Motley Moose – Archive

As I write, I am sitting in Fiumincino Airport in Rome waiting for my flight back to New York, but I do not want to get on that plane. I do not want to accept the reason I am going home. You’ll excuse me if this diary sounds rather incoherent.

Yesterday morning I was awaken to news that shattered my otherwise quiet life. My little brother, with whom I tirelessly worked with on last year’s campaign in Virginia and North Carolina, with whom I celebrated last year’s election victories, and with whom I have always had a close relationship that began when, at age 5, my mother sat me on the couch and placed him, as a newborn, in my arms, collapsed and died on the front stoop of the Queens home we grew up in. My father, the only person in the family who can manage a word, tells me he died at age 25 of a severe asthma attack he suffered after running home from a friend’s house. He had always had a bad asthma problem.

No wonder we never win a battle…too many of us are too afraid of losing to ever actually fight.

in recent days, the feeling over on the other blogs, DailyKos for example, is one of whine, defeat, hopelessness…comments like “I’m out of hope” or “there will be no public option, we’ve lost” or “Our majority is gone in 2010 now”

And what pisses me off most is that this type of attitude just plays into the horrible stereotype of the yellow-bellied weak-kneed cowardly liberal (excuse the world) pussy.  

I’m home in New York for a few weeks…the good old melting pot. I grew up in Southwest Queens, a fabulous mixture of cultures and ethnicities…and a plurality of white Italian/Irish Catholics who didn’t flee to Long Island in the 1980’s despite their obvious xenophobia.

My block is still mainly of the latter kind…my family absolutely screams xenophobia. Those “there are no white people here” and “We speak English in this country” types.

So needless to say, an uproar occured when a group of Latinos moved in across the street last fall.  

I’m beginning to see that being in power is not something we liberals on the blogsphere are used to.

At the first sign of Obama’s approval rating dropping below 60%…panic ensues.

I can only name one President in history who has gone through an entire term with positive approval ratings; Eisenhower, and even he dipped lower than Obama at some point…Obama will be unpopular at some point during this presidency…can we deal with that? Or are we going to panic and delcare the end imminent.

This is a call for whatever rational people are left on the internet…we need to get involved in the healthcare debate.

The blogsphere isn’t helping the cause, with OpenLeft and DailyKos throwing in the towel with comments like “It’s obvious Obama is the enemy” and “is six months a record for a presidency to become a lame duck?”, and MyDD become infested with the worst of the PUMA, like sharks smelling blood in the water.

Tom Harkin has hinted he will be open to a healthcare co-op instead of a public option…this may doom the public option. Tom Daschle says the public option might have to be dropped

A recent Gallup polls shows an uptick among conservatives to the higest rate in five years…but also has the highest percentage of people calling themselves “liberal” than ever before.

The poll might also provide a hint as to why the Democratic majority

http://www.gallup.com/poll/120… vatives-Single-Largest-Ideological-Group .aspx

Perhaps the dominant reason why I am, or lean in the direction of, a liberal, is because of my rejection of religion as a political force. I was born and raised in a conservative Roman Catholic family, but I was also raised to respect the seperation between church and state. I found myself becoming a vocal critic of fascism and theocracy.

So it’s rather ironic that I found my home in Rome of all places

WTF?

WASHINGTON — Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to closing the detention center for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and moving some of the detainees to prisons on U.S. soil, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds.

By more than 2-1, those surveyed say Guantanamo shouldn’t be closed. By more than 3-1, they oppose moving some of the accused terrorists housed there to prisons in their own states.

The findings underscore the difficult task President Obama faces in convincing those at home that he should follow through on his campaign promise to close the prison in Cuba, especially in the absence of a plan of where the prisoners would go.

It is one of the few subjects on which most Americans side with the views of the Bush administration over its successor.

I was just stunned by this and thought I had to point this out, because I don’t think if this guy is a troll or what, but I had an exchange with someone at MyDD who claims to be gay and “a proud Centrist Democrat” (whatever that means) who supported Proposition 8.

Here’s some of what he said;  

We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama’s inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through.

From healthcare to torture to the economy to war, Obama has reneged on pledges real and implied. So timid and so owned is he that he trembles in fear of offending, of all things, the government of Turkey. Obama has officially reneged on his campaign promise to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. When a president doesn’t have the ‘nads to annoy the Turks, why does he bother to show up for work in the morning?

Obama is useless. Worse than that, he’s dangerous. Which is why, if he has any patriotism left after the thousands of meetings he has sat through with corporate contributors, blood-sucking lobbyists and corrupt politicians, he ought to step down now–before he drags us further into the abyss.

Coutesy Thadguy