Gibbs, to Meredith Vieira, on ‘Today’: ‘The president believes that somewhere in all of this, we can find common ground. … The American people … didn’t vote in November for gridlock.’
Senate Republicans intend to block action on virtually all Democratic-backed legislation unrelated to tax cuts and government spending in the current postelection session of Congress, officials said Tuesday, adding that the leadership has quietly collected signatures on a letter pledging to carry out the strategy.
CBS News senior White House correspondent Bill Plante said officials had confirmed the letter was being circulated among Senate Republicans.
If carried out, it would doom Democratic-backed attempts to end the Pentagon’s practice of discharging openly gay members of the military service and give legal status to young illegal immigrants who join the military or attend college.
It’s clear that the White House and the Senate Republicans have two diametrically opposed opinions of what the election meant in November. Oftentimes you hear talk of the brilliance of American voters, who will vote one party into the White House and the other party into one or both chambers of Congress. This recipe makes gridlock fundamentally likely and easy. Unfortunately it seems to be what the GOP wants to take away from the voters is that they should get to do whatever they want, regardless of its human cost. Blocking anything from happening is their mission now and will continue to be for the next two years. Pretending otherwise is going to be a very dangerous from a tactical standpoint.
Hold Fast 
It’s gotten to the point that one has to wonder what Obama’s motives are: is he a chickenshit liberal or is he actually a conservative? Krugman and Ian would say he’s conservative.
After all this time of hoping for hope, I’ve got to agree that Obama is a conservative.
I believe he’s getting exactly what he wants. His frustration with the GOP can be understood as kabuki. He WANTS to give in, because at heart he wants what the GOP wants: to continue the status quo for elites.
It’s like Obama is a plant that the GOP placed into the Democratic Primary back in ’08.
Imagine picking sides for a flag football game and the guy who ends up being your quarterback actually wants the other team to win. What would he do? Nothing super obvious. Number one, he’s not going to play very hard. He’s going to call dumb, easily read plays. Occasionally he’ll throw an easy interception and pretend like he’s angry; either mad at the intended receiver, or mad at himself, or mad at the defense.
At a certain point, you’ve got to ask: who does he want to win?
One thing’s for certain, he doesn’t want liberals to win.
GET OVER HIM! Primary Obama. Otherwise, when he goes down in flames in 2012, he’ll take liberal ideology down with him. Low-information voters will associate liberalism with the horrible wreckage of his White House and never return to it for as long as they live. Then the Republic is fucked.
If liberals like us don’t repudiate Obama, publicly, ASAP – then liberalism is dead in America. The political debate will be between conservatism, libertarianism, and theocracy. Those will be our only choices.
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