RACIST! RACIST! RACIST! (Plus: A note about Andy)

The Obots are still calling us racists! It all started with this shitty article by Melissa Harris-Perry in The Nation. The title: "Black President, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama." The gist: Yes, Obama is a disappointment, but those awful, awful Clintons are MONSTERS FROM HELL and yet Bill Clinton didn't lose support from liberals in 1996. Liberal dissatisfaction with Obama must therefore result from only one factor: Racism.

"If old-fashioned electoral racism is the absolute unwillingness to vote for a black candidate, then liberal electoral racism is the willingness to abandon a black candidate when he is just as competent as his white predecessors."

Where to begin? Let's start with the obvious: Bill Clinton gave us eight years of prosperity and peace. Barack Obama has given us nothing but poverty and war. Bill Clinton raised taxes on the rich and was thus able to end the Bush I recession while (eventually) running a surplus. Barack Obama kept the Bush tax cuts on the rich and has made the deficit much, much worse. Dems used to be able to point at Dubya's massive amount of red ink while smirking and guffawing. Now we can't smirk about that anymore, thanks to Barack Obama.

Saying that Barack Obama is "just as competent" as Clinton is like saying that an ostrich can fly just as well as an eagle.

Here's Harris-Perry:

Today, America’s continuing entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan provoke anger, but while Clinton reduced defense spending, covert military operations were standard practice during his administration.

Screw you, Melissa. Note the lack of specifics. Which "covert military actions?" Do we have anything on the Clinton side of the ledger that even begins to compare with what Obama has been doing in Libya, Colombia, Pakistan, Yemen?

For what it is worth: I guessed that Obama might be a war-monger when I saw his 2004 address to the Democratic National Convention. Not once did he criticize the decision to invade, even though both Clinton and Kerry did. (Look it up.) And although he later presented himself as an anti-war activist, I could not find (after much searching) any occasions in 2003 or 2004 when he made a public denunciation of the Iraq invasion.

Let's get back to Clinton. Despite what Melissa what have you believe, he did not receive a great deal of liberal support. In fact, lots of progressives fucked him over at every opportunity.

I'm referring to the writers of "progressive" publications like The Nation, which printed a lot of sheer conspiranoia bunk about Clinton back in the day. Most of the time, Alexander Cockburn's "Beat the Devil" column was brimming over with ScaifeShit so noisome that even Scaife might have steered clear of it. Z Magazine and the Pacifica network were often just as bad.

Meanwhile, the fetuses who wrote for the allegedly centrist New Republic (which I rechristened The Newly Republican in that era) also trafficked in anti-Clinton conspiranoia, especially when it came to coverage of Whitewater. Major periodicals like The New York Times and the Washington Post became notorious for printing anti-Clinton allegations first sounded in the National Enquirer and other tabloids. Clinton got no positive press anywhere in America -- on the left or on the right. Virtually any anti-Clinton lie got into ink, and very often that lying ink was liberal ink.

That's the secret history of the Clinton era. That's the story which revisionist creeps like Melissa don't want you to know about.

If you want to feel even more infuriated, read the response by Melissa's good friend, Joan Walsh. Bring on that revisionist history, Joan:

White liberal Sen. Byron Dorgan was one of the few Democrats with the integrity and foresight to stand up to Clinton and his economic team when they supported the repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall banking restrictions, which opened the door to Wall Street corruption that torched the economy in 2008.

Pure bullshit. Let me repeat some points made in an earlier post.

Glass-Steagall was a law. As Joan may have learned from her civics teacher -- do they still teach civics in high school? -- laws are neither made nor repealed by presidents; they are made and repealed by Congress. In this case, the repeal measure was the Republican-led Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which was crafted to allow Travelers to buy Citibank in 1998.

Here's the part that the the progs won't tell you about: The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act passed by a veto-proof majority in a Republican-controlled Congress.

My earlier piece quotes a summary of Anglachel's marvelously detailed research into this period:

So what do we see in this contemporaneous report? That the White House had been pushing back on this act for months. That certain Congressional Dems, Dodd and Schumer foremost, explicitly wanted to kill Glass-Steagall. That the White House fought them as well as Gramm on this issue...

Despite that incontrovertible fact of history, jackass brie-and-chablis progs like Melissa and Joan -- can't you just picture them "doing lunch" at the latest trendy bistro? -- continue to say "Bill Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall." As though any president could do such a thing.

Did Clinton sign the bill? Yes, and I'll tell you why. Clinton was concerned about CRA, the Community Reinvestment Act, a 1977 act which Clinton had dramatically strengthened. Bascially, the CRA helped combat redlining, and made it easier for minorities to get loans.

Discussing the reasons for the Clinton administration's proposal to strengthen the CRA and further reduce red-lining, Lloyd Bentsen, Secretary of the Treasury at that time, affirmed his belief that availability of credit should not depend on where a person lives, "The only thing that ought to matter on a loan application is whether or not you can pay it back, not where you live." Bentsen said that the proposed changes would "make it easier for lenders to show how they're complying with the Community Reinvestment Act", and "cut back a lot of the paperwork and the cost on small business loans".

(No, the CRA did not cause the subprime loan madness that created the 2008 crisis, although many Republicans will try to convince you that it did.)

The same forces which attacked Glass-Steagall also wanted to gut CRA at the same time. Clinton got the best deal he could. He signed the bill; in exchange, CRA was protected.

You think otherwise? You think Clinton could have done better?

What part of the words "veto-proof majority" do you not understand?

And while you mull over your answer to that question, you might also want to try your hand at another poser that I've been asking for the past four years: Can you name a single black person not named Obama whom Obama has helped? Ever? I can tell you which black people were helped by Clinton: Anyone who was ever aided by his strengthened version of the CRA.

So much for the charge of racism.

I'll have to give Walsh credit for writing these words:

And whether it was the Volcker rule getting commercial banks out of speculative, proprietary trading, or efforts to sell shady derivatives on "exchanges" for the sake of transparency, or a contingency plan to force the toxic behemoth Citibank into bankruptcy, Obama let important reforms either die on the vine or be diluted into ineffectiveness. He had a rare window to change the system radically, and it's now closed.

Of course, that's the reason why so much Wall Street money went into the Obama campaign in the first place -- to make sure that a controllable president was in office. I also have to give little Davey Sirota credit for the following:

Obama is also a man who criticized Bush-era civil liberties policies as a candidate and then as president not only extended those policies -- but, in many cases, actually made them worse. Among other things, he has pressed for longer Patriot Act extensions than congressional Republicans, added bipartisan legitimacy to warrantless wiretapping (which he explicitly promised to end) and claimed autocratic powers that even the extremist Bush administration never dared to claim (for example, the power to assassinate American citizens without charge).

And let's not forget trade and healthcare. Candidate Obama promised to renegotiate NAFTA and reform the corresponding free-trade template that has cost Americans so many jobs. He also repeatedly pledged to champion a public option to compete with private health insurers and promised to push for legislation allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. Now, President Obama is pushing a new series of NAFTA-like deals in Panama, South Korea and Colombia. And, as we now know, he didn't merely try but fail to pass a public option or the Medicare drug-negotiation provisions -- he actively used his power to eliminate those provisions from the final healthcare bill.

Of course, Sirota goes on to assail those evil, evil Clintons.

What bugs the fuck out of me is this: The Obama failure has completely discredited the anti-Clinton crowd, and yet these clowns continue to write as though they don't know that they've been discredited.

We wouldn't be in the current mess if not for people like Walsh, Sirota, and the Obama groupies at The Nation. If not for them, we would now have President Hillary. True, she probably would have done a lot of things that would have pissed me off. Even so, we can safely presume that she would have dealt with Wall Street very differently -- and she probably would have spent the stimulus on jobs instead of tax cuts. This much is certain: She was very clear about her desire to institute a new HOLC to help people keep their homes.

We need to make sure that the psychotic Clinton-haters get the news: Your side lost. Obama's failure has consigned you to the trash heap of history. Stop writing. Just stop writing. You have no credibility. Just go the fuck away.

They spent much of 2008 telling us to get out of the party. Now it's our turn.

BigTrouble: Here's a new site which may be of interest to you: IndictBreitbart.org. There is reason to believe that Big Things are going to start happening on the Breitbart front, and very soon. As I've said before: The problem with guys like Brietbart is that they are creatures of impulse, creatures of the Id -- and they simply don't know when to cool their jets.

More to come.

(By the way: Andy is pissed off because some people have called him gay. Oh, come on, Andy. In today's America, if you are male and at all well-known, there will always be someone out there who has nothing better to do with his time than to spread gay rumors about you. If Lee Marvin were still alive, people would be calling him gay. Consider it a sign that you've made it. Hell, even I have been called gay -- and if that person says it again, I'll sic my ferocious Hell-hound Bella on him.)