Obama, the great disappointment?

Here's a column by Mark Morford that I needed to read and its timing in the wake of last night's speech is uncanny:

But not so fast. Back here in the dwindling twilight of the '00s, there is much puling from the liberal left that Obama has not done nearly enough, quickly enough, that his list of accomplishments is no list at all and is more of a giant, infuriating shrug. Many are saying he's not all he's cracked up to be because he has yet to completely revolutionize every aspect of human life as we know it by instantly turning everything organic, curing all diseases and setting all gay military personnel free to romp in the fields of boot camp.

Where is the complete ideological overhaul of the entire federal government? Where is the Gandhi-like pacifism? Why are we sending 30K more troops to Afghanistan? What about my new job, my single-payer health care and my tiny car that runs on sunflowers and hemp popsicles? Indeed, rabid impatience has combined with impossible expectation to give many liberals a free ticket to the land of nonstop bitching. Alas.

Conversely, there is all manner of incoherent noise spewing like radioactive urine from the far right, a nonstop wail of childlike panic claiming that, because Obama behaves with unnerving calm, shakes hands with foreign dignitaries and doesn't seem interested in bombing everyone in a turban, he must be a socialist Muslim Nazi hell-bent on banning machine guns and killing all old Republicans in their sleep and replacing them with French-speaking hip-hop jazz musicians.

The good news is, both sides are wildly, fantastically, delightfully wrong. [...]

But somehow, as I delved in a bit more deeply, as I scanned those lists and noted all the changes in a single year, I found myself reenergized, invigorated, slapped awake at the new tone and direction, the sheer scale of all the changes, and how we are no longer the rogue macho cowboy laughingstock jackass of the world.

Sure, there's still a long way to go. Yes, we're still invading Afghanistan. Wall Street is still packed with jackals and demons. DOMA still exists. All is far from perfect. But times have changed indeed. Things are most definitely not what they once were. I can think of no better news to report.

Thanks, Mark. I needed that. I can wait for the world of rainbows and unicorns and piles of puppies for a while longer now.

You owe it to yourself to go read the rest.