how is this change?
I spent the morning answering a plethora of emails from people about political issues ranging from health care reform to the wars to Bishop Tobin’s refusing Sen. Patrick Kennedy communion. It was unbelievably depressing. Much like every day during the Bush Administration. Only worse, because there is now no prospective Democratic president to hope for.
I acknowledge being a strident optimist. I don’t know how cynics get by in life and don’t especially want to know. That said, I’m increasingly cynical about the current administration and its apologists.
Remember when we progressives were against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan? Remember when we thought the refutation of the rule of law under the Bush Administration was tantamount to if not an outright war crime? Remember when the Abu Ghraib photos first appeared in The New Yorker and how shocked we were?
Cut to election night and the throngs in Grant Park and the tears and the cheering and the not having to wait for three days or three months to find out who was going to be the next president. Even if you weren’t a big fan of Barack Obama (I was a stalwart Hillary Clinton supporter, but voted for Obama in the general), you had to feel relief.
The enthusiasm and yes, hope, of that night is long gone. Now we are sitting right where we were a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, eight years ago—listening to excuses for things that are inexcusable, listening to the Democrats explain yet again why they have no spine (not all of them, but certainly well more than a quorum), listening to a President explain how a troop surge (what else do you call 35,000 more troops to Afghanistan?) will “finish the job,” listening to what we found loathesome under George W. Bush and making excuses for why it is okay under Barack H. Obama.
It’s not okay. It’s so not okay. Anyone who twists their integrity and logic around to excuse these inexcusable crimes—war, torture, recision of the rule of law, indefinite detenti0n—is simply lying: to themselves, to the country, to the world.
This is not change. This is the status quo we have been listening to for nearly a decade. It’s what we spent years defending against under Bush.
I voted for change. I didn’t expect all the change that was promised. But I did expect some modicum of difference. I did expect that I would be able to discern at least a subtle if not tectonic shift in the political status quo. But instead I have been seeing a Democrat in Republican clothing where a progressive was supposed to have been elected. And almost everything I read in the left-leaning blogosphere keeps saying it’s all the Republicans’ fault.
How? Since they’re not in power, I mean?
I have come to disbelieve that this President wants change. He keeps saying change is hard. But how would he know? He hasn’t effected any. Listening to this mantra of Obama’s that change is hard just sounds so very…Bush.
I don’t want another president deluded by his own power into believing that he is the answer. Obama isn’t the answer in Afghanistan. You can ask “how many Afghanis does it take to change a lightbulb?” again and again but the answer will be the same–the Afghanis have to really want to change the lightbulb and move from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the present. 35,000 more American troops will not force that change. Cannot force that change. We need to leave. We need to let these people fail or rise on their own. We can’t give them a pill to end corruption, we can’t change their deep desire to entrust their futures to war lords and corruption and repressive religious theocratic dictatorships. We can’t force democracy. We can’t even force it in our own Congress.
I feel we are back to the shell-game politics of the Bush Administration: look over here! No–look over here! First it was health care reform, then a jobs summit, now Afghanistan. No one is saying these aren’t all pressing issues. They are. Nevertheless, it seems as if there is just an endless stop/start routine between the President and the Democrats in Congress that stymies any and all actual progress.
It’s depressing. It’s not hopeful. And it’s definitely not the change most of us who voted for Obama were expecting. Stasis is not change. Someone as smart as Obama has to know that. And if he doesn’t, someone smart who is close to him should tell him. Before it’s too late and his one-term presidency is sealed.—VAB
