I doubt you’ll read this blog post. Let’s face it, it’s not like this is the Daily Kos or The Huffington Post, and with your busy schedule I don’t know that you’d even have time to read either of those more popular sites on the Web. But regardless, I feel the need to express some concerns.

I know you’ve been trying to get your progressive agenda across. During the campaign, you expressed many progressive ideas, and stuck to your guns despite attacks from your opponents and nearly everyone with a mouthpiece on the right. You handled them well, didn’t capitulate, and earned my family’s support and the support of millions throughout the country and worldwide. I embraced your candidacy early on, recognizing your intellect, commitment, and the promise of being what Colin Powell referred to as a “transformational leader.” Since your election, you’ve been faced with a major economic recession, two wars, the Bush/Cheney legacy, Iran, Israel/Palestine and of course the ongoing threat from al Qaeda. It’s never easy to be president. It’s even tougher when your predecessor spent eight years really messing up the nation and the world.

But if you don’t have time to read any further, here’s the take-home message I’d like to impart: try harder. Way harder.

You speak very well. Your intentions are good. I applauded your speech to the Muslim world. On my iPhone, I still have your speech on race that you delivered so well in Philadelphia during the campaign. I was happy when you pursued a more even-handed policy towards the Middle East. I was hopeful when you signaled your intent to close Guantánamo Bay and also when you officially banned torture. And when you aggressively started the process of healthcare reform, seemingly based on the notion of universal health care, I was deeply impressed and excited.

But something happened between January 20th and today; you dropped the ball. Your “tough love“ treatment of Israel was more ”love“ than ”tough“ and peace talks have stalled indefinitely. Guantánamo remains open. We still practice rendition. The covert prison at Bagram in Afghanistan remains open and out of reach of your presidential directives against torture. We’re getting out of Iraq at some point, but escalating the war in Afghanistan with inconsistent information as to when, and whether, we finally withdraw. Last time I checked, despite your continued promises to the gay, lesbian and transgendered community, both Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act remain in force.

And now health care. You dropped the ball. I understood why you wanted to try to avoid some of the missteps of Bill and Hillary by empowering Congress to draft the bill. And in an earlier time, that might have worked out mostly okay. But this is a different world. It’s a time when your election has brought out the haters in our society, who never really went away but who at least knew to stay in their rat holes underground and out of sight. It gave a sense of urgency to racists in every state, and to those fringe Libertarian folks who hate the notion of government and who are too ”out there“ even for the Republican Party. Hence the ”teabaggers“ who are working to either take over the GOP or create an alternative party to make the GOP even more irrelevant than it is today.We still have folks like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and many others on the airwaves and on the Web who virulently hate you and who will never provide any balanced view or opinion on anything you do. Face it, the right-wing is united against you in a way that is far more organized, insidious and, regrettably, effective than any of the progressive groups were during the Bush/Cheney era.

Have you spoken with Bill Clinton about his lovely time as president? At that time, I thought I had never seen such voracious attacks on any president. And that was true, until your ascent to the presidency. What’s going on now makes Whitewater and Travelgate seem like trivial events. Clinton’s impeachment was nothing compared to the hate-mongering that has been directed against you since 1/20/09. I don’t recall Clinton being called a socialist fascist communist racist. Nor did I ever see signs depicting Bill as a Nazi, nor was there ever any racial overtones to the attacks against him. After all was said and done, as much as the Right hated Clinton, he was still a white Southern boy. Too smart for his own good (he is brilliant, after all), and corrupted by a Northeastern and Oxford education. But Bill was still one of them in terms of background and race.

For all intents and purposes, President Obama, you might as well be an alien to folks like Sarah Palin and most of the Republicans in Congress. Many of them still think you’re not a natural-born American citizen, and think it’s perfectly fine to raise questions about your birth just as they find it socially acceptable to question evolution. Hell, a lot of them still fear you’re a Muslim. What you really should do is come out as a Jew-deep down, many of these people don’t like us any more than the Muslims, when push comes to shove.

Anyway, it’s a very difficult, negative and backbiting world we live in. And you had a great idea-let’s do something to reform health insurance and health care delivery in this country. Few can argue, and none successfully, that such reform is necessary. We have tens of millions without insurance. We spend more in GDP in healthcare than any other major nation, yet our clinical outcomes lag far behind countries we generally don’t view as comparable.

Most experts indicate that a single-payor system provides cost-effective care with better outcomes. I’m not going to argue that all single-payor systems are wonderful. Canada has its issues, for example, although I know a lot of Canadian gynecologists and they all seem pretty happy. And their clinical outcomes are not worse than ours. The NHS in the UK, the health system in France, the system in Israel are all single-payor, government-run health care and outcomes are great, costs are controlled, and the citizens are generally happy with their health plans. I have a friend who moved from this country to France specifically because of their health care system, and he’s doing quite fine as an expat.

You know this. Your clinical and economic advisors know this. You also are an attorney and I’m sure have a good idea of what negotiation involves. Yet from the start, single-payor health care was off the table. It was never even raised for discussion. Instead, you moved quickly to have Congress draft a bill involving a public option. And it was all downhill from there. Despite your political capital and urging that this be accomplished quickly, we saw delays, obfuscation by the Republicans, and the ugly spectacle of town hall debates taken over by a group of rabble rousers reminiscent of the worst in our society. The message shifted. The health care plan grew more complex, and frankly, was never really consistent from week to week. One day we had a public option. Then an ”exchange.“ Then an ”opt-out“ public option. Then Medicare for 55 and up as a for-purchase option with no public option (which was probably okay as by then, the public option had been so watered down as to be inconsequential). Interspersed were arguments about fictional ”death panels,“ government bureaucrats coming between doctors and patients, lack of payment for preventative screening tests such as mammography, etc.

You spoke to a joint session of Congress. I’m sure you remember-that was the night some lunatic expressed his free speech rights by calling you a liar on the floor of the Capitol. They didn’t even do that to poor Bill.

But good for you. It looked like you were finally taking charge after ceding control to Congress on a very important issue.

So what happened? You let it run out of control again. Sure, the Republicans were a thorn in your side. But they’re in the minority. A tiny minority. You have a majority in the House and Senate. Even better, there is what was heralded as a ”fillibuster-proof 60-vote majority“ in the Senate. You could do whatever you wanted to, right?

Well of course not. That ”60-vote majority“ is a figment of some correspondent’s imagination. There never was a safe majority because there aren’t 60 progressives in the Senate. Instead, you have folks like Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman who are about as Democratic as Ronald Reagan. Sure, diversity is a good thing, and I’d love to think the Democratic Party can be a big tent (and in many ways, it really is, unlike the Republicans). But these folks can’t even agree to vote for cloture, let alone for the current health care reform legislation. And you allowed Lieberman, who’s as trusty as the Lion King’s uncle in that Disney movie, to take control and derail reform. He’s still doing it, and will continue to do it. And even if he decided to play nice (which he won’t), you still have major problems in terms of the irreconcilable divide relating to abortion. Good luck solving that one now that Stupak and Pitts opened that can of worms.

So what can you do now? In all honesty, I have no definitive answers. But directing the Democratic leadership in Congress to play along with Joe Lieberman, Olympia Snowe and everyone else trying to muscle in and control the news of the day around health reform makes you look weak, indecisive, and even (and I really hate this word after it was so abused by that war criminal Dick Cheney) ”dithering.”

With all due respect, you made the wrong decision in Afghanistan. But at least you made a decision, and I can respect that. The entire point of the Bhagavad-gita is that action is better than non-action. In the case of health care reform, you started by being decisive, but then failed to act. And you’re still acting, at best, in half measures. You need to think to yourself “What would Ronald Reagan do?“ Or JFK. Or Harry Truman. Or even LBJ (no one dared screw around with him). Despite all the forces allied against you, it is within your power to take the lead and control the arguments on health care. Giving a speech to Congress isn’t enough. You and I both have spent time in Chicago and I’m sure you know very well how it’s done-you have to become the alpha dog and even bust some heads to get somewhere. But sometimes the ends justify the means. You still have good favorability ratings. Far better than W during his last days. Use your capital-take control already. Push Lieberman aside. If you want to embrace the minimal sense of bipartisanship, sure, try to get Olympia Snowe to sign on. But do it from a position of strength, not weakness. Right now, Snowe and Lieberman have the power. Snatch it back. Threaten them in a subtle fashion. Bill Clinton would have done it in a heartbeat. You can have Lieberman lose his chairmanship in the Senate. I’m sure there’s some potential pound of flesh you could exact from Snowe to make her go along. But so far you’ve been caving in.

I get it-it’s great when everyone gets along. I’d love it if the world could work that way. But it doesn’t. Remember the story of the scorpion and the frog? Well, right now, you’re the frog. There are a lot of scorpions out there, unfortunately.

I’m disappointed, and so are many others who have supported you. Rather than go after Howard Dean, go after Joe Lieberman. Howard is right-this bill is pretty bad and really should be allowed to die in the hopes that something better could be salvaged and adopted by a 51-vote majority.

More importantly, what happened to the Obama we elected? The Obama we went door-to-door for, who my wife and daughter worked phone banks for?  I understand there is a great void between running for office and running a nation. But even so, your first year has been marked by capitulation after capitulation without much of anything to show for it. It’s still possible to rebound; you have three more years, after all. Bill Clinton made some missteps during his first year as well, and he did well by the country even with his roving penis. You have a much better moral grounding. Now you need to channel some of Clinton’s and even W’s feistiness and even ruthlessness. Like I said, there are many scorpions out there. You can’t keep being the frog.

I’m not a person of faith, but do feel that as a democratic republic, people in the US should be free to practice or not practice a religion without fear of discrimination, violence, etc. For many years, American Jews, Quakers, Mormons and others had suffered discrimination in the US, and for the most part, such discrimination is a thing of the past, with infrequent instances of outright discrimination and prejudice against these minorities. Muslims aren’t there yet. Just as American Jews and Catholics were often inappropriately viewed as having foreign allegiances (to Israel and the Vatican respectively), since 9/11, Muslims in this country are too often stereotyped as being secret terrorists, a veritable “fifth column” waiting for orders to act against this country. In this regard we’re no better than Israel, where Israelis of Arab descent (20% of Israel’s population) are frequently discriminated against and viewed as working against Israel itself, even though the great majority of Israeli Arabs are peaceful and by any account loyal Israelis. We’re also no better than a number of predominantly Muslim nations that viewed their Jewish population with suspicion and in many cases drove out their Jews after both the 1948 and 1967 wars with Israel.

So for many years, American Muslims have been considered suspicious, and despite even George W. Bush’s instructions to behave otherwise, a great number of American Christians and Jews continued to hold unpleasant, even paranoid, opinions regarding their Muslim neighbors and friends. What’s particularly bizarre, at least to me, is that many Christians who decades ago would have been likely to hold frankly antisemitic views now are very supportive of Jews and Israel in part because of their rage against Muslims. Perhaps a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” attitude is driving this, but regardless, many Christians, particularly Evangelicals, are not exactly BFFs with the Islamic community in this country. Many seem to actually hate Muslims, regard any and all of them with suspicion, and at the drop of the hat will espouse all sorts of anti-Muslim rhetoric and hysteria.

In other words, the Muslims have become the new Jews.

What’s particularly appalling to me is that some of my coreligionists think nothing of branding all Muslims as terrorists, as wanting to live under strict Sharia law, etc. To them, anything bad that a single Muslim does reflects poorly on the entire population of US Muslims. Concern about Israel is also frequently brought up, as if to justify their Muslim derangement syndrome. That is, since many Muslims express criticisms of Israel, clearly they must be capable of terrorism within the US, and anything a Muslim does that is not proper or legal justifies whatever harsh collective action Israel does against the Palestinians.

The Ft. Hood killings is a perfect example of how the right-wing media has taken something an individual Muslim does as the starting point for anti-Muslim invectives and a campaign against Islam. Just a month ago, several Republican congresspeople held a press conference to warn against an “infiltration” of the Federal government by Muslim interns under the “control” of the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR). This was nonsense, trumped up by that bastion of truth, World Net Daily. But that pales in comparison with the prejudice being espoused since the Ft. Hood murders. Because the shooter was a Muslim, and (oh horrors!!!) a Palestinian, Fox News, Michelle Malkin (blecch), Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Debbie Schlussel and others from the right-wing hate-sphere just had to opine that this meant Muslims in the military should be viewed with extreme suspicion.

To put it into context, in the run up to the Holocaust, a Polish Jew acting alone assassinated Ernst vom Rath, the German Secretary of Legation. The Nazis immediately used vom Rath’s murder to justify Kristallnacht and the indiscriminate murders of many German Jews along with mass vandalism of their businesses and property. In the US during WWII, Americans of Japanese descent were rounded up and sent to internment camps. In both cases, there was collective suspicion, prejudice, punishment and (in the case of German Jews) mass murder.

I’m not saying that the current anti-Muslim hysteria being whipped up by the right-wing media is going to lead to a Kristallnacht of sorts against Muslims in the US. But I have absolutely no doubt that some law-abiding Muslims who are good citizens of this country will be discriminated against, and even hurt or murdered, as a result of the utter crap and ignorance being broadcast 24/7 against all US Muslims, all because of the act of a single Muslim soldier and physician. Why his religion has anything to do with this is totally beyond me. But it’s given racists like Debbie Schlussel the ammunition to continue her spewing of hate. Why am I singling out Ms. Schlussel over Michelle Malkin and many others? Perhaps its because as an American Jew, she should be more than understanding of where such invective can lead. If she doesn’t, then clearly she is no better than the folks in Nazi Germany who used any excuse to spout antisemitic commentary and whip up violence against Jews.

When Timothy McVeigh, a Christian who was previously in the US military, committed a horrible act of terrorism against the US, no one suggested that Christians in the US military should be viewed suspiciously. Indeed, a Bush-era report on hate groups and violence in the US that appropriately concluded that some White veterans might be capable of similar acts of terrorism was widely condemned by the Republicans in Washington. But let a single Muslim, one who might have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, commit a deranged act of murder, and it’s no longer a workplace killing but an act of “Islamic terrorism.” As if any religion endorses terror.

So I would appreciate it greatly if the media at large and the blogosphere got rid of its Muslim derangement syndrome once and for all. The specific religion of a crime perpetrator is irrelevant unless it has some clear bearing on the incident, as when a Catholic priest is guilty of sexual abuse within the church. The fact that Dr. Nidal Hasan is a Muslim and has Palestinian ancestry has as much to do with his contemptible act against his colleagues at Ft. Hood as his being a doctor, his eye color or whether he was right- or left-handed. No one seems to make much of the fact that the person who assassinated Dr. George Tiller was a fundamentalist Christian, so why does Dr. Nidal’s religion have anything to do with his irrational decision to commit mass murder?

The hypocrisy and prejudice is enough to make me want to scream.

I’ve been very concerned, as have many, by the forceful, venal and often racist attacks on our president. Recently, I’ve been reading Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency by James Bamford on my iPhone, and it’s interesting to notice how much opposition, even at the level of a potential military coup, there was to Kennedy’s early administration. He was felt to be too soft on Cuba, decided against invading the island after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and engendered a lot of crazy opposition from the John Birch Society and others. Obama has the birthers and the teabaggers, but that might pale against the forces that were arrayed against JFK from the outset.

The scary thing is that we know what happened to JFK. And Rabin. As much as I wish Obama would do more to make good on his promised changes for the country, he is my president. Our president. The fact that folks on the right are cheering against this country because they so desperately want Obama to fail is mind-boggling to me. The atmosphere is toxic, and can turn deadly very quickly. We have talks about secession-serious discussions even-and some bring guns to town hall meetings and presidential visits.

This is why I feel eerily reminiscent of the early 60’s. I was born in 1961, two weeks before JFK was inaugurated. But I think I’m living it over again as I read more about the fervent rumor mongering and name calling the right did against another president who had a great vision for the US.

I’m all for freedom of speech, however odious it may be. And I give Rachel Maddow a ton of credit for enduring what had to have been a painful discussion/debate with Pat Buchanan on the Sonia Sotomayor nomination. But given Buchanan’s known antisemitism, misogynism, racism and, frankly, clear hatred of anyone who isn’t a white Christian male, why do networks like MSNBC continue to hire him as a commentator and give his idiocy a prominent TV pulpit? Just consider his hypocrisy: he rails against Sotomayor as an “affirmative action appointee,” yet it never occurs to him that it could be argued that the Republicans took the same tactic when Miguel Estrada was nominated to a Federal court appointment. He argues that Sotomayor is not qualified for the Supreme Court. Given the facts of her education, performance and very substantial judicial experience (the most in 70 years for any Supreme Court nominee), this is at best intellectually dishonest, at worst racist and sexist. I am very comfortable stating my opinion that it’s the latter. Pat Buchanan is racist. He hates women. In the past he’s made it clear he’s not a fan of Jews either. Let’s stop giving him credibility by providing him with a TV pulpit and instant credibility. He has no reason to be hired as a TV commentator or “expert.” Trust me, there are more than enough jackasses on the right to put on the air, so do we also need to include someone who so blatantly gives comfort and support to all angry white male Christians out there?

The Inquirer just hired torture architect John Yoo for a monthly column. Another sign of the fall of a once great newspaper.

Here’s my letter to the Inquirer. Feel free to send them your thoughts here (you’re welcome to recycle my text below as your own).

I wish to protest the Inquirer’s hiring of John Yoo as a recurring columnist. As a chief architect of the Bush Administration’s misguided and illegal policy on torture, Yoo has no credibility and deserves condemnation by the Inquirer, not employment. I am urging all my friends and acquaintances to boycott the Inquirer until and unless the hiring of John Yoo is rescinded.

Sincerely,

David Toub

• Prosecutions for US-sanctioned torture. I don’t care where it leads. A war crime is a war crime, period.
• Repeal of ”Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.“ We’re supposed to have equal rights for all in this country. I’m not sure we can say that when we ask so much of people who are willing to sacrifice everything for this country, then essentially fire them for a biological reality, namely being gay or lesbian.
• A Twitter client that does everything I need in a simple way, and no more
• Time. I really need a 27-hour day.
• A Democratic primary victory by Joe Shestak over Arlen Specter, and a general election victory for Shestak. He gets it. Arlen doesn’t.
• Tolerance. We’re such a divided nation, and in a very personal, ugly way. I’m speaking about you, Rush, Sean, Glenn and all the other right-wing talking heads who just spew hatred against progressives and pull ”facts“ out of their asses. Guess I’m intolerant of intolerance.
• A moratorium on rain in the Northeast
• Real separation of church and state in this country. Get rid of the National Day of Prayer. We’re a pluralistic country, and just as clergy have no business telling people how to vote, the government shouldn’t be telling folks how to pray. Or whether to pray.
• No more funding of “abstinence-only education.” It doesn’t work. Or do facts not matter any more?
• Passage of the Freedom of Choice Act. Like the Equal Rights Amendment, it’s long overdue.
• A reduction in bigotry, including racism masked in “anti-immigration” hysteria. No one was pushing to close our borders with Canada during the SARS outbreak, were they?