Right-wing obstruction could have been fought: An ineffective and gutless presidency’s legacy

[woo me with science]

277. Yeah, that seems to be the new talking point. I've seen it several times since yesterday.

Attempting to normalize predatory policies, including the continuation of the vast majority of Bush polices under a Democratic President, as an unavoidable part of living in a capitalist society. I wish I'd bookmarked at least one other time I saw it....The wording was almost exactly the same. What utter garbage. And what utter nonsense to pretend that Obama was up front during his campaigns about these policies and exactly how corporate and predatory toward the 99 percent he would be.

Candidate Obama debates President Obama on NSA spying:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=5047981

I guess when you reach a point where you can no longer deny the predatory agenda itself, all you have left to do is try to normalize it. And that includes trying very hard to hope people will believe that Obama would have been Democrats' primary choice if he had been honest and up front about his plans to push for the TPP and the TISA, to enact even more vicious austerity than Paul Ryan initially hoped for, to pursue expanded drilling and fracking, and to use our "Justice" Department to actively defend mass spying on Americans.

And you are certainly misrepresenting how the Democrats ran on Social Security. In 2012 they arrogantly and publicly refused to disclose their plans on it DURING AN ELECTION campaign. I remember, because I wrote an outraged OP about that: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021483594 . Then Biden came out and promised the people point blank that Social Security would not be cut. They certainly did *not* run on promises to use it as a bargaining chip.

Yesterday I posted for one of your colleagues a list of links of this administration's outrageous contempt for Americans re: the NSA spying. The links documented the administration's active concealment of important information about their spying from the people being spied upon, attempts to defend outright LYING to Americans and to the courts about what they collect, and the outrageous abuse of spying information to arrest and imprison Americans using false evidence trails. I got pretty much the same response you just gave me, trying to normalize the outrages and suggest that anyone who complains just doesn't understand how things work in this country.

Here's the upshot, Josh. Vague blather about "political realities" is not an adequate response. We have established that the betrayals are not due to Republican obstructionism but rather are coming aggressively and proactively from the administration itself. There is no Republican overruling him and forcing him to work aggressively to pass the job-gutting, wage-gutting, national regulation-gutting TPP, or to further deregulate business with the TISA, or to defend spying on Americans. To claim that he ran advertising this sea of predation is, to put it bluntly, more than absurd.

And to suggest further that his record is *redeemed* for all this predatory behavior, simply because we should have expected it (?!) is the cherry on top of this insulting argument you are making.

I call it, 'Third Way blase," the attempt to normalize the unconscionable. And I suppose it's all that left when the abusive policies can't be denied anymore.