Have We Been Sold Out Yet?

We’ve been ignoring the debt-ceiling talks as long as possible, in part because it’s a ginned-up crisis that nobody cares about, in part because the daily play-by-play is fucking boring — but really because we just want to know how much we’re getting screwed and be done with it.

We’ve been so heroic in our disregard, we managed to ignore an entire day of flailing, following the deliberately provocative suggestion the Social Security and Medicare are now among the lambs to be sacrificed to the Gods of Bipartisanship.

At least, that is, until Glenn Greenwald socked us in the kisser:

When I first began writing about politics in late 2005, the standard liberal blogosphere critique — one I naively believed back then — was that Democrats were capitulating so continuously to the Bush agenda because they “lacked spine” and were inept political strategists: i.e., they found those policies so very offensive but were simply unwilling or unable to resist them. It became apparent to me that this was little more than a self-soothing conceit: Democrats continuously voted for Bush policies because they were either indifferent to their enactment or actively supported them, and were owned and controlled by the same factions as the GOP.

This certainly isn’t a new critique — we all can name our favorite conservative Democrats — and it’s not even new when applied to Barack Obama, especially if you recall the consternation when he originally handed over his Cabinet to Wall Street.

It’s just that, at this particular moment, we’re having a hard time resisting it.

We never bought into the Svengali Rahm theory, that somehow a henchman was keeping The Preznit from releasing his Inner Progressive. Obama’s been in charge from Day One. Yet despite our own longstanding frustration, we’ve somehow felt there was an Inner Progressive in there somewhere, but trapped by circumstance.

The circumstances are bad as they ever were, in some ways worse. And hey, you play the hand you’re dealt. But the poker metaphor only goes so far — a President can change the rules. This President hasn’t. We’re honestly left wondering what Barack Obama stands for, because while he’s not a pandering idiot like Romney, he doesn’t seem to believe in anything except mediation. And silly us, we thought we had voted for a leader.

It’s been said that throughout his political career, Barack Obama has been lucky in his opponents. We see no reason for that luck to change next year, since all his prospective opponents are flat-out unthinkable. But if the only reason to vote for Obama in 2012 is that he’s Not Michele Bachmann, we’ll have come a long way since 2008.

Reports: Obama pushing for cuts to Social Security, Medicare [Greenwald]