I will never, ever fucking ever understand supporting everything a president says and does.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

85. Thank you for saying this, cali

Didn't Obama himself say "Make me do it"?

And yet we're just supposed to roll over and accept it when he sells us out to the 1%?

I reserve the right to be pissed off, not because Romney would have been better but because Obama could have been so much better. I feel as if many of us voters (not me, I never quite trusted Obama) were subjected to a bait-and-switch. We wanted and needed a Robert Kennedy with Ronald Reagan's knack for PR (and to those who never paid attention to any real firebrand populists, Obama looked like the real deal), but we got a Tony Blair, in the sense that he bought into the whole conservative lie that the Democrats were "too liberal."

The problem is not really Obama himself. It's the whole power structure of the Democratic Party. They don't want anyone who upsets Big Money too much. They'll talk a good game at election time, but once they get into office, it's business as usual: let the banksters keep their obscene bonuses "because contracts are sacred" but let the auto companies break the contracts they made with their workers, who are just ordinary people without pinstripe suits and wing tips, after all. Take a hell of a long time to withdraw combat troops from Iraq (and still maintain a presence there) and keep finding new excuses to stay in Afghanistan and dropping hints that it would be a good idea to intervene in Syria.

Talk about health care for all and then force the Republicans' original corporate-welfare-for-insurance-companies proposal on America without even a public option, in an effort to appease the Republicans, who weren't going to vote for it anyway. You know what would have been easier for the public to understand, helpful to a lot of people, and hard for the Republicans to oppose? Gradually lowering the age of eligibility for Medicare. If they had started by lowering it five years every year, it would be at age 45 by now. But no, Obama had to appease not only the Republicans (who were going to fight anything he did anyway) but a small group (a SMALL group) of people in his own party.

If you agree with a policy just because Obama advocates it, even if you hated that same policy when Bush proposed it, you are not acting like the intelligent, rational human being that Democrats like to see themselves as. You're acting like the mirror image of the Republicans. Really. We scoff at Republicans who hate the ACA, even though it was proposed by the Heritage Foundation and first implemented on a statewide scale by their own golden boy Mitt Romney. But aren't some Democrats doing the same thing when they try to explain away the times that Obama has chosen to continue some of Bush's worst policies (e.g. renewal of the Patriot Act; he could have refused to sign it)?