Juan: You really nailed it with the part about Evangelicals taking over the Republican Party. I've been reading, thinking, and worrying about that group for some time in my frame of a life time as a "Progressive Protestant" Christian. It's all about having power by whatever means.
Juan: This is an old acquaintance, David Cook, more or less stumbling on this piece from a Facebook scan. Made me realize I miss you and your thinking. So please get me back on your email newsletter. I just turned 89!
Juan, you really took off the gloves to pummel Obama today. Hard to disagree with your specific charges, but it begs the question of why (besides the missing father), and what alternatives we have. I just wrote Obama a letter, knowing the odds he or anyone who cares would read it, in which I basically said he should concentrate on two things before his Presidency ends: reversing the direction of income inequality in America and ending the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I said if he passed the latter war on to a successor his presidency would be a failure. All this from me was predicated on a second term in which his lame duck status would free him up to "do what needs to be done". You and many might say "fat chance". And you may be right.
In a dying empire losing any semblance of being able to control much of anything elsewhere in the world, let alone our own economic despair, Americans are most vulnerable to the rhetoric of fear and the lies designed to keep the plutocrats in power. It doesn't leave much progressive rhetorical wiggle room. The American Presidency has become mostly an ideological trap for any President that is hard to break out of, especially on the progressive side, which requires brutal honesty. The conservative side can only live with dissembling and outright lies to keep power.
If you look at this landscape it is hard to see who could successfully challenge Obama for the nomination and even harder to see a Republican candidate who, if elected, would not continue to make things even worse. Though I can conceive that the latter outcome might be what the country needs to find and elect someone who is really fed up with plutocratic governance and the ideology that it perpetuates. Where you and other progressives feel angry and betrayed, I mostly just feel sad and still hopeful that something will shift in the body politic (including with Obama) and things will begin to be different. Call me naive, but also call me 82 years old. I don't do rage anymore.
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Juan: You really nailed it with the part about Evangelicals taking over the Republican Party. I've been reading, thinking, and worrying about that group for some time in my frame of a life time as a "Progressive Protestant" Christian. It's all about having power by whatever means.
Juan: This is an old acquaintance, David Cook, more or less stumbling on this piece from a Facebook scan. Made me realize I miss you and your thinking. So please get me back on your email newsletter. I just turned 89!
Juan, you really took off the gloves to pummel Obama today. Hard to disagree with your specific charges, but it begs the question of why (besides the missing father), and what alternatives we have. I just wrote Obama a letter, knowing the odds he or anyone who cares would read it, in which I basically said he should concentrate on two things before his Presidency ends: reversing the direction of income inequality in America and ending the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I said if he passed the latter war on to a successor his presidency would be a failure. All this from me was predicated on a second term in which his lame duck status would free him up to "do what needs to be done". You and many might say "fat chance". And you may be right.
In a dying empire losing any semblance of being able to control much of anything elsewhere in the world, let alone our own economic despair, Americans are most vulnerable to the rhetoric of fear and the lies designed to keep the plutocrats in power. It doesn't leave much progressive rhetorical wiggle room. The American Presidency has become mostly an ideological trap for any President that is hard to break out of, especially on the progressive side, which requires brutal honesty. The conservative side can only live with dissembling and outright lies to keep power.
If you look at this landscape it is hard to see who could successfully challenge Obama for the nomination and even harder to see a Republican candidate who, if elected, would not continue to make things even worse. Though I can conceive that the latter outcome might be what the country needs to find and elect someone who is really fed up with plutocratic governance and the ideology that it perpetuates. Where you and other progressives feel angry and betrayed, I mostly just feel sad and still hopeful that something will shift in the body politic (including with Obama) and things will begin to be different. Call me naive, but also call me 82 years old. I don't do rage anymore.