I’ve been getting regular e-mails from the Obama re-election campaign asking for cash. Sometimes I write back, although I am sure that nobody reads my missives. I do it for therapeutic value. I recite the administration’s record, well, part of it –– the list of horrors is too long for a letter –– and suggest that they pick up the bucks from Goldman Sachs.
These cheery little letters from Barack, the first lady, the campaign chairman, the guy who is putting together the North Carolina festivities, and so on, alternate between notes on how dangerous Mitt Romney is (he’ll wage a ‘war on women’, mostly; they can’t really point out that his foreign policy would be more bellicose, nor that he would attack the Bill of Rights any harder than the incumbent) and chest-thumping about Barack’s ‘accomplishments’, which of course keeps these letters short.
One of the solicitations repeated several times by some clown assigned to raise money for Carolina told me that unlike in the bad old days the Democrats were not going to pay for their convention with corporate funds. This would be a ‘people’s’ convention, paid for by ordinary Americans like me.
This morning, in an announcement thus far missed by the mainstream media, the Democrats said they had changed their minds. The Charlotte whoop-de-do will be paid for by Wells Fargo Bank, Bank of America, and Duke Energy, the latter corporation a prime beneficiary of the Obama push for nuclear power plants. No word yet on money from Monsanto, but can it be far behind?
I just love these guys. For a sleight-of-hand carnival act the Obama presidency is right there with the best of them.
Over the past week, Barack has been glorying in his courageous, ‘evolved’ position on gay marriage. He was against it once and then sort of for and sort of against, and now he’s all for it. This announcement has been met with wild cheering and a not-coincidental massive inflow of money from what is termed ‘the gay community’, and the usual reactionary stupidities from the right wing. It may have cost him six votes in Tulsa but he was not going to carry Oklahoma anyhow.
I don’t want to criticize it too much. After all, this is a President who has done virtually nothing of any positive consequence. Just taking a position is sort of a miracle.
Someone pointed out to me that President John F. Kennedy once took to the airwaves to argue that racial equality was a moral issue, and that while this didn’t change anything it offered a strong and purposeful leadership; Obama’s announcement, my friend said, was the same thing.
Well, no.
Kennedy’s great televised speech was a much more direct message to the American people. He pre-empted regular programming to deliver it. He did not ‘offhand’ it as Obama has done. But more than that: he followed it up with an executive order banning racial discrimination in federal contracts and in the companies which wanted to do business with the government.
In other words, Kennedy walked the walk. Obama, by contrast, lots of talk, no executive orders. Obama’s executive orders are about assassinating American citizens. Not quite as inspiring, somehow.
It was announced this morning that the U.S. was expanding its sale of advanced weaponry to the regime in power in Bahrain, where the government is killing pro-democracy protesters.
Same as it ever was.
