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Arianna Huffington Is A Republican, Folks?

I was torturing myself this morning as usual and watching Morning Starbucks with Joe and Mika. Arianna Huffington was on with them, apparently she hosted a party for Mika’s book last night with the Hollywood folks, she is kind of the west coast’s Sally Quinn. I watched as Joe and Arianna agreed on damn near everything, it inspired me to write this post about the transformation of The Huffington Post from being a Bush bashing blog to an Obama bashing blog.

I remember vividly when Arianna Huffington broke with the Bush/Cheney Republican Party, I saw a speech that she gave on C-SPAN and thought, wow, a Republican criticizing a fellow Republican. She then turned it into a business by launching The Huffington Post blog and news site. She seemed rather good at attacking Bush and drew many progressives to her site for that reason. I have to admit, I was a regular reader during the Bush/Cheney years and it continued until several months ago when the transition from attacking Bush to attacking Obama occurred. It was a gradual process that has now taken full bloom. In a recent post by Arianna, she interprets the president’s State of the Union address through her veil of cynicism and her true conservative beliefs are coming into display again. Here is a piece from her post…

But judging from the speech, he also spent a lot of time going over the results of focus groups and polls. Indeed, the speech, despite its charm, humor, and occasionally impassioned rhetoric, had the feel of being focus-grouped within an inch of its life. There was a decidedly paint-by-poll-numbers air about it.

Ah, so he doesn’t really believe anything he said, he’s just saying what a poll says he should say. She somehow then jumps into blaming Obama for the two wars that he inherited and is trying to clean up. It’s like she’s just swapped out Obama’s name with Bush’s, because they are soooooo similar, aren’t they? She then goes on to write this….

The president’s Pander-palooza continued with the middle class-friendly initiatives he announced on Monday and touched on again during the SOTFG (State of the Focus Group).

Oh no, not middle class-friendly initiatives, that must be pandering. It’s so fucking easy to be cynical about everything, it can’t possibly be that he cares about the middle class.  She then blames the whole bailout of the banks on Obama, even though I seem to remember that it was a Bush administration proposal, before President Obama even took office. Remember, the sky was falling, pensions were at risk, life savings at risk, the housing market was about to collapse, the stock market…..great depression….oh nooooooooooo. So our new president did what everyone told him had to be done and bailed out the banks. Almost all of that money has been paid back, but somehow that fact eludes the people who want to attack the president, convenient amnesia.

When are the democrats and real progressives going to call out the Arianna Huffington’s, the Jane Hamsher’s and the Cenk Uygur’s on their undermining of progressive causes? When are we going to stop playing footsie with those who want to bring down our democratic president who is fighting against the new 41 seat majority of Republicans? When are we going to take a look at these folks as the turncoats that they are? I’m going to keep hammering them.