White House unloads anger over criticism from 'professional left’

From the Hill, courtesy of, well, everybody:

During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: “They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”

More here.

Of course, the "professional" left is absolutely outraged. Not me, though. Frankly, I've been wondering for a while when White House rhetoric on liberals was finally going to match its actions. Now that the other shoe has dropped, so to speak, I'm kind of giggling about it all.

That is, as I've been writing here since it became clear that Obama was going to win the primary back in 2008, President Hope And Change is no liberal. Indeed, he's a corporatist Democrat, conservative, even, on virtually everything except the so-called social issues, FOX News weirdos and psychotic Tea people notwithstanding. President Obama has never approached his work in the nation's highest office from a liberal perspective, and anybody who's been paying close attention already knew that.

So this is kind of a "Ha! Told you so!" moment for me vis-a-vis liberal Democratic loyalists. I mean, my smug satisfaction in this arena has been slowly growing in the months since he was elected, watching liberals slowly realize that Obama is not the person they allowed themselves to believe he was. But this is a smoking gun, a frying pan to the face of stupid fucking liberals from sea to shining sea.

I wonder if it will have any effect on their ass-embedded heads.

In most ways, this has a lot less to do with Obama than it does with where the Democratic Party is today on the ideological spectrum. Whatever historical associations the party has had with the plight of average ordinary working citizens have degenerated for decades now into not much more than lip service. This became obvious to honest political observers by the mid 1990s when President Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council had finally solidified control of the party in the wake of its resounding defeat in the 1994 Congressional elections. Behind the scenes Democratic power brokers were saying "fuck the left" and holding out their greedy hands for corporate donations. In front of the cameras it was all lovey-dovey with the AFL-CIO. Clinton's reelection in 1996, and Gore's near election in 2000, simply convinced Democrat insiders that the DLC road was the right one to take.

Liberals seemed to notice none of this, continuing to see the Democratic Party as their natural political home. Actually, some of them did notice, voting for Ralph Nader in small numbers in '96, 2000, and 2004. But most liberals apparently had absolutely no idea what had happened to "their" party, even going so far as to blame Nader for Gore's loss, in spite of overwhelming, if unpublicized, evidence of GOP vote tampering. Thus, liberals have been in a state of total delusion and denial about American politics for a decade and a half.

That is, we now live in a de facto corporate state, with our elected officials responding far more to the influence of vast concentrations of wealth than they do to the concerns of regular Americans. The Republicans, obviously, are the corporate party of the far right: the Democrats are the corporate party of the right and middle right. And this is the party that nominated Obama to run for President. Of course, he's not a liberal. The Democrats no longer have the ability to nominate an actual liberal.

But nostalgia for the glory days when Democrats were truly left-of-center, for the most part, continues to hold the majority of America's left wing in thrall. All Democratic politicians have to do is make a few vague statements about jobs or abortion or whatnot, and that's good enough for the stupid liberal Democrat. "He's one of us, guys! Let's go knock on some doors!" The Party fully understands how liberals swallow its bullshit good-vibes rhetoric, and has benefited greatly from the deception. Liberals, conversely, continue to be clueless, always ready to line up and bend over.

Sure, they're mad now, but my bet is that they'll simmer down by November, totally ready to campaign and vote for candidates who do not in any way represent their political views. Tea Baggers are stupid because they think Obama is a socialist. Ditto for Democrat liberals.

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