Article: How President Obama and his supporters damaged the Democratic Party

Why Politics Sucks in America
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Psycho-Babbling Obama "Rather than face the fact that Obama is not a friend of the people, leftish commentators insist on conducting a psychological analysis of the president."

As William Kuttner of The American Prospect says, "Let's stop pretending. Barack Obama is a disaster as a crisis president. He has taken an economic collapse that was the result of Republican ideology and Republican policies, and made it the Democrats' fault. And the more that he is pummeled, the more he bends over. "

In Obama's Obsession With Confrontation Against the Left (UPDATED), David Sirota writes, "Yesterday at OpenLeft, I wrote a post about how the Obama administration unduly shies away from confrontation with Republicans and conservatives.... This president goes out of his way to be very confrontational towards progressives."

In Obama's "bad negotiating" is actually shrewd negotiating, Glenn Greenwald writes, "Whether in economic policy, national security, civil liberties, or the permanent consortium of corporate power that runs Washington, Obama, above all else, is content to be (one could even say eager to be) guardian of the status quo. And the forces of the status quo want tax cuts for the rich, serious cuts in government spending that don't benefit them (social programs and progressive regulatory schemes), and entitlement 'reform' -- so that's what Obama will do."

Dan Froomkin writes, "In a lot of ways, we're worse off today than we were under George W. Bush. Back then, Bush's extremist assault on civil liberties, human rights and other core American values in the name of fighting terror felt like an aberration. The expectation was that those policies would be quickly reversed, discredited -- and explicitly outlawed -- once he was no longer in power. Instead, under President Barack Obama, they've become institutionalized." (from Obama Makes Bushism the New Normal)

Why Progressives Should Run Against Obama and "Blue Dogs" in the 2012 Democratic Party Primaries By Rabbi Michael Lerner

Seymour Hersh unleashed Hersh, whose exposes of gross abuses by members of the U.S. military in Vietnam and Iraq have earned him worldwide fame and high journalistic honors, said he was writing a book on what he called the "Cheney-Bush years" and saw little difference between that period and the Obama administration.

Obama's Drug War Budget Looks a Lot Like Bush's "President Obama's newly released drug war budget is essentially the same as Bush's, with roughly twice as much money going to the criminal justice system as to treatment and prevention," said Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the non-profit Drug Policy Alliance. "This despite Obama's statements on the campaign trail that drug use ... See Moreshould be treated as a health issue, not a criminal justice issue."

See the June 7, 2010 article "Whacking the Old Folks" in The Nation; the editors are highly critical of Obama's stance on Social Security.

For a Year and a Half, No Signs of Torture Ending, Willful Self-Delusion That Torture Has Ended

Obama's FCC disappoints on media, Internet policies ("Obama appears to be no different from his two immediate predecessors,")

Treasury Makes Shocking Admission: Program for Struggling Homeowners Just a Ploy to Enrich Big Banks

Why Obama can't blame the GOP for his inability to pass progressive legislation"

What Created the Populist Explosion and How Democrats Can Avoid the Shrapnel in November

Rabbi Michael Lerner, in Healing from Post Traumatic Abandoned-by-Obama Syndrome, writes, "Many are suffering from post-traumatic Obama abandonment syndrome--an ailment that came from being severely traumatized by Obama's political moves in the past thirteen months. A palpable sadness, depression, anger and even despair carried by many who had worked for Obama and now felt betrayed by his choices in his first year in office was mixed with compassion and a strong determination to not allow the political Right to use our despair as their ticket to a political revival." Unfortunately, if anything, the President has become even more conservative since Rabbi Lerner wrotw those words in February 2010.

The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic According to African American Princeton Professor Cornell West, President Obama is "a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it."
This was maybe America's last chance to fight back against the greed of the Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats, to generate some serious discussion about public interest and common good that sustains any democratic experiment," West laments. "We are squeezing out all of the democratic juices we have. The escalation of the class war against the poor and the working class is intense. More and more working people are beaten down. They are world-weary. They are into self-medication. They are turning on each other. They are scapegoating the most vulnerable rather than confronting the most powerful. It is a profoundly human response to panic and catastrophe. I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out.

Cornell continues with, "But he lacks backbone." But the more likely explanation is that Obama is simply conservative in outlook, as described in the next item below.

Can OWS be turned into a Democratic Party movement? describes how President Obama has been a great friend of Wall Street. He surrounded himself with senior Wall Street Executives, accepted huge donations from them, supported their bailouts, and voted to protect their profits. Moreover, "Obama recently opined -- even while there are supposedly ongoing DOJ investigations -- that Wall Street's corruption was, in general, not illegal."

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