Obama Year 2: Quo Vadis? Fecking up?

by Michael Blim

Question: The Barack Obama Administration in its first year has been characterized by

1. fecklessness
2. inexperience
3. incompetence
4. all of the above
5. none of the above

My friends, as it used to be said in Chicago, vote early and often. 

For my part, I’ll vote number 4. After all, incompetence and inexperience can be fixed by learning from mistakes and getting rid of the boobies.

There is no cure for fecklessness, or for the feckless which is probably more to the point.

Still competence and experience might make fecklessness less likely.

Each time I try to I try to sum up and draw the line on this Administration’s losses, with the hope of starting anew, I end up feeling like an idiot. I then stop listening to the TV and talking about politics with my friends while I stanch my losses, and then I try again.

I have decided that “feck” should be a verb, and “to feck” is to “coward up.” Take that high school teachers of English. 

So, January 21. After the Playgirl centerfold wins in my home state, President Obama responds with the Volker rules. OK, I think. It’s bad, but he is finally getting it. 

By February 4, the President “fecks up.” About health care legislation, he tells democratic faithful, “I think it’s very important for us to have a methodical, open process over the next several weeks, and let’s go ahead and make a decision,” Erica Werner of the Associated Press reports. (Boston Globe, 2/6/10, A9)  “And it may be that … if Congress decides we’re not going to do it, even after all the facts are laid out, all the options are clear, then the American people can make a judgment as to whether this Congress has done the right thing for them or not. And that’s how democracy works.” (elipsis in the original)

Memo to the President: 

1. Health care has been debated for a year – this after a half century of debate.
2. You have majorities in the House and the Senate that have passed the legislation in one form or another. Pass the bill by whatever means are possible, and never mind the niceties. Fifty plus Joe seems right to me in the Senate. One trusts that Speaker Pelosi, who doesn’t seem to feck around, realizes she won’t be speaker next year if she doesn’t jam health care through the House. Mr. President, when people feel you are fecking around, it is important to shove it down their throats.
3. Why did you take on that miserable attack dog Rahm Emmanuel in the White House if he weren’t going to bite the legs off people who don’t vote your way? Is there no price people are going to pay for f**cking you up?
4. After Wall Street and the banks f**cked up the country, how can you feck this one too?

A lot of good, important, but below the fold things are happening in this administration. Departments and agencies are belling the many cats’ tails that eight years of open contempt for the government as a guarantor of the public’s interests had unleashed at the cost of life, limb and well being. Attorney General Holder is trying to wrest a bit of justice out of system of hell-bent on denying detainees their human rights, including a jury trial for those treated to water-boarding just a couple of years ago. The Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, has spoken of knowingly having served with gay men and lesbian members of the Armed Forces and has argued that they be set free to serve their country with dignity as they choose.

President Obama, I don’t want a one-term president: your one term, if so, will have been an ignoble failure for all that you would have sacrificed. You will have set back the prospects of reform for a generation, as President Carter did.

Stop fecking around. It’s all or nothing now.