Place Your Midterm Election Bets.

I'm one of those filthy liberals who has been dissatisfied with our President for half a decade. But as I've stepped back and looked at why, I realize I'm engaging in fallacy. While it is certainly true that Obama has not be a particularly competent legislator (though the PotUS isn't technically a legislator, anyhow), his very existence has been the crux of Republican political campaigning. It's not that he's done anything especially bad (except ACA which is such a glorious clusterfuck that I'm 100% certain the Republicans actually hoped it would pass -- more on that shortly), but nor has he been able to accomplish much good.

That's also being somewhat unfair. A President can't magic a solution to the jobs problem that the Republican party systematically created over the past 20 years, regardless of whether that President is D or R, yet somehow people blame Obama for poor job recovery. And a lot of the little victories he has had have been brushed under the rug since it doesn't make for interesting headlines to see DOMA slowly dismantled.

But the big thing is that Republicans said, "We're going to obstinately stop anything from happening until we get this guy out of office." It's been a 6 year filibuster. Even when the Democrats had control of Congress, Obama's naive attempts to play nice resulted in very little happening as he pandered to people who were instructed by very savvy political scientists to be mules (in virtually every sense of the word). It's not a new tactic, but this Presidency seems to have experienced the worst instance of it.

But most people appear to be blind to it, myself included. It's easier with a single blame figure and the monolith that is the US President works so much better than pointing at some unknown spin doctor in RNC HQ. I talk to people who lean conservative and what I've noticed is that, in addition to having delusions that their party actually serves their needs (a delusion they share with their liberal neighbors), they think that all the world's ills can be laid at the feet of Democrats. This is verifiably and objectively false, but with the current spin control ensuring that nothing happens (Mitch McConnell even agrees this is what's been happening) while a Democrat is in the White House, it's not too hard to twist people's perceptions. Republican strategy has been to focus on things that are irrelevant, unsolvable, or diametrically opposed to the opposition in order to, what, relive the glory days when we saw habeas corpus illegally suspended and the financial industry was free to *** over the entire planet in a way that makes Bernie Madoff seem small potatoes?

Anyways, I'm being needlessly verbose as usual. My question is why anyone trusts the Republican party when they've unapologetically been doing nothing useful for anyone over the past 6 years? This has gone above and beyond the usual "To hell with the voters" attitude of modern politicians of all parties. How many financial crises have been deliberately orchestrated by the RNC? And yet people still want to blame the economy on our top military commander and chief representative to foreign powers?

I'd love to jump on the liberal bandwagon with everyone screaming that the world's going to burn. And it probably will, given how unrepentantly evil the RNC has become (note: evil is when you treat people as things, and in this case, as things to be fleeced and tossed aside). Is there anyone seriously willing to argue that every person shouldn't have unrestricted access to healthcare?

Actually, on this site, I guarantee there is, since the kooks here are happy to suggest that we murder the poor so long as they aren't forced to use those precise words. You know where some of the biggest welfare cheats are? Living in poverty in red counties across the nation, voting Republican while they cook meth and cheat on their taxes. Just sayin', if you wanna watch the welfare cheats die, you alleged red-state country boys are going lose family, friends, and neighbors.

But, yeah, ACA was such a colossal failure and I've had people continuously claim that Republicans had no part in it. You know, except for demanding all the worst parts be included and having written most of the basic structure themselves 20 years ago. It's the perfect false flag: appear to oppose something that you've helped design to explode on impact and reap the benefits of brainless public backlash.

I really don't see this playing out as well as the Republicans hope it will, though. They need to manufacture another catastrophic attack on US soil to get the kind of unlimited power they're dreaming about and I'm not the sort of person to suggest they'll try that. Not yet, anyways. Political discourse is getting bad enough that I won't be surprised if we have political terrorism in our own country about 20 years from now.