Revoking Obama's Liberal Card

For the past several years, Obama’s left flank has been growling at him to be more progressive. With the need to stay in power, they’ve remained silent as he’s screwed them time and again and made a mockery of their issues. But as I told you, the left will only remain silent for so long, and once it becomes clear that their guy has failed, they follow a predictable pattern: surprise (“huh, why isn't he doing more”), deflection (“the Republicans stopped him!”), anger (“he isn't trying hard enough”), disavowal (“he was never really a liberal”), and betrayal (“he betrayed us from the get go”). They do this every time. It looks like we're somewhere between disavowal and betrayal at the moment. Indeed, according to Politico, several leftists have just “revoked his liberal card.”

● Said Rep. Alan Grayson: “I don’t think that anyone at this point would characterize the president as the progressive warrior that the progressive movement is anxious to see.”

● According to Politico, Dennis Kucinich blames Obama for “poisoning the movement by seeming to support it, while actively betraying it.” Kucinich claims that on foreign policy, national security, privacy, the economy, health care, Social Security and workers’ rights, Obama has “wrongly been perceived as liberal” and has thereby managed to “successfully usurp any legitimate liberal agenda.”

What has these and others so outraged?

Well, for one thing, failure breeds contempt. Things aren’t going well for Obama on any front. His healthcare plan is the “bumbling dead” with bad rates, bad data security and a public who refuse to “end their confusion” and drink the Kool-Aid. Its days are numbered. His economic record is the worst since the 1930s. His foreign policy is a joke, to say the least, and makes a mockery of supposed liberal principles.

Indeed, let’s start with that. Liberalism has correctly claimed that a US foreign policy in which the US wears a white hat instead of a dirty black-spotted hat would benefit the US and the world. Reputation matters and being seen as someone who will always stand for right will pay huge dividends. Unfortunately, liberals mis-define what is right. Rather than standing for opposition to aggression, free markets, individual rights and freedoms, and the isolation of bad actors, liberals want the US to surrender its control to international organizations, to never defend its own interests, and to use the military to enforce certain ticky-tacky things, e.g. stop dictators from killing people, but only if they use “illegal” weapons to do it.

In fact, for decades the left has cited this example as the one time they would absolutely, guaranteed be willing to use force: some dictator in a country where the US has no conceivable economic, geopolitical or national defense interest uses chemical weapons against a minority he has been oppressing. Bingo!! Syria. But now they’ve proven that even that is a lie and Obama has led the way in wishy-washying his way through it.

In any event, here are some other things to consider:

● This year, the top 1% of earners in the US took in 19.3% of all income. That’s the largest percentage taken in by those people since 1927 and is much worse than it was under the evil Bush.

● Obamacare is going to kill the unions. They know this and they are desperate to stop it. In fact, they’ve appealed personally to Obama to exempt them from Obamacare so they won’t face extinction. What happened? The headline from Forbes tells the story perfectly: “White House To Unions: Drop Dead”.

● Remember all those leftists with the signs about Wall Street being full of crooks and how they needed to be held accountable for the financial crisis? Do you remember how they claimed Bush somehow caused Enron and then did nothing about it? The Bush Justice Department put 12 Enron executives behind bars... some are still there. So far, not a single banker has been arrested for the financial crisis by Team Obama.

● Black unemployment in August finally returned to 12.6% (43% for teens), that’s down from a high of 16.5%. That 12.6% percent, by the way, was the worst level reached under Bush in December 2008... at the height of the financial crisis. So blacks were better off every single day under Bush than they have been on any day under Obama.

● Under Obama, the Supreme Court has all but killed affirmative action, it’s established gun ownership as a right, it neutered the Voting Rights Act, it’s so far refused to grant gay marriage... and Obama has done nothing about any of this. Obama hasn't even done anything to reverse the Court's campaign finance reform decision. These are all things the left squealed about, and he ignored them.

● Gitmo, drones, killing terrorists without a court order, spying on everyone and everything... these were “war crimes” under Bush, but are now SOP under Obama.

● Obama’s carbon regulation efforts stop and start with power plants. Whoopee. His green loans program turned into a crony cash machine. He hasn’t killed coal. He hasn’t banned nuclear. He hasn’t stopped fracking. He hasn’t banned the use of oil. All he's done is hold up one pipeline.

● Obama was meant to revive the era of Big Government, yet polls show that the public’s trust in government is at an all time low. According to Gallup, only 42% of the public has faith that the government can handle domestic issues. That does not future socialists make.

This is why the left is outraged and feels betrayed. And as we tip further into the betrayal phase, look for a steady attack from the left at Obama's ties to Big Business and the establishment.

As an interesting aside, leftist blogger Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos) was asked to identify liberal leaders right now and he noted that there were almost none in the White House or the cabinet. Instead, he identified Elizabeth Warren (Senate), Luis Gutierrez (House), Rachel Maddow (MSNBC), Dan Savage (LGBT activist), Richard Trumka (AFL-CIO) and Bill McKibben (environmental writer). That’s hardly an endorsement for Team Obama.