Sunday, November 13, 2016

Deliver us from evil: Obama and DNC’s betrayal of the American people elected Trump



The people don't want a phony Democrat. If it's a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat,
~Harry Truman, May 17th, 1952


The DNC never learns.  The DNC under Howard Dean’s leadership abandoned Hillary Clinton and the Democratic base of white working people in favor of a “new kind of Democrat” called the Obama coalition.  Ted Kennedy, Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden headed up the new Democratic coalition that consisted of courting millennials and black Americans while labeling Hillary and Bill Clinton and their supporters “racists.”


During the 2008 primary, the Democratic Party was hijacked and white working people were banished and left by the wayside.  Candidate Barack Obama, the Illinois Senator who was famous for avoiding any votes in the State legislature by voting “present” and having an unremarkable half term in the U.S. Senate was chosen by the Democratic elite as their candidate.  During Obama’s first interview he took the opportunity to slam President Clinton as an ineffective president, while lavishing effusive praise on his hero, President Ronald Reagan. 


In 2008 Obama marveled at how Reagan had changed the trajectory of the nation and alluded to an Obama Administration that would continue on the trajectory set by Reagan.  Oh, and how Reagan changed the trajectory of America.  From Dr. Mercola:

Excerpt:

In 1970, following a series of environmental calamities, 20 million Americans — 10 percent of the U.S. population — took to the streets on Earth Day, demanding an end to environmental pollution. It was the largest public demonstration in American history. And it worked.  The sheer enormity of the outrage forced President Nixon to address the problem head-on.

As a result, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created. The Federal Water Pollution Control Act, which later became the Clean Water Act, was enacted to empower the EPA to go after major polluters.  The Act included strict pollution limits and penalties for those who violated them, and called for waterways to be fishable and swimmable again by July 1, 1983. The EPA initially made significant headway, suing several major polluters and banning DDT, for example.

Unfortunately, a decade later, the Reagan administration’s deregulation agenda gutted the EPA, effectively stopping it in its tracks…   Today, it seems both public and political will to take strong, affirmative action to protect the environment has been lost, and the pollution flowing from industrial agriculture and elsewhere is essentially and largely unregulated.

So let’s take a look at the accomplishments of the Republican-lite DNC’s President Barack Obama.  From Counter Punch: 

Excerpt:

President Barack Obama’s Crappy Legacy by DAVE LINDORFF

Barack Obama came into the White House on a wave of passionate new voters, many of them black or young and white, becoming the nation’s first black president and promising a new era of “hope and change.”  Eight years later, as he is preparing to exit the White House, he leaves behind considerable wreckage, disappointment and a legacy of death and destruction, plenty of it physical, but also much of it in the legislative and political arena.

He did give us, over the last eight years, a lot of change, but not much hope, and most of the change has been negative.  Let’s just run through at least some of the list:

* One of candidate Obama’s big selling points in 2008 was that he promised to end the Bush/Cheney administration’s disastrous war in Iraq, to close the horrific torture site and prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba …  Eight years later …  US forces being added even as our Nobel Peace Laureate president prepares to leave office. Guantanamo remains open and stocked with prisoners many of them known to have been wrongly accused of terrorism, as the president has proved too gutless to do the right thing and just shut the place down, or order the captives released…  

Meanwhile, torture continues, the president has expanded and formalized a system of state-sanctioned and directed murder, even of US citizens abroad, and surveillance of Americans has reached appalling levels not even imagined by science fiction writers like George Orwell a generation or more ago...

* Race relations in the US, and the economic condition of people of color in America, have only deteriorated during President Obama’s two terms… racial profiling and the killing of unarmed blacks, including children, by mostly white police officers has become epidemic… along with a general militarization of police (encouraged by his administration’s offer of free military surplus war armaments) to the point that it’s hard to distinguish them from an army of occupation across the land…

* The prison system has continued to expand, with perhaps some of the worst conditions of all in Supermax prisons run by the federal government (under the direct control of the president), where all inmates are held in conditions of solitary confinement that the civilized world considers to be a form of torture

* A once-in-a-generation opportunity to finally scuttle this country’s outrageous and uniquely expensive and class-based for-profit health care system in favor of some kind of government run “single-payer” national system such as, again, the rest of the civilized nations of the world have adopted at much lower cost and with far better access and outcomes, was squandered by this president

* Climate disaster, which candidate Obama warned was the biggest crisis facing America and the world, has been allowed to worsen almost unimpeded. The president refused to make it his number one issue… instead pursued his wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia and elsewhere and his drone killing campaigns elsewhere in places like Pakistan and Yemen, and as he promoted a gratuitously confrontational foreign policy towards both Russia and China as advocated by the neo-con advisors he appointed to key positions in his administration, including as Secretary of Defense.

* Particularly where it comes to energy, the president not only did nothing significant to reduce carbon emissions in the US…  He continues to back the construction of pipelines that only encourage more exploitation of heavy carbon-producing “dirty” oil from places like North Dakota and Canada’s tar sands.

And now on his way out of office Obama is now betraying the Native American water protectors and plans to approve the Dakota Access Pipeline.




* Nuclear war, which the president as candidate promised to make less likely, has become more likely… than any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. This is in large part because this president has pushed an aggressive program… of undermining the elected government of Ukraine only to replace it with a coup government run by anti-Russian fascists…

* The president campaigned with tremendous labor movement support…    American workers have continued to have to battle to survive during the president’s two terms under a National Labor Relations Act that is stacked against them.

* Beginning in 2010, the president…   ran conservative Democratic candidates against … more radical and progressive candidates seeking office in Democratic Party primaries. The result of this backstabbing of progressive candidates… leading to Republican takeover of both House and Senate — a grim situation that will now be difficult to undo.

* In the area of education, the president has actively encouragedprivatization of public school systems at the expense of public schools…      shifted public tax money from poor schools to selective privately run schools, where much of it ends up being siphoned off to high-salaried executives and the shareholders of for-profit management companies running the charters…  At the level of higher education, the president had the government take over as lender to students… although such loans do not even allow default, they continue to be offered at extortionate interest rates, leaving graduates as essentially indentured servants for life.

* In the area of open and law-abiding government, candidate Obama promised a new era of open government. That was probably his biggest whopper. By all accounts, his has been the most secretive government in history, with the most prosecutions of whistleblowers… his hounding of such courageous exposers of government wrongdoing as Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, NSA critic Edward Snowden, and war-crimes exposer Chelsea Manning, and his G W Bush-like fondness for executive orders.

* Finally, Obama failed abysmally on the economy, in large part because just as with the criminals of the Bush/Cheney administration whom he declined to prosecute for their clearly illegal and unconstitutional crimes of torture, aggressive war-making and illegal surveillance on Americans, he decided to bar the Justice Department from prosecuting the criminal bankers...  That decision was a disaster that still haunts the USA today, where some 20 percent of the workforce remains unemployed or unwillingly working less than full-time, often at a fraction of the wages they were earning before 2008.

In spite of the horrendously disastrous record of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton decided to abandon the white working Americans who stood by her in 2008 in order to attract the “Obama coalition.”  That was a big mistake, her fate was sealed when she decided to defend the indefensible record of Obama.  Is it any wonder that the Democratic base fled the party and joined the ranks of Donald Trump and his “make America great again” campaign? 

Trump’s message of fighting for all Americans, extracting us from these wars for profit and dumping the class based, Wall Street profit driven healthcare system resonated with the people.  The Democratic Party is dead, the Republican Party is on notice, support the Trump agenda or you are fired.

Harry Truman faced the same phony Democratic Party in the 1950’s and he was absolutely right when he said “The people don't want a phony Democrat. If it's a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat.”  Trump is a Teddy Roosevelt Republican and that is a good thing.  The world is ready for a new day, and it is here, Donald Trump will make America great again.


By Patricia Baeten

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