Lame duck?
Not this president.
More like lame GOP Congress.
Read about it HERE.
"Despite the GOP's big midterm victory, it's President Obama who's seen his influence on the national conversation increase, and the Beltway is grudgingly admitting it.
CNN observes that "Obama [is] redefining the lame duck presidency", Politico revels at how the President is "calling the shots" amidst GOP chaos in Washington, and the AP says Obama has the "upper hand" in the budget fight. Heck, even the horrendously right wing publication Newsmax is forced to admit Obama's dominance.
This passage from the CNN piece captures both the White House's confidence and the media's surprise.
“We are on offense,” said a White House official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, noting with satisfaction that predictions that the new Republican majority would grab the initiative and quickly make the White House a peripheral player did not pan out...”
Those predictions were, of course, the secretions of our venerable fourth estate. Politico observes that an emboldened Republican majority in the House and newfound Republican majority in the Senate has failed to capture control of the agenda or even the conversation.
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President Obama has been reaping the benefits of his hard work finally beginning to pay off: the Affordable Care Act is now responsible for health insurance coverage of over 16 million Americans, the nation's largest banks have passed stress tests designed to determine if they can weather another economic storm in the order as bad or worse than the Great recession, vindicating the President on Wall Street reform, and as we previously talked about, the economy is strong again.
President Obama is bringing together world powers to find a peaceful solution to Iran's nuclear ambitions, negotiating two progressive trade pacts - one transpacific and one transatlantic, and, you know, just being president. And that is throwing Beltway into chaos.
Being president while black is bad enough, but acting like it in your seventh year? Doing big things even though you can't run again? Sprinting to the finish instead of limping there head hung in shame to your radical political foes? And above all, overshadowing what the media should be able to concentrate on at the beginning of 2015, the presidential horse race to be decided at the end of 2016 (and thus ruining the media's hyperventilation sessions about Hillary and Jeb)?
We have said it for a very long time now. The Obama presidency will be judged by history as one of the most progressive, most transformative and most consequential in history. Barack Obama is far from done. He has gas in the tank yet, and he has history to make yet."
Meanwhile, one of the extreme right's BFF, Little Ricky Santorum, attracts a certifiable nut to his Security Action Summit speech.
Your modern Republican Party: -- Encouraging the paranoid crazies and not having the cajones to tell them to seek help. If you're looking for a representation of what has happened to the T-GOP, this woman is it:
Obama is dominating the agenda because the Republican "opposition" in Congress is congenitally incapable of getting anything done. Everything they attempt collapses in defeat and/or has unintended consequences and/or leaves them divided against themselves and blaming each other for the mess.
ReplyDeleteThey're not so much lame ducks as enraged baboons. You could put a bunch of enraged baboons in the Senate chamber, but all they would do is fling feces all over the place, just like they would back at the zoo. Quarrelsome fanatics don't stop being quarrelsome fanatics just because they get elected to something.
And now, right after their effort to hold DHS funding hostage implodes in ignominious defeat, they take the Lynch nomination hostage. Haven't they heard the classic definition of insanity?
Congress is pretty much out of the picture for two years until we can get rid of the baboons. Obama will run things because there's no one else to do it.
It is SO UNFAIR that the far right is way nuttier and more dangerous than the far left.
ReplyDeleteBagger definition of the "far left": Anyone who doesn't think Obama is a Commie Marxist Fascist Kenyan America-hating Muslim who wants to take away your guns! And blow up a nuke in Charleston SC!!!!!111!!!
Did you listen closely to the hysteria of that woman? That's the GOP in a nutshell alright!
PLEASE! Stop casting aspersions and asparagus to baboons. Any comparison to a Republican is beyond insulting.
ReplyDeleteObama may be a lame duck, but the republicans are just lame.
ReplyDeleteDon't expect the Baggers to understand any of this. They've swallowed so much magic unicorn Kool-Aid they're pooping rainbows.
ReplyDeleteAre people really surprised that Obama is eating the TeaPer's lunch? What have they done since they took the house in 2010 and the senate in 2014? Anyone?
ReplyDeleteAs far as I can tell, they've done nothing but suck up to foreign governments and leaders and continue to find ways to make the rich richer and make the already miserable more miserable by threatening to take away health insurance.
Enraged baboons is a good description of them,
Santorum appeared amused.
ReplyDeleteI loved your comment C. Johnson the 3rd.