The stupidity of pundits

The last few weeks have been full of the usual inane punditry especially on the cable news. In this case it has focused on obamacare. Having failed in their attempts to first kill it, then defund it and the latest to postphone it by a year,the republican critics have concentrated their ire on the rollout of the program. It seems the webpage design for signing up for insurance was not ready on time and had problems. If any of these pundits had ever worked on a computer they would know that these flubs are commonplace- have they not heard of "beta" programs. Now they have seized on a statement by Obama about people keeping thei insurance rather the new policies which provide greater protection. In all this noise, none of these so called pundits ever inform the public that Obamacare will provide protection to over 30 million people. Not once do they mention the additional protections that are now mandatory.

Of course I have given up watching these clowns realizing that these pundits are merely performers being paid for their faux outrage on screen.-truth and accuracy be damned.

Then there is another set that pronounces the death of the presidency at regular intervals . "Obama has failed and his presidency is dead", they crow' Tom Brokaw in his gravelly voice, pretending a gravity but one devoid of perspective and context regularly prounounces that Obama is a lame duck president with little to show for his tenure' Even Ruth Marcus has joined these band of idiots.  In their latest columns both Dana Milbank and Ruth Marcus are convinced that : "Maybe the president does understand that the game is over." And "Can he recover? I’m sorry to say: I’m not at all confident." Wah-wah, indeed. And all this breast beating because a web page site was not working on the day it was projected! His presidency is unproductive and doomed and he is a lame duck just because the public could not log onto a webpage! Really!

In Washington, Kentucky and Connecticut — the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” is working. Tens of thousands of  residents have enrolled in affordable health-care coverage. Many of them could not get insurance before the law was enacted. People keep asking why  these states have been successful. Here’s a hint: It’s not about Web sites!

The fact is general disenchantment starts setting in as the poetry of the campaign turns to the prose of governance. Every misstep thereafter is magnified, every error seems to portend the end of the world. In this period, objectivity tends to get lost and people forget all that has been achieved already.

The facts are this president has delivered more sweeping, progressive change in 36 months than the previous two Democratic administrations did in 12 years. "When you look at what will last in history," historian Doris Kearns Goodwin tells Rolling Stone, "Obama has more notches on the presidential belt" than anyone before him.

As president, he has rewritten America's social contract to make health care accessible for all citizens. He has brought 100,000 troops home from war and forged a once-unthinkable consensus around the endgame for the Bush administration's $3 trillion blunder in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has secured sweeping financial reforms that elevate the rights of consumers over Wall Street bankers and give regulators powerful new tools to prevent another collapse. And most important of all, he has achieved all of this while moving boldly to ward off another Great Depression and put the country back on a halting path to recovery.

Along the way, Obama delivered record tax cuts to the middle class and slashed nearly $200 billion in corporate welfare — reinvesting that money to make college more accessible and Medicare more solvent. He single-handedly prevented the collapse of the Big Three automakers — saving more than 1 million jobs — and brought Big Tobacco, at last, under the yoke of federal regulation. Even in the face of congressional intransigence on climate change, he has fought to constrain carbon pollution by executive fiat and to invest $200 billion in clean energy — an initiative bigger than John F. Kennedy's moonshot and one that's on track to double America's capacity to generate renewable energy by the end of Obama's first term.

On the social front, he has improved pay parity for women and hate-crime protections for gays and lesbians. He repealed the policy of "do'nt ask, do'nt tell."He has brought a measure of sanity to the drug war, reducing the sentencing disparity for crack cocaine while granting states wide latitude to experiment with marijuana laws. And he has installed two young, female justices on the Supreme Court, creating what Brinkley calls "an Obama imprint on the court for generations."

The historic progress that Obama has made is especially evident in nine key areas especially if you remember where the U.S was in 2008 before he took over: In 2008, just two years ago, the country faced a fiscal crisis and a second great depression, we were mired in two wars abroad, Dow Jones was touching an all time low of 600 , US was losing 75000 jobs per month,  there were no investments in infrastructure or green technology, the American auto industry faced bankruptcy.And what has Obama managed to do in just five years:

1 | Averting a Depression: his economic team has helped prevent the collapse of the US into the second great depression and the world economy
2 | Sparking Recovery: US economy has shifted from a tailspin to some measure of stabilization and some prospect of job growth and Dow stands at over 15,000
3 | Saving Detroit: GM is now the largest and most profitable car company in the world
4 | Reforming Health Care: Universal health insurance (with promised deficit reduction!) is now law of the land providing coverage to over 20 million of our fellow citizens, covering pre existing conditions, allowing students to stay on their parents plans - a goal sought by Democrats for decades.
5 | Cutting Corporate Welfare
6 | Restoring America's Reputation:Equal pay for women has been passed into law.
7 | Protecting Consumers: The race to the top in education spending has created reform in a large number of states from the bottom up,.The size of Peace Corps has been doubled, Pell grants increased substantially and a major fillip given to Volunteerism. A new Consumer protection agency has been created.
8 | Launching a Clean-Energy MoonShot:Major investments have been made in green technology laying the foundation for the future.A stimulus package has helped undergird infrastructure and will probably do more to advance non-carbon energy than anything that might have emerged from Copenhagen.
9. In foreign affairs, he has quietly managed to disarm Syria of its chemical weapons- Assad has been forced to acknowledge the possession of chemical weapons and to their destruction under UN auspices, and started a dialogue with Iran, after 39 years, for nuclear disarmament. Given the hysteria of these so called pundits along with the hawkish politicians, this is no mean achievement.

These are the facts the bloviating pundits conveniently ignore.

So now I treat them as I would when I go to the circus-just one more clown taking his turn in the spotlight for his daily bread.

I would advise you to do the same.