All ye who failed to believe my last blog concerning the REAL political leanings of Arianna Huffington, please take a look at the picture she recently tweeted below.
She’s on holiday in Italy, and whilst in Amalfi, just “happened” to run into an old friend and his wife. Guess who?
Unexpected encounters: in Amalfi, running into Newt Gingrich and his wife (even invited him to blog about his new book)
What’s the old Rod Stewart song say – every picture tells a story? She’s even asked him to blog. Huffington Post takes a sharp turn to the Right, with the man who likens Muslims to Nazis.
I feel vindicated.
I second Bito’s comment.
GN and dildenusa, you’ve developed a thought provoking dialog on Obama’s performance on HCR, what was and is possible and the decision making process. However, let’s stay on topic and keep The Planet ethos of not personalizing disagreement. Thanks!
In all of this nit picking and teeth gnashing of President Obama’s failures (single payer HCR, watered down financial regulation, tepid fiscal stimulus) has it ever occured to anyone that his advisors might be the problem. The same thing happened to Bush. He was pushed into a unnecessary war in Iraq by self serving advisors. Obama seems to be at a loss on how to deal with the tea bag partiers. You just co opt them with the coffee filter partiers. His advisors downplay the effects of the tea bag partiers at theirs and the nations peril.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html?_r=1&hp
I agree. I think he’s surrounded himself with some pretty compromised folks, and he gets a shitload of bad advice. He seems to be a firm believer that only insiders can fix things, but that just means the solutions they come up with are the ones that their buddies still in the industry can stomach. It’s the “if we don’t do this, world go blooey!” argument.
In fact, that might work as an epithet for the whole darn human race:
“We Got Bad Advice”.
Obama knows, as we all do, exactly what’s at the core of the Teabag movement: race. What would you have him do about them? He can’t stop them from assembling and from saying almost anything they like. That’s their right under the Constitution. Equally, as a prototypical President, he can’t call them out on racism – first, because they’ve been cack-handedly clever enough not to mention his race directly, and secondly, as the first black President, he really can’t bring race into the equation. He’s got to be above that. The same as if Clinton had won and someone would bring up her gender. She couldn’t play on it, although that skank Palin would
There’s really nothing Obama can do about the Teabaggers. They are galvanised and they are in the streets. This has been the problem with the Left since time out of mind. After the late Sixties’ protests, the Left put protest to sleep.
Listen, the Teabaggers were, ultimately, a creation of the media, who hyped them into more than what they were. They give Palin hype that they shouldn’t. Tell me, when was the last time a defeated Vice Presidential candidate got so much hype from the media? Never. A lot of this shite is pure corporate media hype, and it’s down to Reagan’s repeal of the Fairness Doctrine.
It’s the duty of the Democrats to hit back hard and refute any and all lies being propagated by the Republicans. The Republicans have Fox News fighting in their corner. When Bush was in the White House, they lionised him. All the so-called Left media does is chip away and undermine Obama, when, in truth he’s achieved more than Roosevelt had at this juncture in his Presidency, and I sincerely believe that RACE has as much to do with that on the Left as it does on the Right.
Race does have a lot to do with the tea bag partiers. The media, whether right or left leaning has given Palin and the tea bag partiers more credit than is their due.
Was it race that put President Obama in office? No. It was that people were fed up with Bush and the republicans. Most half-normal Americans are still fed up with the republicans. You don’t have to worry about normal Americans, there aren’t any. Americans are either half-normal or psychotic. The trick will be to energize the center and center-left to vote in the midterm elections. In the long term the only way to deal with the tea bag partiers will be to co opt them. Obama is listening to the wrong people for advice. His advisers are doing a go slow approach to avoid being tarnished with the “socialist” label. Duuuhhhh. Obama will be called a socialist no matter what he does. So why not do what’s correct? The problem here is self serving advisers and politicians in his own party undermining Obama. What ever the so called left wing media is doing is harmful but not as harmful as listening to bad advice from self serving people.
You’re wrong about his advisors. There isn’t nearly half as much of the ego-thrusting and back-biting as existed in either the Bush or the Clinton White Houses. I agree that the Democrats aren’t serving him well out of their own moral decrepitude, but the message is in the media. Fox News made George Fucking BUSH a demi-god and defended him vociferously when the Left, at last, found a voice. The so-called Professional Left has done Obama no favours. They could be praising his accomplishments as they happen, and they’ve got the pulpit to put the positive spin on them. Instead, you get gotcha journos hauling out Howard Dean because he sometimes speaks without thinking and people like Jane Hamsher being given full political pundit status when she knows jack shit about government, shilling to kill the health bill. Various so-called Leftwingers have cherry-picked, spun and resorted to name-calling the President at almost every juncture of the way for him. It is THEY who have undermined his agenda and turned their brain-dead followers against him. When you have Ed Fucking Schultz tell his radio audience not to vote, because the Press Secretary dished him some of the vitriol he’d been levelling at the White House, you have to wake up and smell the coffee.
I agree with you, Marion. These folks hated Clinton too but not like they hate Obama. This is different.
A brilliant summation of the situation, Marion. Race is the enormous, but artfully dodged, issue here.
I also would question the assumption that Bush was led into the Iraq war by self-serving advisers. I think this action was decided by Bush himself — perhaps even before he was sure he had been “elected” (I use the term loosely)– and the decision was merely enabled by the people around him. I agree with Oliver Stone’s take on Bush…that when push came to shove, he really was the “decider.” He never was as dumb as he looked. He was no intellectual, to be sure, but he was bloody cunning. And he had the surest instincts for protecting the interests of the wealthy that I think I’ve ever seen in a politician — bar none. Iraq was in his cross hairs almost from day one.
At the same time, I don’t know that Obama is tremendously influenced by the people around him either. I think he listens to them. But ultimately I sense he’s flying this plane. To me, it’s almost too early to tell if he’s mishandling things. I sometimes wonder if he knows parts of the story now that will only become evident later to historians, and has made decisions based on info not accessible to many outside the oval office. (Or, on the other hand, maybe he’s a born people-pleaser and we will find out to our sorrow that trying to deal with people who refused to be pleased did him in. Only time and history will tell.)I suppose it may boil down to the fact that people choose advisers,like friends, for definite reasons, and keep them around for those same reasons, And ultimately, that makes the person who chose the advisers the “decider.”
I sense that if Obama gets into serious trouble (and, oddly, I don’t feel he’s there, yet), it won’t be his advisers’ fault, or even necessarily his own. It will be the fact that the times were just too totally, utterly mad for any rational person to be able to seize and master. It was the era of the “half-normal and the psychotic”, as dildenusa so aptly called it.
George Bush was no intellectual, but he was hardly stupid. You can get legacied into any top university in the world, but you have to be able to do the work to stay there; and besides, Bush got an MBA from no less than Harvard Business School, and he wasn’t legacied in there. That dumbass face was a carefully cultivated mask to appeal to the Texas, and later the base of the Republican, electorate.
And cultivating the dumbass demeanor was, in itself, kinda brilliant…
This comment doesn’t seem very reality based. First, it bizarrely compares President Obama with Bush (Bush as a passive participant in his foreign policy portfolio is one of the more bizarre constructions which I’ve seen). Second, it characterizes health care reform, finreg reform, and the stimulus not as historical and unprecedented pieces of legislation, but as “failures.”
Media spin.
Excuse me GN, your comment doesn’t seem to be written by an adult.
Actually, this comment resembles the sophistry which inhabits the worst of the sensationalized blogs in which the perfect is the bitter enemy of the good.
In the context of this country which is not remotely close to 100% progressives, immediate conversion to a single payer system was not an option. To declare HCR a failure because of that is the worst type of political gamesmanship. This applies to your “analysis” of the stimulus as well.
GN, what took you so long to get back to me with your ridiculous nonsense?
Correct me if I’m wrong but there is already a single payer health care system in this country. It’s called Medicare. The fAILURE of Obama to extend medicare coverage to any age group with a supermajority in the senate shows his nature as a typical politician.
And so in other words, the game is to create unattainable expectations for President Obama comprising of a wish list which was never promised, and then slamming President Obama for not meeting those expectations.
Again, this is sophistry and political gamesmanship, not positive or mature advocacy. Unless your goal is to enable the GOP, it is also very ineffective advocacy.
And who are you enabling? Nobady of course. Not even the far left wing nuts for which you claim to advocate.
Obama promised reform of the health care delivery and provider system. What did we get? Mostly cosmetic changes. A few real reforms but an even bigger mega lobby of big pharma and big insurance. Doctors and patients got screwed while the sophists (Obama included) talked a good game. You have to walk the walk. Obama just talked the talk. Then he wouldn’t get a backbone when congress failed. That became his failure.
By speaking from the center of the political spectrum I make a difference.
What do you do? You think with your 10 cent words like sophistry you push peoples buttons. My buttons don’t work anymore other than to push back.
Dildenusa,GN, This is a good topic and it offers differing views and opinions all of which deserve examination. Let’s not get into a personal spat and keep it at an intellectual level.
I saw this pic on HP, someone posted it.
‘Twas not any of you under another guise, was it?
Needless to say, I echoed Maion’s points (which are not hers alone, just more eloquently and systematically delineated).
Just asking, ’cause I hope it does go viral.
Oh, and Newt? That slimy opportunist already campaigning like its South Carolina 2011?
I regret ever saying anything remotely nice about him as one of the more intellectual Republicans. He’s back, and trying to out-papulist [sic] Osarah bin Bailin.
Wait! Someone posted it on HP? Where? I posted a link and got two sniffy comments from her kool-aid drinkers that said there was never any previous association between the two. What a LIE! Unless it was one of her mods and she’s trying to rub out all the previous innuendo between her and Newt.
I just logged in to my Huff post account just to see if was still active and it was, but I did not post any comments. Huff Post does have value as a news gatherer and that is sort of what the drudge report does. Arianna has taken the news gathering idea to the next level. I thank Marion for opening my eyes to the truth. I did appreciate this story on Huff post.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/akmuckraker/tea-party-candidate-joe-m_b_697517.html
It it this story from the Mudflats?
😆
http://www.themudflats.net/
It sure is.
Don’t you have pics of you and quitter S’arah from the cruise?
I went on a cruise?
Please … I hope this gets viral. And that meeting was anything but accidental. She planned that.
Here’s something else. Karl Rove and Bill Maher are Twitter buddies. Expect to see Newt, Rove and Darrell Issa (another close friend of Maher’s and Whoreanna’s) on Real Time this fall. You betcha!
Truly, what are the odds that they just “bumped” into each other?
About the same as me “bumping” into Barack Obama.
Especially, folks blogging at HP should see this and get this. Maybe a link to it at Twitter should be included in comments at HP?
Here’s the direct link to the pic at Twitter: http://twitpic.com/2hqj1m
Don’t you still have the pics of you and Quitter S’arah on the cruise? 😉
I put the link up and got two abusive responses, one from a woman refusing to believe Huffington had ever been a Republican. Her history is on the internet for all to see.
I’m re-reading All the President’s Men, and I’ve got to the part where they’ve just found out about Donald Segretti. Wow, what a dipshit he was – and he employed Karl Rove as a ratfucker. One of the things his fratboys did was infiltrate the protest movement and THEY were the ones who got violent. Rove learned a lot from Segretti. He’s taken it to a new level.
I’m sorry, but you DON’T proclaim yourself to be a Progressive and go on vacation with Newt Gingrich. Now, for all those who see this with common sense, the ueber Obama criticism should be clear to see.
By all means, promote this link – on HP and otherwise. I hope it goes bloody viral.
I didn’t need any background on her (I did), I didn’t mind the comment section completely (even though I got many a”time-out”) but I did finally say after reading one too many sensationalist headline and one too many that had zero sources….BULL SHIT. I don’t go there.
Arianna is a right wing whore in sheep’s clothing.
No offense to whores.
😆
😆 😆 😆 😆
A leopard never changes its spots; sometimes just takes a little longer for the whitewash to wash away. What’s the cliche about giving enough rope…? And, I used to admire this woman. What a Bitch!
PS Marion – just sent the link, your post, and the photo to MoveOn.org with a note from me as well. Hope someone wakes up and smells the coffee!
I admit, after yahoo closed down it’s comment boards, I was one of those left of center independents who moved to Huff post. Was I ever fooled.
dusa,
Oh my dear, I gave up on HP long before the primaries — oh so long ago. I had no idea Missy was a Greek in RW agenda clothing. Makes me want to throw up. I hate being screwed and not enjoying it. 😆
I actually visited Huffington Post once recently and not for very long.
It is a good aggregate of headlines – but the stink from a right wing bias was just too much for me.
Arianna still closes comments from a disagreeing POV.
Daily KOS has had many leave that site, and I’ve tried to register and tell them to come here, but even KOS practices censorship.
I have become very tired of Daily Kos. The only reason I go there is because of Blackwaterdog’s diaries.
Yesterday, there was a diary on the rec list about Alan Simpson. The Obama Admin. decided to accept his apology and keep him on the commission.
Gosh! The vitrol coming from the commenters toward Obama and his Adminstration was SICKENING. The insults and name calling was WAY over the top.
Where did this self-righteous mindset in Dems come from…or was it always there?
This group conformist sentiment that if Obama does not make each decision exactly as the Purists would, he has betrayed them and America once again.
Reminds me of when the Politically Correct movement on the Left became extremist, a kind of social fascism where anyone who expressed anything they didn’t approve of deserved to be attacked as hateful or insensitive.
I would like to do a documentary on the lives of these hypocritical Purist Dems and examine the decisions they make in their own lives, exposing them for the compromises they’ve made and make on a daily basis.
Then we could organize a group of Purists to attack them on blogs and via email, see how they like being held to an absolutist, solipsistic standard.
Yahoo’s boards are back open, but they are not what they were and whatever you do, do not go there.
It’s all right-wingers hating, unless you get there at the right time, so trust me in the warning of never going there.
Mean, nasty and filled with trolls.
I don’t have a yahoo account anymore.
Well, we did have our suspicions…. wow. Thanks for sharing that, Marion!
the badger surfaces! Nice to see you here, furry!