Solemn Hope

I had planned on posting something on Occupy Cincinnati today; however, this is huge. It was Iraq that helped reactivate, for better or worse, The_Wizard politically, got me into this blogging game.  While I have my grave concerns about the President's commitment to the poor, working and middle class, I am not blind to the contrasts between this president and his predecessor.

It is not lost on most of us that this president has been hired to clean up the previous president's gigantic, horrendous fuck-ups, a thankless job. If there is anything to be gleaned from the two videos, it’s the humility on President Obama's part. He didn't parachute onto an aircraft carrier or anything so ostentatious. No, he solemnly, delivered the news we've been waiting for these nine years, resigned to reality of what we have lost on this fool's errand.  There's no party here; the broken hearts of tens of thousands mean that no champagne should be popped. You cannot celebrate this as a victory, because we have won nothing. You can hug a veteran, and buy that person a beer. That is the least we can do.  We didn't win anything.

Contrasting this to the PR hand job Bush foisted upon us all, and the cruel cynicism of that administration is laid bare once again, like a festering wound who's scab will not stay put.  We did this for no good reason. And he threw a party eight years ago to celebrate, with all the self-aggrandizing of an idiot Caesar. He was that stupid; his people thought we were, too.

And this seems to have been the millennial narrative written by the cold warriors hell bent on keeping the future at bay, and continue in that capacity as they demonize our slow collective realization that we are entitled to a better today, and tomorrow, than these greedy, evil motherfuckers think we are, and today, as with the past few months with the Occupations, we may yet get there.

A popular talking point with those who fear tomorrow belies the tenacity of yesterday: Quit Blaming Bush. Obama is President, and what’s he done? 

Rather than list accomplishments in an attempt to persuade the persuadable or anything like that, I would remind people that Bush really fucked things up. REALLY. FUCKED. THINGS. UP.  And while Obama, as I wrote at the outset, often gives me pause, I cannot, in all fairness, forget the nightmare of incompetence, old paradigms, cronyism and paranoia that came before, nor can I pretend that many of the same actors, or their facsimiles, would love nothing more than to bring back the “good old days”.   However much of a shit sandwich it maybe for me and my politics, I will be compelled to vote against such backsliding in 2012.