Pholus
Pholus's Journal"Reality" check -- This week "-bo" whipped the GOP! Why now and not 18 months ago?
We got some really flawed "deals" because of bipartisanship, "the art of the possible," starting negotiations by ceding large amounts of ground to the GOP and general meekness. This week the President did EXACTLY what I was asking for 18 months ago and oh look the GOP rolls over in less than a week. It was always possible but for some reason the President was pulling his punches.
Too bad that wasn't on the "hostage situation" that extended the Bush cuts on the wealthy.
Too bad that wasn't on HCR.
Too bad that wasn't on Wall Street regulation.
But I'm reasonable. If the President has started coming to work with the attitude that he needs to win for the American people and that means making the GOP LOSE then I'm fully on board with him and yesterday's failures don't matter anymore.
It's good to see him back. Too bad that "holding his feet to the fire" is seen as disloyalty by some here.
It seems like both sides in this little internecine spat feel like they are the only aggrieved ones.
Consider for a moment that most of the folks here who you're arguing with are rank-and-file Dems just like you. Also consider that these two factions here were CREATED and ask yourself how that could happen. After all, it is a strange situation -- I find myself simultaneously a Democrat by principle and a President Obama skeptic by circumstance despite my general approval of what he has accomplished.
For me personally, it was the TSA nudie scopes. Sorry, that one crosses my personal line. I teach radiation physics and I am familiar with computer imaging. I also am quite familiar with our govt's fascination with collecting all the biometrics they can on their own population and I find that a tad unwholesome. I paid attention to Chertoff's lobbying and how other similar and obviously safer radiation choices (millimeter wave) were ignored in favor of x-ray backscatter simply because an IMAGE was created. I found several instances where promises were made about how the data was handled which were demonstrable lies. I watched the safety exceptions granted for TSA employees so that they didn't have to wear a radiation badge -- exempting them from the workplace safety rules the rest of us follow for good reason. I watched that one engineer from Livermore suggest a software fix that would alleviate most of the privacy concerns IN SOFTWARE. The fix took 45 minutes and no additional hardware. It took THREE YEARS of continual complaints for that fix to finally be accepted. For amusement, I read the doublespeak over on the TSA blog from "Blogger Bob" and the rest of the crew as they attempt to justify all this BS and manage public concerns about the outrage du jour that they've typically brought down upon themselves. I have read Schneier's "Beyond Fear" and realize that many of the things being done to make us safer actually don't work but are done to give us the PERCEPTION of being safer. That seems a bit intolerable.
For my concerns, on for some on DU I instantly became:
1) A republican plant
2) A PAID republican plant
3) A useful idiot for the Tea Party
4) A useful idiot for the Koch Brothers
5) An Obama hater
Kind of like the names you're worried about. Number 5 actually kind of shocked me. I thought I was complaining about Bush-era policies that could be changed by the new (at the time) administration. But oh, no, apparently this was just as the honeymoon was ending and the poll numbers were not looking up so the opinion of some here was that I should just take a heaping bit of STFU for the team. "The art of the possible" I was told along with indications that I had some kind of personal problem for even feeling bad about needless radiation exposure or the "freedom gropes."
Look, just because the possession of the ball has changed doesn't mean that up became down. My values mean more than that.
Now I am not going to name names, but several of the posters on this very thread who are currently tut-tutting about all those nasty name-calling O haters were among the very people happy to fling little bon mots at me for having a non-approved opinion on an issue. Fine, I'm an apostate -- it actually has its positives you know. One of them is that your eyes become open to a lot of things around you that you'd kind of happily accept in better circumstances. It made me generally skeptical of any thread where these same people came down with their same kind of dissent smashing tactics -- after all I know what happened on the one issue where frankly I KNEW what I am talking about.
Now you personally, ProSense, seem to wear very very very thick rose colored glasses but you've generally refrained from some of the more childish name calling and so I can respect that even as I find flaws in some of your arguments. However, as you seem shocked that this name calling can occur I decided to take some time to explain it to you. The entire situation is unhealthy. In the end, I forced myself to take a break from DU for a couple months when I realized that I was not as upset with the President's behavior NEARLY as much as I was with his DU proponents. I'm back, but my core beliefs have not changed, and the same people are behaving in the same fashion so we'll see how long my new found sense of balance lasts.
So in the end, I hope you realize the moral: as you fight all these monsters you have to realize that sometimes you've created them. To end it, *everyone* has to change. Good luck with that.
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