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the "far left"? who on earth are you talking about?
obama is a centrist. he's always been a centrist. he's about process. his administration doesn't seem to quite get the battle for news cycles and importance of appearing to be clear. rather, the communications strategy seems geared around process as well, which is i suppose a form of transparency, but it puts the administration at a continuous disadvantage in terms of framing its own actions. this isn't new as an issue...you'd have thought that they'd have figured out that this is a Problem. ever since machiavelli wrote that instruction manual for people holding power, it's been clear as day that image matters, that it is an aspect of power.
the problem with the republican tax cut extension is that it does nothing good for the economy at all. it does nothing good for anyone. it is not fiscally responsible. it does not help unemployment. it is a simple bone thrown to the nimrods on the right who still find themselves in the position of having to pretend that they were not of the bush period, that it is their economic ideology that is responsible for the disaster we've been in. so they're in marketing mode, illusion-building mode. and the administration capitulated in a high-profile way in order to get a series of measure that it wanted---and then did very little to control the way the capitulation was framed. with the result that the democrats are (were?) trying to scuttle the deal.
bad communication, really.
but caving in to the israeli far right was and is more egregious a failure.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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