Let me count the ways.
First, Mr. Doughboy, you are not Bill Moyers. You are not even Pierre Salinger. And you never will be no matter how many times over how many lonely nights you tent your bedsheets looking at pictures at Ari Fleischer with a flashlight under your cum-stained sheets.
Secondly,
in squirting sewage recently at "the professional left", ironically insisting that
we be drug-tested, you had perhaps unknowingly climbed into bed with the likes of Charles Krauthammer (he of the "Bush Derangement Syndrome"), Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter. Not only that, you had made all but official the rift and Great Divide that had begun forming between we of the "professional left" and Barack Obama the minute he began back pedaling from his campaign promises and bumper sticker mantra of "hope and change."
Thirdly, perhaps without realizing it, when you wildly began swinging at all liberals and professional, bomb-throwing anarchists like us, you also knocked down those at Daily Kos, still among your man's most vocal supporters.
In swinging with both fists at the "professional left", you only jeopardized your man's chances of getting reelected in a little over two years (a proposition, as my readers know, that wouldn't result in an abundance of tears on my end). The very act of insulting the liberals and progressives, many of whom being "professionals", who worked their asses off getting your man elected immediately reduced you to the level of party hack on a par with Fleischer, McClellan, Snow and Perino of the Bush junta, someone less interested in giving the press honest information and more interested in defending a single man and Dick Cheney's wet dream of the Unitary Executive. We saw and heard enough of that during the Bush years.
Perhaps you couldn't help yourself, now that Fox "News" occupies one of the neighboring front row seats in which the legendary Helen Thomas had until recently sat. But your loyalties are abundantly obvious, given your track record of hamstringing
real Democrats like
Howard Dean for being inexperienced yet had taken up the cause for a guy who, four years later, also had zero military and foreign policy experience.
You waved your private parts in our general direction for our claiming that in some ways, this is a third Bush term. The evidence is irrefutable and inescapable, especially if you're an Iraqi or Afghan or Pakistani civilian whose home had been reduced to rubble and his family to worm food after yet another antiseptic drone airstrike was ordered by your man.
At least under Bush, there was no secret executive order authorizing the Unitary Executive 2.0 to hunt down and assassinate American citizens without due process. Under Bush, we never saw the tragic clusterfuck that is Afghanistan bloated to such cartoonish proportions. Bush never promised to do anything really cool like draw up an exit strategy for Iraq, close down Gitmo, release documents showing what atrocities have been done in our names and with our hard-earned money, prosecute traitors and war profiteers...
... then reneged.
Your man had. Many, many times, thereby immediately reducing him from the statesman you'd like to think he is to the level of just another damned political opportunist.
Mr. Gibbs, my dear, dear, pudgy Mr. Gibbs, we're not looking for "ideological purity" from our president. But since we gave tens of millions of dollars and tens of millions of man hours getting your man elected in spite of a Bushian lack of qualifications for the presidency, the least we expect is some moral purity.
But your man is in more pockets than Ford car keys. He had given BP and other oil cartels one free pass after another to pollute our ecosystem, kill marine life and destroy livelihoods. He allowed the HMO's and Big Pharma to write their own health care legislation that just turned nearly 300,000,000 of us into serfs. Your man turned his back on the neediest to serve the greediest.
Your man appointed a mummified maniac named Alan Simpson to co-chair his Debt Commission, appointed a crook named Tim Geithner to head Treasury, and let blue ribbon-award-winning fuckups like Robert Rubin and Larry Summers into the inner circle of his economic team. He kept on an ineffectual seat-warmer named Robert Gates as Defense Secretary and Afghanistan has only gotten worse.
The national debt is approaching $18 trillion, the
official unemployment rate has remained stagnant at 9.5% for yet another month, health cares costs are still spiraling and the ARRA bill and stimulus packages, while small steps in the right direction, have been all but proven to be vastly ineffectual in curbing unemployment and getting our nation on the road to recovery.
He has done nothing to wipe out vulture funds, even though he can wipe them out with one presidential stroke of the pen. He has done nothing for Darfur, even though the genocide continues. He has done nothing for Iraq and Afghanistan, yet alone his own country, yet wants to give Israel $30 billion a year, ten times what they're now getting, and saturninely cluck his tongue at the slow-motion massacre in the Gaza Strip.
"Ideological purity"? How about some moral purity?
You know what the similarity is between the Bush administration and the one for which you work? Like your immediate predecessors (and a quality we admire in dogs), you're loyal to your man. The difference? Bushie returned unswerving loyalty even when they broke the law and committed treason and war crimes. Your man? The minute Andrew Breitbart twitches and spasms in his Turette's fashion and starts screaming "racism!", or when some right wing snotnose right out of high school alleges criminal activity in ACORN, Obama lets the axe fall where it may and keeps his hands clean without losing any sleep over some of the few competent people in his administration getting railroaded by a pack of lies from right wingers with plainly malignant agendas.
Let's get one thing straight: George W. Bush is, simply put, still the worst President this nation has ever seen. Your man's got a long ways to go before he can assume that mantle. But he's catching up. Fast. We did not elect him so he could sandbag the GOP for the first four years then show us the good stuff in Years 5-8. We elected him to do this
now.
And, yes, many of us are disappointed by being forced over a BP oil barrel and made to bite a stick. That's democracy, the right to criticize and disagree with the Powers That Be. That's the First Amendment in action. Get used to it.
And even though the White House may be soft-pedaling your vicious comments, it's all too obvious to those on "the professional left" and those of us like me, the amateur left, that you were not speaking out of turn. You were perfectly voicing the sentiments of an administration made up of other party hacks, seat warmers, hangers on and professional politicians, starting with Rahm Emanuel, who called liberal agendas "fucking retarded" while careerists like Joe Biden gave the Tea Baggers one free pass after another.
It's all too obvious that your man has spent infinitely more time and energy sucking up to not us but a rabid right wing that would sooner shoot him on sight then nominate the turkey he would've pardoned if they could think of a way to put an "R" after its name.
No matter what your man does from here on in, he's lost my vote and this is not coming from Jane Hamsher or Marcos or any "professional lefty" but an amateur liberal, an average voter and man on the street who fucking hates having to log on every day and to give the bad news that, yes, in some ways, this administration is worse than the last. I want to be proud of my president at least one more time before I die, to honestly believe without resorting to wishful thinking that my president actually cares more about our welfare than that of corporations.
And that, my dear Mr. Gibbs, is why, in all due respect and in the most sober and scholarly geopolitical and socio-economic terms, you can kiss my rosy red, Irish ass.
(Sp: "Tourette's")
- Alex