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Progress report: Obama abandons his base on multiple counts, earns an F grade
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The forked tongue of Pres. Barack Obama is becoming a legend in these short 6 months. So the former teacher I am, I will give Obama a Progress Report:
Mideast Occupation: F
Health care: F
LGBT rights: F
The Economy: F
The constituencies of these interests represented solid, high-turnout supporters among Democrats and progressives, yet Obama seems wholly disinclined to even humor them. Instead, he earns high marks from the homophobes, free-marketeers (Obama was affiliated with the University of Chicago after all, the Vatican of Milton Freidman), military-industrialists, and health-care company shareholders, who want to earn profits on death.
And five months into his change-is-coming administration, Obama has shown no sign towards making health care universal, has continued US occupation of Iraq including the bombing of soft targets a week into his administration (soft targets comprising neighborhoods, schools, hospitals ... noncombatant, children, women), has bizarrely defended the Clinton-Era bigoted Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which Obama himself opposed during the campaign, and he continues to remain inactive on his support of liberalizing union organizing and his promise to extend collective bargaining protection to all federal workers, including officers at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). You know these workers if you've flown anywhere in the last seven years, as they -we! - are the ones who screen your baggage, you, and not only make you take your shoes off, take your tubes of toothpaste and bottles of shampoo and water, but also keep countless weapons off the flights you and your family have taken.
As a candidate he can put these issues squarely on the shoulders of the Establishment, critique them, show their heartlessness. Once in power, a government must act reasonably quickly and decisively to correct these horrors until they themselves become responsible. Pulling immediately out of Iraq may not be possible overnight, funding an increase in the war under different rhetoric is no better than the get-us-out-of-Vietnam candidacy of Richard M. Nixon. Obama, like Nixon, seems to be finding a way to escalate the war, therefore the casualties, therefor the loss of US soldiers, who are merely boys and girls. The blood of collateral damage from the soft target bombings is now on Barack Obama since he directed it as commander-in-chief. Bigotry and violence toward the LGBT community is extended yet another day by his inexplicable defense of DOMA [is this a "I opposed it before I supported it" moment?]. And while it is far out of most people's radar, easing collective bargaining rights for all US workers would begin to correct much that is wrong with the economy.
That a portion of federal workers asked to protect the flying public work unprotected and at the whim of many incompetent supervisors, managers, and federal security directors who think they are running Third-World sweat shops is a disaster waiting to happen (and why would they think otherwise, when there is no law to stop them?). Without a union, TSA officers's disaffection, low morale, arbitrary rules, write-ups are kept well hidden from public view, with only the highest officials apparently speaking on our behalf, while we ourselves are kept from speaking to the Press.
So when blow-back occurs in the Mideast, as the partners of hospital patients are denied access to their lovers, some as they die, as health care is denied yet another patient when just across the northern border all workers are guaranteed access, or when an airline catastrophe happens, it will be the Obama Administration at fault for dragging its knuckles on the ground.
If first impressions are meaningful, Obama is showing himself to be without much depth or substance. Simple, there is no there there, which is amusing in light of the controversial criticism against him by Mrs de Rothschild, who dared called Obama an "elitist." It would seem, like an elitist, he likes to hear the sound of his own voice regardless what it's saying and himself alone puts great weight to his thoughts and expects everyone else to follow suit.
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