The 5 stages of getting over Obama
I don’t really like the news anymore. You may have picked up on that. Most news stories annoy me to no end. Once I blog about them I don’t want to chat about them or even think about them again. Needless to say, if they show up in the news day after day after day, I become wroth and sometimes livid. And that’s what drives my blogging; the need for space to vent. In practice it means that the longer a story stays in the news, the angrier I get about it. Except when I develop expectations. Then I start to cheerlead, especially just before an election.
My two biggest/worst fan boy fave raves in recent years were on the pot referendum in California (that I was so sure would pass) and the re-election of George Bush in 2008 (which, at the time, seemed like a good idea).
So anyhow, you probably thought this was about my anger management issues but not hardly. This is about me coaching former Obamaites in the fine art of being pissed at one you once loved.
There are five stages in getting over Obama.
- Denial. It’s not really Obama I’m mad at, it’s this crazy upside down world where you have to kiss cracker ass all the time.
- Anger. Who the fuck is Obama to do this to me, er, I mean our country!
- Bargaining. Maybe if I work even harder on his re-election things will be better in his second term.
- Depression. It’s true, he’s never going to fight back. So long as Wall Street gets theirs, job one is done.
- Acceptance. Obama is a prick bastard fucker, but that’s his problem. I will not allow myself to be defined by the faults of others, however much it totally fucks up my world and my friends’ and family’s worlds.
Because when all is said and done, you can live on canned meat, beans, rice, potatoes and local produce. An apartment will suffice and less clutter can be nice. Less money means fewer options and life gains new clarity when decisions are clear cut.
We’re being Hoovered and getting mad doesn’t help. Smile and do a little dance while they’re putting it in, and then a year from this fall hope we’ve got options that let us stick it to all of them from Obama on down. And then, when it finally dawns on us why Obama’s DOJ never got around to cleaning up electronic voting…you can get pissed all over again.
It’s the cycle of life, and it’s supposed to suck. Unlike the President of the United States who, every once in a while, shouldn’t suck this much.
David Dayen on five turning points Obama blew
More from Jonathan
Jon Stewart continues to be the go to guy for debt ceiling commentary [video]
Fox bloviators already demanding higher taxes on the middle class
Obama throws in the towel over the FAA (blaming both sides equally) even as Schumer tries to fight even as Coburn obstructs
Obama rewards Utah for all their votes
• • •
News:
War in Afghanistan continues to wind down: only 650 airstrikes in July
Glenn Greenwald aggregates some of the things that have been aggravating him
ALEC pushes for prison labor [the right truly is deeply and incessantly offended by that whole minimum wage thingamajig of FDR's]
Some laws ALEC pushed in Minnesota
China the biggest pirate of them all? [more from emptywheel]
Israel’s only news when someone dies (Israelis finally catch on to the if it bleeds it leads nature of the media)
Scott Walker gets served notice next Tuesday
• • •
ExxonMobil fracking flack stretches the truth a mite:
“There have been over a million wells hydraulically fractured in the history of the industry, and there is not one, not one, reported case of a freshwater aquifer having ever been contaminated from hydraulic fracturing. Not one,” Rex W. Tillerson, the chief executive of ExxonMobil, said last year at a Congressional hearing on drilling.
Amazingly, the NYTimes’ Ian Urbina outs Tillerson just two grafs later:
But there is in fact a documented case, and the E.P.A. report that discussed it suggests there may be more. Researchers, however, were unable to investigate many suspected cases because their details were sealed from the public when energy companies settled lawsuits with landowners.
We’re never going to end pollution as long as corporations can buy silence. Once a U.S. court is involved, it should be impossible to seal records and all evidence should go into the public record. I guess there have to be exceptions, but the only exceptions now are when we find out wtf was going on.
• • •
Breivikianity:
Max Blumenthal on Breivik’s American influences
Bachmann historian assures us that Jesus would’t have hired a gay apostle
Bachmann advisor Gaffney suggests Breivik was a “false flag operation”
White nationalists flock to Tea party banner
Buchanan defends his right to call 50-year-old man a boy
FORPs: the Friends of Rick Perry [Blue Texan, btw, is not a friend of Rick's]
Poll shows U.S. Muslims, atheists, least likely to approve of violence
Wigger Day in Red Wing [Breivik would approve]
• • •
Rupertgate:
The latest from The Guardian [more]
The latest from the Rolling Stone
Fox is pushing a lot of anti-climate change garbage and it’s making the usual rounds — for the record, NASA totally believes in global warming all Fox News bullshit to the contrary
Apparently Democrats only get news coverage if 1) they’re President, 2) get shot, 3) email pix of their weiner to half the women on Twitter
• • •
Again, I’ll support Blue America just as soon as they put up a page listing ALL the politicians they’ve raised money for. And, as I said in the comments at Digby’s, the Netroots really don’t seem to be very good at picking candidates. Given that, a lot more transparency would be helpful to Blue America, and to us.
And under that heading, I really have to rip on Ed Kilgore for mocking Michael Lind for being absolutely right about the Tea Party roughly approximating the old Confederacy. Yes, the Tea Party is nationwide now, but that’s because we let the evangelicals migrate out of the South and they’ve now infected the rest of our country with their contempt for facts and their need for calumny.
But, in the meantime, Bernie! Bernie! Bernie! (Nir is somewhat clueless here, not understanding that REAL SOCIALISTS are often more appealing to Republicans than fuckcentric douchebags.)
• • •
Etc.:
The FBI’s big lead on D.B. Cooper turns out to be courtesy of a niece who thinks he died in ’99 (no, I didn’t really think the Bureau had turned up anything new as that would imply superheroic competence instead of the usual middle management Mormonism)
Once upon a time, we were bi-lunar
Would killing copyright put an end to Hollywood’s love affair with remakes?
Yes, that IE6 IQ study was a hoax, but there is a serious study out that suggests some of us are getting smarter, much smarter
It’s over and Kersten won (fuck those kids for ever thinking they had a right to learn)
The Awl goes long on Aaron Swartz, the latest American to get busted for being smarter than our horrifyingly dense DOJ
L. Ron’s grandson gets even on the comedy circuit [video]
Dan Gillmor on how the NYTimes made their porous paywall work
More proof that Swedes are not even remotely like Norwegians (we build our homemade nukes in the stabbur)
• • •
Still looking for gigs and found this at Craigslist under Creative Gigs:
It’s the unpaid part I object to most, altho the puns are equally objectionable. Even if I were inclined towards this kind of project (I’m not), I strongly suspect we’re talking about some very imaginative high school kids here.
I’m really interested in reading the Marriner Eccles book that Jonathan is reading. I was aware Eccles was one of the first Keynesians (according to Galbraith) but I’ve never learned what impact he really had. FDR’s early actions in repudiating the gold standard in 1933 and then in 1935 (in the Banking Act of 1935) so Eccles would not have been much influence I don’t think. I’ve read a memo written by Harry Dexter White while he was at Harvard about the Depression which apparently was how he got into the Roosevelt administration. It shows a kind of thinking about the economy unimaginable these days.