Is This Barack Obama's 2nd Term? Is it Bill Clinton's 3rd? Or Is It Ronald Reagan's 9th?

[quinnox]

5. wow, powerful stuff -

This part is especially hard-hitting and jumped out at me:

"It works the same way at home. Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush would have liked to tamper with social security, but dared not. All Reagan could do was tell welfare queen jokes, and despite Reagan's open disdain of organized labor, NAFTA was a distant wet dream of corporations and billionaires. The first president Bush proposed NAFTA but could never get it through Congress. It took a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who marshaled a minority of Democrats in Congress to vote with Republicans both to pass NAFTA and to eliminate welfare. It was Bill Clinton who publicly embraced Republican myths about balancing the US budget, while allowing liberals to imagine he would deliver a “peace dividend.” The second president Bush openly trumpeted right wing lies about the solvency of social security and the (lies which Barack Obama happily repeats to this day) and tried more than once to privatize it. Again, that's continuity across administrations and parties.

True to form, Obama picked the ball up where his predecessors left it and has run relentlessly righward ever since. Barack Obama uses the language of the elites when he calls social security, Medicaid and Medicare and other federal benefits “entitlements” and asserts that their growth must be trimmed. He championed the formation of a deficit reduction commission chaired by Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson, both advocates of privatizing social security and drastic cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and federal benefits and tried to fast-track their recommendation through Congress. Fortunately that recommendation never came.

Just last week, Obama offered as his opening position in negotiations with Republicans, the chaining of social security and all other federal benefits to the consumer price index --- a monstrous betrayal that will reduce social security benefits by as much as $100 monthly by a decade from now. It wasn't anything he had been cornered into by Republicans. It was the point from which Barack Obama decided to start. That's continuity. Only a Republican president, like Richard Nixon, could go to China in the 1970s. Only a black Democrat can break his promises to labor on championing a card check law, refute his commitments to a just and fair media with network neutrality, and do nothing to roll back the prison state which has engulfed black and brown youth. Only a black Democrat could deport more Latinos than all the last three Republicans together, in his first term alone.

In the game of advancing the interests of the American people, it seems, Democrats and Republicans are not mutual opponents. They are a tag team, each one pushing the ball further and further down the field in the wrong direction. It's still winter in America, and the dead hand of Ronald Reagan still guides this nation, decades after his exit from the White House. Welcome to the 9th term of Ronald Reagan, in the person of Democrat Barack Hussein Obama."