Cenk Uygur: "Washington is infested"

Only weeks after he cut ties with his former employer MSNBC, Cenk Uygur sat down with RT today to share his take on last night’s GOP debate and what — if anything — Obama can do to rival whoever wins the Republican nomination.

According to the host of The Young Turks radio program, the ideas coming from the right are comical at this point. “They always say the same thing: we need to lower taxes,” says Uygur. He insists, however, that whether it comes from the mouth of Mitt or Michele, Republicans are only interested in helping out the rich while the conditions imposed on the not-so-well-off continue to worsen.Uygur adds that President Barack Obama himself is borrowing from some Republican ideals, and it is those mistakes that are costing him a shot at another term in the White House. “He is in massive trouble and apparently doesn’t quite understand that he is,” says Uygur. He says that Obama’s jobs plan, which will be formally introduced to the American public this evening, “is not the correct one.” It is, however, a Republican one. “It’s the number one issue in the country and he keeps falling for the Republican strategy,” says Uygur. “What he’s going to wake up and soon and realize is, oops, turns out the Republicans were wrong!” predicts Uygur. Who will be to blame for a still stagnant unemployment rate at that point? The pundit says the president will have to pin that one on himself. Uygur also tells RT that it is that job problem that is easily causing Americans to lose faith in Obama. Recently polls have placed the commander-in-chief with an all-time-low approval rating, and Uygur says it makes perfect sense to him:“Of course people don’t love you. It’s a 9.1 percent unemployment and honestly you aren’t doing much about it.”While Obama does little to help revitalize America, Uygur paints a not-so-pretty picture of the United States today that has gone corrupt, he says, with no help from the president. “We ran from the terrorists. We changed our civil liberties because we were so afraid of a bunch of guys hiding in caves,” says Uygur. Now, reflecting on what has changed in the ten years since the 9/11 attacks, Uygur says America has become only a shell of what it once was, and a crooked one at that. Now supposed-terrorists can be executed by Americans without a trial, says Uygur. “That’s not the country I grew up in. That’s sick! What has happened to this country?” he asks.Uygur adds that his take on the president is that he’s “profoundly disappointed” but remains hopeful that, even given the state of the country, Americans still have a chance to turn things around. How would they do that, though?“The way you do that is you do not go to Washington. Washington is infested,” says Uygur. “The virus has taken over the body of Washington.”