Posting about topical current events is pointless

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[Editor's note: the following text isn't written very well.]

I'm about done with trying to post about stuff that's in the news now-now-now. I'll fade away sometime during this Syria issue and try to focus on a bigger picture with reference to journalists and writers who perform real reporting and analysis outside of the disgusting narrative-formation machine.

Was just listening to President Peace Prize on the radio, in high dudgeon, ask his "liberal friends" how they could reconcile their beliefs with images of children writhing and dying on cold hospital floors in Syria. This kind of argument is one of the core tactics of classic propaganda: an appeal to emotion that bypasses reason. Therefore, it's not an argument at all. Since our schools don't teach rhetoric and applied logic, this cheap-jack public speaking technique ties most people in knots---especially liberals who are "troubled" by issues such as the Obama-propelled NSA surveillance state and the proposed launching of missile attacks on weak countries without a compelling US national interest. Liberal blogs are full of sentiment along the lines that while they don't agree with the President on these issues, he's still a sincere and awesome man who they like and who shares their values. And this sentiment also carries a halo effect to produce comments like this one from Balloon Juice:

Even with the NSA and Syria and whatever other Watergates I’ve forgotten about, it’s hard not to feel good about the future of the Democratic party right now. 

All because Rush Limbaugh wrote a stupid book that must be mocked. Why should this fool be cheered by the future of a Democratic party that can swallow any Republican-type policy atrocity as long as their own guy is in charge? It's as if they think Republicans don't already control all three branches of the government through obstructionism, domination of mainstream media, and undiminished mastery of fomenting the worst instincts of the populace. The Democratic version of this crypto-fascist performance art is acceptable because they like their president's style?

Apropos of a bigger picture, I'd like to suggest a few books that offer some nonconventional perspective. Importantly, they were authored outside the corporate narratives that constrain our imaginations. Start with Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television, by Jerry Mander. You can get by with reading Part I of the book; Part II is the same material, but written in a more scholarly style with documentation and references. (A significant amount of the material pertaining to the physical harmfulness of CRT-based TVs is passe or overcome by later developments, but all the important principles remain valid and prophetic, in my view.)

If you want to improve your understanding of political conservatism and all its apparent self-contradictions, read The Reactionary Mind, by Corey Robin. Starting from the correct proposition that universities do a poor job of educating students---even political science students---about conservatism and its origins, Robin gets to the origins of the ideology back to Thomas Hobbes, who even predates conservative godfather Edmund Burke. Using the writings of all the seminal conservative thinkers, up through Ayn Rand and Bill Buckley (and later), Robin makes a compelling case that the real tenets of conservatism are much different than what it's proponents have professed to the rest of us.

Finally, track down a copy of Vaclav Havel's Power of the Powerless to read, from the pen of a 20th century dissident with more guts than an abattoir, how authoritarian states begin to lose their hold when citizens refocus on the true aims of life. And remember that formulation: the true aims of life, or the authentic aims of life, or the genuine aims of life.

This last document is important for what I wish to start writing about as I can purge myself of the "dailiness" of the corporate narrative machine. Following it is such a drag, and trying to discuss it with people who believe in it ("news junkies") is worse.

Unstated assumptions

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It would be helpful for purposes of coherence for the author to explain the unstated assumptions of this post and this one:

President Obama is "going to Congress" about Syria exclusively as an exercise in political theater. I'm old enough to remember his inspirational, New-Deal-type State of the Union message back in January, in which he made a lot of pretty noises about his intention to act on the wealth gap, climate change, and so on. His speech was to thank all the progressive-leaning suckers (including me) who voted for him in hopes that he would repay us by being a more liberal-minded president than Mitt Romney. For more than 4 years now, however, he has been consolidating a terrifying surveillance state into a permanent feature of our democracy. He has done nothing to keep banks from literally stealing houses and possessions from victims of financial racketeering (because "these cases are very complicated"). He has exercised no meaningful political muscle on behalf of basic liberal causes such as reproductive rights, voting rights, or card-check legislation to give union organizers a fair shake.

President North Star knows that the Congress will authorize any action against Syria that he likes. And he also "knows," as expressed by anonymous administration sources via authorized leaks, that he doesn't need congressional approval as long as Secretary Kerry can rattle off half a dozen justifications for military strikes in the style of former Ubergruppenfuehrer Powell.

Some time ago, US policy and media elites determined that The State need not be bothered by the collective opinion of its citizens in matters of military aggression.

President Peace Prize asks the world what he believes to be a tough question

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I listened to the President's statement today about the inevitable message that will be sent to Syrian President Bashar Hafez al-Assad in the form of Tomahawk cruise missiles that are certain to destroy a number of people not named Bashar Hafez al-Assad. I was listening out of a portion of the corner of one of my two ears, so my brain has no accurate transcription of his remarks, and I am too lazy to look them up. (Plenty of others are busy doing that right now, though, so go read their stupid blogs if you like your disingenuous political speeches to be quoted directly.)

Anyway, there came a point where President North Star asked The World if they were prepared to deal with the consequences of "doing nothing" about Assad's terrifying new way of dealing death to his citizens. I guess this was the President's way of challenging The World to justify the position that a nation should hold its fire until an achievable military objective can be defined and articulated. I suppose the President thinks his question is tantamount to The Riddle Of The Sphinx. It's not, really. One retort might be along the lines of "yeah, conducting chemical warfare violates the norms of 'civilized warfare.' And so does committing an act of war against a sovereign nation that doesn't pose one scintilla of a military risk to the citizens of the United States.

Also, does anyone remember President Peace Prize "sending a message" to the President of the University of California - Davis 2 years ago when her campus dicks waged chemical warfare against peaceful student protestors during the November 2011 Occupy sit-ins?

If the President wanted to "send a message" to Mr. Assad about using chemical warfare against his citizens, why didn't he do that 3 days before the attacks, since US intelligence agencies knew in advance that it was going to happen? Or, at least, why didn't he "send a message" to the intended victims of the gas?

Wait: do US citizens still get to ask rhetorical questions these days?

President North Star wants to send a message

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There may have been a bygone era when the pen was mightier than the sword. But that was then. Now, President North Star---the most peaceful Earthling of 2009*---evidently believes that the cruise missile is more powerful than a menacing diplomatic cable to a pipsqueak tyrant in the Middle East.

If it were possible to fly a few Tomahawks up the fundament of Bashar Hafez al-Assad and his senior staff in order to "send the message" that he needs to die, then war hawks and doves would at least have an issue to debate. But it seems more likely that the people who will be dying in the inevitable "surgical strike" on Syria had no meaningful role in the acquisition or use of banned chemical weapons last week. And, to me at least, it seems just as likely that Mr. Assad will go about his business using whatever materiel suits his purpose.

If President North Star would like to send someone a message, my suggestion would be to marshal his eloquence and aim it at Russia and China. Those are the actors who thwart the (potentially) constructive involvement of the only authority that has any business intervening with force against Assad's government, namely the UN. Why not spend a week or two letting the world know who provides Assad with his munitions and cover? Why won't President North Star use his pulpit to take the world to church on this crisis?

(Answer: because it might disrupt some corporate cash flows).
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* Unimportant observation: looking back at the text of the post I linked to above, I'll take a puny victory lap about the main point, but cringe at how naively I framed it. Yuck!

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.

President North Star gets all enigmatic

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In Santa Monica on Friday, in reference to the NSA Prism project, President Obama said that

... if people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.

Ten-four.

Will a member of the White House press corps ask the President what the problem is and what he intends to do about it? His words sounded to me like a threat.

Incidentally, when I was searching for a transcript of this quote, the top Google hits were nuthouse sites like teaparty.com and breitbart.com. No progressive media have taken note of the statement, as far as I can tell. Naturally, wingnuts will vomit outrage about three words President North Star lays end to end, so their current reaction is more of the same and not to be taken seriously. But he wasn't talking to them: he was talking to civil libertarians, good-government advocates, and regular people who are sickened by the police state infrastructure Cheney and Bush built here over 10 years ago.

Reactionaries have no problem with a well functioning police state as long as they control it. The Obama administration does not fear them. It fears the rest of us. The President took off the Centrist mask yesterday and threatened everyday Americans. I wonder what he meant by it.

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.

The best-case scenario sucks anus

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Ever since liberals discovered that President North Star isn't too damn proactive about being liberal---maybe around the time of his stimulus initiative---there's been an annoying denial meme. There are several flavors.

One varietal is that Obama is "naive" about bipartisanship and the good faith that supposedly validates it. This idea is based on the premise that "he doesn't understand that he's dealing with maniacs."

A related variant is that Obama has been a tactical blunderer, always pre-negotiating his policy proposals with himself in order to present a reasonable centrist position that everyone should be able to agree upon without rancor. His losing tactics are the consequence of his belief in the good faith of the "maniacs."

One other variation of the denial meme is that President North Star would really do this or that progressive thing, as we all wish he would, if only it were possible in the "present political climate." Unfortunately, the situation forces him to aim low.

As I say, all of these ideas are forms of denial by people grieving a betrayal of their expectations.

Obama is not naive about the politicians who are deranged by the fact that he's a (two-term) presidential usurper---he's the Jackie Fucking Robinson of major league politicians, and even had to deal with the indignities of racist campaign tactics from Hillary Rodham B. Anthony Sojourner Truth Isis Clinton and her loathsome taxidermied pachyderm dick of a campaign manager, Mark Penn. So, no, if he's betraying the expectations of liberals, it is not because he's naive about his political enemies.

Obama is also not tactically incompetent at politics. His mastery of retail politics is obvious, considering those three certain things he had to overcome in order to be elected to his present office---he's black, he has a Muslim-sounding name, and he's a Democrat in a bombastically conservative "post-911" political ecology. His approval ratings have soared the more he speaks like a progressive. Destroying the right-wing ideologues, rubes, and crypto-Confederates in Congress should be simplicity for a youthful, media-savvy Harvard-educated constitutional lawyer with considerable rhetorical skill.

And finally, no, Obama is not constrained by the "politics of the possible." (Refer to the previous two paragraphs.) He knows how to lead and he knows how to go over the head of Congress to the American public.

To borrow a phrase, I think these denial memes amount to "the soft bigotry of low expectations" by liberal Obama partisans. Here's what I think is the truth: President North Star is pursuing the exact policies he is looking for and, to a large extent, achieving them. Obama is arguably no more liberal than either Clinton---willing to embrace corporatism, globalism, and Reaganomics while surrendering the concepts of public goods and services, meaningful progressive taxation, and government as the necessary protector of American human rights.

As pertains to the sequester, but also to the longer political game over the next 4 years, I'm bummed to agree with Heather Digby Parton:

Look, he's never been straight with the American people about this, I don't care what anyone says. He never admits that he's put cuts to Social Security on the table, ( and even hardcore deficit hawks like Alice Rivlin admit that Chained-CPI is a cut.) He never says upfront that he's been willing to raise the eligibility age for Medicare. He always says he's willing to make "tough choices" and will do things "his own party won't like." He never comes right out and says what her means about "entitlement" cuts.

President North Star has already conceded on fundamentals. His fans will consider it a victory if we "only" have to settle for raising the Social Security and Medicare eligibility ages, and indexing their benefits to the chained CPI.

Here's our partisan ecology today: Democrats are Republicans; Republicans are Confederates; the Tea Party is the Brownshirts; and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are the Democrats.

In front of our noses

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This Krugman blog post highlights a virtually unreported detail about the past week of financial-world turmoil on the heels of the S&P downgrade of US debt:

A week ago, before the S&P downgrade, the interest rate on US 10-year bonds was 2.56 percent. As I write this, it’s 2.24 percent, with the yield on inflation-protected bonds actually negative.

You would think this would amount to strong evidence that the downgrade totally failed to shake confidence in US debt.

Yet people who listen to radio and TV reporting tell me that most stories attribute the stock plunge to the downgrade, and are telling listeners that the case for immediate spending cuts has gotten even stronger.

Get it? This is how the corporate narrative works. The Situationists figured it out more than 40 years ago:

[They] argued in 1967 that spectacular features like mass media and advertising have a central role in an advanced capitalist society, which is to show a fake reality in order to mask the real capitalist degradation of human life.

Their term for the narrative and its associated creations and fabrications was The Spectacle. Sounds correct to me.

Be that as it may, I call it criminal malpractice by the news media. Ordinary people who consider themselves to be very well informed because they follow the "nice" media CNN, MSNBC, Newsweek, The New York Times, and NPR are being deliberately misled. I call it deliberate deception because I know what a fucking news editor is really supposed to do for a paycheck.

One might think that our very own President North Star would have been hammering this point home for the past day or two, or maybe that he'll get around to it next week. But in order to do that, he would have to be a leader of sorts, with a few guts inside his skin. Where have you gone, Huey Long? Our nation turns its longing eyes to you. Goo goo goo joob.

Won't need to search in Pakistan this time

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So Vice President Biden made news today by telling House Democrats today that the teabaggers have "acted like terrorists" during the debt ceiling standoff. President North Star will probably give him a scolding for saying so, but what he really should be doing is setting up a secure conference call with SEAL Team 6. Maybe a nice black-helicopter tour of the Potomac for a few properly selected chiefs of think tanks and cable news operations would be just the thing to lower the temperature in the glistening swamp on a hill. JK LULZ!!!

Meanwhile,at the bottom of the TPM piece linked above, we learn that Republican National Committee (RNC) chair "Reince Priebus" has "tweeted" that VP Biden has "more than crossed a line today when he called fiscal conservatives 'terrorists'. I demand an apology." Haha! I hope Biden gives "Priebus" an apology by way of his posterior annular ring.

By the way, I never make fun of a person's name, but I'll make an exception here. What the fuck kind of name is "Reince Priebus" supposed to be? I mean, really? And I'll add to that rhetorical question the amusing discovery made awhile back by some unnamed wag: if you remove all the vowels from his name, you're left with RNC PR BS. If that's not evidence that witty time travelers from the future have modified our current timeline, then I'm a monkey's uncle and so are you.

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?

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.

And Dove Bars shall issue from the assholes of the righteous

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Predictably, it begins: the call for "civility" by a Beltway pundit, "Howard Fineman," who hopes all of us will emulate George W. Bush "at his ardent best" on a 9/11 rubble heap, as he lathered up the nation for the willy-nilly destruction of Afghan places and people completely uninvolved with the Bin Laden cabal. Or Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband as he drooled platitudes about "God and the Bible" and "tolerance, forbearance, and love" a few days after a right-wing conspiracy executed the largest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.

This "Howard Fineman" creature is the worst that corporate media has to offer. He asserts, with only the same information at hand that you and I have right now, that the Giffords massacre was "not about politics, ideology or party." And that, therefore, an appeal to "civility" is the salve to be applied. While posing as a voice of reason and moderation, this "Howard Fineman" instructs the nation to avoid discussing the level of accountability that might be assignable to the right-wing media and political ringleaders. These animals who have clawed their way to wealth and power by trading on unvarnished prejudice and violent political rhetoric over the past several decades must not be connected with the predictable fallout of their actions. We must avoid analysis, one supposes, because this might create discomfort for "Howard Fineman" and his paymasters, and the horrible, horrible people he shares cocktails and finger foods with to gain personal validation.

Never fear. I am certain that President North Star will lap up every refined droplet of "Howard Fineman's" wise counsel. And that as a result of same we Americans can look forward to a new Era of Good Feelings that will usher in a hundred years of prosperity and peace. Long Live "Howard Fineman"!

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.

Way to keep the eye on the ball

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Among President North Star's highest priorities for the new year? Using the Justice Department to intimidate WikiLeaks sympathizers not accused of any crime. Unconscionable and futile---a waste of resources and good will.

I intend to write a bit about the new era of whistleblowing the world entered last year, but there are reasons why I must select my words carefully. It's probably legal for me to say that I think this has been the most fascinating and asymmetric application of political expression I've ever been aware of. Kind of like that guy in Tienanmen Square standing in front of a column of tanks in 1989, except packing a coupla Romulan disruptors and a Jem H'Dar cloaking device.

As nearsighted, misguided security apparatchiks busily labor to make a martyr of Julian Assange, they may discover that he has something in common with the mythical hydra. Some people may still think the President really can play 10-dimensional chess, I'm pretty sure he's no Hercules. Even if he were, why not labor to decapitate the criminal Wall Street hydra, for example? (Oh wait, I already know why: because we must not hold banking racketeers accountable for their crimes, but we must instead "reach out" to them and give them high-level policy positions in our administration.)

Editor's note: my intent for the new year is to write less about topical issues like this, because it feels pointless. RubberCrutch has bigger fish to fry.

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.