The hard part about being President is all the whoring you have to do to get the job. That I certainly wouldn't relish. But I could sooo do an infinitely better job than Obama as President. For him, it's Goldman Sachs, Israel, and Party, and Country comes in a distant last if at all.

He is either totally gutless, unimaginative, or most likely, his People are the elite. He has the power to make good on everything he ran on, just no will and no guts.

Don't cry for Barack Obama.

Greenwald wrote:

"...this is the mindset of Rahm Emanuel, and its precepts are as toxic as they are familiar: The only calculation that matters is maximizing political power. The only "change" that's meaningful is converting more Republican seats into Democratic ones..."

But, while this mindset is certainly toxic to progressive policies, it ultimately is self-defeating even in its goal to retain power. If Rahm Emanuel (and ultimately Obama) must continally appease the right and adopt their agendas or (as they see it) face political defeat, then in fact they have no power at all, and they never had any. They are merely puppets of the right - doing the right's bidding in order to keep up their meaningless win-loss record and in order to maintain 'control' of Congress. But since they can't ever control their own bluedogs (who are republicans in all but name), or retain any loyalty from the corporations who control them, and must concede everything to them, their victories and their power are totally meaningless illusions, and Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama, far from being powerful and victorious, are the most thoroughly impotent politicians in all of Washington.

Any interaction with the right is like a knife fight. You can never capitulate enough, you can be sufficiently obsequious, to satisfy them. They will take what you concede to them and still doublecross you and undercut you. It is finally better to fight like a man than be an emasculated lapdog like Rahm Emanuel, or Barack Obama - the weakest and most utterly defeated pair of losers in Washington.

can someone please waterboard eric holder according to john yoo's guidelines?

thanks,

I entirely agree that this is a very important story, and I am glad that Glenn Greenwald has pursued it and helped to put the spotlight on it. I have to say that's a little hard to swallow Olbermann's claim that he just happened to choose the exact same day to stop all criticism of O'Reilly but for an entirely different reason than the order from on high that was alleged by the NYT reporter to have been issued that day. And the reason he claims seems incredibly weak. He implies that the more serious the charge being made against O'Reilly the more one should refrain from discussing it.

Whatever else he is, he ain't as stupid as Palin.

In a few short years we've gone from 'The blogosphere is all garbage. I never even read it', to 'All their good stuff is stolen from me'. That's progress!

I heard a BBC interview with Barofsky after his report came out last week, and I have to say that I was more irritated with him than impressed. He seemed to bend way over backwards to pull his punches against the obama regime, despite the recklessness of their chosen appraoch to their self-proclaimed goal of 'averting a depression'. In his six months - six months! - on the job as 'watchdog' all he seems to have done is to politely and deferentially, if repeatedly, 'ask' the banks to give him information on what they are doing with the money. He should have long since brought infinite lawsuits against every bank and used every possible hardball technique to achieve some accountability. Of course, one can argure that compared to the completely unprincipled behavior of the Treasury and the Fed, he comes across as the 'good guy', but it's only, as always, in relative terms. He came across to me as a total weakling, just like the weaklings in the bush regime who knew better, but only timidly and faintly protested to the insane policies of the bush regime in their megalomaniacal pursuit of their own disastrous agenda - the generals who knew better but were too gutless to put their jobs on the line to protest the insanity of the bush agenda. In fact, I think the parallels are horrifying between the bush regime's response to the so-called 'existential threat' of terrorism, which they continuously asserted to justifiy all of the lawlessness, all of the most extreme and imprudent policies, and the scarily similar mindset of the obama administration in justifying its own set of reckless, autocratic, and, ultimately, quite possibly equally catastrophic means of confronting its own chosen and self-proclaimed existential threat of economic collpase. In both cases expedience trumps the rule of law and concern for the long term consequences of their actions. I do not see Barofsky as a hero. A hero would have acted with such ferocity against the insane financial policies of the obama regime that he would by now either have reigned them in or been fired. And if he was fired, he should then have denounced the obama regime from the bully pulpit of his experience inside the regime. He is totally milktoast as far as I can tell. The $23 trillion of damage is already done. And incidentally, I noted that thinkprogress.org, which one would like to think of as a progressive site, reacted to Barofsky's report by quoting an interview in which, they say, Barofsky 'debunked' his own $23 trillion figure and set it back to $4 trillion:

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/22/barofsky-debunks-23-trillion/

Sorry, Barofsky is not my hero.