Barack Obama has heard that people on the left don't like his compromise on tax cuts. Tough . You know what he has to deal with? He says the Republicans took the American public hostage. Have you ever had to deal with hostage takers? No you haven't. They are not normal . You know who else isn't normal? Democratic ideologues. This guy can't stand them -- as you can see from him blowing off pent-up steam about the health care debate -- and he's not working with them anymore. It's just going to be him and the American public hiding in an undisclosed location for the next couple of years. He will protect them in his arms. You ideological freaks can die for all he cares.
Here is the hostage clip. Hah:
But back to the first clip: "This is the public option debate all over again," pissed Obama says. Extending the Bush tax cuts for the middle class and not extending them for the wealthy is ideology. And sticking to it instead of dealing with reality is something cartoonish intellectual elites do in their silly elite newspapers made out of $100 bills smeared with caviar-based ink. And it is wrong.
Of course, ideology has to come from somewhere. And in this case it came from Barack Obama. Sure, others had a similar position on the Bush middle-class tax cuts in the past. But it was not a time-worn tenet of Democratic ideology. It was a position codified into the Democratic agenda by Obama himself in the 2008 campaign.
"I'm tired of that town Washington telling us what we can't do," Obama said there in 2007, yet to know the true depths of human exhaustion, obviously, because he is obviously VERY TIRED and CRANKY of all this crap today. "We're assured... there's no problem that can't be solved by another tax break that the wealthy didn't need and half the time didn't even ask for. But we've tried that way for the last six years. We're ready to try something new. We're hungry for something new. It's time to turn the page and write a new chapter in American history."
And now, that large, erect thing in Barack Obama's pants does not mean he is happy to see you. It means that thing in his pants is the Washington Monument. Because now Barack Obama is Washington. Barack Obama is telling us what we can't do. And what we can't do is stop giving tax cuts to the wealthy. Although Obama is criticizing others here, and trying to relate it to an aspect of the health care debate, he's really criticizing his own campaign rhetoric.
Pissed Obama has evolved out of Emo Obama in the month after the midterm elections, and Pissed Obama does not care what Campaign Obama used to say about things.
Of course, this happens to pretty much every president, and every politician, vis-a-vis campaign promises. But here's something you notice when looking through YouTube for past remarks on tax cuts: Obama promised, resolutely, over and over, in vivid video sound bites, not to raise taxes on those earning less than $250,000 a year. He did not promise, out loud, in words, to raise taxes for those making above that level. So which of those parts of his plan do you think was more important to him?
He's now running for office. He will not allow himself to be eaten by the YouTube. He's not the kind of idiot who has to play around with a football every five minutes. This is about preservation of self, as much as, or more, than preservation of his beloved American public.
So now Obama, like many presidents before him, will carve out a comfortable place in the political center, free to snipe at members of both parties, content with the knowledge he made some progressive gains, even if he couldn't reform the system itself, and sufficiently emo'd to the point where he is certain he cannot instill a predictable ideology in that official North Star™ common independent voter, the kind of person who picks up hodgepodge pieces of political convictions somehow without really paying attention to anything.
And everyone else will be faint, albeit more interesting, constellations. Or something. SPACE: IT'S A BIG THING.
But yeah, he's totally wrong about this being a "compromise" thing. The only person he compromised with was his former self. [ YouTube ]
I'm pleased that benefits got extended and 98% of the country didn't get a tax hike. We can kill the tax cuts in 2012 when the average American is actually paying attention to the game.
At least he didn't sign a free-trade agreement with Mexico, gut welfare, and deregulate the telecommunications and financial industries so there'd be huge busts in both years down the road.