Remember, it could be worse. We could be under the reign of President Palin now, with Johnny Mac being poisoned, err, had “an incident” back in June or something. You think things look bleak now, life under her rule would be pure bloody anarchy.

So, read this and this with that in mind, no matter if it means you lost out on a Playboy pictorial of a heavily airbrushed moose hunter to spike her ratings during whatever scandal du jour knocked her favorable ratings down.

The success of his first year will be largely dependent on the outcome of the health care debate, but Obama may soon be able to point to his first 12 months in office and say he rescued the economy from a depression, passed the health care reform bill Americans have been waiting decades for, approved most progressive budget bill in a generation, got a Supreme Court nominee confirmed, lifted the ban on stem-cell research, passed a national service bill, passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, passed new regulations of the credit card industry, passed new regulation of the tobacco industry, achieved some key counter-terrorism successes, and helped improve the nation’s standing on the world stage.

There have been plenty of painful missed opportunities, but as first years go, this isn’t bad. Imagine what Obama’s record would be like if Republicans hadn’t gone mad and if supermajorities weren’t needed on every vote in the Senate. (Or better yet, imagine what Obama’s record would be like if he entered office in 2001, with a strong economy and massive surplus.)

Whether you like it or not, if you voted for President Obama last year, you are partly responsible for this strategy. That’s not entirely a bad thing depending on your position on the war, but it’s worth repeating that the president never spoke of drawing down our forces in the Af-Pak region during the campaign, nor did he mention such a thing during his first 10 months in office.

From this article from Bob Cesca.

Maybe this ruins some of my liberal credentials, but I figure that if you start a war, you’d better finish the damn thing or create conditions to make it look like you did what you could before bailing out. I mean, hell, it took a Democrat to get us through World War II. Not to mention World War I as well.

Hell, the simple act of electing a Republican started the Civil War. Yeah, that’s unfair to Lincoln but it is an absolute fact. And barring Vietnam, I can’t think of another war out there the Republicans didn’t fan the flames of. And Vietnam is just another in a long series of lessons of “don’t try to clean up French screwups” with all apologies to the French.

In any event, if you voted for Obama and didn’t know he was going to escalate the war in Afghanistan, you, frankly, are a fucking idiot. You should have wrote in for Kucinich and then bitched and whined about it, because Barack flat out told you we were going to go back and finish that war. And I truly hope he does and without much more deaths to our forces.

I don’t get all these folks who are crying that Obama isn’t the peacemaker he apparently told them personally he was going to be. HE TOLD YOU WE WOULD CONTINUE THE FIGHT MORONS!

I swear, the people I align myself with. Thankfully the Rethugs are repressed gays and unrepressed bigots otherwise they’d almost be attractive. Ha! I kid.

But seriously, to take back this nation from racist religious zealots, you need a hard-headed, big-hearted, patient but fearless guy. That’s what we’ve got. No ego-windbag Clinton, no well-meaning but pacifist Kucinich. We’ve got Obama. He, to date, hasn’t done anything he hadn’t already advertised he was going to try to do. He’s got a list, you know what it is, and he’s going down it. Not as fast as everyone would like, but you already KNOW how this is going to work.

So stop crying and pretending like this is shocking or something.