A Little Old-Fashioned Vituperation...

...does a body good.

Let us begin with Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton is a snake-oil salesman, and the son of a snake-oil salesman, who sees himself as a latter day Woodrow Wilson: a liberal idealist who has fought in the trenches of real-world politics in an effort to actualize his ideals.

Frankly, I don't know what sort of a mirror he's looking in; what I see (and have seen since I voted for Jerry Brown in the 1992 Pennsylvania Democratic primary) is a political opportunist whose actions throughout his public life have continually belied his liberal credentials. Granted, next to George W. Bush, Clinton looks like a saint. But then, who wouldn't?

Mrs. Clinton, perhaps. No, Shrillery is no saint. She was, and remains, DLWYR: Daddy's Little Wellesley Young Republican, and the less said about her the better.

Indeed, if the Democratic Party is ever to redeem itself, if it is ever to reassert a valid claim to being the "party of the people," it will have to distance itself from the Clintons and their "New Democrat" cohort.

Which brings me to President Barack Hussein Placebo. President Placebo campaigned on a platform which promised to bring genuine change to the direction of this country after 8 years of neo-con junta rule. But rather than bring that change, he has elected to ignore the will of the people and to continue most of the policies put in place by his recent Democan-Republicrat predecessors: Clinton and Bush.

Indeed, the "team of rivals" with which he has surrounded himself is heavily weighted with Clintonians. So, where is the change we were promised?

As it turns out, he (President Placebo himself) is the "change." You see, he's African-American, and that is an historic change for the aptly named White House--a change that warms the hearts of leftists like yours truly. This is the "change" that the plutocratic war party that runs what Garry Wills has rightly termed the "national security state" has offered the American people in exchange for the cure they began to clamor for in the 2006 mid-term elections.

But leftists like yours truly are not so easily bought off. This is because we were converted years ago to Dr. King's re-vitalized Whitmanian vision of an America where the content of one's character trumps the color of one's skin every time. So the question that the Whitmanian left keeps asking is: "What IS the content of President Placebo's character?" How could he offer himself as the substance of the change in national direction that a solid majority of the people of this country elected him to effect?

This Whitmanian leftist, this "Old Democrat" of the Jefferson-Jackson-McGovern line, hopes and prays that the current occupant of the Oval Office will awaken one fine morning--very, very soon--and re-invent himself as Barack Hussein Obama: the promised agent of change for whom we voted, for whom we volunteered our time, and to whose campaign and cause we contributed money. Because if he doesn't, he will go down in American history as one more snake-oil salesman who joined the plutocratic militarists in their relentless, post-World War 2 assault on the American experiment in government of the people, by the people, and for the people.