a vastly persuadable mass of idiots held captive by a highly motivated minority of plutocrats

[phantom power]

Asked what advice he’d give himself if he could go back to his first day in office, President Obama said Wednesday, “I would’ve closed Guantanamo on the first day.”

“I didn’t because at that time we had a bipartisan agreement that it should be closed,” Mr. Obama said at a town hall-style event in Cleveland, Ohio. “I thought that we had a consensus there that we could do it [in a deliberate] fashion.”

Instead, he continued, “The politics got tough, and people got scared by the rhetoric around it… The path of least resistance was to leave it open, even though it’s not who we are as a country.”…

See, that’s where the President’s community-organizer training led him astray: This is who “we” are as a country — not a rather unwieldy group of neighbors trying to achieve a workable concensus, but a vastly persuadable mass of idiots held captive by a highly motivated minority of plutocrats, grifters, and sociopaths.

Or, as NYMag more gently phrased it, “Rather than focusing on Guantanamo, he could’ve just told his past self to abandon any hope of bipartisan compromise.”

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2015/03/20/open-thread-roads-not-taken/