via Post Mortem: Did Obama’s Speech Set Stage For Death Of Change? | Air America Media

Okay okay, I know I’ve gone back to the trough. I wrote about Air America yesterday. But honestly, how can Air America, our first and only progressive news outlet, support this right-wing drivel about Obama’s setting up the “death of change”?

President Obama Calls a Joint Session of Congress

Wednesday, Barack Obama addressed a joint session of Congress to lay out a more specific vision for health care reform, spur compromise and shore up support within his own party for meaningful legislation.

But if the booing, heckling, legislation-waving conservatives–let alone their pre-canned statements of opposition–are any guide, it never mattered what the president had to say, so, one would have thought he might say something. And one would be more or less wrong.

Yesterday, I criticizedAir America for publishing the same author, Megan Carpentier, who coughed up a fact-less and baseless argument that Joe Kennedy was scared out of his wits by his past association with Hugo Chavez and that he had no choice but to decline to run for his late uncle’s Senate seat in Mass. because of it.

Now she turns her right-wing pen toward Obama. Carpentier had this to say about Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress last night:

What Obama did say tended to be as short on specifics as previous speeches on the topic have been, and high on the same reassurances he’s unsuccessfully repeated in the past. It’s as though, having repeated ad nauseam that his health care reform wouldn’t allow employers to drop people’s insurance coverage and most Americans would see no changes other than (maybe) lower costs, Obama thought that repeating it in front of Congress and with Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi behind him might make it all more believable.

Here’s the rub. The reassurances Obama gave last night, and I’m assuming she’s speaking of the public option, rang true to me. Obama is not giving up the fight for the public option, and he said so:

“It’s worth noting that a strong majority of Americans still favor a public insurance option of the sort I’ve proposed tonight. I will not back down on the basic principle that if Americans can’t find affordable coverage, we will provide you with a choice. And I will make sure that no government bureaucrat or insurance company bureaucrat gets between you and the care that you need.”

Carpentier could have defended Obama’s goals for health care reform as easily as she spewed more right-wing talking points. The more we progressives, and I am assuming that Air America still calls themselves progressive, support the right-wing framing of issues, the less room there is for the liberal frames.

Obama made one of the most eloquent defenses of liberalism that I’ve heard in two decades. The President said that he would “call out” Republicans that misrepresented the points in his plan. And toward the end of the speech he set his feet firmly on liberal ground declaring it’s time to move away from Reagan era policies. From Huffington Post’s Jacob Heilbrunn:

Obama didn’t simply come out swinging. He also made the single most persuasive case for government intervention in decades in the final section of his speech. He put an end to the Reagan era dogma that America’s biggest foe is government itself. With this speech, Obama has begun to fulfill the promise of his presidency. Obama, you could say, found his sea legs. He’s ushering in a fundamental philosophical shift that could set the stage for several decades of a revived and modern liberal movement, while the right spins off into noisy irrelevance.

Why didn’t she make this case for Obama instead? The answer is obvious. She’s a P.U.M.A. Her own words:

For those people, some of whom adopted the acronym P.U.M.A. (or Party Unity My A** in response to calls by Democrats — including Hillary — to come together to elect Barack Obama), there is no president who could be better than Hillary, no vice presidential pick that wasn’t a slight. Some of them would even call the secretary of state slot a “safe, expected place for a woman to be,” in order to denigrate the selection of yet another woman for the position, even if that woman is Hillary Clinton.

Well, the rest of her article is snippets from his speech and then more vitriolic and disgusting verbiage about how Obama has failed to deliver. This crap might as well have been written by Rep. Michelle Bachman.

C’mon, Air America, you guys can do better than this!