We Can’t Just Be Obama Cheerleaders

Written by Mike Papantonio | 01 June 2009

Mike Papantonio

. Several years ago, Paul Begala, a CNN political commentator, told me during an interview that when the GOP began to crumble, it would be because of their failure to question their party leadership. Begala called it right. He is a reliable political prophet. Democrats need to pay closer attention to Begala’s wisdom. Grassroots Barrack Obama supporters should avoid the tendency to mimic the well-trained Republican loyalists who danced like organ grinder monkeys every time their leadership played a new tune. But I hear that organ grinder warming up for the Democrats. Last week, we barely saw more than a yawn from Democrats when Obama recommended Ignacia Moreno to take over the position of Assistant Attorney General for the Environmental and National Resources Division at the Department of Justice. It’s basically the equivalent of asking Colonel Sanders to guard your chickens.

A quick history on this newest Obama pick is that she has always been a lawyer for some of America’s most lawless corporate polluters. Not just the little polluters, but the real experts. Moreno represented General Electric in that company’s effort to reverse health protection regulations for people who breathe the toxic filth emanating from America’s most poisonous superfund sites. She wanted to help super polluters abolish clean-up requirements and allow the residents living near those sites to become ill and die from diseases related to toxins like PCB, arsenic and mercury.

When Obama tapped Moreno for this new job, he knew that Moreno also went to court on behalf of Mexican factory tuna fisherman who were killing Pacific dolphin by the thousands so they could catch more tuna. With Obama’s pick of Moreno, we begin to see a pattern. For example, when Obama chose Ken Salazar to be his Secretary of Interior, it was as if Obama believed that no one noticed that the guy he picked to protect our natural resources was the same guy who G.E., Frontier Oil, and Duke Energy, endorsed as one of their own. It’s beginning to look like the Clinton years all over again. Bill Clinton built his career on words that made him sound like an everyman’s visionary. That use to scare U.S. Chamber of Commerce leadership until they figured out that just like Republican presidential candidates, Democrats are also for sale.

By the time Clinton had secured the White House, corporate America had secured political influence over Bill Clinton. Rather than a people’s Populist president, we were left with just another Republican-like corporate tool. In fact, Clinton brought us CAFTA and NAFTA. He also brought us Walmart-caliber overseas job outsourcing along with federal judge appointments that came almost exclusively from corporate law firms that represented big money not big innovative political ideas. The Democratic diehards who helped elect Clinton were too timid to be forcefully critical. They took on the persona of mousey GOP-ers who historically never asked questions of their leaders.

By 2000, the Democrats’ three-monkey party that heard no evil, saw no evil and spoke no evil looked almost as pitiful as the GOP in 2009. And registered Independents like me recognized that there really is no difference between an organ grinder’s monkey, a timid donkey, and an aging well-trained elephant.