Bad Casting or a Bad Movie?
This continuing focus on the person of the President, regardless of who it is, misses the point badly. It is not the President that is the problem, it is the Presidency.
It is the fundamental institutional framework of the government and the two parties that should be the focus of our attention, not this endless characterization of whoever holds the office.
Structurally what we have had (until now) is a functioning two party coalition government ~ let me repeat ~ a coalition government whose job it is, like every government, to protect the means of wealth production, populism be damned.
That is why we hear the unending cries for ‘bipartisanship’ and ‘compromise’, without which a coalition government cannot function. It is the defense of the status-quo. As long as that status-quo provides obscene wealth for a few and cheap gas and TV for the rest, it works.
But what is different now is the addition of a set of legislators who do not hold to that paradym. They hold to a fundamentalist religious view of impending apocalypse and their holy mission is to guide the world toward the fulfillment of that view.
Let us put this into perspective: President Obama is doing what the President must do, protect the integrity of the union so that the businessmen, who are licensed to do business in the various States, can best go about their business. That’s what the job description is. The Presidency has nothing, nothing to do with the general welfare of the citizenry, except to stave off insurrections.
You can cry all you want to about betrayals and such, but it’s like crying about the tooth fairy. The political machinery is structured, and has been since the founding, for the purpose of accumulating and concentrating capital in the hands of a few. The “popular” opposition to the status-quo is an ultra-right-wing fundamentalist religious orthodoxy.
These are the political operatives at work today. The socialists were purged from the Democratic Party and the Unions decades ago.
Refocus.
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Pax Lupo 
A real groaner of a script
I like to take a particularly generalist view of our history.
I may be seeing things that nobody else sees, or wants to see, and I may be making very dangerous parallels, but…
Western civilization is founded on the uneasy cohabitation between two heritages : our Greco-Roman one, and our Judeo Christian one.
If you look at the way things are playing out right now, you can also see.. how the religious fundamentalists look and sound surprisingly like the radical… Jewish population under Rome.
Rome was built to do commerce. The Romans believed in commerce, and its civilizing influence.
And they were exceedingly put out when they colonized Judea, to find a people who did NOT believe in the civilizing effects of business at all costs…
And they were even more put out to realize that that tiny country had people in it who were willing to immolate themselves rather than believe in the civilizing effects of commerce…
How does this perspective influence our perspective of what is going on right now, under.. THE NEW ROME ?