When the prez was unbuckling his belt, letting his pants slide to the floor and assuming the position in front of Pumpkinhead and the rest of the GOP caucus, I wonder if the video clip at top was playing in his head.
Or perhaps, he was doing his Zappadan obeisance, taking his cue from FZ’s “Keep It Greasey”:
Mad Blog Media 
Obama caving in? No surprise to me, or anyone else reading this for that matter. Donkey, Elephant, Libertarian, Tea Party (oh wait, are these all the same?) all suck from the same teat: corporate cash. This elegant system of legalized bribery that we’re so blessed with, along with a new definition of “person” (no, not a fetus, a corporation!) is/was/will be guaranteed to give us…well, just what we have.
I’ve heard it said, and I think accurately, that we don’t have a class struggle going on, we have a class massacre. Tomorrow’s news, like today’s, will no doubt provide even more proof that this is so. As if we needed it.
Have a nice day.
Maybe he was thinking “a day that will live in infamy”?
Matthew 7:6, paraphrased: 6″Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before Repubicans, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces. “
Or a more hopeful version (no I don’t totally buy it either) is that he’s seen what has happened to Julian Assange and has decided to swim with the stream rather than against it.
Of course the other version is that he didn’t “assume the position” so much as he “laid back on the couch with legs in the air to wantonly receive” what the Repugs wished to provide.
That way at least, he could perhaps count on a kiss.
Seems to me that Barry is trying to get something rather than nothing.
The Donks lost their chance to get their way on Election Day. There is no way in hell that Obama or the Dems could get their version of the tax bill through the Senate over an Elefink filibuster. So it was a game of chicken; either let everything expire or hold one’s nose and get something in return, i.e., the extended unemployment, payroll tax breaks, etc. So in the game of chicken, I’m not sure who won. My guess is the Repugs got more than Obama.
If the Bush tax cuts had expired, everyone would have seen a tax boost and that might have been even worse political suicide on the first payday of next year and you know that the Repugs would have poured gasoline on that one and lit a match.
People blame the president for this shit, not Congress. That’s too bad, but people are stupid, to quote Larry’s wife Professor Heather. The only good side of letting the tax breaks expire would have been that the US Treasury desperately needs to balance our bills with our taxes before the Chinese pull the plug on our IOUs. Then it will all be moot.
Politics and law is the art of sausage being made, right? I just wish I heard as many pissings and moanings out of the Right as I do out of the Left right now. That worries me. As does the fact that these cuts will again come up in 2012. I think Obama made a big strategic blunder, but then again, I don’t get paid the big bucks to sit in the White House.
The Repuglicans were pretty good at blocking most of the Obama agenda without ANY majority. With a new majority in the House and a wimpy majority for the Demo’s in the Senate come January 2011, it’s going to get very ugly. But as I’ve written before, if Obama has both sides mad at him, he’s probably doing an OK job. I can’t wait to see all the budget-balancing stuff come out of the House with the Tea Partiers added to the rest of the Repuglican majority there. Somehow I bet it’ll be the old “deficits don’t matter” baloney that got us into this mess the last time these bozos ran the government. As someone once said, the Repuglicans are convinced that government doesn’t work — and as soon as they control it, they prove it! At least we had a couple of years of adult supervision in DeeCee…imagine what things would be like right now if Insane McCain and Caribou Barbie were running things!
The good news for me is I just realized we’ll be in Italy during ALL of the BS with the Iowa caucus next time round. Mitt, Huck, Lipstick, Dipstick and the rest can tromp around the frozen plains all they want — I’ll be enjoying “la dolce vita” with the wife on academic sabbatical starting next fall.
Late to the match as always, but I just don’t have the apocalyptic fear of the tax cut extension that the media is pushing on us Dems. It was an understandable, if regrettable, compromise that gets the President cred from many regular, albeit imperfectly-informed, voters who will think he “kept their taxes from going up.” His poll numbers are not stellar (49% approval I heard in one poll today), but they are higher than everybody else in politics (except his wife, Michelle). Obama is far from perfect, but compared to the oppositions’ alternatives (McClain, Huckabee, Palin, etc.), he is Jesus H. Christ.
I have always thought that Obama is a pragmatist, not an ideologue, and if I did not think that, I would not have supported him in 2008. Unfortunately, unlike some pragmatists, say, LBJ, he still does not work the system to his best advantage. LBJ would have trapped the Repugs’ testicles in the wringer of “making the middle class pay the way for the rich” and turned the crank until they did his bidding. Obama is not that sort of guy. Sometimes, I wish he were. I like it when he gets mad. Just get mad at the Repugs, Mr. President.
Dale