Obama Watch

[The Rude Guy Podcast #68 June 1, 2010]

[Obama’s Oil Spill]

[clip of FDR speech: I welcome their hatred!]

Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The president of presidents. A real man’s man. Even though he was crippled with polio and couldn’t walk.

This is Rich Zubaty the Rude Guy. I don’t know why I still make these shows, but a couple hundred people still download ‘em, so I guess that’s something. Though they never email, and never donate anything, so it’s hard to know why they download ‘em. Or if they even listen.

Once upon a time I thought that this show could exert some populist pressure to push President Obama further to the political left. But I’ve given up on that. He’s too ignorant. He’s too conservative. He’s too slow of a learner and I am tired of being caught up in his learning curve. He still thinks corporations are his friends, even as this BP disaster mires his presidency waste deep in petroleum muck. Even as the health care industry turned health care reform into a joke. Even as Wall Street turned banking reform into a joke. Even Donna Brazille, big black mama of the Democratic National Committee, said that the problem with the Obama administration is, that it’s not tough enough.

Anyone who read my book What Men Know That Women Don’t knows that this feminized, I’m OK you’re OK, touchy feely consensus management style is exactly what produces catastrophes like the gulf oil spill. The woman Obama appointed to head the Mineral Management Service that was supposed to be overseeing drilling regulation just resigned. But that’s not good enough. The buck doesn’t stop there. Obama is harping about “the cozy relationship” between petroleum companies and regulators when he should be ranting about fraud and bribes and corruption. But he won’t do that. Because he’s not tough enough. Becasue he doens’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Because he’s the first female president of the United States. And frankly, most women I’ve ever met would do a better, tougher job of running this country.

Moreover…Someone besides me finally said it. Barack Obama is, scary. Chris Mathews from Hardball said Obama’s reaction to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is, Quote “scary. He’s acting more like a Vatican observer than president of the United States.” Unquote. Then Dan Froomkin on Huffington Post echoed Mathews saying that Obama’s oil disaster behavior is scary.

The New York Times said it’s well past time for Obama to do something, even if it IS risky. But that’s his Achille’s heel. Isn’t it? He’s a school teacher. He’s a risk adverse president. Which is almost a contradiction in terms. Presidents have to be willing to take on risk. But here a momentous crisis explodes in his face, and Obama sits down on a rock to analyze it.

The man is pathetically incompetent, and he is NOT a fast learner. The BP oil spill IS going to be his Katrina. He’s making jokes at the Washington Press Club Dinner, and eating gourmet molé at a trendy Mexican state dinner, while the marine resources for the southern half of the country are being destroyed. When the globs of goop reach Long Island, his presidency will be over.

I just hope Borgs don’t arrive from another galaxy, far far away, while he’s still president, or he’ll start giving speeches about how, resistance is futile, and we’re all in this together, and how there are no American machines, and no American people, but just American machine-people.

I’m sure glad he wasn’t president when Joseph Stalin was around, or France would be speaking Russian. And I’m glad we had Franklin Delano Roosevelt and not Barack Obama to point the way after the great Depression, or the rural electric program and the union movement and the Federal Highway system would not have existed.

I voted for this silver-tongued coward and I feel betrayed. He was an establishment whore from the moment he walked on the national stage, and started babbling about how there was only one America, and it was both black and white. No, there was only one Barack Obama, and he was both black and white.

A former poker player companion of his said, Obama is the worst kind of guy to play poker with. He antes up and takes his cards. If he doesn’t like them he drops out immediately. If he likes them he places bets, and everyone else drops out, and he wins a small pot. Boring. Like watching a turtle run a race.

He’s only had two visions in his life I can think of. One was to marry Michelle. And the other was to become president. But beyond that – nothing. No idea that corporations are too powerful and have to be cut down to size. No idea that we cannot control Asian oil and gas by occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, in obedience to long-disproved cold war geopolitical fantasies. The man got the Nobel Peace prize and sent more troops to Afghanistan the next fucking week. He has NO vision.

He is a tinkerer and a technocrat, jamming political alliances together like they were legos. Let’s see: take this funnel and stick it on the end of that hose, then electrify the hose and jam it up an elephant’s ass, and then, when I talk into the funnel my voice will come out of the mouth of the elephant sounding just like…Hamid Karzai…and the Taliban will be defeated. This is how he thinks! That an incremental patchwork of half-solutions is going to add up to an unprecedented policy victory. Well…it always worked for him before. When he was a school teacher. Duh.

The man never managed anything more complicated than a classroom full of greedy law students, and then he bullshit his way into becoming CEO of the largest corporation on earth. The U.S. Government. How did this happen? We were riding on a national tidal wave demanding something wildly different than we were getting from George W. Bush, and all we got is different skin color. We got a healthcare bill that helps big medical corporations, and a banking reform bill that helps big banks.

We voted for Martin Luther King Jr. and we got Redd Foxx, from Sanford and son.

Barack Obama is a one term president, and I hope we field a serious Democratic primary challenger to him, because otherwise Mitt Romney and the Republicans are gonna be swept into office. When people ask me: if not Obama, then who? – the names Ralph Nader, Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich rollll off my tongue. And that’s the point. We have solid progressive worker-bees who have toiled in government for decades, and who know exactly how to take the people’s power back from the corporations…and instead we elected some brown skinned charlatan yodeling about change we can believe in. What bullshit.

Instead of accomplishing a great deal, and lasting for only one term, he is going to accomplish virtually nothing, and last for only one term. And you call that smart?

Obama’s political technique is to give a rousing speech against something, then vote for it. When Obama was a Senator, and John Roberts was nominated for the Supreme Court, Obama gave a passionate speech about how Roberts had always served big business and ignored the little people…and then, Obama voted to confirm him. What the fuck. What are we supposed to make of that?

“Watch what we do, not what we say,” is a famous Republican quip. If we use that yardstick, Barack Obama is a Republican.

Obama says he didn’t get elected to serve fat cat bankers, but when the financial reform debate was raging, the White House policy ninjas, maneuvering off camera, struck blows against breaking up Too Big To Fail Banks, and capping credit card interest rates, and auditing the Fed. What the fuck? What are we supposed to make of that? Obama talks about ending the war, and then sends in more troops. What the fuck. What are we supposed to make of that? Is he schizophrenic? Or just a slimy Chicago political chameleon? The banks and generals and oil companies and conservative Supreme Court nominees, don’t care what he says on TV. They care what he DOES. And he consistently DOES their bidding. While talking against it. He’s the worst possible nightmare of a Democratic president. A conservative sell-out who leftists won’t criticize because he has brown skin.

I was told the Obama presidency would be like an oil tanker. Turn the rudder left now, and one mile, (or one year), later, the ship would start to turn left.

Problem is, Obama never turned the fucking rudder. He took control of the ship and held steady as she goes. This man committed a crime against the American people. He promised to change course, and plowed straight ahead. Flat out lie.

New York Magazine said Summers, Geithner and Obama are technocrats, who do not think there is anything wrong with the economic system. It’s just an old house where they can clean out the basement and paint the bathrooms and put some flower pots on the front porch and – hey – good to go!

We have systemic problems in this country. A banking system that robs from the poor and gives to the rich. A military out of control. A service economy with nothing to serve.

We voters ordered up a whole new house. And these guys are giving us handyman repairs.

Here’s what Michael Brenner, from the Center for Transatlantic Relations, said in February 2010, in an article titled:

Obama versus Obama

The enigma that is Barack Obama grows day by day. Contradiction after contradiction, abrupt gear shifts, perpetual motion that never reaches a destination. (I like that. Perpetual motion that never reaches a destination.) ‘Obscene’ Wall Street bonuses suddenly transmute, into well earned rewards for a good guy golfing buddy; the imperative to act boldly on the jobs crisis, means placing it the callous hands of Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley, of health care fame; the plotting of exit strategies from Afghanistan by 2011, becomes a, quote ‘long as we have to’, occupation. All these contrapuntal reversals, against a sound track of non-stop exhortation, and a restless shuttling, from one photo-op to another. Who is this guy, anyway?

A few elements of Obama’s personality are now evident: a strong narcissistic streak, an ingrained sense of superiority, a nimbleness – intellectual and political – enabled by the incredible lightness of his conviction, about anything, an audacious ambition, yet no gumption for a fight. Behind these traits, there is something even more basic discernible. Obama is two people, one superimposed on the other. The visible, surface man, is the epitome of an enlightened, Ivy League, socially responsible liberal. This is Obama the community organizer (albeit an exceptionally non-confrontational one), Obama the African American political activist, who attends Jeremiah Wright’s, cosmopolitan church, Obama the orator, who routinely hits the high ‘Cs’ of the call to conscience, Obama the optimist, who appeals to the better angels of our idealistic American selves. This is Obama, the African-American, who moved enough voters, to be elected President of the United States.

To this portrait, we must juxtapose the other Barack Obama – the Barack Obama who surfaced in the public arena, and quickly shed his ‘liberal’ skin a month before he got to the White House. This other personality, I contend, is the underlying one – truer to the man’s core nature. This is the Obama who, twice in his young career, sought out positions in big corporate law firms; this is the Obama who was raised by three Kansans, who instilled in him conservative heartland values; this is the Obama who relishes wealth and what it can buy; this is the Obama who feels more at ease playing golf with his Wall Street buddies,
than with anyone of the Move On America crowd; this is the Obama who chose as his trusted confidant, that unscrupulous, liberals-be-damned, fixer – Rahm Emanuel; this is the Obama who absorbed the spirit of Ronald Reagan’s America, he himself has said, stands as the model of inspirational leadership. Unquote.

This is the Obama who is still waiting for the U.S. economy to recover by itself. Who is still waiting around for greedhead bankers to start making loans to small businesses. This is the Obama who sat on his hands while oil squirted into the Gulf of Mexico, a mere few weeks after assuring us offshore drilling was perfectly safe. This guy, is the Commander In Chief of the U.S. military, who is SUPPOSED to know, that after Gulf War One, U.S. Navy vessels successfully pumped up most of the Kuwaiti oil Saddam had viciously dumped into the Persian Gulf. Why weren’t these same naval pumping operations deployed in the Gulf of Mexico? Our gulf! This is the technocrat, who knows nothing about technology.

How much longer will we gawk at this melting pumpkin of the Obama presidency, before we demand he toss Rahm and Summers and Geithner to the sharks, and bring on some worker-bees who are willing to take some risks on behalf of the American people, and not only on behalf of oil companies and derivatives traders.

[bird]

Some lesbian harpies deleted my wikipedia page. Lesbian harpies, plus some feminized manholes, probably mostly from Australia or New Zealand – though there were certainly a few North Americans in the mix. It was a one week battle. They were led by someone called FisherQueen, who had already deleted my page twice in 2007, but someone had reinstated it. Our side was led by Lewis Loizou from Luxembourg. There were guys coming to my defense from Asuncion Paraguay to Melbourne, Australia, and across Europe, the U.S. and Canada. Our opponents were credentialed wikipedia so-called editors. We were the global insurgents for men’s issues. Their utter contempt, for the rights of free speech, for people they disagree with, was…contemptuous. That’s why I think they were mostly Ozzies or Kiwis. Countries that do not have a Bill of Rights, and that attempt to limit the speech of others. The United Kingdom does not have guaranteed free speech. I remember once when I was in Scotland, a man got arrested for calling a police officer’s horse, queer.

Anyway, their argument was that I am not, quote, “notable”, but that was just a red herring. They had made up their minds to bump me off, and then started looking around for reasons why I did not meet their criteria. We countered that my books and podcasts made me notable. They moved the goalposts, and said we had to give them print media references. So we gave them dozens of mentions in everything from Transition men’s magazine, to articles I wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times and San Francisco Chronicle… They moved the goalposts again, and said the print articles had to be about me, not about my books, and not by me. We gave them the Harvard Crimson and the Irish Times and the Spokane Spokesman. They made no response to that, except to close the online deletion discussion, and delete the page. Total tyrannical cowshit.

I recommend that people boycott wikipedia. It’s a useless publication with gross biases. It’s not some fabulous new open source for knowledge. It’s an online publication devoted to the tyranny of the majority. If I’m an approved minority, OK. But, if timid tenure-conscious academicians won’t write about me, because I question the moral superiority of women and the sanctity of feminism. Or if the corporate media won’t write about me, because I openly bash corporations. I can go beat off. According to wikipedia.

[donkey]

If you wanna see this show keep going, send money. Go to therudeguy.com or happyfool.orG and push the make a donation button. And enjoy all the other free stuff while you’re there. Especially the oil paintings. If I could sell one of those I could journey to the Chaco in Paraguay, and pick up the revolution where Che left off.

The future of America is in South America, where the workers are taking over the factories with NO ideology involved. How about that?

Hasta luego.

Tags: borgs | BP | brown skin | conservative sell-out | FDR | Gulf | Gulf Oil Spill | lesbian harpies | Obama | Obama's oil spill | technocrat | two Obamas | wikipedia