Greg Sargent Nails the GOP Plan to Unseat Pres. Obama

I met political commentator and analyst Greg Sargent in 2003, around the time I was working with Ambassador Joseph Wilson on his book, The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity. Greg was then a reporter and media critic for one of my favorite websites, talkingpointsmemo.com (TPM). He later moved on to create a blog called the Plum Line at washingtonpost.com, absolutely one of the best things at the Post. I’ve always found his analysis penetrating and clear, and his first post this morning, “The GOP’s Game Plan to End Obama’s Presidency,” nails why I find the Repub game plan for 2012 so diabolical.

I mean, the Bush administration failed to thwart a preventable terrorist attack on my city and our capitol, capitalized on that event to polarize the country into a needless foreign war, then cavalierly depleted our national treasury to the point that the middle class can barely hang on to what they’ve got. Amid the worst recession in seventy years mass layoffs occurred in many industries, including my own and I lost my job. At that desperate point, the keys to the national mansion were handed to a Democrat who promised to try and do things differently. After handing this new president the foulest bag of excrement ever, Repubs then set out to delay, deflect, destroy, and sabotage his agenda, not bothering with the merits of an initiative, even ones they’d earlier supported, doing their utmost to prevent that agenda from being implemented. It was shameless, and appalling for its clear disregard of the national interest, one that the media failed to accurately label, with rare exceptions.

Now, according to Sargent’s cogent analysis, those same Repubs plan to channel the electorate into blaming President Obama for supposedly falling short of what he’d pledged to accomplish–and which a clear majority of the country was, and may well still be, eager for him to achieve. Apart from the transparent sabotage of the president and the economy that’s been the undeniable plan of the Repubs, it was never likely that Barack Obama could in four years repair what had been in broken over the previous eight years. This among many reasons is why I will work for the president to give him, and the country, the second term he needs to really do the job. Meantime, I’ll be reading Greg Sargent for lucid analysis of the shifting political tides. Thank you, Greg!