Hightower: The Trans-Pacific Partnership is not about free trade. It's a corporate coup d'etat

[Maedhros]

84. Maybe it's pathetic, but it is understandable.

I have a close friend who really suffered during the Bush Administration. He says that his faith in America was dashed when Bush was re-elected in 2004 - he just couldn't understand how people didn't see through the guy even given the obvious nature of the Bush Administration's crimes.

With Obama, he has chosen the "eleventh dimensional chess" option of coping with the cognitive dissonant reality of having so much at stake, emotionally, in promoting the Democrats but at the same time watching the Democratic President propose some stunningly Anti-Democratic policies. It's easier to simply trust that the President is much smarter than we are, and all of these things are really secretly brilliant ways of humiliating the Republicans, than to resolve the conflicting narrative.

I don't necessarily find it pathetic, but frustrating. Believing one's self to be essentially powerless, and putting all your bets on an Administration cobbled together from former Bush appointees and Wall Street CEOs, hoping that it will somehow do something progressive in the future.