Theaters of War at the White House

As a group protesting military spending put on a puppet show on the White House steps today to show how money spent on war could be better used to create jobs, fight poverty and fund education, some living breathing puppets were inside the People's House* to put on a show of support for military families.  

A Military-Industrial Complex policy group creepily called the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) is funding Michelle Obama's signature initiative, called "Joining Forces." And joining her today to head the team was fired and formerly disgraced Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal, now embarking on a political version of the Celebrity Rehab Tour in an unpaid (directly) gig to ostensibly lend support to our abused and overused troops.  However, according to an article by Nathan Hodge in The Nation last month called "Coalition of the Shilling", the core purpose of CNAS is anything but altruistic. Founded in 2007 by a group of centrist Democrats, defense contractors and retired military brass, its sole purpose is to keep the wars going and the profits flowing to the MIC.  One of its  trustees is the former CEO of Lockheed Martin, which profits mightily from its military hardware and fighter jet sales - both domestically and to foreign armies.

Hodge writes, "Two former Clinton administration officials, Michèle Flournoy and Kurt Campbell, founded CNAS in 2007 as a way for centrist Democrats to reclaim a place in the national security debate ahead of the 2008 presidential race. It was an expert triangulation: Flournoy, Campbell and their associates staked out a hawkish (or, as they would term it, a “pragmatic and principled”) position on Iraq, opposing early deadlines for withdrawal. After Obama’s election, CNAS would emerge as a key feeder for the new administration’s national security team. No fewer than fourteen CNAS grads would land slots in the Defense and State departments. Flournoy now occupies the number-three post at the Pentagon, and Campbell is the head of the State Department’s Asia bureau.

"How exactly did Flournoy and Campbell conjure up a think tank out of thin air? In addition to support from foundations like the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Ploughshares Foundation, CNAS received heavy backing from the military industry. Its list of donors includes major weapons manufacturers like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon and BAE Systems. It also receives contributions from private security firms like Aegis Defence Services, as well as from KBR, the logistics support contractor notorious for overbilling the Pentagon for its services in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it generates income from research contracts with the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, as do others like the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments."

As military families are struggling to get by on their relatively meager paychecks, defense contractors are getting obscenely rich on weapons systems and military hardware.  And as the troops struggle through tour after exhausting tour in Iraq and Afghanistan, with no end in sight, the White House is utilizing the warm and smiling Michelle Obama as the face of a ramped-up PR campaign of showing the troops our love (and also to make us feel kind of bad for bitching about our own petty problems?) Keep drumming it in: they are sacrificing and getting killed to keep "us" all safe.  Would that it were true and they were not just being used as warm expendable flesh to enrich a few wealthy corporations and defense contractors.

(A sidenote - one of the original alleged participants in the White House project to improve the health of the troops was a former Gitmo psychologist who oversaw the "enhanced interrogations" of prisoners. He was disinvited by the First Lady's staff after Glenn Greenwald wrote an expose on his self-proclaimed participation).

Meanwhile, the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive activist think tank in Washington DC, was one of the sponsors for today's lunchtime event on the White House steps to mark the first Global Day of  Action on Military Spending. (GDAMS - love the acronym).  This protest, along with hundreds of other demonstrations nationwide and worldwide, comes  one day after the release of the 2010 figures for global military expenditures by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In 2009, the world spent more than $1.5 trillion on the military. Even in the middle of a global economic crisis, military spending has increased, with the United States responsible for nearly half of all such expenditures, worldwide. As IPS director John Feffer explains, what the American defense industry doesn't make for our own wars it gladly sells overseas -- to our allies and enemies alike.  A dollar is a dollar, despite what any treaties might stipulate.

 
The noontime White House protest  featured poetry, puppets, and graphic  representations of military spending. Representatives of national and local peace and human needs organizations presented "flash facts" to demonstrate how the money spent on defense could be used for other things, such as education, jobs and anti-poverty programs.

We don't know if Barack and Michelle Obama,or Joe and Jill Biden,or Stanley McChrystal,or the CNAS crowd looked out the window at the protesters in a break from their own military love-in, lunch and photo ops, or had any thoughts or comments on the bloated defense budget.  Nothing was said about our brave men and women in uniform coming home, permanently. We do know that the President smiled a lot and Michelle hugged everybody. And Michelle made the big announcement that military family members who work at Walmart will get transferred to another Walmart store if their spouses are transferred. Yippee. Way to go, Walmart!  Hire American and support our troops, but sell Chinese!  And Goodwill promised to hire military families to help sell used clothing to other poor people!  And the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will hold military family job fairs.  Fairs, mind you -- no jobs quite yet, all that trickle-down from their record profits and tax breaks hasn't quite reached down that far.  But it'll be fun, and maybe now Obama won't pick on them and their anonymous political donations so much.

We also don't know if Mary Tillman, who tried and failed to have McChrystal held accountable for the cover-up of her son Pat's death by friendly fire, had any reaction to his big White House comeback as a caring father figure of the troops. She was not included on today's guest list.  Nor was Anti-War Mom in Chief Cindy Sheehan -- who should maybe think about setting up a new campsite on the White House lawn as a refreshing change from Bush's ranch.

There is now every sign that all those supposedly noncombat troops in Iraq will be on permanent assignment. And especially now that the U.S. is being kicked out of Pakistan after the CIA murder scandal and the collaterally damaging drone attacks, Afghanistan is not only the longest war in U.S. History, it's aiming to be one of the longest in world history, too.  There is money to be made, weapons to be manufactured to boost the economy Military Industrial Complex, political offices to win, billions of dollars worth of minerals in those mountains, poppy fields to keep populations anesthetized and cartels in the black, private security firms to profiteer.

Les Screwed-Up Priorities

 Is it any coincidence that the 2012 Democratic National Convention is being held a stone's throw from Fort Bragg, North Carolina?  This is one war-loving Administration with one hell of an ironic Nobel Peace Prize winner.

* Update/Correction 4/13 -- Since writing this post, I learned that the "Joining Forces" Obama event was actually held in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, not the White House as originally announced. I apologize for the error -- and will add that it now seems obvious the officials could not and did not see the demonstrations.

Update II 4/14:  Mary Tillman has told Jake Tapper of ABC that she is outraged at McChrystal's appointment, and she thinks it makes Obama look "silly."

"I’ve come to learn through this journey that there are many other families that have been lied to by the military about their sons and daughters and so we feel that what happen to Pat is pertains to other people, not just us. I think it’s a slap in the face to all soldiers to appoint this man, to be on this committee," she said.

 Amir Bar-Lev, the director of the critically-acclaimed documentary "The Tillman Story" was nothing if not blunt: “Putting Stanley McChrystal in charge of a commission on military families is a little like putting Bernie Madoff in charge of a commission on pensions," he told Tapper.

Obama Deconstructed

The following post was written by Kate Madison of Depoe Bay, Oregon, in response to Paul Krugman's column today questioning the whereabouts of President Obama.   

..."What have they done with President Obama? What happened to the inspirational figure his supporters thought they elected? Who is this bland, timid guy who doesn’t seem to stand for anything in particular? "

You have not really asked for a psychological "autopsy," but that is what I am inclined to give--rather than a "they did it" answer.

First of all, Barack Obama never knew his father--met him twice in his life. He was raised and influenced mainly by strong women, his mother and grandmother. Grandfather was a nice guy, seemed to finish last and had a hard time keeping a job-- not an inspiring male role model, to be sure. His mother was an effective mediator and organizer;  her life's mission was to bring understanding and economic power to 3rd world women. One can see how the torch was passed to his sister, Maya, who is doing the same kind of work in Hawaii.  Read her profile in last week's Nation magazine to see that the "apple does not fall far from the tree."

About Barack Obama--a more difficult situation, obviously. He was encouraged and educated in the best schools mother and grandparents could afford--and was so smart he got full scholarships. Still......there is the ghost of his father--a brilliant, aggressive, ambitious, but irresponsible drunk, who later died in a (probably alcohol related) car accident.

Barack, the son, has both his father, mother and grandmother in him--incompatible,  impossible ghosts, one might say. He is ambitious and a brilliant orator, but also (first and foremost), like his influential mother, comfortable only in his role as a mediator.  So....that is who we have for a President. A basically good man,  but so inclined to mediate and reconcile that he does not possess other options about how to function.  Yet he has tremendous ambition. You might say it is in his genes. Would that the world operated in a saner way.  We know it does not. I believe that is why Obama has hired such aggressive, psychopathic operatives to keep the path open. He cannot do it himself, but does not hesitate to find those who can do it for him.

Kate is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who had a private practice in  Washington, D.C., Virginia and Maryland from 1973 to 2004. She studied Family Systems theory with Murray Bowen at Georgetown University, and became interested in the inter-generational transmission process of emotional issues in families.  Though Kate is officially retired from full-time practice and currently living on the Oregon Coast, she remains active in the field, and is presently supervising therapists in the D.C. area in family systems thinking and application. She frequently contributes to the comments boards of op-ed pieces in The New York Times.

Serious Scalpels and Mendacious Machetes



I'll Give It to the Republicans.... 200% of What They Want!



I knew there was a reason my email from the President announcing his re-election campaign got jammed next to a Proactiv ad in my spam folder last Monday.  It's because he is going to be proactive for a change, and give a speech on the deficit in just three more days!  We don't know the details yet, but his point-man, David Plouffe was all over the TV jabberfests this morning to tout it.


I just looked over a written transcript of Plouffe on "Meet the Press" and was able to formulate a rough idea as to the predictable uplifting vagueness (inspiroratory) we can expect. Plouffe used the words "moving/going forward" a total of nine times, and "come together" for a grand tally of seven -- in just the first few minutes.  Therefore, we can rest assured that the Obama speech will contain lots of winning the future and bipartisan bullshit.  We'll hear more sermonizing on shared sacrifice, historic cuts, visiting our national monuments and national parks, marriage counseling tips to stop all the bickering, lots of ideas on lots of tables, as well as a bit of David Brooksian S&M drivel on the joys of pain and belt-tightening.  And it will not be complete without some philosophical hovering above the fray, with Obama talking about Democrats and Republicans as if he were not partisan himself.  Actually, he is, but it's Republican-lite, and that is not an official party (yet). But I am counting on at least one pointed, blaming dig at Congress and how "the American people" are fed up and sick of "the way things are done (by others) in Washington".  And that "we" (meaning they) will do better, because that's why we/they were sent to Washington, to do better.


Paul Krugman, who was pretty dismayed by Friday's Democrat capitulation on the budget, writes on his blog that he dreads the speech and wouldn't put it past Obama to call for privatizing Medicare.  Since that is what Paul Ryan wants too,  Obama might do what Obama does best, and start negotiating by preemptively offering Republicans twice what they're asking for and then settling for 400 percent. He still hasn't figured out his job description.  But many are calling him Mediator in Chief, and those are the ones who are being kind.


The only thing we are being told is that Obama will use a selective scalpel to slice and dice, as opposed to the vicious machete of Paul Ryan and the Austerian Hordes.  Paul Ryan was also on TV this morning, and he was every bit as vague as Plouffe.  And yes, the pundits are still calling his plan to privatize, and thus kill, Medicare "bold."  I think it's only because they don't know how to spell, or pronounce, chutzpah.  H-u-t-s-p-a.  Here are some more synonyms the vocabulary-challenged chattering class might consider for Ryan's budget plan:  reckless, overreaching, brazen, overweening, rash, unmitigated gall, mendacious, nasty, brutal, vicious, moronic, math-challenged, politically suicidal.  It sure makes whatever death by a thousand sterile incisions Obama is planning under the anesthesia of his rhetoric seem painless in comparison.  But maybe that's the whole plan. 

Was the Shutdown Threat All About S-E-X?

In the wake of the near-shutdown of the government, it is becoming crystal clear that the fight was never about money and austerity and deficits. It's about ideology. The cause celebre this go-round was Planned Parenthood and abortion. But it goes beyond reproductive rights. It goes to the heart of the arch-conservative mantra that Sex is Bad.  It's particularly bad, in their view, when it involves the unmarried, the transgender, the gay, the unemployed, the minority.  Let's face it. People like Mike Pence and Rick Santorum and all the goons of Right Wing World don't like the idea of taxpayer money being used, even obliquely, to help people have fun, particularly when it comes to their sex lives.

Title X is a government program that gives about a quarter of its funds to Planned Parenthood, and the rest to other clinics for low-income people throughout the country.  It specifically does not fund abortions, because that is illegal under federal law.  What it does pay for, however, are family planning for both men and women, STD screening, HIV/AIDS, Diabetes, hypertension and cancer screening.  The services are for  ALL people -- married or single, gay or straight. Planned Parenthood offers all of these in addition to abortion services that it funds through private means, adding up to only about three percent of its total program. 

Title X pays for birth control pills on the taxpayer dime and Planned Parenthood does not demand a marriage certificate when women come in seeking the pill. Thus, in Republican World, they are promoters of promiscuity and orgies. Planned Parenthood is also known for its compassionate treatment of transgender patients.  Planned Parenthood supplies free condoms to its clients, thus promoting even more unrestrained sex.  See where this is going?  Way, way beyond the right to life movement. 


Since the radical right culture warriors are also anti-gay and many seem to have sexual phobias of all kinds, could the threatened government shutdown have been about homophobia as well as misogyny? Nobody's telling, but it wouldn't surprise me. 

 Christian fundamentalism as a force in American politics has never died.  The religious fanatics still haven't gotten over the repeal of DADT. Their dogmatism and their demogoguery trump rational thought. It wouldn't shock me if they actually thought that the "X" in Title X stands for X-rated, instead of the number 10.  The right wing crowd probably never studied Roman numerals in school because those numbers are un-American.

The Radical Right is Easily Confused & Obsessed With Sex 

And speaking of Rome, if I didn't know better, I'd swear the Vatican might have a hand in this too.  The American bishops tried to kill the affordable health care act due to abortion issues.  Could this be payback time from the mighty lobby of men in mitered hats?  Nothing would surprise me at this point.  If you'd told me a week ago the government would be shut down over Pap smears, I wouldn't have believed it either.


And then there's the cultish Abstinence Movement, which espouses just saying no as the proper right wing method of birth control. Bristol Palin, teen mom, is the poster child of that movement, or revirgination campaign or whatever you want to call it.  Conservatives even have weird debutante-type affairs called "Purity Balls" in which fathers parade out their daughters in some vaguely creepy chastity sweepstakes.  Daddy's Little Girl is Daddy's Little Girl until marriage do them part.

Not a Planned Parenthood Alumna

And if you still don't believe how far right we've come as a country, take a gander at what President Nixon wrote when he signed Title X into law one Christmas Eve long, long ago: (and Dickie, from all accounts, was one repressed Oedipus "my mother was a saint" Complex dude):

He Put the Planning Back in Family Values

ON JULY 18, 1969, I sent to the Congress a message proposing the creation of a Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. The Congress acted promptly on my proposal and the act establishing the Commission was signed by me on March 16, 1970. The Commission is now functioning: its interim report will be due in the spring of 1971, and its final report will be submitted in the spring of 1972.
 
At the same time, I called for a national commitment to provide adequate family planning services within the next 5 years to all those who want them but cannot afford them. It was clear that the domestic family planning services supported by the Federal Government were not adequate to provide information and services to all who want them on a voluntary basis.
 
To implement this national commitment, I asked for expanded research in contraceptive development and the behavioral sciences, reorganization of family planning service activities within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and legislation which would help the Department to implement this important program by providing broader and more precise legislative authority and a clearer source of financial support. The National Center for Family Planning Services was established in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare shortly after my message.
 
The bill before me today, the "Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970," completes the legislation I requested in my message on population. This measure provides for expanded research, training of manpower, and increased family planning services. In addition, it provides for the development of family planning and population growth information and education.
It is noteworthy that this landmark legislation on family planning and population has had strong bipartisan support. I am confident that by working together-at Federal, State, and local levels--we can achieve the goal of providing adequate family planning services within the next 5 years to all those who want them but cannot afford them.
 
I am proud to affix my signature to this important legislation and share this pride with so many who have worked so hard toward its enactment."
 
Wow.  A Republican president proposed what would today be called a socialistic public health law and it was promptly approved in a bipartisan manner by Congress. If Tricky Dick were in office now, Mike Pence would be calling him a Marxist.  No, wait.  Mike Pence would never have been elected to anything except maybe treasurer of some tiny local chapter of the John Birch Society.  And amazing, isn't it, that presidents actually thought up bills to send to Congress all on their own and didn't just shrug and tell them to hash it out among themselves and stop acting like children?

And now we have another down-to-the-wire save, passage of a budget nobody even had the chance to read before voting. And it is merely a stop-gap "bridge" cure, a massive kick-the-can down the road for another week.  At the rate we're going, we won't have a real budget till it's time to vote for next year's. And these hard-right fundamentalists who seem to have a spooky sway over the Democrats who outnumber them aren't going away.  The Democrats are rapidly becoming superfluous in this whole mess we call a government.  The Culture Wars have joined the Class War in what increasingly appears to be a descent into fascism.

The Tainted Cheesiness of Paul Ryan

I don't know who's worse:  pathological zombie politician Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, or the alleged intelligentsia who are cheerleading his "seriousness, courage and bravery".   I am still trying to recover from the David Brooks column in yesterday's Times that treated this two-bit hack like the second coming of Christ.


Read instead the running commentary of Paul Krugman in his New York Times blog for a piece-by-piece evisceration of the Ryan Manifesto of Death by a Thousand Cuts.  After Professor K called out Ryan's (via the Heritage Foundation) projection of only a 2.7 percent unemployment rate in coming years to vindicate his fictional deficit cure, it was mysteriously cut from the online Heritage Foundation version.  But Krugman has posted a screenshot of the original.


The obvious point of the Ryan plan is to Scare Us All To Death, as well as start a generation war between Millennials and their grandparents.  Ryan is fine with leaving Medicare alone for the 55-plus crowd around today, but if you're in the unlucky below-55 age group, you will only get a few thousand bucks to buy crappy junk insurance when you retire.  Meanwhile, you'll be paying to keep old geezers on life support through your payroll deductions. It's the tried and true "divide and conquer" formula all bosses and overlords use to keep their disgruntled workers and subjects in their places. Pit colleague against colleague, private sector versus public sector, young  college graduate minimum wage McDonald's hamburger flipper against the Grandma living in retired "comfort" on his FICA/Medicare deduction dime.  Destruction of the social safety net is the goal. "Family values" in GOP-speak is of the Corleone/Tony Soprano variety only. 

 It's also the old propagandistic bait and switch trick of cutting social programs in order to "save" them -- so as not to burden our children and grandchildren with our bills. We must die for our sins.  Come on.  The real burdensome crowd are the kleptocrats who want to keep their tax cuts for eternity and live off the rest of us like the bloated leeches they are.  It's the class war, stupid.  And speaking of war -- not a mention does Ryan make of our three (official) wars and their terrible cost in money, lives, limbs and mental health.

Ryan is a fall guy being paraded out by the Republicans to provide a sideshow. As my friend Kate Madison pointed out yesterday in her comment on Brooks, he is so despised in his native Wisconsin that he is not expected to even win re-election next year, let alone remain House Budget Committee chairman. 

The Ryan Show is like a Grade Z horror flick that's so bad, it's funny.  What the GOP is really banking on is the  possibility that their outrageous demands for a trillion dollar cut will so scare the spineless Democrats that they might even get a third of what they're asking for. Little Paulie a Whiz Kid?  Cheez Whiz is more like it  -- and that amounts to sacrilege in the Dairy State, the birthplace of labor unions. His artificial cheese product of a budget is held together by intellectual emulsifying agents that don't stand a chance when exposed to heat and light.  He has cheeted with the facts. His mendacious manifesto and his fellow Republicans are becoming as unglued as xanthum gum left out in the rain.

The Fierce Urgency of Town Halls and Political Galas

When President Obama popped in at yesterday's White House press briefing, he gave the impression he'd be personally involved in intense budget negotiations with Republicans to avert what many believe is an imminent government shutdown.

Hovering Above It All

But according to the official schedule released today, the president will be leaving town right after lunch - first, for a Town Hall event in Philly and then to a fundraiser for Al Sharpton in Manhattan.  I guess his "team" will be handling the crisis in  his absence.... the latest in a line of absences both physical and political.  As Kevin Drum of Mother Jones puts it: "Obama has long followed a strategy of letting other people fight pitched battles for awhile and then parachuting in towards the end to act as peacemaker."

But his re-election campaign beckons, so never let a crisis get in the way of a good town hall.  Obama plans to meet with workers at Gamesa, a Spain-based wind turbine company with a factory in Pennsylvania that constructed the Allegheny Ridge Wind Farm.  Since Hispanics will be a key voting bloc in 2012, the President is going a-courting now.  And then, on to his second foray into the Big Apple in less than a week, a political payback of sorts to Al Sharpton at the National Action Networks gala at the Sheraton Hotel.  Sharpton was initially a Hillary supporter, but made up with Obama before the convention.

The president arrives at Kennedy Airport at 5 p.m., just in time for the evening rush.  Local news outlets are treating the story as A Traffic Gridlock of Epic Proportions.  New Yorkers tend to get irate when a president breezes into town at  inconvenient times on an increasingly consistent basis.  But that's okay. Irate New Yorkers will get the chance to let off some steam next weekend (4/15) in what promises to be a gala mass demonstration in Union Square against the banksters and the kleptocrats.  Somehow I don't think any politician of either political party will be in town for the occasion.  

They call the presidential route through Manhattan a Frozen Zone.  And despite all the heated rhetoric coming out of D.C., the budget talks seem to be in the deep freeze as well, at least as far as Obama is concerned.  Here's what he said yesterday:

"The only question is whether politics or ideology are going to get in the way of preventing a government shutdown.  Now, what does this potentially mean for the American people?  At a time when the economy is just beginning to grow, where we’re just starting to see a pickup in employment, the last thing we need is a disruption that’s caused by a government shutdown.  Not to mention all the people who depend on government services, whether you’re a veteran or you’re somebody who’s trying to get a passport or you’re planning to visit one of the national monuments or you’re a business leader who’s trying to get a small business loan.  You don’t want delays, you don’t want disruptions just because of usual politics in Washington.

So what I said to the Speaker today, and what I said to Leader Reid, and what I’ve said to the two appropriations chairs, is that myself, Joe Biden, my team, we are prepared to meet for as long as possible to get this resolved."

Only, he'll be MIA for a total of 10 hours today.  His defenders, or apologists, will likely continue to say he's no-drama Obama, the only grown-up in the room, he likes to stay detached, he knows what he's doing.  In one respect, he's like an annoying helicopter parent, always hovering near the children's activities but never getting directly involved or, heaven forbid, getting angry or showing who's the boss.

Kevin Drum said he likes to parachute in at the last minute.  But I'm afraid that this time, he's merely bailed out.


** Update, 7:05 p.m.  The New York Times now reports that Obama will meet with House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid  immediately upon his helicopter landing tonight at 8:45 p.m. I guess the three-minute quickie phone call he made to Boehner before blowing town earlier today didn't do the trick.

Talking Points for Obamabots

Now that thousands of you have already signed up for Obama '12 and are champing at the bit to work those phones a year and a half before Election Day, here's a script I just unearthed to help you connect one-on-one with the undecided folks in the heartland. If they tell you they won't be voting for Obama, here's what you say:

If you don’t support Barack, you’re enabling the Tea Party

People who criticize the president are racists.

He was a left a mess by Bush and he's doing his best to clean it up.  He’s been trying to drive the car out of the ditch. He has to deal with circumstances beyond his control, every minute of every day.  Give him a break. He’s only been president for 26 months and we’ve had 200 years of bad governance.

Lily Ledbetter, Lily Ledbetter, Lily Ledbetter.

If you don’t support Obama, then Sarah Palin/Newt Gingrich/Michele Bachmann will become president and the world will end.  Is that what you really want?

He was solely responsible for the repeal of DADT. He inspired the Egyptian Revolution. He had to give tax breaks to the rich to save the middle class down the road. Because of him, we will all, someday, have the privilege of buying private health insurance.

He is the only grownup in the room. Everybody else is a child. 

A third party candidate or primary challenger will just be a spoiler.

He is playing three dimensional chess, so give him the benefit of the doubt. You should trust him because he has a higher IQ. than you do.

He has to pander to the corporations now, so he can become the true progressive he wants to be during his second term.  He has to pretend to love Wall Street because without their money he couldn't get re-elected.  That's how politics works.  Can I put you down for $25?

Some people just don't appreciate nuance. 

Pragmatism is the greatest virtue ever invented.

He’s the only thing standing  in the way of a total fascist takeover of the Supreme Court.

Have I left anything out?