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"Dil Na Laghay" :: Faakhir |
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I am blatantly cribbing some of this from a conversation I had with ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) graeae over the weekend, but since I have the memory span of a goldfish, it's possible that I will forget things. But some of the ideas come from that convo.
I was reading spam today, as one does, when one is unemployed and single and the apartment is already mostly clean and one's issues with contacting people are making getting a new job a bitch. I've had a few emails from some group called MomsRising.org; imagine my confusion when I realised that this was, actually, a forward from my semi-pro email account. Evidently, despite not being a mother, and not giving one tiny shit that 1.2 million children have now lost their health care, I signed up for this at some point. I guess.
The premise of the email is one I've seen several times, and this is where I start to lose my shit. Tell Congress to move quickly to make this promise a reality on Day One of the Obama Presidency by a quick and fully-funded reauthorization of SCHIP.
I've seen this elsewhere on the internet. Right now, Obama is supposed to save children, Gaza, and *insert your pet cause here* by, at the latest, Day 100 of his presidency. I have actually seen someone call Obama's presidency "failed" because he's not doing whatever the fuck they wanted him to do - I don't think that was in the context of Gaza, but it might have been. Or it might have been because, yanno, he wants Reverend Wright to do his thing at the Inauguration.
This is insane.
1) Obama is the President-elect. Not the president. As such, he cannot do these things prior to taking office. Even though, as Barney Frank said recently, saying that we have only one president at a time is overstating the case on how many presidents we have right now, he cannot do anything other than what a senator may do right now.
2) There are other problems in line before yours. The economy leaps to mind. The environment needs to get started on - I say this, by the way, from Seattle, where we are completely cut off from the rest of the United States: due to heavy snowfall and avalanche danger, both US 2 and I-90 across the mountains are closed, and I-5 has at least three feet of water over the roadway south of Chehalis; it's expected to hit ten feet, even with pumping and a manmade levee breach, before it crests. Getting some of the more pernicious acts of our previous "president" out of the way leaps to mind, as well - as graeae pointed out, Bush has made it, currently, so that the documents relevant to his presidency remain secret, not only in his lifetime but may be held as secret by his heirs. Emperor Bush indeed.
3) Just because, as good liberals, we've endured eight years of the worst presidency America has had, with empire-building, a failed war, massive executive power increase and the sort of vice-presidential powers that not even Henry Kissinger dreamed of, that does not mean that it's now OUR turn and we get to fucking have ponies on the day that Obama takes office. For Chrissake, let the man figure out how to turn the phones on.
Now. Just to clarify one point: I take Gaza very seriously. I am pro-Palestine, all the way, and I can fucking back that opinion up; I did my Master's on the subject. I take health care (for ALL people) very fucking seriously indeed; as the child of a nurse, it would be hard not to. As someone who's lived for an extended period in England, it would be impossible not to. As someone who stands for everything that Reverend Wright opposes, I don't like his selection, but I'm not gonna kill anyone over it. So now you know my biases.
I drank the Obama Kool-Aid, and I drank it early and often. I was never a supporter of Clinton; while I would not have cried tears of blood at voting for her, I felt - and still feel - that Obama is a uniter, and Clinton is a policy wonk. We don't need a policy wonk right now. We need someone who can pull the two sides of this country back together and make ALL of us realise that whatever else we are, we are all Americans, and that we don't have to annex part of the county to get along. I also think that Obama is a very, very smart man who likes more than a little bit of Machiavelli in his politics; Clinton is a deal-maker who'll bargain to get what she wants, but Obama will convince you, and will make the gestures needed to get his point across: he is the president for ALL of America, not just the evangelicals (as Bush was not) or for the tree-huggers, or for the minorities, or for whatever sub-group you'd like to ascribe to him.
And now I'm watching his approval rating - 75% - with a lot of trepidation. Not because I think that Obama will do something wrong with that, but because he could. That's higher than Bush came into office with; that's higher than Bush had at any point in his presidency other than during 9/11, when he polled 90% (and let's be honest: he didn't look presidential then; it could have been Bozo the Clown in office and he would've scored that high.). He tapped 75% again with the declaration of the war, and it's been downhill ever since for ol' Bush.
Source.
Obama could use that approval rating to do anything. Anything at all. Keep the changes in executive power over the last presidency? You can have them! Refuse to reverse some of the policy decisions made by the Bush administration, such as family planning overseas? Go for it!* Want to nuke Pakistan? Knock yourself out!
I believe - because of the Kool-Aid - that Obama will do the right things with that rating, things that I approve of and can get behind. I also think that this addresses why he selected Wright for the Inauguration - if he'd not reached out to the conservatives who believe that his election mean that they're gonna get witch-hunted for not being pagan queers, he'd get nowhere. Whether liberals like it or not, there are fundamentalist conservatives in this country. And they're not going away.
But do you really think that Obama can fix everything on the first day? He's just gonna sign a bunch of legislation and that's it, we can all have a beer for the next four years? No. We did not get into these problems overnight. We're not getting out of them overnight, either. And the economy is the 800lb gorilla.
This is why all these calls for Obama to fix this on the first day/first 100 days drive me bananas. They don't recognise a basic fact. The man may be able to walk on water, without even having Air Jesus shoes, but he can't do everything. And - quite frankly - he would be fucking insane to try. Not merely because it can't be done but because he needs to do two things first: fix the economy, and unite the country.
There is no possibility that we could have a president left-wing enough for me. I am so far left I verge on communism, frankly. Perhaps that gives me some of the necessary distance here, but this pet cause business drives me nuts because it doesn't recognise reality. You are not the most special snowflake in the room. And expecting Obama to fix, in the first three months of his administration, all the things that Bush fucked up is unrealistic.
Anyway, if you didn't like it, why did you let Bush get away with it?
This is from the Declaration of Independence. Read it very fucking closely.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
The consent of the governed. It is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government.
This means that we have the right to overthrow the government if we don't like it. If it fails to provide for our unalienable rights - and certainly, I would argue that the Constitution and Bill of Rights, both of which have been thoroughly skullfucked in the last few years, posit an entire constellation of unalienable rights - then we have the right, even the obligation, to overthrow the government and try something new.
The 33% approval rating that Bush polled in May of 2006 would argue that two thirds of the American people agree that Bush was a shitty president.
Why was there no revolution?
Why did no one choose to take power back, take it away from the hands of the madmen we've allowed to run the country (into the ground) for the last four years?
I didn't, I know that. No one else did, either, though. No one figured out that we had the power, and we had the right and organised around that. Instead, we sent petitions and marched in demonstrations and protested quietly and bore witness - in a media state that did its damnedest to hide the numbers of those protesting, marching, angry. Hell, that tried to hide that such things - such dissent - was occurring.
There is a reason that we have the right to bear arms, by the way. I would argue that Bush, Cheney, et al are not necessary to the security of the state. They seem to be doing too good a job, even now, fucking us all over.
And there's the answer. Obama can't fix everything in the first day or first hundred days, or even first term, because none of us said, in any effective way, that enough was enough. None of us demanded loudly enough that our government be accountable to us again. None of us exercised our rights - so the mess got worse.
The mess, in fact, became almost im-fucking-possible to see through.
And now, armed only with the joy of some portion of the country at the fact that we have gone against type and elected a smart, competent man as president, Obama is supposed to fix this? Right now?
Are people actually out of their minds?
Evidently so.
Do not come to me with a demand for what Obama "should" do on the first day in office. Do not outline for me a plan of what you think Obama should do in his first hundred days. Do not tell me that everything will be better now.
Let's borrow a business maxim. You can do it fast, cheap, or well, and you have to pick two out of three. My corollary is that generally, fast and cheap go together. Well is the redheaded step child in this.
I'd rather he did it well. I'd rather that he, and his team, and Congress, thought about things before rushing right into the briar patch. I'd rather that you and I and everyone have to deal with the consequences of our own fucking inaction for a while longer.
Because maybe that will remind us next time: we are not obligated to sit still for a president like Bush.
* I have to note here, I don't necessarily think Bush did a bad thing with that, frankly. I am pro-choice - but I also live in a society where the value of a fetus is not, generally speaking, determined by whether or not it's male or female. In countries where that is the context, the statement of "Pro-choice means no choice" is accurate. Otherwise, female babies are aborted in vastly disproportionate numbers. Just something to think about, there.
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