Obama Spent Too Much Time Trying To Reach Out To GOP. A Bloody Stump Was All He Got.

[woo me with science]

68. Not this Third Way bullshit again.

The Social Security cuts are still on the table, where they will remain until the government tires of USING the threat of them to slide through other types of vicious austerity. The PR machine seriously needs new talking points, because this alternate reality in which Americans have not been repeatedly and deliberately gutted under this administration using these threats as a TOOL is growing beyond tiresome.

Every Democrat, every American, should be sick of the constant Third Way claim that these Social Security threats have been just words and didn't harm anyone. They have harmed EVERYONE.

1. Without the threatened axe of Social Security cuts (which kept returning as the austerity kept escalating), the Third Way would never have been able to sell the vicious budget and social program cuts they HAVE inflicted on Americans...by justifying them as the lesser of two evils.

If you had told us a few years ago that the Barack Obama administration would be presiding over government spending that assaults the poor even more viciously than the RYAN plan, we would never have believed it. Yet that is exactly where we found ourselves, surrounded by corporate mouthpieces exhorting us to be grateful, "because he didn't cut Social Security."

No, what he DID was collude with Republicans in the debt ceiling fiasco to orchestrate a situation in which the only possible outcomes were austerity or even more vicious austerity. We sat here and watched the entire obscene process, including lecturing speeches about eating our peas and inexplicable right-wing offers like this coming from a Democratic president....all of which crap we were expected to swallow gratefully, "because at least he didn't cut Social Security."

Look at the OFFERS: Look what passes for Democratic "representation."
Look at where our Democratic president starts with OFFERS.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022060108

Third Way Surreal: President seeks credit for election-year pause in his own hostage-taking.
He's *temporarily* removing, during an election year, the ax *he* suspends over our heads repeatedly as a tool to continue implementing vicious Third Way austerity. ('It will remain on the table." )
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=733502

2. For years, Republicans have drummed lies into the heads of the American people about the source of our economic problems and how to fix them. They have pushed vicious austerity and malignant, economy-starving deficit-cutting instead of the real help to the 99 percent that is needed, and they have preached lies about the need to cut SS and LIES about its contribution to the deficit.

President Obama had from Day One of this Presidency to correct Republican lies linking deficits and Social Security. He had from Day One to correct lies recommending austerity for the "health" of the country. Three hundred economists stood up early in his presidency and warned about these vicious Republican lies. But Obama instead chose to cement for the entire country the vicious Republican narrative that austerity was needed and to repeat the lies tying SS to the deficit. He CEMENTED the lies and and made them a *bipartisan* narrative in a way that we will struggle to correct for a long, long time. These lies damaged our country, and they viciously poisoned the message and identity and reputation of our party. We are two relentlessly lying corporate parties now.

And the fleecing continues. We just got yet another round of food stamp cuts signed by this president, and a farm bill based on pension smoothing. And all the other assaults that have been posted here over and over and over again. And still we are treated to the surreal, Orwellian lectures of the PR machine exhorting us to be grateful that the SS cuts are off the table during this election year, even though the administration itself says they will be back....because this president persists in perpetuating the right-wing lie that they should be connected to the general fund.

Thanks to this administration, we have massive, new longterm war of choice to pay for. What's that gonna cost? Oh, and let's not forget Obama's TRILLION dollar commitment to ramp up our nuclear program! And what's on the horizon economically? Obama's TPP and TISA, which will further gut American jobs and wages and trade away our democratic protections against predatory corporations.

Corporate money floods Washington, and these manipulations by the two corporate parties are what we get as a result. That, and this absurd PR that tries to pretend that what they do to us every single day isn't really happening. Your attempt here to sell all of it with some pathetic reference to gazillion dimensional chess is the obscene Third Way cherry on top.