A Sorry Joke

Another take on the first year of our new President, this one by David Lindorff, a good old-fashioned Philadelphia populist radical:

You know, the year 2009 started out kind of nicely. We watched Barack Obama take the oath of office, serenaded by the awesome Aretha Franklin (wearing her awesome hat), after first hearing Pete Seeger sing the real Woody Guthrie verses to "This Land Is Your Land" on the steps of the Lincoln Monument.

And we saw Congress pass the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, to correct a scum-sucking decision by the US Supreme Court's conservative woman-hating, corporation-loving majority that said women (and minorities and the elderly) couldn't sue for pay discrimination unless they acted within six months of the initiation of the violation, even if they didn't learn about it until years later.

Great stuff.

But basically, that was it. The promise of an Obama Presidency, and of the huge new Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, came and went like the puff of dust from a dessiccated puffball, leaving behind nothing but a leathery dry little husk of fungus--an apt description of Democrats in Washington today.

Since then we had the pathetic stimulus package that hasn't stimulated, and the continuation of the Bush/Paulson bank bailout--the gift that keeps on giving to Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, B of A, Wells Fargo and the other greedhead banks that created the current financial disaster that has thrown a fifth of the American workforce out of their jobs and that has put a quarter of all homeowners underwater, with mortgage balances larger than the value of their shrivelled homes. We've got a whole new war--actually the old mini-war in Afghanistan now ramped up by Obama and his Democratic backers into a major war--and the old war in Iraq sill chugging along, and maybe even a new one in Yemen or a bigger one in Iran. And of course we've got no health care reform, though they're calling the crappy legislation working its way through Senate and House "health care reform."

What a sorry joke.