1 Boring Old Man

I’m over caring about Fox News too. I can understand why the White House is tired of messing with them.  They’ve become something of a study in vaudevillian kibitzing, but little else. How do you argue with the point of throwing a frog in boiling water, then claiming it wasn’t really a frog? I posted the segment because it was absurd, but all I can recall is Beck saying, "Forget the frog." I couldn’t forget the frog, but I forgot Beck’s point [actually, I’m still wondering about the frog]. Then there was the claim that Anita Dunn, White House Communications Director, is a Maoist because of a truncated quote in her speech to graduating high school students. It was followed, I heard, by some mystery parent complaining about the effect on his child. I saw one where Beck was swinging a baseball bat recently, but didn’t linger to watch. Oh yeah, there was one where he did art therapy with the statues on the facade of Rockefeller Plaza – Nazi and Commie themes – ergo MSNBC is Nazi/Communist. And Chris Wallace is joining in the fun too. In a discussion of the war of words between Fox News and the White House, Chris Wallace played a clip from the 1987 gangster movie The Untouchables to illustrate how the Obama administration operates. The movie is about gangsters in old Chicago. Obama is from Chicago. Get it? Therefore, Obama is a gangster.

At some point in a life, you have to just say "no" about certain things, and I’m saying "no" to Fox News. I had developed an idea during the Bush Administration that I should keep up with the Republican Talking Points. That conviction was based on the observation that George W. Bush  almost  won the election in 2000 using a rapidly changing set of Talking Points that endeared him to the Religious Right as well as the Conservative Right. What he ran on and what he did had little similarity. But come 2004, they added the Swift Boat tactic and did it again. So I decided that I, we should keep up with the Talking Points and refute them as soon as they raised their heads. But I can’t keep it up. It’s just too absurd these days. Even Rush Limbaugh is too off the wall to keep up with. It’s like a shotgun at close range, pellets flying in all directions. Too much. So I prefer to leave that front to its own devices. Anyone wanting to base a political opinion on such things can be my guest.

There are other things to consider. Many Progressives [heavily represented in the blogs I read] are portraying Obama as something of a turn-coat. In the Healthcare fight, they say he’s waffling on the Public Option – giving in to big insurance and big pharmacy. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, there’s a lot of frustration about bonuses, about regulation [particularly of derivatives], and about the megabanks – that Obama isn’t pushing hard enough for financial reform. And in the area of the Bu$hCo sins [torture, surveillance, wars], he’s not given us all the data we need. I think these are the more important questions to think about. The Republican criticisms are mostly generic nay-saying [and frankly, they seem to be slightly waning] – though I doubt the bloc voting will change no matter what.

Pleasing Progressives wouldn’t be high on my list were I the President either. Progressives are going to vote. Progressives may well push Progressives in the Primaries, but come November, they are guaranteed Democrat votes – no matter how disappointed they are in Obama. Pleasing the current Republicans in office is almost a non-issue. They have a clear strategy – vote the Party Line. In this case, the Party Line is against anything Obama is proposing. So who is his audience? It seems to me that there are at least two – the sort of Republicans who appreciate his reasonableness and the not terribly liberal Democrats who appreciate his reasonableness. I’m not as mad as most about the stalled Progressive Agenda except for the financial arena. It’s vital!

^{Obama Approval – June 2009
The last Gallup Poll by States
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