I love Twitter. I think it’s the best way in the history of the planet to get “breaking news” about anything and everything, depending on who you follow. But some tweeters are obsessed with how many followers they have. 10,000 seems to be the point at which, no matter your gender, you grow a pair of balls.
Me? Hey — 82 people follow me and that’s fine. Life’s too short to worry about that.
Anyway, the thought I had when I started writing this post was one about how, again, some people seem to measure their worth in life by how many Twitter followers they have. Apropos of that, they try to increase their “stats” by resending the same message over and over again throughout the day, but prefacing it with, “As I said earlier…”
That would be like me putting a post up four, five, seven times a day with the identical headline, prefaced by, “As I posted earlier…”
People are losing their mind over this.
That said, I just saw a greasy, crispy piece of chicken fried steak with gravy and mashed potatoes being served up on the Travel Channel. OMG. Take me to the nearest place — I want some!
In their op-ed columns this weekend, both Bob Herbert and Frank Rich are screaming at President Obama to get real about the economy and jobs and to start biting back at the GOP which is willing to sit by and watch the failure “of American society itself” in order to get back in power:
But voters do not feel that the administration and Congress have delivered the fundamental change they were seeking when they swept President Obama and huge Democratic majorities into office nearly two years ago. Forget about the crazies in the Tea Party for the moment. Forget about the ugly Republican obstructionism that is based on the idea that the failure not just of President Obama but of American society itself is the G.O.P.’s quickest ticket back to power.
Forget about that for a moment. The Democrats are in deep, deep trouble because they have not effectively addressed the overwhelming concern of working men and women: an economy that is too weak to provide the jobs they need to support themselves and their families. And that failure is rooted in the Democrats’ continued fascination with the self-serving conservative belief that the way to help ordinary people is to shower money on the rich and wait for the blessings to trickle down to the great unwashed below.
It was a bogus concept when George H.W. Bush denounced it as “voodoo economics” in 1980, and it remains bogus today, no matter how hard the Democrats try to dress it up in a donkey costume.
As many have noted, the obvious political model for Obama this year is Franklin Roosevelt, who at his legendary 1936 Madison Square Garden rally declared that he welcomed the “hatred” of his enemies in the realms of “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.” As the historian David Kennedy writes in his definitive book on the period, “Freedom from Fear,” Roosevelt “had little to lose by alienating the right,” including those in the corporate elite, with such invective; they already detested him as vehemently as the Business Roundtable crowd does Obama.
Though F.D.R. was predictably accused of “class warfare,” his antibusiness “radicalism,” was, in Kennedy’s words, “a carefully staged political performance, an attack not on the capitalist system itself but on a few high-profile capitalists.” Roosevelt was trying to co-opt the populist rage of his economically despondent era, some of it uncannily Tea Party-esque in its hysteria, before it threatened that system, let alone his presidency. Only the crazy right confused F.D.R. with communists for taking on capitalism’s greediest players, and since our crazy right has portrayed Obama as a communist, socialist and Nazi for months, he’s already paid that political price without gaining any of the benefits of bringing on this fight in earnest.
F.D.R. presided over a landslide in 1936. The best the Democrats can hope for in 2010 is smaller-than-expected losses. To achieve even that, Obama will have to give an F.D.R.-size performance — which he can do credibly and forcibly only if he really means it. So far, his administration’s seeming coziness with some of the same powerful interests now vilifying him has left middle-class voters, including Democrats suffering that enthusiasm gap, confused as to which side he is on. If ever there was a time for him to clear up the ambiguity, this is it.
I can’t believe how badly the White House has blown the messaging over the last two years. They’ve been totally inept. I hope they listen to these two guys and to the hundreds if not thousands of other writers who are putting up posts just like these (ah yes, the “professional left”).
Obama — the future of the country is at stake. Remember the “fierce urgency of now?”
So, 2,000 people gathered last night in NYC “in support of religious freedom and the right to build a mosque near Ground Zero” but the big story on the teevee this morning is that the moronic Terry Jones, with 50 followers, has decided not to burn the Koran.
