For Never was a Story of More Woe

Excellent work by Cerberus of Sadly, No.--SS

For Never was a Story of More Woe:

“Mr. Bailey, your assault with a rancorous tone upon my person will not stand!”

Leon Cooperman:

Open Letter to the President of the United States of America

From the comment threads to the front page, it’s me Cerberus. See now what your unnatural appetites for more content have wrought? Repent Sadlies, repent!

(Warning, I don’t do shorters, so this will be meaty.)

Now, we here in the liberal community have thought hard about a number of suffering communities in this time of Great Depression II: Electric Boogaloo.

But in our zeal to be inclusive we have forgotten the most hard-done group of all.

That being 1% hedge fund managers who after sleeping on their piles of money and finishing the day’s tasks of paying the police to evict the OWS protestors, have found their lives ruined by the most painful bigotry of all.

That’s right, mild comments of disparagement that maybe collapsing the global community and preventing any positive action to fix it wasn’t the best response after having the government save your rigged Casino from itself.

How could we be so cruel? Let us truly sympathize with the raw pain of this man.

It is with a great sense of disappointment that I write this. Like many others, I hoped that your election would bring a salutary change of direction to the country, despite what more than a few feared was an overly aggressive social agenda.

I expected you to fix our mess and do absolute nothing else socially to distinguish yourself from a right-wing paid shill. How dare you not live up to those standards and occasionally remember that you are the nominally liberal choice?

And I cannot credibly blame you for the economic mess that you inherited,

Well, that’s big of you, seeing as how you and your right-wing stooges in government got us into this mess by-

even if the policy response on your watch has been profligate and largely ineffectual. (You did not, after all, invent TARP.) I understand that when surrounded by cries of “the end of the world as we know it is nigh”, even the strongest of minds may have a tendency to shoot first and aim later in a well-intended effort to stave off the predicted apocalypse.

Ah, not even going to retain that pretense of not being a wingnut for longer than a second.

Also, 1%ers of the world. We’re trying to work our asses off to prevent “shoot first and ask questions later”, but you’re going to have to start recognizing that OWS and Keynesian economics is there to prevent the poor from having no other recourse than breaking into your homes and harvesting your organs for the black market.

But what I can justifiably hold you accountable for is your and your minions’ role in setting the tenor of the rancorous debate now roiling us that smacks of what so many have characterized as “class warfare”.

Well our paid shills characterize it as that. But we paid a lot of shills, so that counts for something, right?

And yeah, if he thinks the current political climate on the left is “rancorous” and unfairly targeting him then he might just want to stop dropping leaflets from the skyscrapers and actually listen for once to what is being said. (Hint: Barack Obama isn’t actually a black panther).

This is a person who thinks a subpar blowjob is a “vile attack to separate his scrotum from his body in what he can only describe as anti-male warfare”.

Whether this reflects your principled belief that the eternal divide between the haves and have-nots is at the root of all the evils that afflict our society or just a cynical, populist appeal to his base by a president struggling in the polls is of little importance. What does matter is that the divisive, polarizing tone of your rhetoric is cleaving a widening gulf, at this point as much visceral as philosophical, between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them.

LEAVE MR. POTTER ALONE!!! Just because the rich want all the money and have directly blocked attempts to directly aid the poor or otherwise keep them from dying in the Depression the rich caused is no reason for the reaction to them to be anything other than fawningly begging them to “Please Mr. Sky God, make the money and jobs come back”.

Anything less is the real bigotry.

People of differing political persuasions can (and do) reasonably argue about whether, and how high, tax rates should be hiked for upper-income earners

Oh can we? Pretty please can we? With sprinkles on top? We’ve been oh so good Mr. Cooperman.

whether the burdens of paying for the nation’s bloated entitlement programs are being fairly spread around, and whether those programs themselves should be reconfigured in light of current and projected budgetary constraints

Just can’t resist, can you? It’s like some pus-filled zit you just need to pop. There’s still some money in the economy that’s not in your rigged casino and that just offends you to the core.

Anyone who could survey today’s challenging fiscal landscape, with an un- and underemployment rate of nearly 20 percent and roughly 40 percent of the country on public assistance, and not acknowledge an imperative for change is either heartless, brainless, or running for office on a very parochial agenda. And if I end up paying more taxes as a result, so be it. The alternatives are all worse.

Okay, fine, I guess I’m forced to acknowledge that maybe giving us all the money in the world isn’t sustainable, but but, wah BUTTHURT!

But what I do find objectionable is the highly politicized idiom in which this debate is being conducted.

Wah, recognizing our role in the financial crisis is the real hate crime!

Capitalism is not the source of our problems, as an economy or as a society, and capitalists are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be. As a group, we employ many millions of taxpaying people, pay their salaries, provide them with healthcare coverage, start new companies, found new industries, create new products, fill store shelves at Christmas, and keep the wheels of commerce and progress (and indeed of government, by generating the income whose taxation funds it) moving.

Worship us as Gods! Oh, where are those jobs, you say? If we are the guardians of all that is good and pure and no jobs will arise but through us?

Uh, look over there! (click, vroom, squeal)

You might do well at this point to eschew the polarizing vernacular of political militancy and become the transcendent leader you were elected to be. You are likely to be far more effective, and history is likely to treat you far more kindly for it.

Your meek and belated acknowledgement of our role in the financial collapse is the worst thing to ever happen.

Also, why are you so BLACK? I just can’t help but see the ghost of Malcolm X whenever you speak and that’s also your fault.

But yeah, if I had to pick out one flaw Mean Green Leon, it was being so out-of-touch with the outside world that you think Barack Obama (a man so mild-mannered and overly forgiving to his enemies that he’s turned pre-emptive over-compromise into an art form) is the symbol of the angry faces you see outside your window.

I know. In wingnut world, the protests on the streets are bought and paid for astroturfs on behalf of big donors and high-level party members, but here in the real world, Obama is the good cop to OWS’s patient cop.

You don’t want to see bad cop.