You know what I don’t enjoy? Waking up and reading, before my coffee pot has finished producing my lifeblood, the press secretary for the White House engaging in a spate of hippie-punching so broad as to sweep up the folks on this blog. If I thought like Robert Gibbs apparently does, I would be unleashing my anger on Glenn Greenwald, because he was the messenger who put the link up on Twitter. But I’m a grown-up, so I’m going to hold Gibbs responsible for his tantrum-throwing statements like this:
The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”
Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: “They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”
Which is, of course, pure bullshit, since the PL he hates so much backed Obama up, and many of us were openly critical of Kucinich for being a weirdo who is ineffectual and attracts people who like lost causes. Which is why this statement from Gibbs is straight up self-defeating:
Gibbs said the professional left is not representative of the progressives who organized, campaigned, raised money and ultimately voted for Obama.
If he believes that, I have a bridge to sell him in the city he forgot to mention in his anti-hippie tirade. I know I sent money to the Obama campaign, as did practically every person I know who nonetheless feels like it’s our job to hold Democrats’ feet to the fire when they go off on one of their missions to sell out on the grim chance that one of those Tea Crackers waving a sign about “Obamacare” will suddenly have a change of heart. The ugly reality is that the netroots that Gibbs is generically castigating, as well as cable TV hosts like Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann, are a major reason that Obama won. Good luck with those midterms distancing yourself from the people that got you elected! What’s really annoying is Gibbs is basically freaking out because Maddow and Olbermann do their jobs. Sorry that the Obama administration doesn’t have a bunch of professional sycophants like Bush did with Fox News. But it’s actually a good thing to have honest journalists who do their damn job of holding the government accountable.
Remember, Gibbs: You work for us.
I had two competing thoughts when confronted with this bout of hippie-punching, besides the initial, “So, like, Gibbs really wants the Republicans to sweep in November as a bunch of disenchanted liberals stay home, then?”
1) I am not a hippie. Seriously, these broad-based attacks on “The Left” for refusing to be sycophants are called hippie-punching for a good reason. The problem is that while there are still some Baby Boomers that are fond of being barefoot and a few trustfarians out there with white boy dreadlocks, most of us aren’t fucking hippies. On the contrary, a lot of us relate to the very people that work in the Obama administration—-hell, some on the The Left have friends and family in the Obama administration. It’s an Othering of your own fucking people. I don’t wear patchouli or sleep in a van. I hate smoking pot and don’t do it. Being supportive of gay marriage, being against torture, and believing that the government should do more during a depression, a la FDR? These simply aren’t out-there crazy hat opinions, as much as cowardly Democrats would like to pretend otherwise. As one of the non-hippie hippies who had the specific audacity to call bullshit on the Obama administration’s willingness to sell out the pro-choice movement that offers so much support, I’m especially annoyed. I’ve often defended the Democrats against some attacks I thought were a tad unfair—-for instance, I’m really not sure how much you could have done to corral Bart Stupak, who was so self-absorbed on the abortion issue he actually ruined his own career over it—-but when the Obama administration does something straight up cowardly they didn’t have to do, then hell yeah, I’m going to say something. That doesn’t mean that I abhor shoes and showers.