Obama says disappointment at Copenhagen justified

[The Northerner]

Source: Reuters

"I think that people are justified in being disappointed about the outcome in Copenhagen," he said in an interview with PBS Newshour.

"What I said was essentially that rather than see a complete collapse in Copenhagen, in which nothing at all got done and would have been a huge backward step, at least we kind of held ground and there wasn't too much backsliding from where we were."

Sweden has labeled the accord Obama helped broker a disaster for the environment, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the summit was "at best flawed and at worst chaotic," and climate change advocates have been even more scathing in their criticism.

The talks secured bare-minimum agreements that fell well short of original goals to reduce carbon emissions and stem global warming, after lengthy negotiations failed to paper over differences between rich nations and developing economies. Some singled out China for special blame.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5BM4DO20091223

[HuckleB]

1. This guy is far from perfect.

But when did we last have a president that would admit something like that?

[WriteDown]

2. He's all over the map. I thought it was a "historic achievement."

He needs to keep a journal.

[FrenchieCat]

3. It appears that in today's age, Historic Achievement s

are not long good enough.
A problem must be solved all of the way through,
before any kind of progressive victory can be announced.

Barack Obama knows this...
What he came back with was an historic achievement,
but since he didn't part the waters and lead us all to the promise land
in that one meeting, it was a rated a disaster by the assholes who sit on the sideline,
with plenty to say, cause they ain't doing shit else to do!

[IndianaGreen]

10. Unlike Moses, Obama would have surrendered to Pharaoh

and told us that slavery is freedom.

[yurbud]

11. in a democracy, the assholes on the sidelines are called citizens, and we have a right to be heard

It's a sad indicator of how deep the DLC is in Wall Street's pocket that their consistent response to feedback is sit down, shut up, vote for us then HOPE we take care of you.

[tavalon]

13. That is a sig line just waiting to happen

[yurbud]

19. thanks

[IndianaGreen]

9. The WH uses words like 'Incredible Accomplishment' and 'Unprecedented Achievement'

to describe much ado about nothing.

[yurbud]

17. that's worth a thread of its own. If you have to laugh at your own joke, sell a war, or call an

accomplishment great, the joke is probably lame, the war unnecessary, and the accomplishment questionable.

[katkat]

22. Maybe he meant Mission Accomplished n/t

[MasonJar]

4. Obama is a loser. He likes to get his way and then pretend innocence of any

culpability.

[KoKo]

7. He never stirs a pots or sticks a finger in to do a taste...he's absent...

while it implodes and boils over the stove...he then says...it was an "Important Thing We Did" and "We Need to Move Forward." Over and Over. It is what it is...

[BP2]

5. The only "historic achievement" is how

a president who was given so much by the American people squandered it in record time.

Hopefully after a well-deserved Yule break, he'll come back with a clear head, canx the HCR bill and have Congress start over and do it the right way!

[blackbear79]

8. That would be a great Christmas present

[KoKo]

6. OMG....He actually is Disappointed? Rahm jerked his arm and twisted it...

Ayyyy....

[Goldstein1984]

12. Anybody following events outside of the mainstream media

knows that Copenhagen was not only a disaster from an environmental perspective, the treatment of citizens during COP15 shows the emergence of a police state that, when considered in light of events in Tegucigalpa during the coup (which the U.S. tacitly supported) and the G20 Summit in Philadelphia, takes on an international aspect that should concern every peasant on the planet.

Until someone in a uniform we've never seen before tells us otherwise, we are citizens, and our elected representatives will listen to our views or deal with the consequences. Our elected officials exist for only one purpose, to serve the interests of We the People. None of us should stand aside and trust them implicitly, nor should we believe what we're being told if we see something different happening.

[Ghost Dog]

14. "Copenhagen was much worse than just another bad deal,

... because it illustrated a profound shift in global geopolitics. This is fast becoming China's century, yet its leadership has displayed that multilateral environmental governance is not only not a priority, but is viewed as a hindrance to the new superpower's freedom of action".

--> http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/22/copenhagen-climate-change-mark-lynas

I see the Chinese as an essentially coal-fired, electricity-based, fast-developing techno-economy with a relatively free (but police-controlled) complex socially-motile post-socialist market structure in the Chinese street tempered or balanced or oppressed, depending on your point of view, by a cold, intellectual, ruthlessly hierarchical self-sustaining bureaucratic autocracy in government.

It is a kind of society that can evolve very rapidly. And yet, that kind of autocratic bureaucracy has always been at the heart of Chinese society throughout millennia.

[truthisfreedom]

15. It's going to come down to a technological solution. We'll have to engineer the planet.

We won't have any choice.

[breadandwine]

16. I always had reservations about putting healthcare ahead of global warming.

As bad as our healthcare system is, it's still better than healthcare in many other countries (though not ones with national healthcare). What good is it if we get better healthcare but all die anyway from global warming?

I think Obama should have made global warming a huge issue first and left healthcare for second. Now we see that a climate disaster of meta-historical proportions is in the works while he's futzing around with a "historic" handout to insurance companies that has somehow not made history.

This is the exact problem President Clinton had. When he ran for president he attacked George H.W. Bush's reference to the "vision thing" as if it were some afterthought to his Republican candidacy. So we all thought President Clinton would indeed give us a REAL vision. But then when he became president the first thing he did was commission pollster Stanley Greenberg to find out what would appeal to the American people and a national healthcare plan scored high on the poll. So national healthcare became it. Not: What does our crisis-riddled planet need. No. What pops up in a poll. This was Clinton's only "vision" - poll driven.

Obama is doing the same thing. You don't decide a vision based on a poll. You decide it by looking at crisis and dealing with it. When FDR tackled the depression he didn't start out by taking a poll to find out if people wanted to do something about it.

Same with global warming. Our planet has already gone off a cliff, the car is already floating down and too late to put on the brakes or turn back and we're just waiting for the crash, just waiting to hit bottom. We've already passed the "tipping points," it's an ecological chain reaction, like trying to stop an atomic explosion after the bomb has already gone off. This requires drastic emergency measures but instead Obama makes pleasant, poll-driven speeches not to the conscience of the nation and world, not with passion, not with pounding the podium like a leader. Rather he shifts left and right speaking blandly to his two teleprompters, a sound byte to this teleprompter on the left, then a sound byte to that teleprompter on the right. And it's all blandville, somnambulistic non-leadership, designed to anesthetize the public. Martin Luther King decried what he called "the tranquilizing drug of gradualism." But that's all I see in Obama amidst the greatest crisis the planet has faced in human history. I remember when JFK spoke, "Ask not what your country can do for you..." He and FDR and Churchill constantly made great speeches with lines so memorable we still quote them today.

But not Obama. When was the last time he said something people spent days quoting as some great speech? He's not a leader. He's an appeaser at heart. He has a spine made out of Jello. There's no fire in his belly. He thinks he can solve everything with comity and not fighting. HE'S NOT A FIGHTER.

Somebody tell me: Why put healthcare ahead of global warming? In fact, why put healthcare ahead of fixing the economy which was also a crisis we hit? If you really want to spend your way out of a recession, do it by spending money to convert to a carbon free economy. THAT would have gotten us out of the recession ten times better than giving freebies to insurance companies on the backs of struggling Americans FORCED to buy insurance when times are tough. And from what I'm reading there are still lots of troubles in the economy and it's far from over. At the outset we could have been spending our way out of the weak economy by giving people special assistance to put solar panels on their roofs and out their windows that would cut their electric bills and so on, putting real money into people's pockets instead of PICKING their pockets for insurance companies just to be able to say we did healthcare.

To hell with the F*ckin polls. The planet is in dire peril. We just wasted a year futzing around helping insurance companies.

[Posteritatis]

18. I imagine the fight against any sane response to global warming would be at least as savage

Possibly moreso, seeing how the healthcare opponents are basically reliving the Cold War while global warming issues add all the wonderful layers of anti-intellectualism and religious fervor to the mix. I'm skeptical of the US' ability to pull off any useful health care reform anytime in the next generation, but I despair entirely of its ability to do the same with environmental policy.

[breadandwine]

20. Okay, so we have a president who doesn't understand the need to fight.

On healthcare OR global warming. That said, President Obama came into office with a certain amount of political capital and tailwind and he squandered it on an issue that is important but not one as important as saving the whole planet. I think that was a mistake. He made healthcare his big issue. One of the things I was hoping for was that this would be a new kind of president, not a rerun of the Clinton presidency, which I think is not adequate. And now that all this money is going to be spent on healthcare and other things, where is the money going to come from to fight global warming? Not all of the fight on global warming depends on spending but some of it does. I think Obama blew his wad on the wrong issue.

[crikkett]

21. this may be off-topic but what is a "climate change advocate"?

Someone who advocates for climate change? Like, a global warming cheerleader?

An environmentalist?

It's just a bizarre label.

[crikkett]

23. I'm finally sick of the hysterics. Does anyone know of a

Democratic Underground that is even a little bit more rational than a 6th grade playground, or Free Republic?

[crikkett]

24. aha! on the Greatest I find a post about how GOP types are infiltrating

progressive boards with sock puppets.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=433&topic_id=95202&mesg_id=95202

[breadandwine]

25. What exactly is your point, crikkett, people should stop criticizing Obama for his weak efforts

on global warming and healthcare?

Where is the kind of Kennedyesque fight, the fire in the belly, the pounding the podium, the dedication to more than lip service on these issues? The healthcare bill is basically just a freebie to insurance companies on the backs of struggling Americans. The President's global warming efforts are very tepid and he's distracted by things less important and poll-driven. The planet is going off a cliff. His lukewarm speech in Copenhagen didn't cut it. It was a dud, as is his whole global warming effort.

We've had some truly great Democratic presidents. Obama could be one too if only he followed in their footsteps. We've had presidents who were great leaders who when they spoke people quoted them for days on end. "Ask not what your country can do for you..." etc. When was the last time our great Democratic President Obama said something you couldn't stop quoting? When was the last time he really moved the nation instead of just responding to critics, polls and GOP and "moderate" spitball throwers? We have a great crisis and we need greatness in the White House. I'm still waiting for that.

It's simple. We're Democrats. We have a right to expect better.