Transparent (Or: The worm turns)

Robert Kuttner -- who once supported the Lightbringer so mechanically as to earn the name rObot Kuttner (see this hilarious post from the past) -- now sends his regrets:

I fear that these columns have been too polite. They have directed criticisms at Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and national economic policy chief Larry Summers. Lord knows, they richly deserve the criticism. But let's not kid ourselves. The man they work for is named Barack Obama.

President Obama has promised to run an administration of unprecedented openness. And in some respects, such as the ground rules for spending stimulus funds, he has. But in the most important area of all, the financial rescue, the administration is making trillion dollar decisions relying on the Federal Reserve and a small Wall Street club of advisors, with no transparency or public accountability.

Remember the primaries? Remember how progs kept telling us that the problem with Clinton's health care initiative was its lack of transparency?

(Of course, progblog smears against the Clinton health plan were blatant attempts to rewrite history in order to befuddle the young and the ignorant.)

What we have is something perilously close to a dictatorship of the Fed and the Treasury, acting in the interests of Wall Street. The contrasts with the first hundred days of the Roosevelt administration are striking. Like Roosevelt, Obama faces an economic emergency. Like Roosevelt, he faces an angry public, which has been bilked by excesses on Wall Street. And like Roosevelt, Obama has a supportive Democratic Congress that is willing to substantially defer to the White House on an emergency recovery plan.

But unlike Roosevelt, who used the public's indignation and Congress's support to constrain the barons of private finance, Obama's economic team is using government funds to put the most abusive players on Wall Street back in the saddle. And Geithner and Summers, working with the Fed, are assembling their plan with no public scrutiny.

Kuttner's not the only one voicing regret. The DUmmies have begun to awaken from their haze. Some of them sound an awful lot like the wife who tries to tell herself that hubby is faithful despite the lipstick stains on his crotch. This DUpe mounts a less tentative challenge to the Lightbringer:

Some powerful interests that President Obama seems unwilling to challenge...

His list includes "The Bush administration war criminals," "The Military Industrial Complex," "Failing banks," and...er..."The private health insurance industry." Moreover:

Obama’s continuation of several Bush “War on Terror” policies is difficult to fathom. President Obama is continuing Bush policies on using the “state secrets” to shield criminals from criminal or civil law suits, abolishing the right to habeas corpus, and blurring the checks and balances of our Constitution regarding the separation of powers.

Cognitive dissonance has caused some DUmmies to propose an explanatory conspiracy theory:

You can like Obama as a person and still realize that he doesn't have the POWER, even if he'd like to… As much as you may love Obama, just realize that he is mostly a figure head, he can only do so much, the rest is up to us…. We also aren't doing anyone any favors if we channel our anger and distrust at him as opposed to the assholes who are really in charge.

Ah yes. "THEY."

We can't blame Obama: Doing so would mean admitting that we were wrong, we were duped, we bought into the lie, we marched in a straight line because we saw everyone else marching in a straight line. Admissions of that sort would bruise the ego. Better, by far, to place the blame on -- well, you know. On THEM.

Of course, this "blame-shifting" ploy is all nonsense.

Nothing stops the Obama justice department from going after the BushCo criminals. No unseen manipulators force Obama to continue the assault on our rights. The Illuminati isn't goading Obama into a new disaster in Afghanistan. "THEY" did not force an unwilling Obama into capitulating to Wall Street interests.

The problem is not "THEM."

The problem, all along, has been blind, ignorant, arrogant progs. They were too dumb to recognise the long con, and now they are too smug to admit that they were marks.

Let us never forget that we are dealing with the same howling mob that graced us, during the primaries, with the following observations re: the Clintons (see here):

"Just slit her throat, lock her in a car boot, and drive the car into river in West Virginia. Ain’t gonna let no whore screw with the man"

She is OFFICIALLY a fucked up human piece of trash.

Hey Bill:

FUCK YOU. HARD.

Get the fuck over yourself....

The Clintons shoud have been arrested long ago; Travelgate, Whitewater, Vince Foster's supposed suicide"

"Hillary is a liar and a cunt"

She’s a monster who just won’t die. In fact, she really should just die.

Bush Clinton crime family must be eradicated.

I could list many, many, many, many more examples. As each day passes, those old snippets from campaign '08 make for increasingly hilarious reading.