The most consequential president of my lifetime...yes, I've said it.

Even K-thug's come around.

But now the shoe is on the other foot: Obama faces trash talk left, right and center – literally – and doesn’t deserve it. Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history. His health reform is imperfect but still a huge step forward – and it’s working better than anyone expected. Financial reform fell far short of what should have happened, but it’s much more effective than you’d think. Economic management has been half-crippled by Republican obstruction, but has nonetheless been much better than in other advanced countries. And environmental policy is starting to look like it could be a major legacy…

 Emphasis B-Juice

Obama, worst monster in American history

As America (well, a few hundred likely Republican voters and a handful of others) watched four wealthy white men debate the horrors of contraception, they heard Willard Mitt Romney fail history (again).

You could almost hear the smiles coming from Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago. In the 21st century, four far-right white wealthy guys, all of whom think they should be president, spent 15 minutes in a nationally-televised debate talking about access to birth control.

The GOP candidates might as well have put a banner over their heads reading, "Independents, please don't consider voting for us."

But it was Mitt Romney's response to the question that amazed me. "I don't think we've seen in the history of this country the kind of attack on religious conscience, religious freedom, religious tolerance that we've seen under Barack Obama," the former governor said.

The picture is called "The Battle of Nauvoo," depicting attacks by the good citizens of that Illinois city on the Mormon population of the town.  This took place following the assassination of Joseph Smith, the LDS founder, in nearby Carthage, Missouri.  All done with the tacit approval of the governor of the state. The attacks ultimately led entire Mormon population to wagon train to the salt lake.

It's hard to know what Willard Mitt Romney is at this point.   He's not this guy -- too old to get out of Nauvoo in time.

Fear and self-loathing

Progressives probably won't be giving thanks to the most successful Democratic administration in a decade, one that led the passage of universal health care, the Dodd-Frank reform of Wall St. (not totally toothless, despite the best effort of Republicans and a Blue Dog or two), the Lily Ledbetter act, and on and on. All of this against a tidal wave of Republican opposition.

Jon Chait explains why liberal dissatisfaction with their very own is nothing new.

Why are liberals so desperately unhappy with the Obama presidency?

There are any number of arguments about things Obama did wrong. Some of them are completely misplaced, like blaming Obama for compromises that senators forced him to make. Many of them demand Obama do something he can’t do, like Maddow’s urging the administration to pass an energy bill through a special process called budget reconciliation—a great-sounding idea except for the fact that it’s against the rules of the Senate. Others castigate Obama for doing something he did not actually do at all (i.e., Drew Westen’s attention-grabbing, anguished New York Times essay assailing Obama for signing a budget deal with cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid that were not actually in the budget in question).

I spend a lot of time rebutting these arguments, and their proponents spend a lot of time calling me an Obama apologist.

Some of the complaints are right, and despite being an Obama apologist, I’ve made quite a few of them myself. (The debt-ceiling hostage negotiations drove me to distraction.) But I don’t think any of the complaints—right, wrong, or ­otherwise—really explain why liberals are so depressed.

Here is my explanation: Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president.

So, what if we compare Obama with a real alternative? Not to Republicans—that’s too easy—but to Democratic presidents as they lived and breathed?

Read the whole...ahem...thing.

Double reverse Stockholm Syndrome

One of the advantages of having too much work is that it is difficult for me to knee-jerkingly react to things throughout the day. It allows me to ruminate before I bloviate...and that's a good thing.

Anyway, it has been alternatively depressing and amusing to watch the anger and see the declarations of liberals Who. Will. Never. Vote. For. That. Man. Again. I mean, check out the comments here. I've seen teenage girls react more calmly to being disinvited from the mean girls' table at the cafeteria. I too was...unsurprised... by the announcement of "the deal" last night. But as smarter observers have pointed out throughout the afternoon, rather than Obama being held hostage and cozying up to his captors, Republicans may have been held hostage to their devotion to preserving the wealth of the rich.

Blinded by estate tax sugarplums, the GOP gave Obama something he -- and the country -- desperately needs: more stimulus for the economy. Now, yes, this is not the greatest form of that -- frankly, I don't know what the rich will do with their $700 billion, but it won't go to repairing crumbling bridges or ya know, hiring anyone -- but it is something that the GOP would otherwise refuse to give Obama. They want the economy to limp along for two more years. They want him to fail. But, like Pavlov's dogs, with the prospect of getting a tax break for the Koch brothers the GOP's drool got in the way of their obstructionism.

And for those who would have preferred Obama "stand and fight" and refuse to accept such a deal, please contact Chuck Schummer, Joe Lieberman, that dick from Nebraska, and the other Democratic senators who opposed letting the cut expire for their key constituents on Wall Street. The House bill restoring the cuts for the "middle class" and letting them expire for the wealthiest did not have the votes to overcome the threat of a filibuster in the Senate.

Oh, and ask someone who has been unemployed for more than a year what they think about the restoration of unemployment benefits.

So, now. Let's fix the tax code to make some dent in the wealth disparity in this country. A clever enough plan will surely fool the Republicans -- they may be brilliant when it comes to political bullying, but math ain't their strong suit.

Obama mythbusters

When I saw the headline, I thought Mythbusters would be doing a show debunking things like his Muslim religion, his birth in Kenya, his socialism and jackbooted fascism.

No, not so much.

President Obama is scheduled to appear on the December 8 episode of “MythBusters,” a Discovery Channel reality show. What’s up with that? Is Mr. Obama just trying to match Sarah Palin, who is getting her own show on Discovery-affiliated TLC?

Ha. Ha.

Well, maybe. But the stated point of Obama’s star turn with Jamie Hyneman, Adam Savage, and the rest of the “MythBuster” gang is to promote science and math education. Monday is science fair day at the White House – besides officially announcing his television appearance, Obama will play host to the winners of a range of science and math competitions, from the Intel Science and Engineering Fair to the Team America Rocketry Challenge.

“If you win the NCAA championship, you come to the White House. Well, if you’re a young person and you produce the best experiment or design, the best hardware or software, you ought to be recognized for that achievement too,” said the president last November.

Appearing on “MythBusters” probably is a pretty good way to get the attention of all the nine-to-14-year-olds in America who are interested in creating explosions with common household items. Which is pretty much all of them, when you get down to it.

How D'Souza thinks

The Economist dismantles Steve Forbes' rag.

Most Americans wouldn’t have a hard time answering the question of why the government ought to guarantee all kids a good education. “Because it’s not the kids’ fault that their parents aren’t rich PhD’s” pretty much covers it… So why would Mr D’Souza perform the moral contortionist’s act necessary to justify elitism in education as integral to a “free society”? Well, here’s an explanation modeled on the one Mr D’Souza provides for Mr Obama’s views:

If Mr D’Souza grew up amongst a tiny hereditary elite desperately trying to protect its privileged status in a huge and bitterly poor third-world country, that would explain why he wants to make sure disadvantaged children are denied the educational opportunities his daughter receives.

What about his weird instinct to dredge up the irrelevant topic of anti-colonialism in explaining Barack Obama’s run-of-the-mill center-left political agenda? Using the same phrasing:

If Mr D’Souza hailed from a tiny Westernised elite that allied itself with the European colonialist project against the national independence movement of his own country, that would explain his monomania about anti-colonialism.

It would, however, be unfair to explain Mr D’Souza’s views this way. First of all, I’m no expert on Indian history or the caste system in Goa, and the description above may be just as shallow a caricature as the one Mr D’Souza provides of post-colonial East African politics in his inflammatory article. Specifically, I know no more about Mr D’Souza’s family’s political views than he does about Barack Obama’s father’s (about which he appears to know strikingly little, given the wealth of information available on the subject)... [A]nybody who wants to know “how D’Souza thinks” is free to look up what he’s written in books and articles over the years, just as Mr D’Souza could criticise the views of Barack Obama by referring to things Mr Obama has said and done.

As the writer notes, it's not Obama who is out of touch with America.

Nom de plume

I eagerly await D.H. Riley's response to this week's Thoughtful Moderation while Excusing 30 Years of Republican Rule by David Brooks, but in the meantime...

President Obama swept into office having aroused the messianic hopes of his supporters. For the past 16 months he has been on nearly permanent offense, instigating action with the stimulus bill, Afghan policy, health care reform and the nearly complete financial reform. Whether you approve or not, this has been an era of bold movement.

But now the troops are exhausted, the country is anxious, the money is spent and the Democratic majorities are teetering. The remaining pieces of legislation, on immigration and energy, are going nowhere. (The decision to do health care before energy is now looking extremely unfortunate.)

Really? How so? Would GOP leadership have been any more cooperative on an energy bill then they showed when it came to health care? Cap and Trade would have still been "Cap and Tax," and Obama's willingness to negotiate on off-shore drilling would, in hindsight, be even more disappointing then it now is, as Deepwater Horizon continues gushing oil.

Health care legislation, Mr. Brooks, was, as Vice-President Biden so memorably put, a big fucking deal. A weak tea, compromised energy bill would likely have proved an embarrassment.

Meanwhile, the biggest problems are intractable. There’s no sign we will be successful in preventing a nuclear Iran. Especially after Monday’s events, there’s no chance of creating a breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli dispute. Unemployment will not be coming down soon. The long-term fiscal crisis won’t be addressed soon either.

In other words, if the theme of the past 16 months was large change, the theme of the next period will be gridlock and government’s apparent impotence in the face of growing problems.

The party he subscribes to has been the source of gridlock for the past 16 months and we're still waiting for conservative ideas on how to curb Iranian nuclear ambitions, which grew only more intense during the Axis of Evil era, or Israeli apartheid, which only grows more self-confident as the country's Only Friend never leaves its side.

Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America’s inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems. In the same way, the uncontrolled oil plume could become the objective correlative of the country’s inability to govern itself.

The plume taps into a series of deep anxieties. First, it taps into the anxiety that the people running our major institutions are just not that competent. Second, it feeds into the anxiety that there has been an unhappy marriage between corporations and government officials, which has had the effect of corrupting both. Most important, the plume exposes the country’s core confusion about the role of government.

No, it's not Katrina. Because, as Brooks bravely skates around it, Katrina exposed the Bush administration for failing to do what was exactly the role of government -- reacting quickly and effectively to a natural disaster that was predicted days in advance. And leading FEMA was an Arabian Horse breeder who was appointed for his political connections, not his competence, after eight years in which FEMA had reorganized itself in the wake of failings during the first Bush administration. And that "marriage" Brooks refers to, I'm not sure it was a marriage as much as it was a three-some.

We should be able to build from cases like this one and establish a set of concrete understandings about what government should and shouldn’t do. We should be able to have a grounded conversation based on principles 95 percent of Americans support. Yet that isn’t happening. So the period of stagnations begins.

A grounded conversation? I refer him back to last summer's town hall meetings and to the intelligent, informed dialog coming out of various "Tea Party" events. What is that "95 percent of Americans" support? That angels exist? That the sun ain't yellow, it's chicken? If there is any consensus on anything like the role of government and regulation then he's yet to identify it.

Chill people. He's got this one.

T-Bogg takes a short break from his trademark snark and speaks truth to...non-power?

Perhaps I misjudged people but I didn’t expect the announcement of the nomination of Elena Kagen to the Supreme Court to be greeted by many good people of the left as if Barack Obama had just shit in their Cheerios.

I have come to expect this from RedState and the other special needs bloggers of the right. That is what they do. But I just spent the better part of the afternoon reading WAY TOO MANY POSTS about what a horrible woman-hating ethnic-hating freedom-hating not-hate-hating-enough person Kagan is and I had to double-check to see that she wasn’t Dick Cheney’s idiot daughter which would have been both accurate and understandable.

I guess the argument against Kagan that I truly don’t understand is the “she’s a blank slate” or she’s a “stealth nominee”. If Barack Obama had selected her the same way John McCain plucked Sarah Palin from well-deserved obscurity I could understand people’s fears. But I willing to bet that Obama has spent more than a modicum of time with her discussing court decisions, legal philosophy, and such and such and he has a pretty good idea what floats her boat. ( I can’t imagine that he asked for her opinion on, say, Connick v Thompson and she refused because “it would be inappropriate to discuss a pending case.”) The only defense for the empty slate attack is a complete lack of faith in Obama; that he is, in fact, a Conservative Republican. And that is just nuts.

Obama came into office promising change and people clutched that to their breasts and ran off in every direction thinking that their pet liberal/progressive cause finally had a champion who would make everything all better overnight. But sometimes change is gradual and, now sixteen months later, he is unacceptable. Quite frankly the country Obama inherited is a fucking mess and, while I’m not entirely thrilled with everything that has gone down under him, I’m willing to cut him some slack.

T-Bogg may be looking for a new place to hang his coat if he keeps talking smack like this.

He goes on to tell an uplifting tale of some truly brilliant 3-D chess playing prog analyst who explained the strategy of drafting Feingold, should he lose his Senate seat in November, to challenge Obama in the 2012 primary. Obama would have to "neutralize" Russ by offering him a Supreme Court robe. Or something.

Not Harriet Miers

Will Elena Kegan be a good justice? Yesterday I was not so sure, but this reminder is encouraging. Nevertheless, whether you think she will successfully halt the Court's drift to the right or not, comparing her to Harriet Miers is just dumb. Jane Hamsher's slide into irrelevancy is a sad sight to see.

Accountability,double standards and a profound hatred for America

So, unlike his predecessor, President Obama did not wait six days during his vacation to make any kind of statement ( as Bush did during an otherwise scheduled news conference) about a lunatic trying to explode a piece of his clothing on an airline, and in fact demanded a systemic security review to be on his desk within two days. That of course means he does not take the threat seriously and is playing fast and loose with our national security. Oh, and he's "sending a message" to "terrorists" that we're no longer "at war" with them.

The very different reactions of Democrats in December 2001 and Republicans in December 2009 certainly has something to do with the post-9/11 halo Bush wore and the fact that his poll numbers would never be higher. But the truth of the matter is Democrats have simply not made attempted attacks on our people for the purpose of political advantage. Republicans, hysterically, have no such qualms.

I use the "why do they hate America?" line generally as a joke. But after months of watching the GOP march in lock step in opposition to any attempt to reform health care and provide it to millions of Americans who do without because they can't afford it or the insurance companies deny them coverage; after months of watching Republicans propose nothing but tax cuts for the rich and a a spending freeze in the wake of the worst economic depression since the 1930s; after months of listening to Republicans claim that our judicial system (the true American Exceptionalism) cannot handle a bunch of mass murder masterminds; and after a week of watching Republicans point fingers of blame and attempt to whip up a frenzy of terror (aka, the "terrorists'" goal) even as they are on record for putting a "hold" on TSA leadership because of the existential fear of collective bargaining and opposing spending on airport security; well, I begin to wonder, why do they hate America?

Meanwhile, as he did in 2001, Andrew Sullivan (or whoever writes his posts), wets his pants and goes a little funny in the head.

Rahm!

Excellent advice from Mark Warner is God.

Priorities?

Shocking. The president waits to "gather information" and to try to "avoid increasing travelers' anxiety" before "reassuring Americans" that we'll be "kept safe" from future Undie-Bombers.

Representative Peter T. King of New York, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, criticized Mr. Obama’s silence Monday before the president’s statement. “We’re now, what, 72 hours into this and the president’s not spoken, the vice president’s not spoken, the attorney general’s not spoken and Janet Napolitano has now told two different stories in two days,” he said on Fox News. “First, she said everything worked; now she said it didn’t.”

Meanwhile, he interrupts a golf game to rush to the side of an injured child. WTF?

As Stalin once reportedly said, a single child is a tragedy, a dozen or so pants-wetting Republican Congressmen is merely a statistic.

The Great Man Theory, or, Grow Up Already

Mark Schmitt reminds us that it takes heavy lifting -- not just a politically gifted politician -- to make real progressive reform.

Consider, for example, the widely predicted possibility that the only major accomplishment of the current Democratic majority before the midterm election will be an imperfect version of health-care reform, while financial reform, cap-and-trade, and long-term economic-investment strategies are blocked or delayed. If that occurs, is it simply that the president didn't give enough priority to those other causes?

That's one possible explanation. Another would be that the work underlying the current health-reform effort began years before Obama even announced his campaign for the White House. Drawing on the lessons of past failures, when reform had no organized constituency, advocates and funders put massive resources into groups such as Health Care for America Now. They picked up political scientist Jacob Hacker's idea of a public plan within a structured insurance marketplace and developed it to give progressive advocates of a single-payer system something politically realistic that they could get behind. And they worked to ensure that all the Democratic candidates for president (with the exception of single-payer stalwart Rep. Dennis Kucinich) converged around roughly the same basic model. Years of health-reform-policy development, projects to improve public awareness of health reform, and advocacy campaigns were able to lay the groundwork for health reform well in advance. It was never going to be easy, but the best possible mechanism for achieving the long-thwarted goal was constructed for the president to flip the switch.

Compare that with the slow and meandering path to financial-regulatory reform. Yes, it's possible Obama doesn't see the urgency of it, or maybe his economic advisers are too cautious or subservient to Goldman Sachs. But it also matters that few liberals were working on this cause before the Wall Street collapse. No coherent alternative model had been developed, and no effort had been made to build a constituency for financial reform. While we had think tanks keeping tabs on various aspects of the economy, from the federal budget to the labor market, no one was systematically watching the development of super--complicated financial institutions, noting the risk posed by financial derivatives and promoting alternatives. A counterpart to the health-reform effort, Americans for Financial Reform, was launched this year but obviously it has a lot of catching up to do.

None of this is to forgive Obama his errors of commission or omission. But just as his campaign was built on a base of organizing, online activism, and civic engagement that preceded him, so the success of his presidency and this Congress will depend on the strength of the progressive infrastructure. If progressives don't support these structures for policy development and advocacy, further failure will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the fault will lie not in our star but in ourselves.

And then, as if on cue...

Dynamite

If the Taliban's response to the decision by the Norwegian Nobel Committee is any indication, the response from their spritual brethren here in Greater Wingnuttia should be priceless.

UPDATE: As if on cue.

Wingnuts assured they've won the daily news cycle

I'm glad they're obsessed with it.