Obama: Like a doctor with an unwilling patient

In the days leading up to the election of 2008, I was prepared to get on a plane to England where I would stay with an old friend until my husband could get the dog and cat prepped for emigration (a six-month UK program through which the UK quarantine can be legally avoided) and join me. Had the successor-in-interest to George W. Bush won that election, supported (if one cares to use that word) by his brainless Barbie doll running mate, it would have been impossible for anyone with a working brain and operational human emotions to live in this nation any longer. George W. Bush had done so much damage in so many arenas that it was hard to conceive how a successor cut from the same political cloth could help but make the disaster even worse. I was not willing to live in such a hapless, hopeless, helpless nation, a nation literally sick unto death.

I compulsively read Nate Silver's website, 538, looking for hope, and found it.

I was joyous on election night. It was such an important election night that I begged off meeting friends at a Democratic bar and grill to watch and celebrate; I wanted to savor our salvation at home with my husband, dog and cat, and know I would not now have to flee for my intellectual and emotional life, at the very least.

Since then, of course, the Republicans who managed to get elected or stay elected have been running their mouths and not much else, except the odd smear campaign in this year’s elections. The Republican dumbkopfs of the airwaves are still shaking their fists and turning red, something sufficient to convince the lower two-thirds of the electorate that Mr. Obama is somehow culpable for their economic distress. How can anyone forget Mr. Bush? How will we ever be able to forget Mr. Bush?

Mr. Bush is politically and economically leprous, and he has infected the entire nation with a malady that takes a while to appear, like leprosy, but when it does…..Oh, boy. Lepers, lacking feeling because the nerve ends have been ravaged by disease, lose fingers, toes, ears and noses without ever noticing it is happening, until repair is too late. It is no wonder Lincoln Mitchell wrote in the Huffington Post today:

“Problems only seem more complicated when they are examined more closely and the ability of the president to do much about them, particularly in the post-Bush period, is less than it seems.”

Mr. Obama is like a doctor trying to treat leprosy when the disease is still partly undiscovered, only a few of the abundant lesions having yet appeared. Worse, while he is trying to treat the infection delivered by Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Gonzales, Ms. Rice and a cadre of wet nurses to a nation’s disaster, the patient is being uncooperative. Even Democrats have whined that Mr. Obama is not fast enough. They forget that he has a systemic illness to cure, one that was lovingly nurtured by the above-named disease vectors for eight years; Mr. Obama hasn’t even yet located all the sites of infection yet. Not a day goes by that yet another soul-deadening, nation-destroying program of the Bush years isn’t uncovered. And even when Mr. Obama does find and alleviate some aging sores (please see yesterday’s column), people complain.

At the end of the day, one must know this: curing a systemic disease takes time, even when all the sites of infection are known and the cure is proven and readily available, none of which is the case with the sick nation that is, post-Bush, America. Curing that disease when the patient is intent on derailing one’s efforts might be next to impossible.

But I’ll take what we’ve got at the moment, a president with a brain and working emotions attempting to bring us back to the normalcy Mitchell sees already but for which I am merely hopeful.

Meanwhile, those who voted for Republicans in Virginia and New Jersey need not be proud of themselves this morning. In their ignorant efforts to “cure” their financial woes faster than any human possibly could―even FDR―they have given the infection new sites from which to attack the body politic and the moribund patient, the United States of America.

Pray only that by the mid-term congressional contests the patient will have regained sufficient health that no such infections are elected or re-elected to serve where it counts, in Washington, DC.

GOP Party of Greed tries to delay relief for unemployed millions

This is the third time, at least, the Senate was ready to pass an extension of the Unemployment Insurance benefits. And it is the third time Republicans are trying to stop it passing in a timely manner, considering 185,000 unemployed people have already lost their means to feed, clothe and shelter themselves and their families. By the way, I use those three terms advisedly. Calling this government program benefits puts distance, desirable to those unwilling to grapple with the problem (Republicans), between the human misery delay is causing and their own greedy, self-centered posturing and bargaining.

Today’s gem from the Party of Greed was almost laughable, if its consequences were not so sad. “The objection came, Manley said, because Republicans were trying to introduce unrelated amendments attacking ACORN and the financial-industry bailout, among other things,” according to a HuffPo article. Manley is Jim Manley, senior communications advisor to Sen. Harry Reid, majority leader.

It is not unusual for either party to attach completely unrelated legislation to bills about to be passed. It’s despicable, for either party, but not unusual. In this case, despicable is not even close to the proper description. The Party of Greed loathes ACORN, and I will admit that ACORN has had some bobbles in its mission to serve the disenfranchised…but then, what organization is without its failures? It would seem ACORN is no worse and no better than many. What it has to do with unemployment insurance, however, is clear. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. But it became useful to the Party of Greed in its attempt to increase the human misery that was fertilized and gestated and given birth by their own very odd couple, Dubya and Dickie.

Which brings us to point two, attaching anything about the financial-industry bailout to this bill. But then, the Party of Greed would have no problem adding insult to injury. The facts:

• Dubya came into office with a surplus Clinton left.
• Dubya saved his rich buddies from paying any tax at all, and he gave away several farms to buddies in oil, armaments and godknowswhatallwhichisn’tevenknownyet.
• Dubya and his partner, Deadeye Dick, created the conditions for a financial bailout to be necessary.
• Dubya took the first shot, locking the next administration into a spiraling black hole of unholy financial hell that I frankly doubt we will see our way out of until some sort of apocalypse radically alters the political scenery―a true people’s revolt (and one would hope it would be civil disobedience only, but then, Americans haven’t been starved and thrown out of their homes like so many medieval peasants before, either, not even in the Great Depression. (At which point, a “thank goodness for Franklin Delano Roosevelt” is in order. But for him, we would probably be entering a second dark age. Well, at least the peasants would, providing we had come through the first.)