Embarassed by Barack Obama? Seriously?

This afternoon I got an email from some organization asking if I was embarrassed by Barack Obama.  Normally I would just delete something like this, but this time I felt like I had to  answer them.  I clicked through the screens until I got to a place where I could write a comment.  I knew what they were after and I wasn't going to fall for it.

I'm not sure whether this post is going to be just a few paragraphs or many pages, so I'll go ahead and get to the point.  A lot was happening in 2007 and 2008. We finally realized that the panic of 9/11 wasn't going to last forever.  The economy was collapsing because our president allowed bankers to reap huge profits at the expense of working Americans.  Our attention had been diverted to security threats that actually didn't exist.  And we fell for it.  We had a president who didn't know how to lead a country like ours, so he diverted our attention to some thing else hoping wouldn't know ant better.  It worked.  We fell for it.

Along came Barack Obama.  He had a message of hope.  During the campaign he was honest with us.  He said that the country's problems could be fixed, but it would be painful.  And he was right.  On the night of the presidential election when I saw that he was winning I thought things were going to change.  And it wasn't just me.  The next day our country was energized and ready for change.  We though that, for once, the United States was going to recover from it's challenges and things were going to be ok.  There was hope.  We were wrong.

The reality is that a president can't just win an election, move into the White House,  and turn everything upside down.  That's the whole idea of our system of checks and balances.  It protects us from one branch of government taking control of the country and doing whatever they want. Barack Obama's fault was that he thought that, if he was the president, then he would be able to change everything without any opposition.

The reality is that he had to deal with a Republican congress.  To those fuckers it doesn't matter if what you want to do is good for the country.  What matters is if it's good for the Republican party and the campaign contributors who paid to get them elected.  Pure and simple.  They are robots, incapable of any logical thought on their own.  And big business owns the Republican party.  They contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to re-elect those guys and, once elected, they own that Senator or Representative.  They have effectively bought a legislator.  When a legislator is elected, the first thing he/she does is figure out how they can serve the entities that put them in office.  The second thing they do is start jockeying for a job for after they leave office.  It's a seriously corrupt and pathetic system.

Legislators will tell you that they represent their constituents. That's not you and me, the people who voted for them.  That's big pharmaceutical companies, oil and gas companies, and any other company that does things most Americans would consider unacceptable behavior but are able to write big checks to get these guys elected.  They have effectively bought representatives for their interests, regardless of what is right and just for the rest of us.

So much for getting to the point I guess.  To answer the question that was asked of me, then no, I am not embarrassed by Barack Obama.  I am proud of him and would vote to elect him again.  He didn't achieve the things he promised, but at least he tried, which is more than I can say for any other president in my lifetime.