“[Obama] will now raise taxes on everybody because he plans to roll back the Bush tax cuts when they expire at the end of 2010.”

Assuming I’ve captured Moran’s intended meaning with this edited quote, this is bizarre because the basic message of the article that Moran links to is that Obama is sticking to the tax plan he proposed during the campaign. Perhaps Moran was thinking of the following sentence from the article:

“Obama plans to raise taxes on the wealthy by asking the Democratic-controlled Congress to allow President Bush’s tax cuts to expire at the end of 2010.”

The writer could have written “President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy,” but in context there is no real ambiguity about which tax cuts the writer is referring to. Simply logic tells us that letting tax cuts for the non-wealthy expire would raise taxes on the non-wealthy, not on the wealthy. And the writer is explaining a plan which has been explained numerous times before, so there is no need to rely on this particular explaination if one finds it unclear.

The other two cases where Moran alleges that Obama is breaking campaign promises (Obama’s abandoning his plan for dealing with high oil prices after oil prices fell, and his appointment of people that Moran doesn’t think represent sufficient “change”) are at least arguable. But supporting the claim that Obama is breaking a campaign promise by linking to an article which reaffirms that Obama plans to keep that promise suggests a certain amount of desparation.

In fact, Obama will not raise taxes on the wealthy - at least until 2011. That is a broken promise. And the fact that he is going to do so in connection with allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire means that everybody gets their taxes raised - not just the wealthy - which is something Obama said time and again on the campaign trail wouldn’t happen.

ed.

No, probably not–but they were determined to vote for Obama, The One, anyway–regardless of whether anything he said made any sense at all.

And that IS stupid.

Setting aside your characterization of things like national health insurance as “far left,” you’ll find most GOP candidate’s web site replete with policies no serious person seriously believes they intend to implement. Banning abortion, for example. The disconnect between GOP rants about abortion and GOP action on abortion is comic.

So, grant that sometimes politicians feed tasty tidbits to their “base.” Knowingly false? Of course. Duh. These are politicians who want to be elected, and we’re all voters who apparently need to be lied to. Unless you actually believed McCain was going to balance the budget by killing earmarks. Or that he knew how to get Osama Bin Laden, but couldn’t tell us until after he was elected. (I could go on, but you know them as well as I do.)

As for radical associations, I warned my GOP friends from the start that this would go nowhere. No one gives a sh*t about Bill Ayers. No one cares about Rev. Wright. If a politician is to to be judged by his broadly-construed “associations” then what do we make of McCain’s craven crawl to Jerry Falwell et al?

And if associations are definitive, then why cherry-pick the ones that work to make your point and ignore all the rest? Dick Lugar is a close associate of Obama’s. By what logic is Bill Ayers definitive but Dick Lugar is irrelevant? Colin Powell doesn’t count, but Rev. Wright does? How does twisting reality that way help one understand anything?

You’re trying to get reality to conform to ideology. You predicted a certain outcome — a radical Obama administration. No one not wearing tinfoil headgear believes Obama is now acting as a radical. You were wrong. Your prediction is simply not accurate.

Now you’re proposing the theory that since Obama is not acting as you predicted he would, it must be the result of his sudden awakening to previously undiscovered facts. In other words, you couldn’t be wrong, so he must have changed. Or he cleverly deceived us all into believing he was what you wanted us to believe he was.

The problem there is that some of us were able to quite accurately predict Obama’s actions, and are utterly unsurprised to find that we have a smart, pragmatic, basically centrist Commander in Chief.

All the way back in March you challenged me to write something realistic about Obama. So I did. It included:

Will Mr. Obama lie to us? God yes. Will Mr. Obama manipulate us? Of course. Can we trust him? Absolutely. Absolutely. Trust is good. And by the way, my car is for sale, I . . . I only took it out on Sundays and then I never drove it over 45 miles an hour. Trust me.

And,

I support Obama for this reason: he promises to reach across the aisle, move away from idiot gotcha partisanship, and try to accomplish something useful. Emphasis on “promises.” The fact that he promises this means he will at the very least have to go through the motions of non-partisanship. He will have been elected on that promise. Even if he doesn’t mean it (always a distinct possibility) he’ll have to at least make an attempt.

Nine months ago. And consistently from that point I predicted he would not be remotely radical, and that GOP attacks on him would fail in part because those of us not blinded by ideology had already figured out that Obama was a uniting, centrist type, and nothing like the GOP’s boogey men.

This line of attack will fail, too. You want to beat Obama? You need to wait until he actually does something wrong. Pre-emptive attacks will injure your side worse than they will ours. Keep your powder dry, you may well have occasion to use it. But you don’t yet.

Nothing in his past, nor in his scant record suggest he would do that…

I will withold judgement of Obama’s “policies” until he Actually takes office, what Rick is suggesting is that O has some choices to make. The question isn’t what he’s saying anymore, it what will a Pres. Obama DO?

In other words, the evidence is quite clear: we got what we expected. You guys on the other hand got suckered by the McCain campaign’s smear tactics. Now you’re trying to explain away your own gullibility.

Just admit you were wrong and move on.

Obama’s website is replete with top down, big government, ruinously expensive solutions to problems that could better be handled at the state or local level. I am sorry the planet you’ve been on for the last 2 years had no TV or access to the internet otherwise you would know this and also realize that there is only one way to ideologically categorize the kook who was advancing these ideas; a far left liberal.

The fact that his past and present is filled to the brim with radical left associates means nothing either, I suppose. He just hangs around those nuts for laughs, right?

Trying to de-left Obama after the fact is what is pitiful.

ed.

Reminds me of the time a barrel rolled out on stage before an Elvis appearance and 12 girls fainted.

Now I am confused. If Obama had waged a “Pragmatism” campaign wouldn’t he have scooped up a landslide?

I am not sure how one morphs amorphous “hope” and “change” into “pragmatism.”

Tell me again about KOS and move-on and Michael Moore and George Soros pragmatism. Tell me again how Obama out-pragmatized Hillary. Tell me again how ACORN honed in on voters who were looking for pragmatism. Tell me again why voters in high tax states that are high in unemployment and deep in debt are pragmatists. Tell me again how the Freddie Mac mortgages that sunk people who could not qualify for such debt burden was pragmatism. Remind me of the pragmatic plan Obama put forth for saving social security, medicare, prescription drugs along with enacting national health care.

I consider myself to be a bit pragmatic, as well. Please edumacate me. I missed the part where the pragmatic Obama and hope and change Obama merged.

Shall I sit by the mailbox and await my tax cut? Shall I count on “wisdom” and “diplomacy” to clear up Mumbai, North Korea, Israel, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, China, Dafur, Somalia and global warming?

Or, will the “pragmatic” Obama morph more and more into a clone of George W. Bush? Oh, I know! The pragmatic Obama will turn it all over to the intergalactic union of eunuchs known as the United Nations. Now there is change we can be relieved by.

You voted for Obama and you are getting something far closer to Bush. Happy?

“…thing that scares me though is that bushy has made the “Office” more powerful than ever…”

Yes! This is exactly the situation we now find ourselves in. Even Obama supporters realize that he may have too much power for our comfort. Two questions for all you conservatives out there:

1. What were you doing when “bushy” was grabbing executive power? Opposing him or cheering him on?

2. Could this have been a legitimate reason for liberals to hate “bushy”? BSD just may have a solid foundation, no?