{"id":92,"date":"2012-11-10T07:00:07","date_gmt":"2012-11-10T07:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/?p=92"},"modified":"2012-11-10T19:36:02","modified_gmt":"2012-11-10T19:36:02","slug":"did-you-actually-think-wed-get-what-we-want-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/?p=92","title":{"rendered":"Did you actually think we’d get what we want now?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yeah, Maddow’s comment did feel pretty good. But did you really think re-electing Obama meant sending a mandate about all the things you and I would like to see in government?
\nA couple things prompted this. First, a friend posted this Borowitz Report<\/a> today making fun of Boehner for already refusing to work with the president. Which, let’s face it, Boehner’s appeal to bipartisanship was about a sincere as, well, you come up with a crazy analogy.
\nBut the other one is named Joe Donnelly.
\nWe tend to think that the Democrats we elect are like the delegates we see on the convention floor – gay-friendly, multi-cultural, greener than the Amazon, working men and women standing up for each other. It is a nice picture but it’s not the Democratic Party that governs. Joe Donnelly may be a Blue Dog Democrat, but even then – the first thing he puts on the table is allowing the Bush Era Tax Cuts to stay. That’s telling. It may not be a smoking gun, but it gives an indication of what the Democratic Party’s core values are, and what they’re not.
\nThey’re not the party that’s going to stop wars (In fact, my own representative, Jane Harman, may just be taking over the CIA directorship. But that’s a tangent). They’re not the party that’s going to end oil subsidies. And they’re not the party that’s going to force the rich to pay for their wars and their subsidies.
\nSure, they’ll come out in support of pet issues like gay rights and GMOs and what not. That’s free votes. And heck, they can even do something slightly progressive once in a while like pass health care reform. But when it comes to the core values of our government – the maintenance and expansion of capitalism, the protection of the wealthy – they’re right in there with the politicians we call our enemies.
\nSo, practically, what does this mean, what do I predict? I predict the Bush-era tax cuts will stay. They’ll blame the Republican congress for it, they’ll all piss and moan till they pass the same budget this year that they did last year. So will oil subsidies. Calls and clamors for the “fiscal cliff” and “the looming deficit crisis” will continue. And while Obama’s demand that the rich pay their fair share sounds powerful now, it won’t withstand the political pressure of the bourgeois press to gut Social Security and Medicare. And let’s let alone that the employment options people had as recently as six years ago aren’t coming back. These issues were drowned out by concerns about legitimate rape and global warming, but they are long-term issues that will become louder in the next election cycle.
\nAnd those are the real bread and butter issues that our government is discussing. Unfortunately, those are the issues that your more knee-jerk progressives prefer to ignore in favor of the isolated politics of “let me have my organic food and weed and let people marry whoever they want.” And that worries me – this sick kind of progressivism in this country, some call it “social liberal\/economic conservative” but I call it being okay with barbarism. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yeah, Maddow’s comment did feel pretty good. But did you really think re-electing Obama meant sending a mandate about all the things you and I would like to see in government? A couple things prompted this. First, a friend posted this Borowitz Report today making fun of Boehner for already refusing to work with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[16,18,17,19],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105,"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions\/105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}