Latest Evidence That Trying To Appease Reactionaries Is Pointless

A segment of the bourgeois commentariat is always berating Democrats to “compromise” and makes a fetish of “bipartisanship.” (If the two parties agree on everything, which is what “bipartisanship” is, then what’s the point of even having two parties? Then there isn’t even the illusion of a choice. Might as well go straight to one-party dictatorship and be done with it.) Obama has wasted three years making nice to the GOP and bending over backwards to try and appease them, which never works. Reactionaries always interpret concessions as weakness and push for more.  (This was the lesson of Munich: appeasement doesn’t work with reactionary fanatics.)

Well, here’s another illustration of the futility of appeasement: Obama has deported more “illegal aliens” than any President, setting new records yearly. He’s also added yet more enforcers to the Mexican border. So what do we hear from Republicans?

Obama is soft on illegal aliens. Not a single Republican politician or any of the GOP media backers like Murdoch’s Minions deviate from this demagogic, mendacious, slanderous line.

For example, Jan Brewer, Governor of Arizona (“The State That Hates Hispanics!”- I think it’s on their license plates) ambushed Obama on the tarmac of the Phoenix airport to stick her finger in his face and hector him for the photographers, a grandstand play aimed at the cheap seats of the white racist reactionary peanut gallery. She took the opportunity she grabbed for herself to promote her vicious hate-speech tome, Scorpions for Breakfast (a title that seeks to make a virtue out of her personal nastiness), a work of lying libel that claims Obama turns a blind eye to illegal immigration in order to woo Hispanic voters. She also lies about a meeting she had in the White House- Obama was stupid enough to invite her! And get this- on the tarmac, she handed him a letter inviting him to meet with her again. Well, who knows, maybe he’s stupid enough to do it, like Charlie Brown trusting Lucy over and over not to pull away the football at the last minute when he’s running up to kick it. Some people are slow learners.

Like I say, in the context of fools who were chumped by Obama in 2008 and might fall for his rhetoric a second time, Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Anyway, since reactionaries ignore facts and invent their own “facts” and constantly say blatantly false things with podium-pounding conviction, following the dictum of Ronald Reagan (“Fact are stupid things”) and the rank and file reactionaries are self-brainwashed deluded jackasses who daily fill up their brains with the rantings of the likes of Limbaugh, Beck, Ingraham, Counter, Savage, et al, such blatant dishonesty and distortion works for them. And no amount of appeasement (“compromise”) will change that.

So you might as well do the MORALLY RIGHT thing, because it’s ALSO politically pragmatic. Amoral hustlers like Obama think it’s clever to sell out common decency. Now he’s hoist on his own petard.

Maybe he was misled by the fact that it seemed to work so well for Clinton. But Clinton was in a different situation and time. That requires a somewhat lengthy analysis that is off the point of this brief essay. Anyway Clinton was no liberal. He was one of the main men of the “Democratic Leadership Council,” rightists whose goal was to make the Democratic Party into a more explicitly rightwing party, which they succeeded in doing. Oh, and the GOP impeached him anyway.

[“Heated Exchange on the Tarmac,” NY Times, 1/26/12, print edition.]