With Health Care And Appointments, Obama Has Told GOP: I'm Not Jimmy Carter

By Manifesto Joe

I hope he's not LBJ, either, with the two foreign quagmires he inherited from Il Doofus. But he seems to have put the Republicans on well-deserved notice. He genuinely tried to work with them, and they are quite determined not to let it happen.

So, Obama decided to use the current congressional recess to put through 15 stalled appointments that are holding up the wheels of government. Here's the story from Yahoo! News.

The Republicans are, ironically, braying like jackasses about this, even after they have threatened the filibuster in many unprecedented ways to hold up routine nominations. I think they need to reconsider their choice of animal mascots. The elephant is a noble creature, famous for its memory. Nothing could be further from the current Republican reality.

Jimmy Carter is arguably the best former U.S. president -- a man unquestionably ethical, and of very high intelligence. Unfortunately, he wasn't prepared for the kind of partisan games he encountered in Washington, perhaps because of his lack of experience in the Beltway. He will always wear the albatross of "ineffectual" in retrospectives on his presidency. I think Obama, after a sincere period of bipartisan efforts, has concluded that this is not going to be the way to get things done in the current climate.

I worried about Obama at first, and confess that I voted for Hillary Clinton in the March 2008 Democratic primary here largely because of concern about Obama's relative inexperience. It would appear though, that a few years in the Senate, plus the expert background in constitutional law, prepared him much better than widely expected.

He hasn't delivered entirely on the promise, but something is better than nothing. I'll take something.

Hit 'em again, Barry.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.