Tue Sep 08, 2009 at 02:00:13 PM PDT
President Obama will be going before Congress Wednesday to make a speech. I hope what he has to say will piss a lot of people off.
Of course, he doesn't have to say anything in order to piss a lot of people off - the fact that he still draws breath is, evidently, enough to do that.
Which in some ways puts him in a very enviable position.
Nothing the president says about health care reform on Wednesday can make his position any worse among those who already hate him.
So he might as well say the right things.
occams hatchet's diary :: :: On October 31, 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt gave a speech at New York's Madison Square Garden. The general election was less than a week away. Roosevelt was wrapping up his re-election campaign at the end of his first term, a term in which he had enraged certain moneyed interests - enraged them to the point that they actually plotted a coup against him.
But Roosevelt knew that the people of the United States were behind him. And the speech he gave that night in New York reflected his certainty:
We have not come this far without a struggle and I assure you we cannot go further without a struggle.
For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away . . . Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent . . .
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.
Reading through the entirety of Roosevelt's speech, the parallels with today's situation are striking. The speech could, almost literally, have been made yesterday:
Those who used to have
are not happy. Some of them are desperate. Only desperate men with their backs to the wall would descend so far below the level of decent citizenship as to foster the current . . . campaign against America's working people.
Here is an amazing paradox! The very employers and politicians and publishers who talk most loudly of class antagonism and the destruction of the American system now undermine that system by this attempt to coerce . . . It is the version of the old threat to close down the factory or the office if a particular candidate does not win. It is an old strategy of tyrants to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them.
All of the same big-moneyed interests that had wanted Roosevelt overthrown early in his first term were still arrayed against him during the 1936 campaign, but Roosevelt realized something very fundamental about the American political process, something that is true to this day, regardless of how much money pollutes that political process: corporations don't vote.
Three days after making his Madison Square Garden speech in which he excoriated big corporate interests, Roosevelt won the most lopsided presidential election victory in American history.
Tomorrow, President Obama will address a joint session of Congress. His speech will come after months of a huge Republican celebration the likes of which have not been seen for at least 50 years: the Celebration of Ignorance.
Ever since the president's election, rightwingers have been desperate to have us believe that America has become what they want to call a "post-racial society" - in other words, a society where, by definition, their oozing racism cannot possibly exist. They seek to perform the same feat of semantic legerdemain with "racism" that the BushCheney legal brain trust attempted with "torture"; i.e., to magically define it out of existence. Alas, as events over the past 12 months have amply demonstrated to the rest of America and the world, these Racism Deniers have merely confirmed their own membership in a tiny, inbred, post-rational society, a society composed largely - and amazingly! - of racists.
The people who have been peddling this particular brand of ignorance have somehow convinced themselves - no, no: they desperately need to believe - that the vast majority of the American electorate is stupid enough to buy their racist, fearful, selfish bullshit. As it has turned out, a sufficient number of scared, ill-informed people - abetted by corporate media which short-sightedly believe their own interests will be served by such abetting - have taken the bait to earn their slot every night on the local news, right after the car chase on the Ronald Reagan Freeway and just before Octomom.
The healthcare debate is about empathy and compassion and promoting the general welfare. People who are fearful and selfish don't want other people to receive health care - especially if they look different. They are afraid of losing what they have - "KEEP THE GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY MEDICARE!!" - and they especially don't want to lose it to brown-skinned illegal socialist fascist Moozlums.
Continued>>>
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/9/8/777444/--.-.-.-and-I-WELCOME-their-hatred
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