Free Republic

African-American leaders fear academic rebel Cornel West’s fierce attacks on the president could spell trouble in 2012. How did Cornel West become the administration’s No. 1 gadfly? The noted African-American scholar and radio host may have helped Barack Obama into the White House, but he has spent the better part of the president’s term taking shots at him, calling him a “black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs,” among other names. “These last few weeks have only proven my point about Brother Obama,” West says in his signature “one love” voice as he talks about the debt-reduction debacle on Capitol Hill....

Link only - Obama's liberal base 'disengaged'

Liberals gin up their engines for kamikaze missions By: Chris Stirewalt Political Editor January 21, 2010 Pundits on the Left are suggesting that the reason Massachusetts voters rejected Martha Coakley -- aside from her personal failings as a candidate - is that Democrats in Washington failed to pursue a sufficiently liberal agenda. As Sen. John Kerry and the other leaders of the Massachusetts Democratic Party were still standing on stage, jaws slack and eyes vacant, commentators Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC said that the vote was proof that President Obama and his team had to act urgently to...

Barack Obama was never the progressive ideologue many of his supporters hoped he'd be. He ran as a fairly centrist, cautious candidate, and that's how he's governed. Though to his credit, he's been office for less than a year, and he's already decided to blow most of his political capital on a party-line vote to reform healthcare, something his predecessor George W. Bush never dared to try with, say, Social Security. But because healthcare doesn't include a public option, thus leaving the for-profit insurers to make a fortune on the great insuring of America, and because Wall Street reform seems...

In the last year or so of George W. Bush’s second term, commentators used to talk a lot about the conspicuous scarcity of other Republicans willing to stand up and defend him. I never thought we’d see Barack Obama face the same problem before his first year was over. But as Obama’s approval scores — 50 percent in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll — sink, it is getting harder and harder to find a full-throated supporter of the president. You need go no further from here than the op-ed page of Thursday’s Washington Post to see what I mean....

Boy, this “Obama Derangement Syndrome” really has gotten out of hand. Why, just this past week the decreasingly popular president has been called a “bald-faced liar,” “an executive who can’t bring himself to lead,” and even an “Uncle Tom.” And that’s just by liberals. The progressive crack-up, before Obama even reaches the end of his first year, has been an awesome and occasionally humorous sight to see. Undead ’60s warhorse Tom Hayden got the ball rolling in early December with his dramatic announcement in The Nation that, with the president’s decision to increase troop levels, “It’s time to strip the...

President Obama is about to accomplish what many previous Democratic presidents have tried to do, and failed. At least that's what the White House spin would be, and it will largely be echoed throughout the Democratic Party. No, they will say, the health care reform bill won't have a public option, but it will extend coverage to millions of people and provide a framework to build on for the future. You would expect the liberals who put him in office to be thrilled. They're not. Here are a couple of highlights from the liberal blogosphere: Taylor Marsh (Huffington Post) "Pres....

There comes a moment in politics when the blinders fall off the supporters of the other guy and they discover what you have known all along: He’s a fraud. The blinders just fell off Matt Taibbi, a writer for Rolling Stone magazine. He just now noticed that while 26% of the money Barack Obama raised came from “small” donors, nearly 3 times as much came from big donors, who ponied up a half billion bucks. Where the 26% saw Hope and Change, the 74% saw Invest and Collect. Wrote Taibbi: “What’s taken place in the year since Obama won the...

The DUmmies are quickly losing their faith in The One. Why? Because it looks more and more likely that any health care program that is passed will have NO "public option" which are code words for "single payer" which are code words for "socialized medicine." Actually it is becoming increasingly unlikely that there will be any health care program, other than just some meaningless Happy Face plan for PR purposes only, coming out of Congress this year or anytime in the foreseeable future. As Obama himself said, we have run OUT of money. Also the Chinese holds a major...

Black Agenda Report’s Bruce Dixon joined Sirius XM’s Left channel’s Mark Thompson on May 27th and questioned some of Mr. Obama’s policies. Mr.Dixon, the managing editor of blackagendareport.com asks some telling questions about why those who opposed former President George W. Bush on particular policies support Mr. Obama who is continuing many of those same Bush era policies. He told Sirius/XM radio host Mr.Thompson,

I would like this thread to be a compilation of stories from those of you who have friends or acquantances who voted for Obama, and are now souring and letting it be known. I've been reading comments from time to time in varying threads from posters saying that they have family/friends, etc., that are turning on obummer. Let's warm our cockles by assembling the anecdotal evidence here!

President Obama is just killing the progressive movement. For the past few years, liberal activists have gathered in Washington each spring for the Take Back America conference, where speaker after speaker -- Obama sometimes among them -- would give rollicking denunciations of the Bush administration before packed rooms of partisans. But now that Obama has actually taken back America, the activists at this year's gathering feel a bit like the dog that finally caught up with the car. Organizers changed the name from Take Back America to America's Future Now, but that didn't prevent a sharp decline in participation. At...

IT'S INCREASINGLY EVIDENT THAT OBAMA SHOULD RESIGN The State Journal-Register http://www.sj-r.com/opinions/x12460 932/Ted-Rall-It-s-increasingly-evident-that-Obama-should-resign May 29 2009 MIAMI -- We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama's inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through. >From health care to torture to the economy to war, Obama has reneged on pledges real and implied. So timid and so owned is he that he trembles in fear of offending, of all things, the government of Turkey. Obama has...

Four decades ago, the liberal, antiwar wing of the Democratic Party helped to force President Lyndon B. Johnson from office. Specifically, Johnson decided not to run for re-election in 1968 in large part because of rising primary challenges and increasingly vitriolic demonstrations against him. One chant that was heard often at anti-Vietnam War rallies was "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" The level of anger now is nowhere close to that level, but there are warning signs that President Obama is starting to generate serious opposition on the fiery left. There is increasing unease about his...

Some of his actions have unsettled liberals, but it's the economy that could undermine Obama's support Democratic strategists are concerned that some of President Obama's recent policy decisions may end his honeymoon with his party's liberal activists. "His problem will be, how can he convince the left to let him be pragmatic?" says a prominent Obama supporter. Obama has unsettled liberals by delaying his promised withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq by a few months and by defending some of the Bush administration's antiterrorism policies, including the protection of "state secrets" in a way that some liberals believe goes...

For many liberals, that Obamagasmic "tingle going up their legs" from the campaign season -- to paraphrase MSNBC's Chris Matthews -- may have crept upward into stomach-churning queasiness as Inauguration Day nears. Consider this counterfactual: If John McCain had won the 2008 presidential election (just a scant half million votes needed to swing the other way in Colorado, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia ... I know, I know), it's easy to imagine him picking Bono-approved, "new age" evangelist Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation, leaving Robert Gates as defense secretary and proposing an economic stimulus package that...

CAN YOU HEAR the grumbling over in what Howard Dean used to call "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party?" The tolerance-and-diversity crowd is upset with Barack Obama; it seems the president-elect has been bringing people into his circle who don't agree with them on every single issue. The consternation on the left began with the naming of Obama's national security team - Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Robert Gates to continue as secretary of defense, and retired four-star General James Jones as national security adviser. "Barack Obama's Kettle of Hawks," they were promptly dubbed in the Guardian by...

Controversy has always been Cynthia McKinney's trademark. This election season, she may have finally found her perfect political home. Last weekend, the 53-year-old former Georgia congresswoman clinched the Green Party's presidential nomination; 35-year-old hip-hop artist and activist Rosa Clemente will be her running mate. A firebrand politician best known for her impolitic statements during her more than 20 years in public life, McKinney has had a mixed electoral record as a Democrat in her district in recent years. After 10 years in office, she was upset in 2002 by fellow Democrat Denise Majette, re-elected in 2004, and ousted again in...

Leaving the Left   By Jacob LaksinFrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, July 15, 2008 Not so long ago, Barack Obama was the darling of the anti-war Left. On a host of national security issues – Iraq, Iran, government surveillance of terrorists – Obama preached a friendly gospel and was worshipped in turn as a political “messiah.” The liberal grassroots, sensing a kindred spirit in the Illinois Senator, rewarded him with the Democratic nomination. Nothing could come between Obama and his base. Now something has. In a word: reality. As he courts the national electorate, Obama can ill-afford to sing from the...

Sen. John McCain on Monday accused his Democratic presidential rival of flip-flopping on the war in Iraq, as a pair of new polls showed the Republican's strategy of painting Sen. Barack Obama as politically expedient is beginning to take hold with voters. As Mr. Obama repositions himself for the general election after exclusively targeting the Democratic base of committed liberals, it leaves some voters on the left feeling he is abandoning them on their top issue - Iraq - and has independents questioning his veracity. "If a perception takes hold that a candidate is flip-flopping on core convictions, that will...