Time to Bell the Obama Cat (and to end the growing hopelessness)

[stupidicus]

unlike many, I've long thought that the abandonment of the dem party for a new one or existing third party is a grave mistake

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2651105

despite being merely a dem voter as opposed to a supporter to the extent many here no doubt have been. I'll take the good cop with the kind words over the bad cop with the phone book anyday. The best scenario however, remains never finding oneself in the interrogation room, or in the situation before us, to minimize the differences between what we want and our elected leaders will fight for.

I think the author has it exactly right here

For progressives, there’s not a lot to be gained by venting against Obama without working to implement a plausible strategy for ousting corporate war Democrats from state power. Nor is there a useful path for third parties like the Green Party in races for Congress and other partisan contests; those campaigns rarely end up with more than a tiny percentage of the vote, and the impacts are very small.

This spring, there’s a lot of work beckoning for progressives who mean business about gaining electoral power for social movements; who have no intention of eliding the grim realities of the Obama presidency; who are more than fed up with false pretenses that Obama is some kind of ally of progressives; who recognize that Obama has served his last major useful purpose for progressives by blocking a Romney-Ryan regime from entering the White House; who are willing to be here now, in this historical moment, to organize against and polarize with the Obama administration in basic terms; and who, looking ahead, grasp the tragic folly of leaving the electoral field to battles between right-wing Republicans and Democrats willing to go along with the kind of destructive mess that President Obama has been serving up.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/04/10-1

This is why I've thought BHO can be thanked for his recent effort, because of the potential it has for exploitation for new and better dems to use in primaries in 2014 to identify and hopefully prevail over. I also think this is right as well.

Obama’s move to cut Social Security is certainly outrageous, and it’s encouraging that a wide range of progressive groups are steamed at Obama as never before. But this kind of outrage should have reached a “boiling point” a long time ago. The administration’s undermining of civil liberties, scant action on climate change, huge escalation of war in Afghanistan, expansion of drone warfare, austerity policies serving Wall Street and shafting Main Street, vast deference to corporate power. . . The list is long and chilling.

Call the SS move a crossing of the rubicon, or going a bridge too far, straw that broke..., etc, but regardless, it certainly has the potential for my fav, a "Network Moment" from and with which we can let the corporatists/corporate-lite crew in the dem leadership ranks know "we aren't going to take it anymore!". It's well past time docility was replaced with outrage, the Orwellian nature of so much revealed, and the Huxleyan distractions abandoned or ignored, and replacing it with the "work" called for. http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/08/who-was-right-huxley-or-orwell/

This is a time for improvements or repairs, not switching vehicles to a new one we can't afford -- like giving rightwingnuts supremacy in the elections in the short term -- and that offers no guarentees we'll ever reach the desired destination should we ever get the keys.

[bigtree]

1. 'the kind of destructive mess that President Obama has been serving up'

. . . this article is stupidicus.

[stupidicus]

2. My dear dog, whatta devastating rebuttal and indictment

worthy of a twig