For the Record

Kevin Drum over at Mother Jones spells it out, for those on the left still choosing to be pissy and obstinate:

"And yet, there's still.....the entire rest of his record. After all, Obama deserves to be judged by ordinary human standards, not by standards of perfection. A sidebar to Paul's piece lists Obama's top 50 accomplishments, and I think it was mistake to create a list so long. It ends up looking like the usual boring laundry list that any president can trumpet. Better to pare it down to ten really top accomplishments in order to highlight how many truly major accomplishments Obama has been responsible for. So I did. Except I couldn't get there. I cut it down to 13 and got stuck. Here they are, in the same order as the original WaMo list:

1. Passed Health Care Reform

2. Passed the Stimulus

3. Passed Wall Street Reform

4. Ended the War in Iraq

6. Eliminated Osama bin laden

7. Turned Around U.S. Auto Industry

9. Repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

12. Reversed Bush Torture Policies

14. Kicked Banks Out of Federal Student Loan Program

16. Boosted Fuel Efficiency Standards

18. Passed Mini Stimuli (July 22, 2010; December 17, 2010; December 23, 2011)

22. Created Conditions to Begin Closing Dirtiest Power Plants

27. Achieved New START Treaty

These are all big deals. Big fucking deals, to quote our vice president. Unless you're just bound and determined to sulk in your tent while insisting that healthcare was a sellout and the stimulus was too small and Dodd-Frank was feeble and the mini stimuli were more like micro stimuli, there's just no way around the fact that this is a historically colossal set of progressive accomplishments, especially in the face of a historically hostile political environment."

Now compare that list against anything you'd get from any of the current crop of sociopathic, war-on-women-waging, hyper-religious, red-meat pandering clowns running for president as a Republican. I'm not gonna let up on this, folks: You have to consider political reality because in the end that's the wall you come up against. You get this president or you get one of them. And if you've got even three brain cells in your head, the choice is immaculately clear.

Any other arguments are a waste.

Mother Jones: Barack Obama's Had a Pretty Damn Good Presidency/3.11.12