Woodworking 101

I am sure that there are studies out there that can explain how people think about their heroes and the very clay feet of those heroes, which they don't actually ignore, but rather deny the existance of, but gee.

One can make the point again and again, that Obama has failed to deliver on almost every level (except for more wars of course) and still people respond by telling me that I do not understand how politics work in this country and he can't rule by fiat (except apparently in foreign policy and war, but not actual military rules, go figure).

When one points out that in fact Obama got almost everything he asked for and pushed for in his first two years.   Or that he did in fact enter into secret negotiations with the pharmacy industry, hospital industry (oops Oxford comma is no more I guess) and the insurance industry, after saying he would never do that.  Or that he has from the first hired and kept around him either minions of the banking industry or people above minion status, when there are at least two Noble Prize economists who are Americans who were recommending different policies.  Well, (other than questioning my ability to form a complete sentence since and think, there seem to be several incomplete sentences up there) one can wonder how his defenders think.

I would think that it is one thing to agree that we have got to help billionaires make more money so this is what needs to be done by golly, but it is quite another to argue that Obama is trying to do progressive things, and is really doing the best anyone could expect.  When all the anti-progressive things he is doing are pointed out people still tell me I just don't understand American politics.  Or FDR wasn't that great a progressive either. It is an amazing situation, when people continue to back a guy who clearly doesn't give a shit about them.

I may have mentioned before (but am too lazy to check) the discussions about Grant and the Civil War on a couple of comment threads in Salon.  One commentator kept putting up "facts" that with a couple of minutes of Googling were shown to be completely false.  I'm not talking things like Grant was a corrupt president, but things like:  there were more slaves in New York state in 1860 then in any other state (it takes little time to go to the census for 1860 and find out that New York was a free state, therefore there were no slaves).  People kept responding with the actual facts and this (these?) people (person?) would just put up another piece of false information.  Until the inevitable:  I'm tired of arguing with you, post.  Of course that is a little more obvious than the people who simply insist that You Don't Understand.  Or alternatively that apparently neither hear or read you, but engage you in debate while ignoring the specific information one puts out there.

Imagine that you are at a movie and there is a kind of wavy fade out and then another wavy fade in.

This is more or less what I"m doing without the religious figure

Well, I'm back from doing some manual labor this afternoon, I started to build a bookcase.  Some fun.  I built several back in my hippy days, but none recently.  My friend David Cohen and I once built one on a wall of a friend's place in Yellow Springs.  The reason I remember it so clearly (well the incident, not exactly the specifics) is that we would go over to her place on a Sunday morning and when we arrived she would immediately bring out the weed.  After we smoked some it seemed to us a good time to have a great home made breakfast and look at the wall and imagine what we were going to do.  It took about a month until David refused both weed and food one morning and started to actually build the thing.  It took about two hours to finish.  Good times.

One last thought, kind of my own, but she says it much better than I have.  This is scary and incisive and I think she is right.  If she is, it explains everything that is going on.  He wants to destroy the America we all grew up in.