Acting Like Chumps

As you may have noticed, I really haven't been posting much.  But it's not because I don't have anything to say, but because I respect your time too much for me to post just anything on this blog, and it takes too long for me to perfect these posts to my liking as I've really become a busy man.  (As I mention on my Facebook page, I'm so busy lately, I don't even have time to bleed.)  And so I've been posting lots of stuff elsewhere, and nothing much here.

So I figured I'd share a comment I left at WaMo.  Carpetbagger wrote a post expressing dismay that so many progressives denounce Obama more than they do Republicans, even though they themselves realize that Republicans are far more to blame than Obama and that this, in fact, is their strategy: To obstruct Obama at every turn in order to rally their base while depressing ours.

And yet these people play right into that, knowing that it only hurts us.  For this, we should be considered Chumps.  Naturally, I agreed with all that, and wrote the following comment:

What bothers me so much is that these people all INSIST that there's a straight forward path for Obama to take which would assure victory, and he's not doing it. And were that true, I'd agree with them completely. But it's not. In fact, there's no obvious path for him at all.

Their advice is for Obama to ratch up the rhetoric and insults, as if he can talk his way out of this and force Republicans to back down. But it wouldn't. It'd only have the opposite effect, as the Republicans' biggest problem is that they have no fricking idea what they're doing and only know how to hurl insults and obstruct things.

And we're to imagine that if Obama refused to compromise that it'd magically force Republicans to compromise. But it wouldn't. Instead, it'd only give justification for Republican obstructionism. The reason Republicans don't compromise isn't because they think Obama's soft. It's because they think he's dangerous and there's almost NOTHING that can get them to compromise. Were he to actively prove he's not "soft," it'd only make them fear him more.

The sad truth is that there are no magic bullets here and rhetoric will NOT win this for us. What WILL help? If these people devoted the energy they spend attacking Obama towards attacking Republicans; just like they did when Bush was in office. That'd be a HUGE help. It's OUR job to make the claim for liberalism and make conservativism look bad; not Obama's. It's easy to blame everything on one man. It's a lot harder for us to take responsibility for our lives and do something about it.

Obama's not preventing us from pushing liberal policies. That's ALL on us.