It’s easy to look at what’s happening in Washington DC and despair. That’s why I carry a little plastic Obama doll in my purse. I pull him out every now and then to remind myself that the United States had a progressive, African American president until very recently. Some people find this strange, but you have to take comfort where you can find it in Donald Trump’s America.Well, I suppose it could always be worse. In clinging to a true-to-life tiny plastic Obama, at least she isn't the type of deplorable magical thinker who carries around a soft cuddly cloth Obama and a box of hat pins. Better a plastic talisman who oversaw the loss of a thousand Democratic seats in his eight years in power than no plastic talisman at all.
And at least Jill's plastic Obama doesn't have one of those pull-strings activating all the mealy-mouthed hippie-punching soundbites we miss so much. Such mechanisms in dolls have been rightly criticized for the damage they do to the creative imaginations of the children who play with them. It's so much more fun for kids to put words into their dolls' mouths and transfer all their own hopes, dreams, love and humanity to a cold inanimate object. It's certainly a mature step up from clinging to a moldy old security blanket.
As an antidote to the tons and tons of plastic goo that will never degrade in a million years in America's toxic landfills, here's the indispensable Jimmy Dore caustically deconstructing the life-size Obama's icy lecture to the poor, elderly and disabled people of Chicago. The bankers are definitely still pulling all of Plastic Barry's strings.
Ye shall know them by their fruits. Slapping a 'progressive' fig leaf onto 44 and trumpeting about his African descent is shallow and boring. Commentator Anna's list of President Obama's betrayal of anything resembling 'progressive' (or humane) in a previous thread puts the thorns and thistles on full display. His allegiance is bare to anyone who cares to see.
ReplyDeleteThe DNC's affiliation with the full-blown-fascism crowd demonstrated in the previous post is also becoming unavoidably obvious. No surprise that a NYT/Guardian propagandist is towing the Company line. The mere fact that They continue to convulse in such unison against 45 leads me to believe that there may be a sliver of a chance the Trump presidency has not yet been entirely captured by these assholes (something that apparently happened to 44, even long before he was inaugurated).
Though, it could all be kabuki for the rubes.
I don't care if it rains or freezes,
ReplyDeleteLong as I've got my plastic... Obama.
Obama wasn't captured by anyone, he worked very hard to sell himself to the asshole club (just as both of the Clintons did). And I guess I'm still finding it hard to accept that anyone can manage to believe that Obama was ever a "progressive".
Jimmy Dore is a national treasure.
ReplyDeleteJill was a big Hillary fan, so I wonder what her Hillary doll is made of. Dollar bills? Glass shards? Wood? Oh, I know. She's a Matryoshka, a Russian nesting doll. One Hillary is inside another and inside yet another and they're all dressed in various colored Mao suits. No one knows which one is the real Hillary and neither does she.
It's a good thing I wasn't in the audience for Obama's remote appearance on video - what an insult! When he deflected from answering the CBA question by grousing about "the minute you start... the next thing I know, I've to 20 organizations coming out of the woodwork". WTF? I'd have yelled out "You didn't mind 20 organizations coming out of the woodwork to help you get elected, you fucking half-White half-wit hypocrite!"
He also deflects from addressing gentrification fear after managing to choke out the concession 'rightly so'. Typical Obama. Then his voice sounds like he's strugglng to suppress his own laughter as he proceeds with a half-ass story about himself with a lot of prolonged ums and ahs and struggle with calculating how many years he spent in Chicago which by design pushes the question further out in the universe. His word salad then finishes with a reminder to the folks that he had to go to D.C. to be President and they should be honored that he brought the spotlight to himself and their crappy city which he's only trying to spruce up because it was such a mess when he was a community organizer.
In other words, "Now shut up and be grateful, you bunch of sanctimonious purists. Don't make the perfect be the enemy of the good". He'd have said it if he hadn't already used those lines to attack supporters of the health care public option.
The only thing I will ever thank Obama for is being the final straw that fully opened my eyes to the real state of affairs in America. I grew to despise the Clintons after initially supporting them, but had thought that 8 grueling years of Bush's war crimes and disastrous economic policies would finally cause America to reverse the relentless downward trajectory we'd been on since 9/11 and really going all the way back to 1981. It was therefore illuminating to not only watch Obama completely sell out the progressives, but how willing most of them were to have the wool pulled over their eyes. The only problem is how politically isolated I feel these days.
ReplyDeleteThanks indeed, Obama.
... aaaand Trump just replaced Tillerson at Sec. State w/ CIA chief Pompeo, and the new head spook is bathed in post-9/11 torture blood. There goes that theory.
ReplyDeleteWatch how fast The Resistance confirms both appointees.