The Real Person of the Year: It’s You, Again
In 2006, Time magazine named “you” the Person of the Year. I was not that impressed, even though I can technically put “Time 2006 Person of the Year (shared)” on my resume. It seemed too much like non-competitive soccer. “You’re all person of the year.”
Perhaps the better comparison with the 2006 Time magazine Person of the Year Award is President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize. Time gave us all the Person of the Year Award in hopes of what we would do with all this technology, and that all this exciting social technology would be used for good and not evil.
Time magazine’s confidence in us has paid off, though perhaps not in the way Time’s editors hoped. As we began this year, many conservatives examined the landscape. Barack Obama was elected by the largest electoral landslide in two decades. He had a guaranteed 59 Senate seats in his hip pocket, along with 40 votes to spare in their House majority. Conservatives looked at the basic fact that all that stood between America and Obama’s agenda was a hopelessly outnumbered John Boehner and Mitch McConnell.
We were doomed.
That was before the Democrats added a House seat after the fiasco in New York’s 23rd district that saw the GOP’s decision to nominate an insufferable liberal toss the seat into the Democrat column, and Arlen Specter’s marriage of convenience to the Democratic Party added another Senate seat.
We were beyond doomed.
But as 2009 draws to a close, Obama’s agenda, with the exception of the stimulus, has been stymied. Democrats chose not to push the Freedom of Choice Act. Card check was checked by red-state Democrats who’d like to keep their political careers. And cap and trade has seen its potential for passage capped by opposition from the dean of the Senate, Robert Byrd (D-WV). ObamaCare is on life support as the plan that appears capable of passing the Senate would draw howls from the U.S. House.
The question is: Why? Who shut down this well-oiled, well-financed Obama train? No answer presents itself at the traditional level. There is no congressional leader who, like Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, foiled the Democrats’ scheme.
Nor is there an answer to be found in the media. We can say that talk show hosts and certain bloggers matter based on the bestsellers list. Glenn Beck and Mark Levin were on the bestsellers list, and Glenn Beck made it there not once, but twice. Throw in Mike Huckabee’s Christmas book and you know why some are calling for separate but equal bestsellers lists to give liberal books a chance at the coveted title.
The Obama administration, in the absence of serious congressional leadership, decided their opposition was Rush Limbaugh and later decided Fox News was an appropriate target for their wrath.
But none of this has to do with why the Obama agenda has stalled. Last year, all the figures and institutions were doing well, making a lot of money, and McCain was nominated and Obama still won. What’s happened this past year wasn’t them; it was you.
“The 2003 grassroots California recall effort led to the disastrous election of Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
I think this i a little simplistic. It’s like saying a cop is disastrous because he doesn’t stop a criminal from robbing a bank. It’s the criminal that is the problem. Not the cop.
Likewise the problem in California is the democratically dominated State Senate that has been on a spending spree for 50 years. You can’t blame Arnold Schwarzenegger for their voting record. Maybe he could have done better? Actually I don’t think so. The state is impossible to govern. Even Reagan didn’t do well as Governor of California.
My person of the year is the crotchety old bag who yelled, “Keep government out of my welfare!” To me, that is the most honest and accurate expression of the Tea Bagger movement – all in one ignorant, greedy, self-obsessed bark.
To all our fighting men in Iraq and afghanistan! Semper Fi.
What sentient person reads TIME magazine? I don’t know any.
No legitimate political movement has been so underreported by the media as the one presently occuring in the Tea Party movement that has swept across America. No legitimate political movement has been more mischaracterized or villified by the media when they do bother to acknowledge it, as the Tea Party movement.
Now, politicians are quietly scrambling to figure out how to ride the wave of this movement or crush it. And the media continues its mixture of ignore or villify.
Well, trust this…this movement is real; it’s grassroots; and it’s legitimate. If people in politics would quite trying to strategize a way to corral and lead the movement, instead of simply having the guts and convictions to abide by its more basic fundamentals, it wouldn’t be hard to ride the power and energy to a better America. That will happen.
In the meantime, keep ignoring this movement. Keep mischaracterizing its participants. Keep reducing us to simplified, emotional labels. We love it; it sustains us.
God Bless the America we are bringing back to Americans.
2. Now and then:
Thanks for the laff- a libtard hurling accusations of “ignorant, greedy and self-obsessed.” What a perfect encapsulation of leftism!
#2: My person of the year is the crotchety old bag who yelled, “Keep government out of my welfare!”
No tea partier with half a brain would say that. Sounds like an instigating plant to me.
Why do we keep hearing from the main stream (lame stream) media keep trying to convince us that the reason the Democrats lost in 1994 is because they did NOT pass Clinton’s health care initiative. I believe that was because they tried so hard and they are now trying harder when most real polls show the majority of the U.S. is against this or most any plan?
We will see soon in less than a year, and I for one would like to see 1994 compounded by 50%!
7. Kevin:
“No tea partier with half a brain” Right you are, there aren’t any.
A lot of people like to disparage the, “Tea Baggers”.
Well, about 236 years ago, there were many who disparaged the “Tea Party Indians”, Thomas Hutchinson included.
What happened? Well, about 1/3 of the population supported the eventual revolution, about 1/3 opposed it, and 1/3 stood and watched.
Same thing will happen this time, I hope. Win, lose, or draw, you can call me a tea bagger.
Oh, by the way, where did Hutchinson spend his later years?