Opinion: Barack Obama’s other worst enemies -- his ‘’friends’’

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Wow, congratulations to the whiny Left.

The Republicans have only been trying to make President Obama a one-term president. The whiny Left is trying to make him a one-year president.

The Senate race in Massachusetts is a canary in this self-destructive mineshaft of the Loony Left’s making.

The pathological Right thinks Obama is a simultaneously a fascist, a communist and a Muslim plant.

The nutcase Left is warning that he’s a stealth Republican: Ooooh, he didn’t insist on a single-payer health plan. Betrayal! Look, look, he’s sending more troops to Afghanistan [as he said he’d do] -- he’s just a Bushian warmonger! He didn’t instantly effect world peace by happy hour on Inauguration Day. He must be a failed, false liberal! People are still out of work -- get the hook!

Grow up. Your childish impatience and petulance are almost as ridiculous and dangerous as the Tea Party’s know-nothing tantrums, and all the more reprehensible because you’re supposed to be in this president’s corner. Republicans acting badly? No surprise. Democrats undercutting their own president? Like pointing a gun at your own head and threatening, ‘’Don’t come any closer, or I’ll shoot.’’

Exactly how hard do you think it is for Obama to carry this nation up out of the hellhole of the Bush administration’s digging? He’s got to perform the labors of Hercules and undo the damages of the past decade before he can get some traction for his own programs.

Didn’t you ever take driver’s ed. and learn about braking distances? How long do you think it takes to put a stop to environmental depredation, to institutionalized business corruption, to an economy built on speculators’ quicksand?

You’ve already got congressional Republicans who don’t mind taking the country into a nose-dive again, just as long as President Obama crashes along with it. You’ve got Blue Dog Democrats who rode the Obama coattails to triumph and are now using their exalted positions to turn on his policies. The president has a harder job than Sisyphus -- the rock he’s trying to roll uphill is the one his putative friends are trying to roll back down on him.

Are you willing to have that political blood on your hands -- the guilt and the burden of dooming the most promising Democratic presidency in at least a generation? Because that’s what you’ll accomplish. You think American voters will flock to a Kucinich candidacy if Obama loses? Wise up.

You could be forfeiting the last chance this country has had in decades to get it right and handing the country back to the worst of the Republicans -- the repugnant, rapacious, amoral, scorched-earth, shameless GOP who have the temerity, the gall, to scold this administration. Get ready to wave bye-bye: No chance at any healthcare reform. No shot at a solid recovery. The working class gets thrown under the bus, again.

And now we have the Massachusetts Senate race for Ted Kennedy’s seat -- the man who, more than anyone else in a generation, made healthcare reform his first and last concern. The Times of London quoted some struggling Bay State lobstermen who plan to vote Republican after always voting for Ted Kennedy: ‘Kennedy was a good friend of the lobstermen. He would help whenever we had a problem.” Ted Kennedy was also a senator for 47 years. Barack Obama has had barely 47 weeks to try to bail out the entire country’s sinking fiscal ship. Do they really think the Republicans are going to throw themselves into saving the working man -- unless he works in the executive suite?

This country is starting to resemble Benjamin Button, the character in the film based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald story of the man who lives backwards, born into old age and growing into his own infancy. We seem to be getting more childish, not more mature. No patience, no long-range plans -- all id-driven, bullying, grasping, instant gratification.

Have you already forgotten what the preceding eight years were like? That ready-fire-aim presidency? George Bush lied and manipulated and spent recklessly on a grudge war and lied again and got away with it for at least five or six years -- he got put back into the White House in 2004. Barack Obama tells the truth -- and even some in his own party are furious with him for it.

Et tu, you brutes?

-- Patt Morrison