On most radars, Facebook wasn’t going to make the political news this week. But it is, and twice. We’ll start with the wingnut, bat-guano crazy and move on to the counterintuitive defense of a public figure by a social network executive. Nothing like some anticlimactic structure to start your weekend, eh?
But there’s surely enough in the beginning to last you: Impeach Obama groups are already appearing on Facebook.
Sigh.
Two things:
First: If the Bush-Cheney tag-team dump on the Constitution didn’t get them impeached, then the only way in modern America to get it done is via slutty White House interns. Who wants to appoint America’s Temptress at Arms? I vote Jessica Gomes. If she can’t get it done then we know something more disturbing than we thought about Obama.
Second: You can’t impeach him yet. He’s not really president yet and he hasn’t done anything illegal. The witch-hunt is going to have to wait until after January 20, and you’re going to have to go after a former editor of the Harvard Law Review to prove it. Have fun and good luck with that.
Comments made among those in favor of impeaching Obama have cited his apparent loyalty to Marxist Socialism, based of course on his support for leveraging the graduated income tax system already in place to redistribute America’s wealth to Marxist programs like Medicare and Social Security and various infrastructure projects like highways and bridges. If the Socialism argument didn’t work for McCain, it ain’t working now.
Besides. It’s not illegal to be socialist, not even all the way.
Other arguments have included that he has “voiced” support for assault weapons bans, universal healthcare (what, like Medicaid?), and that he’s a smoker Muslim Arab. Again, voicing isn’t illegal and an assault weapons ban is debatable not impeachable, and neither being a smoker, nor Arab, nor Muslim is illegal, and in this case all are untrue.
I address these things as though this particular Facebook community can hear me, and as though I need to anymore, and as though their cry into cyberspace is worthy of a response. But it’s still not clear as to whether this group is serious, or just playing, and they seem to be serial president impeachers, one member acknowledging they were prepared to impeach McCain, should he be elected.
The other thing is that Facebook COO and former Google executive has written a missive for the HuffingtonPost defending former and possible future Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. The last time you heard of Summers, he was being shamed out of Harvard by feminists because he said girls just can’t do math.
Some people (feminists in particular) are little upset about his possible appointment in Obama’s cabinet. Sheryl Sandberg writes:
“Larry has been attacked by some in the women’s community for remarks he made about women’s abilities. As he has acknowledged himself, this speech was a real mistake. What few seem to note is that it is remarkable that he was giving the speech in the first place – that he cared enough about women’s careers and their trajectory in the fields of math and science to proactively analyze the issues and talk about what was going wrong. To conclude that he communicated poorly — and even insensitively — is fair. To conclude that he is opposed to progress for women overlooks the fact that improving this progress was precisely the subject he was addressing.
“Many people note that our nation has few economists with his intelligence. They should also know that we have few leaders, if any, in the financial world who have done more for women.”
And to add to that: Feelings are for social theory; smarts is for economics. He could be anti-cute-puppy for all I care so long as he fixes the economy, if that’s at all possible.
