Democrats see him as not capable of leading well enough, and the Republicans will block any and all attempts to do anything useful.“I think it’s tempting not to negotiate with hostage takers, unless the hostage gets harmed, then people will question the wisdom of that strategy,” Obama said.“In this case the hostage was the American people and I was not willing to see them get harmed.”
Especially with one party who is becoming more and more thuggish with each passing day.
while i certainly consider myself a progressive who happens to be forced to vote democratic, i kind of understand Obama's anger with the left. while he absolutely let all of us project our Earth Born Black Messiah Intellectual Antidote To The Bush Era, he never, ever made promises about making America into a liberal paradise. in fact, his inaugural address -- which i attended -- was quite downbeat, quite sober, and quite aware of the enormous problems the country is facing.
I wish it could be like the 50s or 60s, but my generation couldn't give a shit about the common good, we have high self-esteem and need to keep working two or three jobs to make sure there is a flatscreen in every home and an iPod in every jeans pocket.
I wish there weren't even a bit of truth to that, but there is.
Irvine511 said:if you care about the common good, post this as your Facebook status.
I think Obama's decision was practical, in that with the Republicans controling Congress next year, they could easily make all the tax cuts permanent--better to get a two-year extension now rather than block the extension of the tax cuts to the rich and get nothing at all.
I wish it could be like the 50s or 60s, but my generation couldn't give a shit about the common good, we have high self-esteem and need to keep working two or three jobs to make sure there is a flatscreen in every home and an iPod in every jeans pocket.
I wish there weren't even a bit of truth to that, but there is.
Good thing we don't look to our baseball players for their intelligence...
Good thing we don't look to our baseball players for their intelligence...
Playing for the Orioles probably messes with your head in a major way.
He looks like a freaking model but I don't know what's going on upstairs. He didn't just talk about the citizenship, if you read the whole interview it's even worse.
It is a little ironic that the NFL seems to breed more politicians than other pro sports (Heath Shuler, Jack Kemp, Steve Largent, etc.), given the tendency toward hits on the head.
wait a second, maybe that helps them be politicians?
House Democrats voted Thursday against considering the tax package that President Obama negotiated with Republicans, raising questions over the president's influence in his own party.
The vote by the House Democratic caucus was a defiant rejection of both the agreement on tax and benefit measures, as well as what many Democrats in the chamber perceived as being marginalized in the talks by the White House.
"This message today is very simple. That in the form that it was negotiated, it is not acceptable to the House Democratic caucus," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who represented House Democrats in the negotiations. "It's as simple as that."