On Wednesday, virtually the entirety of Rachel Maddow's show was devoted to an annihilation of Robert Gibbs. It was carried out by almost entirely ignoring Gibbs himself, and instead focusing on the reality that Gibbs and Obama desperately want everyone to ignore.
Of course, there is so much reality Gibbs and Obama want us to ignore, it would have been impossible to cover it all. So Maddow focused on just one aspect, an aspect in which the gap between promise and performance is particularly striking, and particularly inexplicable: the foot-dragging over the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", during which the careers of hundreds of GLBT military personnel continue to be destroyed for no reason.
Maddow did separate segments on three different service members, and she finished her program with the following segment (short transcript excerpt below):
On tonight's show you met U.S. Army Captain Jonathan Hopkins, Catherine Miller and Lieutenant Colonel Victor Ferenbach who are having their careers ended.... Why are we kicking people out while we are waiting for the views of the Commander in Chief, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. If you are changing the policy soon why not hold off the ruination of lives under the policy now? Why not? I'll tell you why. Because that would take some political capital. That would take guts. And liberals, according to this White House, ought to be drug tested. Stop complaining and be happy for what you have. Lieutenant Dan Choi, Colonel Ferenbach, SBT Hopkins, they are expendable. Watch their careers destroyed, but stop complaining about it.
Barack Obama is a moral coward. And Robert Gibbs is his would-be enforcer.
They are not our leaders. They do not represent us. They represent tokens of appeasement from a power structure that has no use for any of us. And certainly no morals, no decency, no honor.
There is a tendency--an understandable one--to see this whole Gibbs affair as a tempest in a teapot. And in one sense, it most surely is. What matters isn't what one administration official--even the Press Secretary--says in one interview. What matters is what the Administration does. But what Gibbs said matters precisely because of how it brings into focus all that the Administration has done--and all that it has not.
This Administration is a failure by choice. It has not been defeated by its enemies, but by itself. By its own actions--and more tellingly, by its own inactions, its failure to act, or even to think of acting. It is a victim of its own lack of imagination as well as its lack of courage.
Oh, sure, one can argue that it's not a failure at all. That it's doing exactly what the ruling class wants it to do. But though true in one sense, that's utter bullshit in another. FDR was hated by the ruling class. But he saved their bacon by going against their petty, narrow-minded, self-destructive instincts. Obama is destroying America--including America's ruling class--by not standing up against the self-destructive passions of the moment. Heck, he can't even speak out for the First Amendment against hypocritical clowns like Newt Gingrich.
We are in a fight for the soul of America, as well as the soul of the Democratic Party. And although those who stand against us have a great deal of organizational power, they are losers at bottom. They are liars and cowards. Their vision of America is a sham and a disgrace. And they are condemned by all the minute particulars of what they have done and not done in our names.
Shame on them all. And shame on us, if we let outselves be cowed by them.
