My political conclusions are hardly based on my being “angry with Obama,” but rather on twenty five years of observation and study of politics current and historical.
Yet, you haven’t managed to lift a finger to back up your ridiculous supposition that two Gore administrations would have been similar to two GW Bush administrations.
I’m just supposed to take your word on it? No thanks. It doesn’t work that way.
I could make a bullet-point list of everything Obama said and did before he was President that would have predicted a Presidency
No you couldn’t. While Gore has been full of shit and flip-flopped like many politicians have, he also had a consistent track record of following through on many of his policy recommendations. Everything from arms control to climate change. Obama DID NOT before he was elected. Why on Earth do you continue to push a false equivalency of the two? What is your EVIDENCE of this?
Don’t forget, I call Gore a lesser evil than GW Bush. Gore’s track record is shitty, but it’s ridiculous to compare him to GW Bush:
• Gore on renditions is shitty, but certainly not a greater evil than Reagan and most Republicans by a long shot and Bush/Cheney took torture to an entirely different level by mainstreaming torture by U.S. soldiers. Not the same thing unless we, once again, delve into false equivalence. Obama’s embrace of some of Bush’s policies isn’t by a long shot a good comparison to Gore’s track record which only consists of support of renditions (in a memoir from Richard Clarke) in certain cases.
• Al Gore was known to engage with and listen to Richard Clarke who warned of inevitable hijacking attempts before the Trade Center/Pentagon attacks, but was blatantly ignored by the GW Bush admin who was known to be absolutely obtuse towards Clarke and other Clinton Intelligence officials. You really have to be dense to compare them there with yet another false equivalence. It’s incredibly likely that Gore would have taken pre-emptive security actions based upon solid intelligence to thwart hijackings in general. Bush was obtuse, sat on his fucking hands and literally went on vacation instead.
• If you go way back on gay rights, Gore sucked. But then you’d have to ignore that while in office he later supported the 1998 executive order banning sexual-orientation discrimination in federal civilian jobs, etc. and other things that set him far apart from the greater evil Republicans including Bush unless, once again, you want to embrace yet another false equivalence.
• On the drug war Gore was much less evil than Republicans and even broke with Clinton during office on Medical Marijuana. To compare Gore to Bush or Obama who both ramped up the war on drugs to ridiculous extremes is yet another ridiculous false equivalence on your part.
• Gore’s vote on the Gulf War just plain sucked, but was still a lot less hawkish, lesser evil than Republicans if one is seated in reality.
• The clipper chip was a shit idea, but one that at least required a warrant which is a much lesser evil than warrantless wiretapping, but I guess you could go with another false equivalence if you’d like.
• Gore’s support of technology. While Gore was busy helping to fund and promote our technology center and spreading access, the GW Bush administration spent much of its time protecting consolidated monopolies that hurt innovation while blustering and spreading the lie that Gore said he “invented” the Internet.
• Music lyrics labeling. Yep, Gore supported that, but you really think that was worse than when GW Bush decided to very actively outright CENSOR climate science and political activists?
• Enviromment … you REALLY want to compare his track record there to Bush?? Or Obama? Are you insane?
Also, you keep leaving out things that Obama has tried to do that has been repeatedly blocked by Republicans. And, guess who they are? The greater evil.
The lesser evil that Gore has done doesn’t cancel out his other policies of greater good on the environment, support for single payer at a time when the public was too ignorant to support him on it and the FACT that he was still a lesser evil than the Republicans were on many, many issues.
What EVIDENCE do you have that Gore in 2000 would be just like an entirely different politician who was elected into office about a decade later after two far right-wing presidential administrations with a mostly conservative, rubber stamp congress in tow during the bulk of the time? Or, once again, are you unable lift a finger on this?
Look, your disappointment with Obama is palpable and understandable. But, it’s infantile to throw out the baby with the bathwater because he’s made you angry.
When many others were jumping for joy when Obama was elected, there were others that knew he was a lesser evil and nothing more than that. Even before Obama was elected, some of us said this:
http://boingboing.net/2008/06/24/obamas-support-for-t.html#comment-229153987?
(scroll up to 06/24/2008 04:29 PM if Discus craps out on the link)
You see, just like Gore, I never had any allusions about Obama in the first place. I admit that I had cautiously hoped that he’d be a second term trojan (in some regards) for various reasons, but he’s blown that miserably except in a few circumstances with tepid support for gay rights, health care and such. Still, much better than anything McCain/Palin or Romney/Ryan would have done, to say the least.
But, once again, I never had any illusions in the first place because I knew that the American public had already screwed themselves by allowing our country to go so far backwards by voting in two disastrous GW Bush terms with a disastrous rubber stamp, conservative congress to back his disastrous agenda. It’s a fucking disaster. You don’t go from a literal disaster to utopia in 5 years, sorry.
Your ridiculous, baseless supposition that two Gore administrations would have been very much the same as the two GW Bush administrations isn’t seated in reality and only serves to keep us all down.
It’s going to take decades to clean up this mess and that’s ONLY if the American public finally pulls its head out of its ass and finally stops falling for false equivalence ignorance and spin. Whether it’s false equivalence spin between the Republican party and the Democratic party or your inane comparison of Obama to Gore in 2000, it just causes us all to spin our wheels and go nowhere but down.
How about complaining about consistently voting in lesser evils over time once we’ve actually tried it? Obama after two disastrous GW Bush terms with many conservative voted into Congress, etc. doesn’t cut it by a long shot.
Your false equivalency mentality hasn’t worked at all and, once again, these guys absolutely LOVE it when you do that. It’s why they actively support false equivalence and half-truths with their power in the media and with their “think tanks”… and here you are, like too may others… falling for it hook, line and sinker.
