A Nation of Cynics
Just two weeks into the Obama administration, naysayers are already pronouncing the man and his administration a failure! And the reason, his promise to institute ethics reform and the revelation that some of his nominees had lapsed tax payments. That’s right. The same group who sat idly by, and in most cases were accomplices in President George W. Bush’s ethical war on the American people; those who kept deathly silent when prisoners were being tortured to death in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib; the highfalutin bastards who looked the other way when the Justice department engaged in the most egregious form of nepotism, mediocrity and racial and sexual discriminations; the holier-than-thou miscreants who hailed George W. Bush to the high heavens even as thousands of American men and women were being slaughtered in Iraq and Afghanistan; the idiotic and myopic wallabies who encouraged Israel to commit untold atrocities in the Palestinian territories, especially Gaza and were quick to blame everything on “terrorists” even as we supported the best of them; the empty shells who blocked every attempt to bring some sanity to the situation in Dafour, Sudan; the hypocrites who wore their “Christian” faith on their sleeves, and sometimes on their foreheads and were determined to return us to the “kingdom” by foisting their “values” and bigotry on the rest of us.
If their justification for pronouncing the Obama administration a failure after just two weeks in office is the tax issue that has bedevilled some of the president’s nominees for office, they glibly overlooked the fact that except for Tim Gaithner (the Treasury Secretary), everyone involved has graciously stepped down or recused themselves from the process – a scenario that was unthinkable in the era of George W. Bush.
There is no mistaking the reality that some have suddenly found their faith and will pray fervently for the presidency of Obama to fail, a good example being Rush Limbaugh. There are others who are still flabbergasted that Obama won the election, despite their best efforts to thwart his campaign and for these folks, no matter what Obama does, they will never be satisfied. They did not expect him to win the presidency and may never be able to come to grips with the reality that he IS the president.
The media is obviously still trying to figure out how to handle a president Obama, hence the heavy doses of cynicism we get from “experts” and commentators every evening. Every “bad” news is expressed as a “blow” to the president’s credibility, his ability to work in a bi-partisan mode or sleep with his eyes shut. There is frustration with his lack of enthusiasm in playing along with the media by dwelling on trivial and non-relevant issues during press conferences.
For a country that claims to be the leader of the world, it is ironic that the rest of the world is showing us how to hope for a better future by basing their policies and actions on the expectation of the changes in American policies that will be engendered by this administration.
It took us over 200 years to develop our cynical culture and anyone who is expecting Obama to change that in two weeks is being ridiculous. And they accused his supporters of seeing him as the Messiah!!