Swimming with Sharks

I haven't seen the news yet tonight, so I don't know if the Senate has passed the stimulus package. I did read earlier that the House did. I have to say, I'm not all that excited. I think Obama has settled for a halfway measure in his misguided attempt to be a nice guy and play bipartisanship with a bunch of vicious sharks. I certainly agree with Frank Scheaeffer, a former card-carrying, breast-beating Republican who told the president:

"[I]f you think that the Republicans in Congress and the Senate are going to do [less] than their utmost to obstruct everything you are and what you stand for you're dreaming."

Why? Because the other side, all ideologues, have nothing but contempt for the president and his party.

"What those senators and congressmen are telling you is not what their rabid core constituents are telling them. Their loyalty is to a fundamentalist Christian ideology on the one hand and American exceptionalism of perpetual warfare and hatred and fear of the 'other' on the other hand. Between the neoconservatives and evangelical Religious Right Republicans you have no friends."

The three forlorn Republicans that Obama paid through the nose to get signed on to the stimulus, are about the last three of the breed that can be called moderate. All the rest take their direction from Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, two truly repulsive people, hate-mongers.

Moreover, Paul Krugman and other economists are convinced that the package that's going to be signed into law shortly will not do the job. He, too, is disgusted with the politics, the way the president has been abused by virtually every Republican in the Congress, but he's even more concerned that the so-called fix is not even close to being adequate to the size of the problem, which, as Rachel Maddow would say is "ginormous." Call me a Mr. Sourpuss, but I think things are really bad, and I don't think a lot of people realize it yet.