It’s getting more difficult all the time to fight off the feeling of frustration as I watch the American political scene unfold “right before my eyes.”  I’m struggling with how on earth an American political party can become as dishonest and disengenuous as the Republican party and still have a national presence.  And my heart wants one of the parties to address the “real” needs of the everyday American people, but it just isn’t happening.  I want to say the Democrats aren’t spineless (although they appear to be) yet my instincts are telling me they are, in general, every bit as much at the mercy of the multi-national corporations as the Republicans.  It seems as if the members of Congress willing to stand up for the principles that we were taught in school were the foundation of this nation are few and far between.

Then we have the President who I so willingly supported, voted for, and to a degree campaigned for – who seems to be all too willing to accept “compromise” which is nothing more than a sell out to the monied interests who have a stranglehold on Washington DC.  When I saw the “consummate” politicians he surrounded himself with once elected I became a bit nervous.  As the year has unfolded my worst fears seem to be on the horizon.  I believe President Obama is a good man with a good heart, I’m just not convinced at this point that he’s the fiery leader I felt we were in desperate need of when I originally threw my support his way.  I know he has the intellectual capacity to take that role, I’m just not seeing it happening.  I keep telling myself that being surrounded by Rahm Emanuel, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and trying to bridge the gap with Republicans who despise him is a failed direction he should be able to detect and change.  I continue to hope for that change because these people are all about the status quo – business as usual – which is what appears to be happening in our nation.

This is not a “business as usual” time – and, I’m tired of all the excuses about how nothing can be accomplished due to the obsinence of the Republicans in the Senate.  What I’m seeing is the same old way of solving problems with the same unacceptable results – WHILE MILLIONS OF AMERICANS ARE GOING HUNGRY, LOSING THEIR HOMES, and losing everything they’ve spent their lives working for.  It would not be difficult to make a clear case directed toward the public as to why this is happening (Republican rule).  AND IT’S RIDICULOUS to be pandering to the ones who created this mess in the first place.  I’ve said from the very first few days of the Obama administration that his “need” for “bipartisanship” was a HORRIBLY BAD IDEA!

What the President should have been doing was confronting the confrontational nature of the Republicans and PUSHING true progressive solutions to the problems created by the Bush administration and 30+ YEARS OF SUPPLY SIDE ECONOMICS!  The whole theory  behind this “trickle down” approach to managing our economy NEVER MADE ANY SENSE in the first place – but these Republicans mastered the art of cramming propaganda down the American public’s “throat” until enough people fell for their nonsense allowing for disastrous political victories (disastrous for what was a robust middle class prior to Reagan which is now a shell of what it – the middle class – was in the 70’s – of course, on the other hand, a HUGE WINDFALL to all those in the upper income brackets and – more importantly – the corporate “heads” who now virtually RUN OUR GOVERNMENT) which have nearly bankrupted our nation.

Here’s what is really depressing when I think about “what’s happening.”  The unemployment rate in the United States, as of Thanksgiving 2009, is somewhere around 17+ percent.  Of course, the government reports numbers considerably less than that – although still DISASTROUS – I guess to keep people from using the “D” word – instead calling this a “severe” recession.  But, when you look at the number of foreclosures, when you listen to all the people who are homeless and have been looking for work for over a year, when you hear stories of THOUSANDS applying for minimum wage jobs, when you talk to numerous parents working multiple jobs thereby leaving their children to “fend for themselves” most of the time, and when you count the number of banks not “too big to fail” which have failed – you realize THERE’S A HUGE PROBLEM OUT THERE.  How bad does it have to get before we call this the depression that it is?

We know that the Republicans don’t care about anything except that President Obama fails.  Therefore, THEY SHOULD JUST BE WRITTEN OFF.  It’s time to end the political nightmare in Washington.  For this to happen we need LEADERSHIP!  The President is the one who is going to have to supply this.  He has the “BULLY PULPIT” and it’s high time that he start using it.  He needs to go on the attack so that the government can step in and really STIMULATE our economy.  OUR PEOPLE NEED JOBS, and they need them now, not in the two or three year time period the economic advisors to the President are predicting.  I’m already tired of hearing Geithner explain how job creation is always the last phase of a recovery.  It’s almost as if President Obama’s advisors have “drunk” the trickle down “coolaid.”

Here’s the deal; if President Obama is going to continue with a policy which rewards Wall Street for their bad behavior by condoning what amounts to a “top down” approach to solving our problems, he’s going to be a one term President.  And, it won’t be due to Fox “news,” or Rush Limbaugh, or Sarah Palin – it will be because the President has chosen to abandon the progressive views of the people who got him elected.  Already we’re hearing rumblings of discontent from the White House about the number of “liberals” who are “jumping off the bandwagon.”  As if, they just have assumed all along that the “base” will stick with the President through “thick and thin.”  As far as I’m concerned, I made it clear that Obama would not get the “sheep mentality” from me that GW Bush got from Republicans and all of the “ditto heads” who simply do/did what Limbaugh and the rest of the Republican leadership tell/told them to do.  I started predicting trouble for Obama as soon as he chose to “look forward instead of backward,” therefore letting Bush/Cheney and the Republicans “off the hook” for potentially destroying this nation as we know it.

Let me explain why this was such a STUPID move.  The constant vitriol coming from the “right” (wrong) was totally PREDICTABLE.  We’ve had to listen to the likes of Glenn Beck calling the President everything from a non-citizen to a racist to a communist to a nazi (of course, if anyone thinks like a nazi it would be Beck and or some of his cohorts – like Limbaugh, Cheney, etc) – we’ve had to listen to Rush Limbaugh say “I hope Obama fails,” and do everything in his power to influence his “ditto heads” to hope for the same thing (notwithstanding the FACT that would mean America would fail), and worst of all for me we’ve had to listen to Dick (head) Cheney going around the country doing everything from bragging how “waterboarding” isn’t torture and provides “actionable intelligence” (both easily proven lies) to undermining President Obama’s attempts to fix the HORRIBLY FAILED political and military DISASTERS Cheney was largely responsible for (along with his good buddy Donald Rumsfeld) in Iraq and Afganistan.  Cheney committed treason when he “outed” Valerie Plame of the CIA to get even with her husband for telling the truth about how Bush/Cheney were lying us into the Iraq fiasco.  That wasn’t good enough for him, so he’s still going around trying to make his own folly look good while unpatriotically undermining our present Commander in Chief.  To listen to Cheney you would think he wants another terrorist attack on this nation in order to make himself feel better about allowing 9/11 to happen on his watch.  THIS MAN MAKES ME SICK TO MY STOMACH JUST KNOWING HE’S STILL WALKING FREE!  Cheney and the rest of the Republicans continue to believe our laws don’t apply to them – they (and America) desperately need to learn that DECISIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES – and, America is a nation of laws NOT MEN!

I believe almost all of the partisan rancor in Washington would be in the process of subsiding had Obama not only allowed, but pushed for, the investigation of and – where appropriate – the prosecution of the Bush/Cheney administration for all their criminal behavior.  I spent the Thanksgiving weekend at a Christian Retreat Center with a group of people who I love – mostly members of the “Christian Right” who just go along with the Republicans because they believe Republicans want to end abortion.  They have NO IDEA WHAT REPUBLICANS ACTUALLY HAVE DONE AND STAND FOR!  These people live to do things to help the least fortunate among us and they just don’t understand the degree Republicans block their own efforts.  When I think of them voting for Republicans I think of the saying about when you “cut off your nose to spite your face.”  A full public investigation of the Bush administration would have put many “truths” out there where even the Fox “news” crew couldn’ hide them.

America DESPERATELY NEEDED to know what had happened in “our name,” when Obama was elected.  He failed the test MISERABLY.  I don’t know if he ordered his Attorney General to “look the other way,” or if Eric Holder did this of his own volition and Obama didn’t intercede – but, regardless, this will go down as a TERRIBLE DECISION that will cause this nation to carry the burden of the Bush/Cheney debacle for maybe years to come.  And, if Obama does end up being a one term President – unless he’s defeated from within his own party we will have another Republican in the White House – and I GUARANTEE YOU – any Republican who moves into the White House without having Bush/Cheney REBUKED will take over where they left off!  Those of us who spent so much energy getting Obama elected will have to endure an encore performance of the unitary executive “theory” imposed on America by Dick Cheney and carried out by GW Bush.  I don’t believe I was the only American who was counting on Obama to reverse their wrongs!

The end result of all this has been a stimulus bill which was woefully inadequate to address the unemployment disaster happening in America over the previous two years and evidently – based on the political will in Washington – the next two years AT LEAST;  an energy policy which probably won’t happen due to the lack of will to confront Republicans, and a health care “reform” bill which will likely be a “boon” to the insurance industry, cause even higher rates for “we the people,” and will possibly “hamstring” the Obama administration for the next few years.  Believe me, if the health care bill is passed without giving the majority of Americans the “choice” to buy a medicare like “public option” as an alternative to the price gauging insurnace companies, the backlash will come from Obama’s own supporters.

This is a time in American history when we are in desperate need of courageous leadership.  And courageous leadership doesn’t mean politics as usual.  We need our LEADER to stand tall for PRINCIPLED legislation which will reverse the 30 year assault on the New Deal agenda which created our great middle class in the first place.  So far we’ve only seen agressive legislation in the Wall Street bailouts and VIRTUALLY NO RE-REGULATION to go along with it.  Health care reform appears headed for disaster and unemployment seems destined to rise for at least another year.  The more I learn about Tim Geithner, the more I believe he’s as connected to Goldman Sachs as Henry Paulsen was.  And Larry Summers helped create the deregulation which caused this mess in the first place.  Rahm Emanuel is the epitome of a Washington “insider” directing the “change we want to believe in” by playing politics as usual.  As I continue to be grieved by all the stories I’m hearing about the millions of Americans who are losing all they’ve worked so hard for I can’t help but wonder; How can we achieve the “Change we can believe in” through politics as usual?