1 Boring Old Man

I suppose turns about is fair play. For the four years that I’ve kept up, the Progressive Blogs have kept tight watch on the Bush Administration, looking behind every decision for some not so savory agenda. And they were always there – the distorted and fabricated prewar intelligence, the secretive N.S.A. Domestic Spying Program, the Torure Memos and "Extraordinary Rendition," the firing of the U.S. Attorneys, politicization of the government bureaucracy, Signing Statements, Executive Privilege, night-time forays to hospital rooms, etc. etc. It was so regular that the phrase, "where there’s smoke, there’s fire" could’ve been shortened to "there’s fire." It seems like there was always something smoldering somewhere. So we’ve been all over the Bush Administration – looking for tricks.

So now, we have a new Democratic Congress and a Democratic President, and the Republican/Conservative Media is on fire. Illinois Governor Blagojevich is exposed as a Class-A sleaze-bag, the worst kind of politician. After a term and a half of selling State Contracts for Campaign Contributions while his wife has profitted personally from Commissions from people doing business with the State, he’s been busted for trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat and trading State support for the ailing Chicago Cubs in return for having his critics at the Chicago Tribune fired. Whether he’s prosecutable or not is immaterial. He’s no public servant, and needs to be removed from office post-haste, independent of his political Party affiliation.

Obama and the Congress have been left with two Wars and an economy that’s "less than zero." So, all of a sudden, the Republicans have rediscovered Conservative Values and are balking at the Emergency Measures required to get the economy going. "Big spending Democrats on the loose!" And the Right Wing Media pundits are screaming bloody murder that Obama is part of the Governor Blagojevich scandal – even though the now infamous Blagojevich was calling Obama all kind of choice nasty names for not playing ball. Obama ran as a uniter – and won. But it seems unlikely that this loud and obnoxious, toxic refrain will ever calm down and give him some space to work in.

So, lets face it, he’s going to have to do his work in this kind of hostile, constantly critical environment. The refrain is already clear. They call him the Messiah, obviously using the term sarcastically – meaning something like false prophet or antichrist. The racial epiteths are thinly disguised. Either he’s a "centrist" who is betraying his constituents or he’s a "leftist liberal socialist communist." If he’s slow to comment, as in the case of Blagojevich, he’s complicit. When he does comment, he didn’t denouce him enough.

I can see that either trying to counteract this barrage of venom, or try to wish it away isn’t going to work. It’s a machine that has a life of it’s own. Given that state of affairs, I’m going to have to personally to find another way to deal with it. I think I’ll try to take my lead from President Obama himself, who is remarkably unphased by it all. In his Press Conference today, he responded to the questions and simply set the record straight. He said that he would try to find out if anyone on his transition team was in contact with Blagojevich outside his awareness. And he ignored all questions that were designed to put him in a bind – particularly hypotheticals. He has an amazing ability to reframe leading questions. He doesn’t even seem to have to think about it, because he responds so quickly. The one today was ‘if he hadn’t been in contact with Blagojevich, how come Blagojevich thought he wouldn’t play ball?’ He said simply that he wouldn’t presume to know how Blagojevich thinks. Great answer! I think he has a great intuition, but I also think he paid attention in Law School. Trial lawyers love to get other people all tangled up with ‘hypotheticals,’ but never respond to them themselves.

Writing this has helped me with my problem – the problem of listening to the din of outrageous accusations that pour out daily from the nasties on the other side of the fence. First, why do I listen? I started listening to learn about how the Bush Administration Talking Points worked – how ‘spin’ got ‘spun.’ And during the campaign, I tried to follow their attack formats just to understand how they had used them so effectively against Gore and Kerry. I don’t need to listen to them any more. Barack Obama lived with that stuff through almost two years of relentless salvos, and he won! He obviously knows how to handle them all by himself. My tracking that stuff was something I did on my own. Solution – stop tracking it. It’s just a bad habit. But secondly, they’re spending their time trying to paint Barack Obama as a crook or a phoney. He’s neither. It’s as simple as that. He’s an honest guy and as long as he stays honest and up front, there’s nothing they can do except make up nasty stuff that will fall flat in the end. Why worry about his being tumbled for improprieties, if you think he’s a ‘proper’ guy? Get over it 1boringoldman. It’s not your problem.