Friday, December 10, 2010

Mr. President,

WTF???


Why does it seem so much harder for you to work with your own party (yes, it can be like herding cats) than it is for you to try to work with the party of ‘NO?’


It seems reasonable to think that after multiple examples of the rejection of your attempts to reach across the aisle (including Republican proposed items in a bill you’re working on, only to get 0 Republican votes for said bill) that you’d realize that your efforts are not just not working, they are being sneered upon by the very folks you’re trying so hard to work with.


Our party did not lose the majority in the US Senate (for the next session of the US Congress), but we did back further away from the super majority that stupid parliamentary tricks require for bills to pass. We did lose the majority in the US House of Representatives, but the party of ‘NO’ does not have a veto proof majority either; a recipe for legislative stalemate for the next two years.


The Democratic Party sustained these loses because you did not walk on water in your first two years as President; expectations are almost always set way too high. You did not lose these seats in the legislature because you did not extend a hand across the aisle often enough; indeed the hand you did extend was ridiculed far more often than it was ever grasped.


Getting angry at your supporters is not an explanation of why you don’t try to work with us more often than you have tried to work with the ‘NO.”


The point for negotiation with health care was single-payer, not the public option.


Why isn’t there an investigation into the previous administration’s torturing of the legal process to justify torture, or the false pretense (apparently known to be false from the start) for starting a second war; insufficient effort in the first, reasonably justifiable, war.


Why weren’t mortgages put under the purview of the Bankruptcy Courts and tax exemptions for mortgage interest eliminated as a precondition to bailing out Wall Street? It was, after all, the incredible risks taken with mortgage based investments that Wall Street used, while government regulators were encouraged to sleep (during the W administration, as it was in the Reagan administration), to bring the US economy, nay the world’s economy, to the edge of fiscal self-destruction.


Why is it so difficult to believe that the best you could do for job creation in these United States of America is to eliminate tax incentives for companies that have moved their entire manufacturing capacity out of the country?


Why is it so hard to understand that all the tax breaks from the previous administration should be allowed to expire, avoiding the perception of catering to wealthy individuals and corporations while addressing the federal deficit? Let the ‘NO’ explain to the nation why the rich are more important than working poor or unemployed folks; ‘Trickle Down’ economics has already had 30 years of spectacular failure. It is not making life hard for working poor and unemployed people when all the tax breaks expire, because their lives already are difficult!


BTW!


Congratulations on the successful bail-out of GM and Chrysler. Also, congrats on what progress was made on health care in the first two years of your administration.


The next two years will be a legislative stalemate, because the shifting numbers in the US Congress allow the ‘NO’ to be ever more intransigent; not because we, your supporters (Democrats and Independents; you don’t win with just insider support), don’t appreciate what you’ve done.


Thanks, for reading this far down the page.