Is Obama Brer Rabbit: Is He Setting Republicans Up, Or Leading The Nation To A Fall

by Monica Davis

Obama’s supporters and detractors on the Left are getting fed up.  Time and again the President has given in, compromised and  negotiated with conservatives, at the cost of eroding his base of left wingers and progressives.  If politics “is the art of the possible”,  how much can an embattled President compromise before he is neutered or compromised?

The question is, how much more can he give up in compromises before he loses his base?

The latest impasse between President Obama and Republican conservatives has generated a lot of responses from the Left, including zillions of angry responses like this one on a newspaper’s comment section.

So, President Obama your speech about playing nice is not worth the telepromter it was displayed on. Compromise is playing nice has not worked. It is time for much more serious and drastic action, something that requires courage. It requires you, and the political leaders in Washington, to put the country ahead of their re-election goals and political agenda. It is time to ignore the special interests and do what is right for the nation and not for for some wealthy oligarchs. You have less than three days to wake up before it is too late…………..more

Many see President Obama, not as the spendthrift outsider that rightwing conservatives view him, but as a major disappointment–almost a holdover of the Bush Administration.  They apparently thought that all they had to do was get rid of President George Bush (sorry, folks, term limits did that), laugh at the McCain/Palin ticket, and all would be right with their world.

The fact that this economic train wreck has been gaining speed since 2000 totally escaped them. How fast can we heal a decade of banking deregulation, corporate financial crimes, money laundering, expensive warfare, and military delusions? Do we honestly think that we could erase the effects of all of these human rights, political and financial outrages in two years?

Between bailing out the banks and Wall Street, and dumping trillions into a self-sustaining War on Terror, we have spent generation’s worth of our nations’ assets.  In one bailout of Wall Street alone, we spent the cumulative equivalent of the nation’s entire economic input for a year.  And that was just one bailout.

This doesn’t include the alleged war on terror that has lost so mich money in Iraq and Afghanistan–yes, lost, as in “up in smoke”, that we are borrowing money  from a nation that we have fought two proxy wars with (China), to help us fight two more wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,

Nevertheless, there is a lot of danger in the debt ceiling warfare for Obama, if he continues compromising.  His enemies see him as weak and, even complicit in the debt, given the fact that we are STILL in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Even his supporters are having trouble supporting his back, when instant

Is President Obama doing a Brer Rabbit? Is he setting his opponents up to empower him, or is he, as some believe, over his head? Or  are both he and the right wing Republicans leading this nation into financial servitude to China and many of our other foreign creditors?