Between a Rock and a Hard Place.



Bite your tongue; cross your fingers.

Elections are coming up.

And the prognosis is not good for progressives at this time if I read the tea leaves correctly.

After eight years of the Teflon kid, it turns out that responsibility for everything that has gone wrong, including the weather, has floated around aimlessly until it found a target in Obama.

According to the prophets of “know nothingness,” the Republican Party, the real culprit is Obama. He is the anti-Christ, the angel of doom and destruction, the Hitler of our time. Obama has become the convenient excuse of the Right Wing. And the cause of everything that is wrong in America today.


Blotto, you might say, what has happened to memory?

It must be something in the water, you say.

No, the truth is that the public wants easy answers.
Nobody wants to think, to exercise judgment, to take the time out to figure who is really responsible and Obama is such a convenient target.

Never would they consider the truth: That maybe, just maybe, they were the guilty ones for ignoring what was happening on their doorstep.

Who cared, after all, they were making money. And that’s all that counts!

And in the process, GWB got the pass he needed.

The pass to push legislation that would give him and his buddies everything they wanted. From expanded powers of State to muscling the big guys who make money out of war to fill their war chests and their portfolios.

And so it goes.

Where we are wrong is in believing government is fair and represents the people.

That’s not the way the Right views it at all.

They see it as simply a way to build portfolios and eliminate taxes.

The hell with what goes on; sooner or later, the dems will have to clean up the mess!

And so it goes.

Today, Obama although a hardened realist who straddles the middle and strives for consensus with those who hate the left, is between a rock and a hard place.

No matter what he does, republicans find fault.

It is a “no win” proposition!

The party of “No” gets ecstatic every chance they can turn something around to their advantage.

Obama is wrong for wanting health care for people. No matter that the nay=sayers have the best programs because it’s part of the deal of being a rep.

Then there’s the tea baggers who bitch and moan about everything the dems do. One might ask where were they over the last eight years when Bush screwed everyone with programs for his buddies….

Where were they when Bush invested billions in a Star Wars program that never worked and had to fake results?

Where were they when Bush did nothing to keep insurance rates down, when he created the Medicare bill that sent the cost of pharmaceuticals through the roof?

Where were they when he condoned the off-shore movement of jobs?

Where were they when Education costs went through the roof?

And where were they when housing foreclosures forced millions of homeowners give up home and hearth.

That was the democrats’ fault, too?

We could go on.

Did we need to spend two trillion dollars for a War that we didn’t need?

But that was okay!

Everything Bush did was okay….because he was an American, a white boy who told dirty jokes.

And he was a conservative.

Only, he was a Reagan conservative who grew government faster than any democratic president ever.

And he never missed an opportunity to take care of his friends.

If these tea-baggers are serious, which I doubt, they need to rethink what they are saying and start considering the facts.

It’s not health care that’s going to put them into the poorhouse, it’s eight years of self-serving policies and bad legislation that has virtually pushed us towards the brink.

Be that as it may, the real problem staring us in the face is that we are in danger of losing too many seats to the opposition.

If this occurs as it now seems likely, there is a very real possibility that all democratic initiatives will be halted and that the republicans will continue policies of increasing debt,
supporting banking programs that are aimed at keeping the rich in power, and dismantling efforts taken by democrats to impose rules and control on business while putting the brakes on programs for small business and home town America.

If the republicans take over, and nothing else changes, we may be surprised to find democracy subjected to a bloodless coup and overlaid by a kind of authoritarianism that operates behind closed doors to continue the advance the interests of the few over the many and continuing the attack on the middle class and the erosion of the concept of America as the last best hope of mankind.

The only unknowable in this equation is whether man has the capacity to bring about change. And make the tough decisions.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon