*Remember that scene in the movie "Defiance", when the milkman brought the army back to the forest to capture the Jews? After which Liev Shrieber's character, Zeus, tells his brother, Tuvia, (Daniel Craig) "you should have killed the milkman."
That would be my advise to his O ness: he should "kill" the damn "milkman".
I see him channeling his inner FDR and trying to pass New Deal like programs. I understand that, and I support it. I love the large expansion of the federal government, because like FDR, I don't trust big business. I wasn't doing cart wheels over the stimulus package because I didn't think the government spent enough. I happen to think the government is the people, and we have more control over it--the government-- than we do a bunch of stock holders and corporate honchos who are watching the bottom line. The clowns on the right who would do away with the government would be wise to reconsider. They should try to remember what big business unchecked has done to this country and the mess that they have left us in. With all due respect to Gordon Gekko; the only time "greed is good" is when you are in a nice Jamaican or Italian restaurant.
Obama's problem is that he keeps playing nice to people who will never be nice to him. Compromise? (And please, no comments about how brilliant he is and how he is two moves ahead of everyone else on the chess board, and blah blah blah. Chess can be a long fucking game. Maybe he should be playing checkers, instead.) Reach across the aisle? (Watch that shoulder there O man, you are going to dislocate it with all that reaching.) Why? His opponents say that he is using the crises the frat boy created to push through his own agenda. Yeah, so what? I say he isn't pushing hard enough. Strike early and hard is what he should have done; don't give them time to regroup and counter with political pressure of their own. That's how you should be doing it O man, put your foot on their necks. If you have to go down to 50% approval ratings in the polls, go. You only need 51% to be reelected president.
"The bill opens the door and invites the entrance into the political field of a power so vast, so powerful as to threaten the integrity of our institutions and to pull the pillars of the temple down upon the heads of our descendants."
That was a congressman from New York standing on his soap box against social security when FDR was trying to get it passed.
"Isn't this socialism?"
That was a congressman from Oklahoma to Frances Perkins, Roosevelt's secretary of Labor.
Sounds familiar? It should; because it's the same type of rhetoric we are getting now from the right. Roosevelt had his fireside chats. That was cool in the mid 1930's, when there was no Internet, no 24 hour cable news cycle, and no conservative talk radio, 24/7, to stir up the rabid masses. The only thing his O ness should be doing by the fireside is burning republican amendments to the health care reform bill. Look how congress carried on when FDR was trying to get social security passed? And now, in retrospect, I am sure that we can all agree that social security ain't such a bad thing after all. I am guessing that 74 years from now, if things go as they should, A-merry-cans will be looking at health insurance reform in the same way: How could we have even fought this for so long? Sometimes time has a way of making idiots out of some of us who are blinded by ideology.
"A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing,".... "Sometimes they will call it 'fascism,' sometimes 'communism,' sometimes 'regimentation,' sometimes 'socialism.' But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical. ... I believe that what we are doing today is a necessary fulfillment of what Americans have always been doing -- a fulfillment of old and tested American ideals. ... We remain, as John Marshall said a century ago, 'emphatically and truly, a government of the people.' "
Way to kill the milk man FDR. I am afraid that it might be too late for my boy to do the same. The army has already surrounded the forest.
*Pic courtesy of Wikipedia.
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