On the speech

From Hullabaloo:

I will say this: Inaugural speeches are often legacy speeches and based on this speech I'm going to guess that whatever his policies actually were and are, he told us today that he would like to be remembered by most people as a progressive president, not a centrist technocrat. Certainly, it won't be centrists or the conservatives who bestow it on him --- positive legacies are sustained by the members of your own party and ideology. If he wants to be in the liberal pantheon beyond the obvious (and very real) accomplishment of becoming the first African American president and some movement on gay rights, the second term will have to be different from the first. From the sound of today's address, it would seem that he wants it to be. And if that's true, progressives have some leverage.

A bit more here.

I'll believe it when I see it.

I've sat for the last four years and watched Obama-the-liberal behave like a conservative on everything but the so-called social issues, which only psycho extremists on the right give a shit about anymore.  I watched as he shepherded a too-small stimulus package through Congress that was mostly tax cuts.  I watched as he gave free money to fraudulent asshole bankers, without any strings attached, which allowed them to continue their fraudulent practices, and to do nothing to repair the wrecked economy they left behind.  I watched as he refused to prosecute these banksters.  I watched as he did nothing about people being thrown out of their houses by those same fraudulent bankers.  I watched as he refused to prosecute anybody from the Bush administration for torture and other war crimes.  Indeed, I watched as he continued many of Bush's worst programs from the "War on Terror," even going further than his predecessor in some areas.  I watched as he treated BP with kid gloves even while oil gushed up from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.  I watched as his federal agencies coordinated the local crackdown on the Occupy movement, even while he denied that this was happening.  I watched as he wrapped up piles of industry friendly dog shit in a wrapper called "health care reform."  I watched as he extended the Bush tax cuts for the rich.  I watched as he offered to cut the fuck out of Social Security, again and again, in exchange for cooperation from the Republicans--indeed, we were only saved from this travesty because the Republicans were too stupid to take the deal.  I watched as the big liberal Obama refused to even give rhetorical lip-service to progressive values.  And on and on.

The President has proven to me numerous times that he is no liberal.  It doesn't matter that the conservatives are so out in fantasy field at this point that they think he is a socialist.  He's a conservative who would be just as much at home in George HW Bush's Republican Party of 1988 as he is in the Democratic Party today.  He's no liberal.

So forgive me if I just straight up don't believe all these liberal platitudes he included in his inaugural address.  Talk is cheap.  Show me some action.

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