Awakening from a stupor

This, from the University of Florida paper, is the kind of hope and change I'm looking for:

It’s common knowledge that presidential politics consist of running to the polar extremes in the primaries to appease the base and then running to the center to earn the support of moderates and independents in the general election.

As such, it’s understandable, given his historic fundraising advantage, that Obama would renege on his pledge to accept public financing. Given his lead in the polls, it was understandable for Obama to shy away from engaging his opponent in a series of town hall meetings, though he previously said he would be open to doing so. And given their electoral importance, it was understandable that Obama would pander to Christian evangelicals by proposing to continue the Bush administration’s constitutionally questionable faith-based initiatives program.

In the past couple of weeks, however, Obama has transitioned from moderating his positions to downright flip-flopping. Although Obama had previously vowed to filibuster any legislation that would grant immunity from prosecution to telecommunications companies who enabled the Bush administration to break the law and conduct domestic spying operations without a warrant, Obama has since changed his tune. He now supports a so-called “compromise” measure that effectively amounts to another congressional capitulation to the White House. As disconcerting and disappointing as Obama’s rhetorical gymnastics on warrantless wiretapping is, it isn’t the most troubling of his recent waffling.

Last week, Obama left open the possibility that he would “refine” his position on the redeployment of troops from Iraq, depending on the conditions he encounters on the ground and the advice of military commanders he talks to on his upcoming trip to the war-torn country. To be fair, Obama has not officially announced any change in his plans to withdraw troops from Iraq , but the simple fact that he is allowing himself the wiggle room to do so is depressing, to say the least.

Perhaps Obama isn’t the great change agent we thought he was. Perhaps no one can change the system. Or maybe we expected too much from someone who is, after all, just another politician. Instead of riding a wave of change to the ballot box, we are faced with the age-old “lesser of two evils” paradigm: Perpetual war and inequitable economic policies on the one hand, and spineless triangulation on the other.

The Obamessiah seems to be getting fitted for a crown of thorns from some of the faithful.

Break your heart?

H/T Blackfive.

Comments

[xtnyoda]

What was it Barak said the other day? Something about he was having to find the hard working troops...something like that?

When I saw the statement the first thing I thought was, "Now that is code language to the extreme elements of the party to lay low as he moves toward the middle for votes."

Evidently some didn't get the message.

[Locutisprime]

These are my sentiments, as posted on my blog today.

There was a good peek in the box on the sentiments of Obama's recent tryst with the center and his pursuit of the supposed moderate vote last week in the Huffington Post. Afternet Link Not that I read that rag period, but I came across the article linked via another site. The interesting part to me....was the realization and verification of my own observations of the democrats over the last eight years. And those observations are, that the rabid and wild eyed anti American factions of the democrat party, are literally beside themselves over Obama's course changes of late. From his reversal on gun control, to his support of telecom legislation, to his supposed redefining of his position on Iraq.

Iraq in particular seems to have set his crowd of loyalist at their deepest devide with him to this point. Not that his latest seeming reversals, be they either symbolic or hyperbolic, will result in any mass defection of the loyal party extremist who will gladly vote for him come November. But the loyalist are certainly expressing their anger and displeasure over his having had any audacity, other than the supposed audacity of hope, to veer even a smidge from the drum beat of procession that they see as their right of accession to the power that they see as rightly theirs.

You have to remember, these are the same people who a generation ago, would have been considered "yellow dog" democrats (those who would rather vote for a yellow dog than a republican.) Now? I'd say they are more akin to the black hearted attack dogs faction of the democrat party. They are literally the living and fire breathing effigy, of what by any means necessary truly represents.

They are in my experience a conglomeration, of what use to be known as yuppies, the entrenched retreads of academia and their minions and those who have been do thoroughly indoctrinated into the belief that they have been disenfranchised by their very birth in this nation, as to be completely irretrievable lost as American compatriots.

It reminds me of the scene in Tombstone, when Wyatt Earp is questioning Doc Holliday over what motivates a man like Johnny Ringo, to be so heartless and evil.

Wyatt Earp: What makes a man like Ringo, Doc? What makes him do the things he does?

Doc Holliday: A man like Ringo has got a great big hole, right in the middle of him. He can never kill enough, or steal enough, or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.

Wyatt Earp: What does he need?

Doc Holliday: Revenge.

Wyatt Earp: For what?

Doc Holliday: Bein' born.

That pretty well sums up the simmering and seething hatred that I have witnessed for the past eight years in the American political sphere of partisan leftist politics. These people on the liberal left, have literally been carrying a large and empty hole right through the middle of them, ever since Al Gore lost to George Bush in 2000. And it is a hole that they are incapable of ever filling, short of the self imposed redeeming qualities of their own hatred for their country and everything that it represents to their political ideologies and aspirations of an American socialist Utopia.

Don't kid yourself, their loyalties have little to do with the represented polices of any candidate in their latest stable of contenders and even less to do with their concerns of the ultimate damage or destruction to this country, that a man like Barack Obama will surely bring about should he win the presidency.

Which brings me to the next dialogue exchange in Tombstone, that I feel is prescient.

Sherman McMasters: [about Wyatt] If they were my brothers, I'd want revenge, too.

Doc Holliday: Oh, make no mistake. It's not revenge he's after. It's a reckoning.

The coming election may very well be that reckoning for this nation of the same magnitude as alluded to in that exchange referenced above IMO. If we as a nation elect Barack Obama, I am reasonably confident as a student and observer of the American political landscape, that we will see a recession if not out right depression in this country. Either a recession that will rival the escapades of Jimmy Carter's economic disaster and failed economic policies, or a direness of woe for this country that may even pale when compared to the stock market crash of 1929.

Obama's plans of change have little to do with anything other than change for the sake of change and the entrenched mantra of the leftist nation that seeks to see it all changed and at all costs. Barack Obama was recently quoted as saying "my friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you will join with me as we try to change it."

Which may very well go down in history as the identifying phrase of his candidacy and potential presidency, that foretold precisely the horrors and realities of the terrible things to come.