The Rabbit Ragu Democrats By FRANK RICH

[babsbunny]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/opinion/04rich.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

By FRANK RICH
Published: October 3, 2009

IN the annals of American excess, there often arrives a moment when those with too much money, too much clout and too much hubris just can’t stop themselves from tempting the fates. They throw an over-the-top party in public, or parade their wealth and power before the press, and the next thing you know their world, and sometimes ours, has crashed.

In the go-go Reagan 1980s, the junk bond king Michael Milken bedazzled investors with lavish Predators’ Balls in Beverly Hills. Sure enough, he and Wall Street would end the decade in ruin. Back East, the financier Saul Steinberg celebrated his 50th birthday in 1989 with a $1 million party in the Hamptons. “Honey, if this moment were a stock, I’d short it,” he said when toasting his wife. He would soon suffer a stroke and see his company go bankrupt.

[tblue]

1. Just read the whole op. This is so disappointing.

Obama needs to rember where he came from and who put him where he is, or he will be a one- termer. This just turns my stomach.

[gateley]

2. Whoa, disappointing is right. And depressing. nt

[jgraz]

8. Obama knows exactly who put him where he is.

The Wall Street criminals and the infinitely gullible hope-and-changers. He's made it pretty clear he doesn't need the left.

[ShortnFiery]

9. As highly intelligent as President Obama is I believe, this present BUBBLE he's in ...

has made him too arrogant. He UNDERESTIMATES the power of his rhetoric on a still viable "intellectually curious" class of the unwashed masses.

IMO, many of those of us "hope and changers" are not as gullible as Wall Street and the Pentagon would have him think.

It's time to do SOMETHING for the American People.

And that does NOT include *endless corporate welfare* for the upper 1% while throwing the unwashed masses the scraps.

Having insurance coverage doesn't mean squat when you must go bankrupt to pay for a catastrophic illness. :thumbsdown:

p.s. Most of us "chattering classes" believe Osama is either dead, or close to it within Pakistan. Slapping up a picture of Osama and playing an audio track in the background is, let me say, UNCONVINCING. Further, sending more troops in to kill and die while they continue to terrorize the people of that war-torn land DEVOID OF AL QUAEDA is NOT the answer.

[Captain Hilts]

11. The WH is always trying put the Left on a leash. Not so the Blue Cross Blue Shield Dems. nt

[AllentownJake]

3. I had a feeling he was going to sell out his supporters

When Larry Summers and Tim Geithner walked onto the stage.

I also knew it was the death of any chance of real economic recovery.

[gateley]

4. Yeah, some of his choices concerned me, too.

Then I tried to tell myself (like with Paulson) who better to help clean it up than one of the ones who made the mess? I heard someone liken it to companies hiring former hackers to help with their tech security. I glomped onto that, I guess.

We'll just have to wait and see how it all comes down. If he has let us down, then he'll lose our support -- he's got to know that.

[AllentownJake]

6. I had the same logic pushed onto me

My argument back was you don't make a Hacker the head of your IT security department. Nor do you make someone who was convicted of fraud as the head of your white collar criminal investigations.

I knew when those two walked across the stage it was over economically for this country.

[gateley]

13. You're right -- key here being the "head" of the department.

Why do you think he chose them? (I'm trying to understand)

[Captain Hilts]

12. Hanging out with Jim Cooper and Sam Nunn and meeting with Colin Powell during the primaries

was my clue.

I wish Feingold and Clark had run.

[catzies]

5. He said for me what I didn't hear in "Capitalism, Inc."

I came away with that feeling more hopeless than energized toward making a change and I wasn't sure why until I read Rich's colum and realized the source of my unesiness: that going up against THIS SYSTEM is not what it's going to take to change things.

I don't think we'll get the CHANGE WE NEED unless we can change the SYSTEM to what we need to get things done.

[AllentownJake]

7. Good and bad news

The system is about to unravel.

In a consumer economy, unemployment leads to more unemployment. Each of the workers servicing something is servicing something on the behest of someone producing something. The less people producing, the less people servicing. We have yet to even near hit bottom on unemployment and it is about to hit the next stage.

The fact that a significant amount of the retirement and savings in this country is invested in the companies of this country is also not good. People have been rich on paper for years. We turned the stock market into a bank and there will be another run on the bank.

That is the bad news.

The good news is that a lot of people are going to be extremely pissed off when the above happens.

[Vinnie From Indy]

10. I agree!

I believe that the economic troubles we are having are just the foreshocks of a more severe economic earthquake. It is very doubtful that any of the manufacturing jobs that we have lost will ever come back to our shores.