Excellent ....excellent work...

Charles Pierce is a gift...I think this sums up the way many of us on DU feel....not hysterical defeatism or equally hysterical boosterism, but a sober...somber assessment of where we really are.

http://www.esquire.com/features/cynic-president-obama-1112?click=pp

snip

We have not been a great country for a very long time, the cynic believes, and it does us no good to claim otherwise. We are not an honest and decent people in our politics, in the way we deal with one another as a political commonwealth. We will trade away our most precious rights in exchange for a bag of magic charms, and even when we find out that these include the black prison, the waterboard, and the secret microphone, we'll think we got the better of the deal. We'll swap our obligation to intelligent self-government for any huckster's trick that makes us laugh or keeps us entertained in our cars for the evening drive-time shift. We hold this truth to be self-evident — that all men are out to get what's ours.

Obama will find this out, the cynic thought. He will discover exactly how much he overrates the country as a democracy and its people as citizens. It will happen. He may not even understand it until it happens to him, but it will happen. —"The Cynic and Senator Obama," June 2008

snip

and.....

Now, four years on, the cynic wonders if the president yet has learned what he needed to learn. He has been subject to unprecedented political obstructionism and to a campaign of personal slander unseen in this country since the days when Thomas Jefferson was hiring James Callender to do his dirty work for him back in 1800. Some of the deepest muck from the river basin was churned up to the surface. And there was an audience for it. Rank insanity drove television ratings and made stars out of weeping hucksters. In 2010, the American people — whose essential unity and wisdom he so warmly praised in the speech that made him a star in 2004 — returned a singularly reactionary Congress full of utterly ridiculous men and women. They dedicated themselves to his political destruction, and they proved themselves willing to wreck the country and its economy, and to cause untold pain to millions of Americans into the bargain, in order to achieve it.