Glenn Greenwald: The Real Reason the GOP Primary Is a Pathetic, Incompetent Clown Show
The Real Reason the GOP Primary Is a Pathetic, Incompetent Clown ShowBecause Barack Obama has adopted so many core Republican beliefs -- particularly in the realm of foreign policy -- the Republican race is a shambles.
By Glenn Greenwald
December 27, 2011
American presidential elections are increasingly indistinguishable from the reality TV competitions drowning the nation's airwaves. Both are vapid, personality-driven and painfully protracted affairs, with the winners crowned by virtue of their ability to appear slightly more tolerable than the cast of annoying rejects whom the public eliminates one by one. When, earlier this year, America's tawdriest (and one of its most-watched) reality TV show hosts, Donald Trump, inserted himself into the campaign circus as a threatened contestant, he fitted right in, immediately catapulting to the top of audience polls before announcing he would not join the show.
The Republican presidential primaries – shortly to determine who will be the finalist to face off, and likely lose, against Barack Obama next November – has been a particularly base spectacle. That the contest has devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free, anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of defeating the president.
In a desperate attempt to find someone less slithery and soulless (not to mention less Mormon), party members have lurched manically from one ludicrous candidate to the next, only to watch in horror as each wilted the moment they were subjected to scrutiny. Incessant pleas to the party's ostensibly more respectable conservatives to enter the race have been repeatedly rebuffed. Now, only Romney remains viable. Republican voters are thus slowly resigning themselves to marching behind a vacant, supremely malleable technocrat whom they plainly detest.
In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party's defining beliefs. Depicting the other party's president as a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger. Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic sanity.
Read the full article at:
http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/153587/Glenn_Greenwald%3A_The_Real_Reason_the_GOP_Primary_Is_a_Pathetic%2C_Incompetent_Clown_Show/?page=entire
= new reply since forum marked as read
Sid
"adopted the defining Bush/Cheney policy of indefinite detention without trial for accused terrorists; and even claimed and exercised the power to assassinate US citizens far from any battlefield and without due process?"
..bullshit!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/100299985
http://www.democraticunderground.com/100285404
http://www.democraticunderground.com/100295851
Still, let me back up:
"In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party's defining beliefs."
the Dems and Dem voters have swung more to the right in recent decades.
Acceptance of Repug policies and attitudes means that this cast of crazies somehow looks credible. That's INSANE. Enabled by Dems who lean that way, whoever they may be. 
That's where we are, like it or not, b/c of pushing that "moderate""centrist" line back and forth for too friggin long ..................
maybe young or shortsighted view? lack of history?
"Building a false meme to justify Obama sucks is purely an exercise in distortion."
= a marathon of distortion
now memories resemble soundbites 
i'm beginning to unnerstan 
'Adopting GOP beliefs' is not the same as being forced to compromise with a radical, hate-filled GOP Congressional majority and lock-step GOP Senate, to save the lives Obama knows will be lost.
The GOP threatens to shut down the government at every turn, knowing it will cause violent rebellion, which they want to use to step into power with and go full fascist. They've bred discontent and paranoia to both sides, since they own all of the media and cater to the left, too.
For their faithful, their pundits have called for the death of Obama OPENLY since Day One. They paid for movies saying Obama intends to slaughter most of mankind. For the left, they slant every single thing that Obama did, not to save lives, but to make his actions hateful to the left, so they will bow to them, too.
When Obama said he was humbled to be president for over 300 million people, he said it was an awesome responsibility. It is a fearful thing. Humility and compromise, no matter how distasteful, is required. As an advocate, I know about being forced to be humble enough to make compromise with powerful people I consider villains, because lives are at stake, not my pride, or my own morality. We don't get to give all we want to those we protect.
The way some 'left' pundits pile on Obama, it's like accusing a carjacking victim of 'believing' that the carjacker was right. That with a gun to their head, threatening to shoot the driver, his family, even his dog in the back seat, he believes it is okay.
Obama has been dealing with these extortionists since he arrived in office. As far as his sin of appointing 'evil people' in his cabinet and elsewhere, the pundits may have forgotten the objections to his liberal appointments by the regressive representatives. These pundits don't dirty their hands by going to the grassroots level, when criticizing a president is so much easier and attention getting.
By not voting, which gave Obama the Tea Party, Americans have voted for the regressives, the status quo. So Obama is reacting to the reality we gave him, which doesn't mean he wants it. But by not supporting his progressive agenda by electing representatives to vote with him, the man has to be wondering if anyone believes in what he ran on anymore. It's still not the man, it's the ideas and Greenwald's focus on the man diverts our energy from them.
Obama's promoting and signing progressive legislation in 2009, which no one seems to remember, drove the GOP absolutely NUTS and they brought in the baggers. They had conspiracy media promoting an alternative reality about things that have never come true, mandatory forced vaccinations, the Obama youth squads set to drag Constitution-loving Americans out of their homes, race riots of suddenly empowered AA's rising up to kill whitey, a flood of illegals and Muslims to create Greater Aztlan, the worldwide calipate, Sharia law, gun confiscation and people being rounded up into FEMA camps.
It never stops and now the 'left' has gone into the same conspiracy mindset, just as intended, as if there is no middle ground between Prison Planet and the Left now. At some point one has to look at where the left meets these rightwing nutjobs and call it like it is.
They are NOT now and have not been, looking out for the millions that the GOP wanted off the rolls, not looking out for the millions on Social Security, Medicare or any of that. No, they will bite your head off if you mention the big picture.
Greenwald has great arguments, but he's into personal attack mode, questioning the motives of Obama since it inflames and it sells. The reason it sells is because of the GOP owned media that has made this environment. He's just contributing to their victory.
And when people didn't vote in 2008 did that also count as a vote for Republican regressives?
That would mean that in every election no matter who wins, Democrats or Republicans, non-voters are in fact voting for right-wing Republican congressional regressives and therefore a Democratic president never has enough Democrats in Congress to get stuff done!
A Democratic President must be a "great compromiser" in order to achieve a grand bi-partisan coalition with Republicans.
So it's the non-voting people's fault, not the politicians!
Sorry. I just don't get the logic behind that argument unless it's yet another talking point such as "It's the voters fault" or "Not enough Democrats are elected to Congress" that should be added to:
