Why should I sound off on President Obama’s talk yesterday, when the Rude Pundit has done it better? And in language suitable, at least in this carefully chosen excerpt, for reprint in a family-values blog:

Yesterday, the Rude Pundit wrote that President Barack Obama was suffering from delusional thinking when it came to dealing with the GOP. Then, as if to prove the him correct, Obama spoke shortly after the Rude Pundit scribbled his bloggy meanderings, and the President doubled down on the delusional as a way of supposedly calming the panicky markets and populace. At some point, one must wonder who the hell Obama is talking to. Because the “most - reasonable - guy - in - the - room - c’mon - independents - love - me” train was blown off the tracks by the depraved mad bombers in the GOP.

Seriously, check this out. Obama said, “Making these reforms doesn’t require any radical steps. What it does require is common sense and compromise. There are plenty of good ideas about how to achieve long-term deficit reduction that doesn’t hamper economic growth right now. Republicans and Democrats on the bipartisan fiscal commission that I set up put forth good proposals. Republicans and Democrats in the Senate’s Gang of Six came up with some good proposals. John Boehner and I came up with some good proposals when we came close to agreeing on a grand bargain.”

It’s as if Obama has created this imaginary friend called “Mr. Nice the Elephant,” and he’s so happy to have Mr. Nice the Elephant around to play with that he just wants everyone to know about Mr. Nice the Elephant. He may as well have said, “Mr. Nice the Elephant and I come up with great ideas all the time. We should all have a pal as terrific as Mr. Nice the Elephant. Isn’t that true, Mr. Nice? He says it’s true. You just can’t hear him, but I can.”

New York Times:

But by this month, in ultimately unsuccessful talks with Speaker John A. Boehner, Mr. Obama tentatively agreed to a plan that was farther to the right than that of the majority of the fiscal commission and a bipartisan group of senators, the so-called Gang of Six. It also included a slow rise in the Medicare eligibility age to 67 from 65, and, after 2015, a change in the formula for Social Security cost-of-living adjustments long sought by economists.…

“Democrats created Social Security and Medicare, and we have fought for decades against Republican attempts to end these programs,” said Dan Pfeiffer, Mr. Obama’s communications director. “And President Obama believes that now is the time for Democrats to be the ones to step up and save Social Security and Medicare.”

Wikipedia:

One of the most famous quotes of the Vietnam War was a statement attributed to an unnamed U.S. officer by AP correspondent Peter Arnett. Writing about the provincial capital, Ben Tre, on February 7, 1968, Arnett said: “‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,’ a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong.” The quote was distorted in subsequent publications, eventually becoming the more familiar, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

Every political system involving some sort of centralized power has so far led to attempts by the central power to gain control. Since the cannon set kings and princes above mere lords, centralization has been the trend.

That trend continues in our increasingly centralized power structure.

A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that former prisoners of the C.I.A. could not sue over their alleged torture in overseas prisons because such a lawsuit might expose secret government information.

The sharply divided ruling was a major victory for the Obama administration’s efforts to advance a sweeping view of executive secrecy powers. It strengthens the White House’s hand as it has pushed an array of assertive counterterrorism policies, while raising an opportunity for the Supreme Court to rule for the first time in decades on the scope of the president’s power to restrict litigation that could reveal state secrets.

The case reveals — or reiterates — the continuing stance of the executive branch of the current form of government. Regardless of party or ideology, every President has tried to accumulate power. As our economic system concentrates wealth, the political system designed by the founders tends to concentrate power.

On the plus side, our system concentrates power more slowly than, say, a monarchy or a dictatorship, whether of the elite or the proletariat. But late-stage empires, regardless of ideology, have already concentrated wealth so heavily that politics cannot fail to be deflected by the private interests of a very few. Suppose we in the US decided to free ourselves of the oil industry, or hedge funds; how would we accomplish that?

One thing we’ve hopefully learned is that electing a chief executive on the promise of change isn’t guaranteed to produce any.

While the alleged abuses occurred during the Bush administration, the ruling added a chapter to the Obama administration’s aggressive national security policies.

Its counterterrorism programs have in some ways departed from the expectations of change fostered by President Obama’s campaign rhetoric, which was often sharply critical of former President George W. Bush’s approach.

The crowning touch on the 6-5 ruling that state secrets trump human rights, that the state can decide which legal cases are allowed to proceed, is the court’s admission that the plaintiffs had a legitimate case.

There were signs in the court’s ruling that the majority felt conflicted. In a highly unusual move, the court ordered the government to pay the plaintiffs’ legal costs, even though they lost the case and had not requested such payment.

More good stuff with which I agree, this time from Professor Wolff at The Philosopher’s Stone, who is almost as old as I am and even wiser:

I never imagined Obama was a left liberal, and I didn’t campaign for him under that illusion. I thought he was a centrist, a left-centrist, in the framework of American politics, with the ability to mobilize the center and the left to defend against the horrors promised by the right. I was right about that. Had the depression not hit, he would in fact be doing quite well now, by his own lights, but quite well means successfully pursuing centrist-left policies. In point of fact, he has been astonishingly successful in that regard. The health reform bill … is the best that we could get, given the realities of American politics, and he is the first president in ninety years to get it.

You are mad at the wrong person. The real villain in this piece is the enormous number of Americans — not, I think and hope a majority, but enormous none the less — who are either conservative or hysterically insane with religious fantasies and political paranoia.

Do you want a genuinely leftist president? Fine, so do I. How do we get one? Answer, we change eighty or a hundred million Americans. Let me remind you — and I was there, so I know — that Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter were all Left Centrists at best. My grandfather gave his life to the Socialist Party, and its high point was electing him and six others to the NYC Board of Aldermen. This has NEVER been a country that was hospitable to genuinely leftist politics.

What we are now facing is a threat from the right unlike any I have seen in forty years. We are in danger of losing such tattered remains as we still have of a social safety net, and of seeing maniacal religious fanatics running our country. I am hoping that Obama will tap into his considerable political skills to stop that from happening, but even if he does, we will nonetheless be stuck with a politics that is markedly to the right of where it is now. These are godawful times, made all the more perilous by the fact that the very large number of genuine progressives in this country are dispirited.

From Paul Krugman’s blog:

Really bad news on the health care front. After making the case for a public option, and doing it very well, Obama said this:

“We have not drawn lines in the sand other than that reform has to control costs and that it has to provide relief to people who don’t have health insurance or are underinsured,” Mr. Obama said. “Those are the broad parameters that we’ve discussed.”

There he goes again, gratuitously making a big gift to the other side.

My big fear about Obama has always been not that he doesn’t understand the issues, but that his urge to compromise — his vision of himself as a politician who transcends the old partisan divisions — will lead him to negotiate with himself, and give away far too much. He did that on the stimulus bill, where he offered an inadequate plan in order to win bipartisan support, then got nothing in return — and was forced to reduce the plan further so that Susan Collins could claim her pound of flesh.

I am currently reading Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, detailing the way America has “converted” other countries to “freedom and democracy” using the often deadly ideology of Milton Friedman and how it uses the same doctrine when natural catastrophes occur to “remake a devastated or destroyed village to save it.”

This is one of the policies of Milton Friedman’s economic theories as put into practice and I had not realized until now that the term coined during the Vietnam War, “We destroyed the village to save it” was actually a literal interpretation of what Friedman proposed as a method to change a country’s economic system. New Orleans is a domestic example of the policy, which is losing a whole class of people who have lived there for many generations who will be replaced by wealthier and more Republican sorts.

Klein also traces the original CIA experiments in the late 1940s on torture and makes a very valuable and original argument that the same basic doctrinal belief system is used by those who justify electric shock therapy as torture, waterboarding and other forms of torture we have witnessed at Guantanamo Bay and other dark prison sites, to justify the policies of dramatically shocking (i.e. Shock and Awe) a nation into submission to institute economic policy changes urged by Milton Friedman. Murder, bloodshed and violence are the inevitable results of these policies.

However, until I finish the book, I will refrain from commenting any further thoughts on it, but this one book has created so far, a mental catharsis as dramatic as that engendered when I first read Eric Hoffer’s True Believer.

So to get some background on Naomi Klein, I went back and searched the archives of The Real News Network for anything that Naomi Klein had commented on and found the following video, which is part of a series of videos by Naomi Klein on the Real News Network. I urge you to listen to her comments about Obama and listen to the rest of the series of Naomi Klein videos if you find this one interesting. Please donate to The Real News Network either by direct donation, or by buying some of your books there, as the preceding link allows you to do.

I believe that I was wrong in my comments on Obama’s selection of Rick Warren to deliver his invocation at his inauguration, despite the black community’s church going members who don’t approve of gay marriage, who are an important constituency for Obama. But I do believe we on the left have been too complacent about Obama’s cabinet selections and we must turn on the heat by calling, writing, petitioning and eventually, perhaps later this year when Obama’s stance on Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan become clearer, by street marching to make Obama aware that the left will not sit idly by while he becomes another traitor to his class, as Bill Clinton did (unlike Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was a traitor to the rich class he belonged to, which was a positive for the poor and middle class). Obama and Clinton came from humble backgrounds and if they cater to their rich constituency, they are indeed traitors to their former class, who are most Americans who make modest or insufficient incomes.

Without further ado, here is Naomi Klein from August of this year. I wish I had taken this video seriously when it appeared, but I either missed it or was not paying attention. It’s past the time for us liberals giving a free ride to Obama. We must turn on the heat. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize this early on. The only thing I would suggest that we do is not to play into the hands of the right wingers, who will going after Obama for nefarious reasons, which is not what I am recommending.