There *are* no liberals

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My heading is an exaggeration, since Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alan Grayson qualify. But this is a point I've been trying to make more and more for the past 8 years. This piece by RJ Eskow makes the same point, but mostly not as directly as it could be made. Here's the guts of it:

Since his re-election, Barack Obama has proposed to cut Social Security, echoed the deficit hysteria of the right, continued to negotiate NAFTA-like trade deals in secret (hidden from Congress and the public but available to 600 “corporate advisors”), and continued to privatize the military/national security state. (He has also pursued the most aggressive anti-whistleblower presidential campaign in American history.)

And yet 85 percent of registered Democrats either “somewhat approve” or “strongly approve” of Obama’s performance, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll. While the level and intensity of Democratic support has dipped somewhat, these figures are still surprisingly robust for a President who moved to cut Democrats’ signature achievement – Social Security – and whose other economic policies are so out of line with his party’s base.

Eskow's point is that corporations are using social policy to distract liberal voters from issues of economic justice just as conservatives have been doing with "Kansas" for decades. Democrats and progressive-type voters will tolerate an awful lot of right-wing economic engineering from their liberal heroes as long as they are on the right side of the gay-marriage and immigration arguments.

Since Day 2, the Clintons, in my view, have been the archetypal smiling-faces-sometimes conservatives---every bit as despicable to me as Joe Lieberman. They know how to charm you into silence as you watch them steal the silverware. President North Star earned a lifetime membership in that club of vipers upon following his terrific New-Deal-type inauguration speech rhetoric with centrist appeasement... as if Social Security is his to compromise away. At this point I think I'd rather have Rand Paul than Hillary Clinton as the next president.

Democrats are Tylenol: they keep the fever low enough that the virus can stay in command.

Fake scandal No. 1: IRS and the Tea Party 501(c)4 groups

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Selective IRS scrutiny based on political beliefs, associations, or activities is (supposed to be) unlawful. Best I can tell is that the Cincinnati IRS people were using a certain criterion to flag new 501(c)4 applications to review. They exercised poor administrative judgment (I see that occasionally from my den in the woodwork of a government agency), and were ordered to stop by upper management. The Inspector General found no evidence of political motivation.

Still, it shouldn't happen. Clear rules for flagging potentially suspicious paperwork should be developed by IRS executives with participation from field offices. Also, the law needs to make it crystal clear that improper IRS scrutiny is unlawful not only when it affects the Tea Party, but also when it affects groups whose names contain words like occupy, environmental, progressive, peace, and so on. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what I might be talking about.

Are Democrats using this occasion to point out (for once) that Both Sides Do It? To make sure that all Americans are protected from IRS harassment rooted in political criteria? No. They have been busy all week stepping on their own dicks, acting like Democrats invented the weaponization of the IRS. They should bring heinous examples of Republican abuse of IRS powers into the public record... not to excuse the Cincinnati field office, but to insist on a "bipartisan effort" to prevent the IRS from chilling political activity irrespective of which wing of The Property Party holds the presidency.

Wall Street Democrats

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This detestable specimen of politician, starting Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband and including herself, Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, and about everybody short of Alan Grayson and Elizabeth Warren (so far as I know thus far), are the real drivers of ruination.

Despite what R.J. Eskow says in the article above, though I believe that President Obama knows exactly what he's doing when he drives liberals to distraction by "negotiating with himself" on promoting long-term rot of the safety net. The bait and switch method begins with bait---

According to The Narrative, he believes that conservatives will play nice with him on Capitol Hill if he shows that he's serious about "deficit reduction" at the expense of no one who works Capitol Hill.

No, President North Star is not naive. And neither are the politicians who I used to refer to as "spineless Democrats." Whether this is what Obama wanted when he was running for the office or he has just surrendered to the inevitability of global hegemony by a transnational military/industrial/banking/infotainment complex, he and his party are intentionally giving radical conservatives all the fertilizer they need to infest our polity like a tropical fungus.

Thanks to President North Star, the "left" position on safety net programs is that they must be "gradually" trimmed back because they are unsustainable. Pretending that he represents the adult faction within the monkey house, the President tells us that the way forward is for Republican thought leaders to erect a so-called permission structure (i.e., comfort zone) that will enable lunatics to fall in line... and endorse a policy that they've been drooling over for 50 years. Note the denial of the author of that linked post, though, and the denial evident at the top of the comments thread: they seem to think this is all the work of "centrist" Democrats. Well, other than the two I mentioned above, I'd be interested for someone to show me a Democrat national officeholder who isn't a centrist. That is, a Wall Street Democrat.

It is these despicable people, posing as traditional liberals, who are willing to accept cuts to a legacy of political genius that is not theirs to bargain away. They're not "naive," and they could turn it around in 6 months if they wanted to. But they don't.

Monsters

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Wanton marquee-grade killing, whether the media label it as "terrorism" or "tragedy," understandably raises the eternal question of where "evil" comes from, and why. Opinions are diverse, understandably, because this is arguably the central mystery of existence to anyone who believes that life has a moral or spiritual dimension (in other words, that the universe is more than a bin of particles that follows "laws of science" to move from chaos toward order). My opinions on that aren't important; they're as unimportant as, say, Mike Huckabee's.

But around these events, the question of what to do about them always struggles to be considered. Predictably to anyone who knows something about post-70s America, Second Amendment enthusiasts and the politicians who exploit their preoccupation tell everyone else that "now is not the time" to talk about gun carnage because, after all, it is people who kill people. Everyone else is also admonished not to "politicize" tragedy, even though it's legitimate and imperative to discuss whether public policy is partially to blame or whether changes in public policy could reduce the frequency and carnage of mass shootings. Corporate media always propagate this conservative admonition, and are its foremost adherents.

I've got nothing profound to offer, but here is a small survey of media response with a comment or two.

This whole Charlie Pierce piece is worth reading. He ties any discussion of gun "tragedies" to the fundamental conservative fallacy---that (to borrow Margaret Thatcher's radical confession of global conservative principles) "there is no such thing as society":

There are things we must do together, in a political context, because these things are too big — and, in this case, too monstrous — for us to handle alone. Self-government and its institutions — public schools, police and fire departments, the ridiculously underfunded mental-health facilities, and all the people to whom we increasingly begrudge their salaries — are the only things keeping us from falling back into barbarism, and the only things keeping us safe and sane when one of us falls back into it on their own.

I agree. The absolute minimal conversation we should be having about gun violence, whether or not conservatives think any time is an appropriate time, is about the necessity of understanding that America needs fully funded and professional education, law enforcement, emergency response, and healthcare institutions... period. If the well off and the Job Creators don't want to pay for the privilege of enjoying an orderly society, they should repatriate their warty asses to China or Haiti.

Second, there is this piece by Maggie Koerth-Baker about "what science says" about gun control. Here is her profound takeaway:

Some studies are funded by biased institutions. Some studies aren't peer reviewed. Some studies feature poorly thought-out methodology.

All of that leads to a mess of frequently contradictory conclusions that can, frankly, be used to support just about any position you'd like to put forward. So, basically, just because you can support your position, don't think that makes you absolutely correct.

As so-called science writers go, Koerth-Baker is especially useless to me, with her patronizing and pseudo-profundities. But I think her conclusion is typical corporate media treatment: it's all just too complicated for us poor journalists and citizens to make heads or tails of, so let's all just love one another. Thanks for nothing, Maggie.

Speaking of the "media role" in public tragedy, the following is something I stumbled across this morning. It's a Roger Ebert anecdote about an interview he gave to NBC news (never aired) after Columbine (via BoingBoing again) in which the reporter was looking to cherry-pick quotes about violent movies causing gun violence. Ebert wouldn't play along:

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them.

As much as public policy, this is a piece of the problem that needs to be discussed. Logos and branding---bullseye. Personally, I wouldn't dismiss the media's normalization of violence as sensual and pre-political entertainment as quickly as Ebert seems to, but Hollywood is not directly responsible for Columbine or Tucson or Newtown.

And finally, there's this last word on the topic, straight from the mouth of a genuine monster:

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee attributed the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in part to restrictions on school prayer and religious materials in the classroom. 

"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News, discussing the murder spree that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, CT that morning. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

As Rob Bechizza said about Huckabee's comments back on BoingBoing: "Don't be angry. Just understand what he understands: that this is political."

I think the conversation needs to be much more far-reaching than the topic of gun control. It needs to examine how this society has become so detached from its own collective humanity that even a discussion of gun control is taboo within both of our major political parties while kids are slaughtered on their mats in kindergarten.

Enough of the "Big Dog" crap already!

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I wish another member of the Bush-Cheney administration would get explosive diarrhea for each time I see a variation on this particular idea:

Move over little dog, the big dog's moving in.

I'm truly and eternally mystified why every card-carrying liberal seems to worship Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband, who signed a law to end the Glass-Steagal Act for banking system integrity; signed the homophobic Defense of Marriage Act; established the humiliating Don't Ask/Don't Tell military personnel policy; beat up on poverty-stricken Americans by adopting a Republican plan to add to the misery of public aid recipients; signed the authoritarian Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Sonny Bono Copyright Act, and pranced around as one of the nation's biggest cheerleaders for a tidal wave of economic globalization initiatives that give us (and citizens of all other nations) much less leeway to run our own affairs, delegating sovereignty upwards to trans-national corporations.

Bill Clinton "beat" the Republicans simply by adopting much of their program and tongue-washing it in expertly-delivered feel-your-pain rhetoric that might either have issued from the mouth of a man with a conscience or a man without one. This is the real reason why he drove Republicans crazy: he was in a position to make them obsolete. They simply had to neutralize him, if not destroy him. And Clinton obligingly gave them a prong they could hang an impeachment trial on.

Too, I'd be surprised if there aren't many liberal Democratic women who are, secretly, at least a little uneasy about all this Big-Dog adulation, considering that the one accomplishment Clinton will always be remembered for is seducing a White House intern into a grossly uneven power relationship that involved having his lumpy pecker (possibly the veteran of a dozen chancres). At very least, it seems that the Big Dog may not have much more respect for women and their feelings than any off-the-shelf rock star.

Can anyone point to a single constructive, progressive piece of legislation promoted and signed into law by Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband that every made anyone's life better outside of a corporate shareholder's meeting or a beltway political consultancy? Truly, I can't think of a single Bill Clinton accomplishment that matters today in any positive way.

Stockholm, DC

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Paul Krugman, paraphrasing Jonathan Chait in The New Republic (and himself on many other occasions), boils the so-called deficit crisis into its irreducible essence:

As Chait says, the first thing you need to understand is that modern Republicans don’t care about deficits. They only pretend to care when they believe that deficit hawkery can be used to dismantle social programs; as soon as the conversation turns to taxes, or anything else that would require them and their friends to make even the smallest sacrifice, deficits don’t matter at all.

In the Stockholm Syndrome world of Washington, DC, and the corporate media that sustain America's political withdrawal from consensual reality, this kind of talk from a liberal is condemned as "partisan bickering" or "uncivil."

Putting that childish, dishonest perspective aside for later discussion, preferably on someone else's blog, I simply suggest that a skeptical reader simply  at the evidence that has been right in front our our noses from the moment we learned about Grover Norquist's quest to drown the federal government in the bathtub. Use Occam's razor. Is there a simpler, more direct statement that explains the state of our political discourse today?

The S&P coup

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I want to add a little to my previous post on S&P's implicit threat to blackmail the federal government into adopting a specific piece of legislation (i.e., $4 trillion spending reduction over the next 10 years).

Paul Krugman seems a little skeptical that an S&P downgrade of US debt would be huge deal because, basically, bond traders already know that ratings agencies don't know what they're doing:

The point is that when S&P or Moody’s speaks, that’s not the voice of “the market”. It’s just some guys with an agenda, and a very poor track record. And we have no idea how much effect their actions will have.

I don't doubt that. But to me the important point is not so much what financial traders do with an S&P intervention of this nature, but what the media and politicians will do with it. A ratings agency downgrade of US debt will be presented as something like scientific evidence that we need to finish drowning the federal government in the bathtub now! now! now! It's hard for me to see how our disinformation economy could get any worse---how it could further accelerate America's decline. But my intuition tells me we haven't reached terminal velocity yet. We'll be even closer when the press, the Congress, and the President anoint Wall Street as the new fourth branch of government.

Fourth branch, Third World

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I think that Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, like the few other reports I've seen about the Standard and Poors threat to downgrade US debt to Third World status, just misses the point.

Yes, insane Republican ideology and The Conceder In Chief have done a swell job creating an existential economic threat by tying approval of the debt ceiling to the politics of government spending and taxation. This is the "Worst. Congress. Ever." Blah blah blah.

In journalism lingo, there's a "buried lede" in Klein's piece:

And having upset S&P, appeasing them might not be so simple. Beers repeatedly emphasized that he wasn’t just looking for a number. He was looking for something “credible.” And credible, in his view, was something that both parties had embraced. After all, he argued, deficit-reduction plans have to be continuously implemented over a decade or more, and if there’s not “buy-in from both parties,” there’s no reason to believe that the plan will survive the inevitable changes in political control.

On the one hand, the S&P view is a reasonable analysis. But on the other, sinister hand:

You might ask whether all this matters. S&P got the financial crisis almost entirely wrong — in fact, their analytical errors, alongside those of other agencies, substantially contributed to it — so why should we listen to them now?

But the question isn’t whether S&P should be listened to. It’s whether the market will listen to them.

Yes, that's right. The once-respectable financial rating agency, which is as tarnished by the 2008 economic implosion as any Wall Street investment bank, has made federal legislative politics an evaluative criterion for assessing the full faith and credit of the US government and the debt it issues.

And as a small digression, it's probably worth inserting here that there really is no deficit crisis. The deficit is high-ish in relation to conventional yardsticks, but interest rates are so low (near zero as applicable to government borrowing, in fact), that there is no problem servicing this debt... unless the ceiling isn't raised promptly. The "deficit crisis" is an invention of right-wing politicians, corporate media, and as a johnny-come-lately, President North Star.

But back to the libretto: There is nothing benign whatsoever about what S&P is up to here. They aren't trying to serve as a voice of reason: they're emphatically inserting itself into the political fray with the power of a fourth branch of government, but one outside of federal checks and balances. "You motherfuckers attend to the 'deficit crisis' ," S&P seems to be saying, "or else we'll sic The Market on you." With "you," of course, meaning both politicians and voters. It is an aggressive, unconscionable lobbying assault on behalf of The Corporation---a protection racket that the federal government must now subscribe to with an initial payment of $4 trillion extracted from middle-class taxpayers, the poor, and the elderly. If they pull this off, there will be no end to the racket until we're all living in sheet metal shacks on dirt lots.

The S&P threat gives every politician in Washington enough cover, or terror, to cave in to the demands of the Republican legislative caucus and The Conceder in Chief for "the good of the nation." Once this smelly, syphilitic Wall Street camel has its nose all the way into the tent, S&P might conceivably become as powerful as the Federal Reserve in dictating the grim economic future of America. No accountability; just the perpetual threat to shit everybody else's nest if some warty bankers and corporate chieftains don't like the drift of public policy.

"Hold it! Next man makes a move, the 'nigger' gets it!"

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Today the Standard & Poors "credit rating agency" borrowed a slick comedy move from Bart, Cleavon Little's character in Blazing Saddles. Specifically, S&P made a hollow threat to cut the rating of U.S. Treasury securities this morning---in effect, Wall Street holding a cap gun against its own head---which I assume is supposed to scare the President and the Democrats into doing whatever the right-wing deficit peacocks demand, such as abolishing Medicare and Social Security so rich assholes can have more tax cuts.

Right on cue, naturally, lame duck Senator Joe Lieberman was on my car radio this afternoon spewing turgid nonsense about the existential threat posed by current US debt levels and why it's important to cap federal spending at some absurdly low percentage of Gross Domestic Product. (I can't find a link to this, so you don't have to listen to his putrid, quavering voice here.) Why do I call it "turgid nonsense"? Because like most talk about federal deficits and debt in the corporate media today (including NPR), the somber generalities preached by deficit peacocks immediately break down to gibberish when real macroeconomists insist that the discussion include valid historic data, meaningful contexts, and other scary evidence-based features.

Nobel macroeconomist Paul Krugman, for example, quickly authenticated this S&P stunt as another episode of Wall Street's tiresome Saturday matinee serial entitled Uncle Sam and the Phantom Bond Vigilantes. It's fair to ask why I might put stock in anything Krugman and other neo-Keynesians say. My reason is simple: because his analysis have been consistently correct (i.e., consistently predictive about what would happen to the economy in the future) since I started following his New York Times blog 5 or 6 years ago, around the time he was was warning readers about the runaway US housing bubble and related phenomena. And he always backs his arguments with verifiable economic data and simple numerical models that every economist and most people with a high school diploma can understand.

Silly me

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My firm prediction that the government would be shut down for between 5 and 7 days, not published here but explicitly stated to friends, was based on my certainty that Republicans needed a face-saving play to keep the tea bag caucus on board with Boehner. My guess was that this would come in the form of a short-term shutdown to satisfy the 'baggers, followed by an appeal to higher authority, such as reopening the government to restore "market confidence." Then we'd get a GOP declaration of victory, and their own well founded faith in having the history rewritten by party propagandists and broadcast on Fox.

Well, I believe I got the "face-saving" aspect correct. But I truly did not predict that it would be Harry Reid and Obama who would give Boehner his political cover, and also several extra billion in cuts to sweeten the deal. Silly me.

Betting against my own predictive prowess tonight [updated x2]

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Up until a short time ago I was certain that there would be a government shutdown at midnight tonight because I assumed that the lugubrious Speaker of the House (Boehner) has much more to lose by compromising than by standing with his tea bag coalition. I would have staked my prognostication credibility on it, and in fact I think I did with a few friends at work.

But today, Herr Karl Rove, "presidential hopeful" Mike Huckabee, and "whatever she is" Michele Bachmann all announced that the wisest course for Republicans would be to take the money and run. Like Josh Marshall says, this might mean that the House 'bagger caucus has been convinced by leadership behind closed doors, accurately, that it would be stupid to hold out on the Planned Parenthood assault when they've already completely rolled Obama and Reid.

By reaching this "compromise" to rob social programs at no negative political cost to themselves, the GOP can frame their Planned Parenthood "giveback" move as a "diplomatic" and "adult" contribution to the national welfare (no pun intended). Meanwhile, President North Star and Reid stand there pretending they haven't been sprayed down in shitmist.

I didn't put this together until I read on TPM that Bachmann had expressed her opinion on the matter. If she brings the 'baggers around, then her status is significantly elevated in the GOP.  If that is in fact the case, then Boehner still looks weak in terms of House majority leadership and is vulnerable to a challenge by Eric Cantor, for example, the Majority Leader. And if that happened, Bachmann might come out of it in the future with a deputy-whip-type position or even shot at Republican Conference Chair, movin' on up to the East Side so to speak, George Jeffersonwise.

Editor's note: for purposes of Truth In Blogging, RubberCrutch discloses that he is employed by a small agency inside a larger one buried deep inside a cabinet-level department that is very good at blowing up things.

Update: if this (from TPM) is true about a three-day continuing resolution in the works, then Obama gets rolled in another way. He said he would not approve any more extensions. Yes, I know that he has to do this if there's an acceptable deal on the table---acceptable to himself and the invertebrate caucus, that is---but it will still be painted by triumphal Republicans as "further evidence" of Obama's weakness. I don't think Democrats could negotiate a discount on a Cabbage Patch Baby at a DuPage County flea market....

Update x2:  TPM sez the pending deal includes two fucking billion dollars more in spending cuts plus a "symbolic" floor vote on the Planned Parenthood attack. If true, then a total win for GOP, plus the corporate media will surely give Republicans all the credit for the "compromise." And I don't have any convincing reason to think this floor vote is necessarily destined to fail. Altogether, a fate worse than a gigantic rogue asteroid smashing up the joint in terms of what this means for the system of government under which we were privileged to be born. Democrats give away the farm and provide political cover for a cabal of thugs. Plus, I was sort of looking forward to having Monday off....

Microeconomics

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President Barack Obama made a unilateral commitment to economic stimulus Tuesday evening before a joint session of Congress by delivering the largest shovel-ready project of his two-year administration to date: the 2011 State of the Union address.

Hideous

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And not only hideous, but very much foreseen and publicized by DHS over a year ago.

Do you remember what happened when DHS released that memo about the rising threat of right-wing extremism? And do you remember the howling about this from right-wingers at the time, like the samples captured at the bottom of the HuffPost article linked above?

And do you remember how DHS chief Napolitano fumbled against that right-wing pushback? And, finally, do you remember how, when questioned by TPM this past September about actual examples of right-wing domestic extremism over the year since the original DHS memo had been issued, she referred to it as "ancient history"? I do.

Right-wing celebrity pundits using mainstream communications media fire up haters with eliminationist rhetoric covered by a veneer of sick humor. Right-wing politicians refuse to disavow pigs like Limbaugh or Beck, and will even express sympathy for the seething fans who are infected with this violent, schizoid ideation. How many times have you hears a senior Republican establishment figure say something to the effect of "Well, I may not agree with the rhetoric, but I certainly understand why these people are so angry."

But "centrist" shape-shifters like Napolitano and President North Star, who always approach this topic without candor in order to spare themselves a scolding from John McCain and Rush Limbaugh and Erick Erickson, share in the accountability for this abominable political massacre. I'm sure that all we'll hear about this from Responsible Democrats in the coming days are abstract platitudes about the horror of it all in This Great Nation founded on principles of blah blah blah; and boilerplate expressions of how everyone's thoughts should "be with the families" of the victims. But not a goddam meaningful word about the hate mongers or their mesmerized audience.

Editor's note: yes, I am aware that we don't have many confirmed facts yet about the alleged shooter or his motives. I see no point in being "even-handed" at this point, but I will immediately apologize for jumping the gun when it is proven that the shooter is a smelly, card-carrying ACLU socialist vegan.

President North Star

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At his December 7 press conference, President Obama declared his belief that this country was founded on compromise:

Under the criteria that you just set out, each of those were betrayals of some abstract ideal. This country was founded on compromise. I couldn’t go through the front door at this country’s founding. And if we were really thinking about ideal positions, we wouldn’t have a union. So my job is to make sure that we have a North Star out there.

See, I thought that this country was actually founded on the basis of an uncompromisable "abstract ideal," namely the right of a peoples' collective and individual right to self-determination. This concept was concisely and eloquently expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

Maybe what the President actually meant was that the U.S. Constitution was hammered out in an epic labor of debate and compromise so both the humble and the aristocratic founders could get behind it. If so, that's true. But you can't compromise if you don't negotiate. Obama allowed senior congressional Republicans to take the restoration of Clinton-era tax rates for the rich completely off the table before the first bag of Cheetos was opened. That's not compromise; it's a surrender to winner-take-all tactics. And it pivots the responsibility for intransigence onto his own party. Smooth move, President North Star.

The mask is off

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Just one more post about President Obama's cynical, stomach-turning political calculations, which I wrote about yesterday. I'm gratified to see that Paul Krugman reads this turn of events, politically, about the same as I do:

What’s particularly striking is that Obama seems passionate about denouncing his progressive critics, even as he has nice words for the people who have spent two years trying to destroy him. 

(Be sure to click through to the Tom Tomorrow cartoon that Krugman links to, by the way.)

I had intended to follow up my weekend posts about Obama's situation to add some coherence to my thoughts. I see no point now. If he had any cognitive dissonance about his role in life, which was only education speculation on my part, I'd say he's now found an effective denial strategy and is acting accordingly. Sleep well, Mr. President. Dream of your legacy: "At Least I'm Not George Bush or John McCain."

Arrogant and pathetic

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There is far too much to say about this three minute clip of Obama's press conference today than I have time or stomach for now. One or two paragraphs after the clip.



Yes, this is the debate we had about the public option all over again. He was wrong then and he is wrong now. The public option is the least-cost, least administratively complex way of providing universal healthcare to all Americans now. He knows it and so does everyone else. But it wasn't good for the insurance industry. So he compromised the best interests of the American people and fiscal responsibility away to the insurance industry. And, no, Obama has not achieved "healthcare for all Americans"; not even close. And his Republican successors, who he doesn't demand compromise anything substantive or enduring, will tear up his "signature piece of legislation" a day or two after he vacates the White House.

And today: the principle of progressive taxation with representation is not an "abstract ideal"; it's a concrete policy issue, and without it we would have had no "American Century." His compromises with enemies of tax fairness are not noble; they're cynical and craven.

This clip is the arrogant, sanctimonious manifesto of that phony kind of centrist whose truly abstract ideal is to imagine that he can raise himself above the fray of partisan politics. His statements are marred with faulty logic and festooned with distorted historic examples. He plays at distancing himself from the extremes on both sides of the spectrum, with a few stern words for Republicans (not in the clip), yet giving them them what they want. Then he deeply insults the ideals and motiviations of his base; in a year from now he will whine about his liberal primary challenger.

Underneath it all, what strikes me about this clip is the President's petty tone. I'm sure he's trying to sound defiant, but he sounds arrogant and wounded.

Voters did not elect Obama to be a centrist and an appeaser of failed right-wing ideologues, but President Obama pretends to believe differently. And because of that, in 2012 we will most likely have a new President. What a pathetic performance.

December 7: a suitable day for a nice stab in the back, I guess.

For your "empty messaging" collection

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Yes, for sure! Progressive Democrats are certain to resonate to this kind of twaddle while the Obama White House is simultaneously busy with futile but chilling expressions of authority that will seem inexplicable and evil to any person who has grown up with open access to the internet. You know what kind of people those are: Obama's base.

I believe it's inevitable that President Obama will have a stiff primary challenge in 2012 from the progressive wing of his party, and that it will be strongly supported by the progressive wing of society at large.

The "why" of Obama's problem [updated]

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Here's my contribution to the grand parlor game of Winter 2010, namely trying to figure out what's the matter with President Obama.

The "what" of the problem was evident pretty much from the start. He has kept his counsel with establishment Democrats and Blue Dogs while dismissing the priorities of the people who voted him into office. He has been preoccupied with "reaching across the aisle," pulling it back each time with another missing wristwatch or gold ring, for the futile pursuit of meaningful bipartisanship with adversaries who are intent on destroying his presidency. He fails to provide vocal, energetic leadership to achieve his purported goals, and fails to use his rhetorical skills to talk over the heads of bitter political enemies straight to "the American people." And finally, he concedes negotiation points to the predators and parasites in advance of the negotiating, which lets them know that they can make him cave on any issue. For a long time, cautious optimists felt that all these tactics were part of some super ninja political strategy that would, without warning, explode forth and overwhelm his regressive opponents. Myself, I discarded the idea that he was a 10-dimensional chessmaster upon his continual dereliction of duty during healthcare reform negotiations.

The "why" of it is a puzzle. Paul Krugman has an idea about it---an extension of observations he has been making for at least a year. The gist of it is that now everyone is seeing what Obama is made of: nothing. Could be. It's possible that Obama was never anything more than a legislator-poet; a guy with a great broadcast voice (when he's not stammering all over himself) and enough charisma to be able to make any of his ideas seem perfectly reasonable to a wide spectrum of people.

A competing idea, just as prosaic as Krugman's but with more of the ring of truth to me, is that while Obama really does possess the attributes of leadership, intelligence, ideals, and virtue that so many of his partisans clearly perceived during the election cycle, he is psychologically and unemotionally unsuited to the level of power he stepped up to. Only four years after logrolling small-time downstate legislators as an Illinois state senator, and having served barely enough time in the U.S. Senate to be oriented into its ways, voters granted Barack Obama his own DEFCON4-grade mansion, airborne command fortresses, bulletproof limousines, personal praetorian guard, and enough power to annihilate all but a dozen nations on earth with relative impunity.

Obama, the dedicated family man---kind, laid-back, hip, spiritual---must try to sleep every night under the inevitable weight of ordering or consenting in assassinations worldwide, the launch of predator drone attacks that kill innocent people, and "renditions" around the globe (I think we can assume that these have not stopped). Immediately upon his election, masses of ignorant, resentful people were whipped into a lather of hate for this well-meaning man, who epitomizes the so-called American Dream, by gleeful corporate news conglomerates, vicious national politicians, and demonic infotainers. He surrounded himself with bad (as in Evil) people in key positions, thinking it to be politically savvy because establishment Democrats told him it was "reality"), and has been cuckolded continually by their bad faith and world-destroying policy recommendations. Certainly he is now aware that he no longer has a significant political constituency---only a relative handful of people who think he's better than McCain would have been.

My current thinking, regretfully, is that Obama's talents and ambition got him to the Oval Office, but he had no idea what arriving at that destination would do to him mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It would be a miracle if he is not demoralized, despondent, isolated, afraid, and fed up. A sign of such a miracle would be if the President were behaving defiantly, deconstructing the malevolent intent of his political adversaries and proactively selling his own positions directly to the American people.

The increasing pace of Obama's political gaffes suggests to me that he's now doing it on purpose. It is possible that he is desperately hoping for a serious, qualified primary challenger. If one emerges and can poll at around 35 percent among likely Democratic voters, I'd have every expectation that he would be greatly tempted announce his intention not to seek reelection on similar grounds that LBJ pleaded after he was almost beat in the 1968 New Hampshire primary by Gene McCarthy.

A hypothetical primary challenger in 2011, like McCarthy in 1967, would most likely be a deeply dedicated progressive who is skilled at retail-level politics and at home in the corridors of power; somebody who has been in The Game for awhile. (No Blue Dog or Clintonista would even have a legitimate pretext for challenging Obama since he has been their cat's paw for 2 years now.) My guess at this point? Madame Speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

[Editor's note: I updated this post on Saturday morning to present a more nuanced viewpoint in the last several paragraphs than I was capable of accomplishing on Friday night.]

Progressives *still* didn't win the midterms, but...

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...two more Blue Dogs look like they're being targeted by the Shit-Hammer of Destiny.

Blue Dogs, as others of you may agree, are a breed of spineless Democrat (there are other breeds, too) that thrives as a parasite on the body of the progressive political tradition. They subsist by devouring Blue Dollars, which they rapidly metabolize into Red Dollars. Blue Dogs excrete Red Legislative Compromises that empower a minority of regressive political bosses to turn our democratic republic into a feudal domain.

No, progressives didn't "win" Tuesday

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But....

Big Hussein Otis pointed me to a plucky column by Karen Dolan, an activist and fellow at the liberal Institute for Policy Studies, which merrily proclaims that progressives "won" yesterday's national midterm elections. That's a farfetched interpretation, obviously, and she certainly must be using it to attract the attention of dispirited liberals. But the analysis in back of if conforms to one of my own conclusions.

I am part of Dolan's target audience even though I'm not a Democrat and never will be. Since high school I've identified with the ideals of the political heroes of the progressive era in U.S. politics: Teddy Roosevelt, "Fighting Bob" LaFollette of Wisconsin, and the muckraker journalists, for example. Democrats are supposed to be the heirs to and stewards of the American progressive political tradition. But Democrats became lukewarm toward, and even ashamed of, their responsibility to promote progressive policies and programs. I assume this abdication of responsibility---cowardice, let's say---is the result of being vilified for liberalism during 30 years of rhetorical assault by a minority of loud, hateful political and corporate thugs. Well, too bad---"politics ain't beanbag. Abandoning the practice of your core principles while publicly implying that you still fight for them on behalf of ordinary Americans an ugly failure of character. That should have consequences. In the Tuesday midterms, it did. And my conclusion is: good!

Over half the members of the House Blue Dog caucus lost their seats to Republicans, by Dolan's count. And, says Dolan, almost two thirds of the conservative House Democrats who voted against HCR---Blue Dogs and others---also lost. Meanwhile, only three members of the House progressive caucus lost. So, as I say: good!

"Blue Dogs", as you know, are a caucus of congressional Democrats who use the party label, its past reputation, and its resources to win their elections so they can use their office to undermine their own party and thwart progressive legislation in concert with the regressive political minority. In other words, Blue Dogs are a critical component of the American regressive movement, and turn that minority into a majority. They do their dirty work in Democrat drag, pretending that they're "centrists," and party leadership permits this situation to continue. The party has gotten what it deserves.

So even though progressives would be silly to consider Tuesday's results to be a win, some bad karma accounts were settled. Will the party learn its lesson? I don't think so. I think it's more likely the party will die from it. So that will leave room for a new progressive party to push its way into the game. If we still have a functioning democracy by then.

And meanwhile, the new Republican coalition is flimsier than a Walmart card table. How can Rand Paul preach to his Libertarian congregation that Government doesn't create jobs when it's just created one for him and each member of his new staff?