I heard on news this morning about reactionaries doing well in Greece, and I remember to note the general swing to the right in Europe: this is valuable perspective.<\/p>\n
Obama has been very disappointing to those on the left, but remember the environment he is in. Who in the world has resisted swinging way right in this environment?\u00a0 Mostly everyone is charging<\/em> right.\u00a0 At least Obama is resisting.\u00a0 And he is<\/em> resisting.<\/p>\n While I am defending the man, remember another disadvantage he has.\u00a0 Not only did George II destroy both our government’s and our country’s finances, and not only did he try to make most of the world hate us…<\/p>\n He also did a damn good job of gutting the federal work force.\u00a0 Good people were driven out, quit, and retired. Rightist incompetents were hired at every opportunity.\u00a0 The people Obama has under his employ include a lot of terrible people who want to do bad things, people who are dolts and crooks.\u00a0 People who now have civil service protections.<\/p>\n When Obama’s history is written his work to rebuild the basic functioning of our government will be a big item.<\/p>\n I am looking forward to reading It’s Even Worse Than It Looks<\/em>, just out by Thomas E. Mann (Brookings) and Norman J. Ornstein (American Enterprise Institute).\u00a0 There is an argument that Washington is not<\/em> its most broken ever, that it was more broken just before the US civil war.\u00a0 Wow, what a low bar.\u00a0 Just before the war where we killed 700,000-plus fellow Americans, we were worse off than we are now.\u00a0 We are in a very bad place.\u00a0 My mother is right about that.<\/p>\n Hollywood has the term “magic negro” for a swath of characters with mystical powers, but how much magic do we expect from this mortal who is badly constrained by a reality that is trying to crush him and our country?\u00a0 He is doing one hell of a good job.<\/p>\n -kb<\/p>\n \u00a92012 Kent Borg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I heard on news this morning about reactionaries doing well in Greece, and I remember to note the general swing to the right in Europe: this is valuable perspective. Obama has been very disappointing to those on the left, but remember the environment he is in. Who in the world has resisted swinging way right […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[62,110,154,176,185,211,216,238,261,308],"class_list":["post-341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-civil-service","tag-federal-work-force","tag-its-even-worse-than-it-looks","tag-leftists","tag-magic-negro","tag-norman-ornstein","tag-obama","tag-politics","tag-righists","tag-thomas-mann"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}