11/18/10

Last time I wrote about Nobelist Paul Krugman's "report card" on Barack Obama as president. I can tell you that I am not alone in echoing these remarks and the sentiment of sadness that is coming with the ever more insistent option of beginning the dumping process. The prospect for Democrats in the next election depends very much on the progress of the economic recovery. If Krugman and Stiglitz and many others are correct, the economy will not recover the jobs lost, although the stock markets may flourish and the rich get richer. The fundamentals of the economy will remain stagnant because there is no chance that the GOP politicians and plutocrats will provide Obama with anything like a legislative win. Obama will not be elected because he will be seen (aside from the racism and ideological fury of the radical right) as inept and ineffective ... at least half of which will be his own fault (and the other half the cynical obstructionism of the GOP.)

Perhaps a good place to start the opinion review is with the New York Times and the letters received about Krugman's column. These are short and pointed letters. Read them now.

Perhaps the most important of the recent comments on the failure of Obama to abandon his weak-kneed centrist compromising, however, is the comments by George Soros yesterday in Huffington Post. Mr. Soros represents the brighter side of extreme wealth, that is, the intelligence that understands the difference between a rational cooperative and competitive economy and a tooth and claw, abandon the masses, all competition and no significant cooperation point of view. He sees Obama as lacking the fundamental qualities of character that would direct his energies toward the needed solutions. You should read this now.

A good vantage point of view is the description of the context in which we and Obama are embedded, as described by Nicholas Kristof today (Thursday) in his column entitled "A Hedge-Fund Republic", for clearly (with notable exceptions like Soros) the United States is very much a plutocracy, a corporatist state with the flywheel of a military-industrial-congressional complex feeding the hungry mouths of the top 10% of income in the population. Read this: this 10% owns 70% of the United States, including the current president ... who being owned by selfish money must go.

Dumping Barack Obama is going to painful for Democrats, because he is the de facto leader of the Democratic Party, ex officio. The process of detaching him from this role would best by accomplished, I think, by the process that Lyndon Johnson detached himself, by declaring his future for the war in Vietnam (rather than with keeping the Republicans out of office and away from their sabotage of the Great Society they so effectively achieved). For anyone, even Howard Dean, to rise up against him for control of the "hearts and minds" of the party in any other way is going to be bloody. Pundits may rant, but Obama remains insulated and, frankly, isolated with the ex officio role in his pocket. Maneuvering the president into the situation where he accepts the fact that one way or another he is a one-term president is not going to be easy, but ... and this is important ... he has already made a statement to this effect, so the ground is already partly prepared for him to release the Party leadership to Howard Dean, who, of course, can choose to run or find another who will galvanize the despondent masses in our Party. The other side of this is us. We must begin the hew and cry for him to step aside. Now! The next two year are going to be quickly spent on this process, so we must begin now!

JB

11/1/10

The American Liberalism Project that I (and my distant cousin Susan B. Goodwin) founded years ago was not intended as a bully pulpit for individual political campaigns. It was originally meant to combat the insidious campaign by the GOP and all the stripes and spots of rightwing ideology to smear the very name of Liberal and Liberalism. It is a testament to the courage of today's Liberals that they have largely failed to win over the center of American politics to their creed of mendacious distortions.

American Liberalism is alive and well, and one need only have read the "Interview" section of the Sunday New York Times and have read Gary Wills's parting comment about voting. You may not like the guy who is running, but voting for his opponent to prove that is a complete folly, Wills said in so many words. You not only bring in a guy from the other side, but you bring in all the trappings, apparatus, and ideology that follows along. In the case of the Republican voters of New York state, the choice of Paladino for Governor presents a special case. The man is a throwback to the 19th century, a man of rigid prejudice, and a liar. It would be hard to vote for Paladino, but should the honest GOP voters then vote for Cuomo, who is going to have his hands full with some of the jackasses in Albany of both parties?

My answer is that if voters understand that Liberalism is exactly the ideology upon which this country was founded, that welfare is not the central position of Liberalism, that the five elements of Liberalism—Individual Liberty, Progress, Humanity, Ethics, and The Rule of Law—are the essence of a Liberal view of government, then "hell yes!" they should vote for Cuomo. Why not? If you understand that these essential principles are in deliberate daily conflict and that politics, particularly Liberal politics is the reasoning and bargaining of solutions that give more than lip service to each element ... always, then you are a Liberal and should vote that way.

If on the other hand you prefer the guidance and money of corporate board rooms and executives to the reasoning of an educated electorate, if you believe that government is there to provide special favors to special interests, if you believe that government has no business safeguarding the civil rights of people whose rights are being trammeled, if you believe that Progress is a myth and that the purpose of life is to get as rich as you can and buy as many toys as you can manage, then you are not a Liberal. Vote for Paladino or not.

This election may contain a few surprises for the corporate press. I have been closely monitoring the major publications in this country for the past year with an eye to the subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) attempts to influence tomorrow's election by insinuating opinion onto their front pages as if it were news. The main way they do this is through poll taking, where they design the questions and interpret the results. Believe me, reports of these activities are not "news." They are opinion, and most of it is untruthful, deceptive, and misleading. The main thrust of corporate press interference in our political process is to suggest to Democrats that they have already lost the election, so they might as well stay home. The pressure on this message has been relentless ... and it has been based on polls the media news organizations produce for themselves. You can bet that the money it takes to do this is a concern at the highest levels of the corporations and their money pool, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

And so we have an article today in the Times that suggests that young voters feel abandoned by politics. Horsefeathers! They cannot possibly know whether young people are feeling "abandoned," "bewildered," "patronized," "propagandized," or any other thing. Polling data on young people is notoriously inaccurate, as young people frequently "play" the pollsters for the reckless fools they certainly are. There is only one reason that an article like this appears the day before an election. They mean to keep young voters home and feeling "abandoned" so they tell them they are "abandoned." It just isn't so.

I have spent hours on the phone banks here and young people are the heart of the operation along with middle-aged and retired persons. Liberal politics is not about special groups or special interests, it is simply about us trying to accomplish our democracy as best we can. We believe in it, and we reject categorically the idea that corporations and the rich know better than we.

JB

10/31//10

Maureen Dowd, in the New York Times this fine Halloween Sunday writes on the two-year report card on Barack Hussein Obama. She is not happy!

Lots of people are unhappy ... and out of work, lost their homes, changing college plans or dropping out, keeping the clunker for a couple more years, indulging their petulance, and even cosying up to the far right ... to teach those bums in Washington a lesson. But, anger and disappointment are not good political motives, and replacing Representatives and Senators with members of the OTHER party just indicates that the primary system does not work. Why, if you believe that Cheney and Bush started all this mess, would you believe that people to the right of them would do better?

Obama has lots of reserve goodwill on this day two days before the election. There are those who believe that if he shapes up his own act in the next two years, they will forgive him the last two. But, Maureen is relentless in her criticism and goes for the throat several times. And, yes, there is a sense that Obama is arrogant, but is he more arrogant than anyone else that has inhabited the Oval Office? I think not. I think that the hubris of being elected "leader of the free world" went to his head like it does ALL the others, but that his failures were more political than personality problems.

I will say it one more time: Obama, Geithner, and Summers had to save Wall Street. They had to save the world financial system by saving the hub and brains and US reserve currency position. Yes indeed this wrankles the rank and file. It was not a populist move and it sticks sideways in our national throat. But it had to be done, and it is foolish indeed for Obama to have been so quiet about these reasons. Shot himself in the foot, he did!

JB

10/29/10

Paul Krugman, Nobelist, Economist at Princeton, and columnist at the New York Times, whom we have quoted endlessly these past two years, has one more chance to dissuade you from your dogmatic irritability, your vent on the Democrats because they were asked to do too much with too little. He tells you, and I am repeating it, a Republican sweep on Tuesday will be a disaster for our country and for the economy. And, I think Krugman's diagnosis is spot on. The Republican rightwing, the TeaParty, will go for the throat of the hapless Barack Obama. He will be a one-term president.

There are a lot of things that you can say about this, and most of them land at the President's desk in the Oval Office.

My take is that Obama's fingerprints are all over the insane "bipartisanship policy" he took. He read Rahm Emanuel as a person who could work miracles across the aisle, and that was wrong. He understood his victory in November 2008 as coming from support he garnered in the center of the political spectrum and assumed that this meant people expected a centrist administration, and this was wrong. People knew Obama to have the highest liberalism rating in the Senate, and they expected him to produce change that reflects the core tenets of American Liberalism.

The bipartisanship issue led to a health-care bill that has too many deficiencies to remain unassailed when the Republicans take over the House. Health care is a huge part of the national economy, so throwing it into chaos by pulling the rug before the good parts of the bill come on line will do what chaos always does. It will retard the recovery, which is inching along right now at 2% growth. We need 4%.

Krugman's dread will be fulfilled. There will be disruptions to government and good, innocent people will be damaged as the swash-buckling TeaParty flexes its muscles and corporate America lines up at the trough they have so assiduously built for the Republicans to feed them. The descent into corporatism will be painless, as all quiet revolutions in government tend to be. All you will have lost is the democracy and the republic.

JB

10/23/10

No one said that the American republic had to be a direct democracy. Franklin is alleged to have answered the question of what the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had come up with the almost tart answer: "A republic, if you can keep it." Most people have no idea what the definition of a "republic" is and how it (the one they thought they came up with) differed from life as they knew it in 1763 or 1665.

A republic is a "A republic is a form of government in which the people or some portion thereof retain supreme control over the government and in which the head of government is not a monarch.". Yep. That's the core of the definition. You can see there are already some provisions for latitude on who "the people" are. And, typically, the people of a republic are "represented" by persons elected specifically to carry out the wishes of those who elect them.

But it is not all transparent. The Franklin story reveals something that should not go unnoticed. The fellow who asked Franklin what sort of government had been created had almost nothing to say about it. The Constitution was written as a fait accompli, albeit by well-meaning, well-educated, successful, and earnest men (no women) whose intent was to replace the Articles of Confederation form of weak central government (designed in a period of backlash against the central authority of King George III and the Parliament in London). They came up with what is an amazing compromise about power and posed the question of the ages: can human beings govern themselves in an enlightened way (remember all of this happened in the full maturity of The Enlightenment in Europe and North America)?

The question is partly about monarchs and father figures and whether we can in our inner selves do without this imagery of authority. If you read the newspapers from then and now you will see a constant strain of thought that looks to the father figure, the President in our republic, for his (her someday) talismanic effect, the embodiment of authority the likes of which many feel must be transcendent and superior to the daily appetites and dishonesties we all know about.

The question is also partly about the nature of representative government and, specifically, whether a "representative" can a) truly represent a congeries of opinion such as existed in, say, Philadelphia or Charleston at the time ... or now? And b) whether a "representative" has a talismanic honesty that he (or she) self-appreciates and holds transcendent to all the other forces and pressures that come along during endless days of compromise?

The answer, class, is that, no, we did not keep the republic. It turns out that the transcendent ideas of political and moral equality were barely present at the beginning, rotten from the compromise over slavery that continued for three more generations of Americans, disabled by the exclusion of women, and given a back seat by the financial interests of the day, including dear old Ben Franklin himself with his press empire. Good thing he was an idealist, eh!

It turns out that money owns the Constitution and money owns the press and money owns the hearts and minds of those for whom daily bread is a bounty from those with money. So, you will not be surprised ... no matter how angry you get ... at this report of the latest in the two hundred years of corporate efforts to undermine the essential element of our republic, that is, who the government represents. It boils down this question, class: if in a republic the sovereign power resides in the people or a sub-set of them, who are those sub-set people today? In the 18th century they were white males who were literate and owned property. But are they now the unelected, unsupervised, unaccountable, fabulously rich and insulated CEOs of corporations whose money absolutely drowns the voice of the guy down on the street, ... or will it finally be us?

JB

10/17/10

Frank Rich is one of the most respected columnists in America. He is the dean of OpEd in the New York Times and very much the wiser man compared to Gary Wills in the corporate press represented by the Washington Post. Rich's essay today, Sunday, is about what I have been writing about all week. He even turns of couple of phrases from my lathe, interestingly. The subject is rage and the antidote ... well, Frank and others do not have it.

But, rage there is in the public about the destruction of our economy by the greedy bastards on Wall Street and scattered throughout the financial sector of this country ... and other countries. I was not kidding when I wrote that there is going to be an explosion. If it is organized and not just a dozen hotheads somewhere, it is going to mean big trouble. I have been pondering the reasons for a long time, and would like to try this reasoning out on you.

People are fucking mad about losing their homes. No question about that. They are angry and afraid, and they don't know whom to kick in the groin about it. Most people have not lost their homes, but they have seen their retirements go down the tubes. They have seen their children having to select less expensive, less prestigious, and presumably less capable colleges, thus diverting their hopes and dreams into shallower waters and evaporating ponds. Most people have someone in the household or slightly extended family who has lost their job and cannot find work. I have! I am righteously pissed off about all of this, because it was avoidable in theory ... if not in the by-play of national politics and national mythologies.

The people need expiation, a release, an event, a reason they can call their own for the disaster. They are mad at Washington for the bail-out, but are TOTALLY MISINFORMED about who is going to pay off the 760 billion dollars of debt. Do you know who?

Paul Krugman has been trying to explain to you that deficit spending to buoy up and stimulate an economy is paid for by the economy. It is quite simple. The gross domestic product is taxed by the federal government at many levels. When the economy gets percolating, it pays for itself. DUH!

Do you think this knowledge is widely known? Of course it isn't and, equally, it is unlikely that if it were it would have any effect on the rage that Obama has not quelled or even given a reasonable chance to die of its own irrationality. No ... Rage is rage. It is the hind-brain in action, the seat of fear and hubris tormented by the certain knowledge of personal failure to foresee how crooked the American economy really is, considering the rampant amorality and the emptiness of Adam Smith's "hidden hand" that is supposed to check human failings and keep the boat afloat.

The event, as Rich and Brett are saying, will happen. As an historian I am saying "it has to happen." You can quote me. Study the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and the American Civil War carefully and explain to yourselves the Grand Peur and the bloody guillotine, the doggedness of the Red Army under Leon Trotsky, the loss of 40 million people to starvation at the hand of Mao. Study Pickett's Charge and Reconstruction. Get down in the guts of those histories and study and know fully and with appropriate apprehension how very savage we are.

This election is about to put the likes of John Boehner into the 3rd spot in American government. Can you think of anyone else you would rather have there? I am pretty sure you can, and if you can, you know now why the rage is bipartisan. We are about to have a debacle.

JB

10/11/10

Paul Krugman is a columnist and economist I trust. So, perforce, you see me writing about his writing a lot. In the Monday New York Times Dr. Krugman addresses three aspects of the current political-economic situation in which were are wallowing: the disappointing response of the Obama Administration to the recent Crash, the persistent drum beat of lies from the Republicans about the response, and the more than disappointing lack of response from Obama and his friends.

This column by Krugman is too late to have much of an effect on voting in about 20 days ... and begun already where I live. Summers, Geithner, Obama, and Emanuel flubbed their opportunities to read the situation in late 2008 correctly ... not without plenty of advice, by the way. They listened to the politicians who did not want to be obliged to explain to their constituents the nature of sovereign responsibility for the economy and their participation in government programs. They chickened out.

The Republicans, girded to the hilt, found themselves with a "power point presentation" against the expected "socialization" of the economy, and when it did not materialize, the just presented their arguments anyway, making up the evidence and facts as they went along. It was and is the worst behavior of a political party since the days of Jim Crow.

Then, Obama did not want to sully his "above politics" mythology in a scrap with the Republicans so the drum beat of lies persists to this day and will throw the election of many a liberal. Obama is central to this failure of leadership ... and, frankly, he does not deserve another term. He, personally, has been found wanting and that's that.

JB

10/6/10

There is no question that Barack Obama has played his intra-party cards very poorly. It is understandable that he very much did have a pile of shit on his plate when he took office, as Mr. Emanuel noted time and again. And, he had fifth columnists sprinkled (sometimes "packed") throughout his rambling Executive Branch agencies, and to add misery to that, hundreds of his appointments were held up in the Senate because Harry Reid could not find a handle on the Republicans who were deliberately sabotaging the Democratic Adminstration. Of course the Republicans were being "Obstructionist"; they had little other choice without a leader, with eight years of disaster to cover up, with no viable plan to bring the government back to an even keel ... except by way of removing the masts, keel, and engineroom.

But, Obama made decisions that sorely vexed the liberal and progressive wings of the party. Some commentators think that he truly believed that a new age of bi-partisanship had arrived and he was going to preside over that. Well, Obstructionism from the Republicans was evident enough early on that Barack should have ditched that bi-partisanship mythology quickly. He didn't. Emanuel had something to do with that.

In issue after issue, however, Obama took the line of least resistance. He could have closed Guantanamo political prison in a trice, moving the internees to mainland prisons. He could have done this early and the blame for holding these people would have still rested on the Cheneyites. But he did not.

And so it goes up and down the agenda, one miscue after another, and nothing by way of apologies or explanations from the guy who is now hiding behind that pile of shit on his plate. He now own the stuff and as this political note details he wants the liberals and progressives to have a bite. Sorry Charlie!

The liberals and progressive may stay home for this election. They can assure themselves that two things will happen if they do. First, a large number of long-term incumbent Democrats are going to flame out and crash into their native hills. Good riddance, is the sub-text of this election. Second, as a result of the Democrats coming in massively behind, one or both houses of Congress will revert to the Republicans, who will probably not have a 61 vote super-majority in the Senate, nor will they have a sufficiently strong position in the House to have their way with the Republic. And, (my point), Barack Obama's plate of shit will loom larger and larger as nothing substantive gets done in the next two years.

Well, something substantive will happen, but it will not be legislation. The world will do its best to recover from The Crash, but without U.S. leadership, de facto strength (pronounced "China") will begin to prevail. The U.S. economy will languish, because Republicans are wrong about temporary public stimuli, dead wrong.

So, Barack Obama will not have any believable momentum going into his re-election year and at the Democratic National Convention he can expect a serious challenge from the liberal and progressive wings, which will have momentum from the terrible two years the Republicans are about to give us.

Yes, these things are on our minds. Yes, this essay is the very sort of anti-Obama stuff that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and yes this breaks the sort of party discipline that I have been calling for for two years. Well, the point is that no one listened and party discipline never existed (as is the tradition in the Democratic Party) and the corporate press has intervened with the help of the more outraged and frankly tantrum-throwing liberals and progressives and we have a debacle roaring down on us.

The take-away is this: if you thing we are strong enough as a Party and a nation to handle two years of Republican posturing and trouble-making, then stay home in November. I have outlined the most probable outcome of that. If you think the country and the Party are too weak then, of course, you must vote for our Party and weed out only the most egregiously corrupt of our own.

JB

9/23/10

I was reading in the New York Review of Books a posthumous article by Tony Judt in which he argues that among the "literati" of our world there has been a problem of selling one's mind over to a system of thought, perhaps an ideology or an economic theory. The piece is called "Captive Minds", and it struck me as instructive and probably wrong in some sense. You have to read it for yourself to get your own drift of it.

A captive mind is one, Judt says (along with an impressive bunch of European public intellectuals who, btw, have much to answer for), that gives over its discriminating and critical faculties to the cause represented. Judt notes that for these men and women one part of the cause seems to cloud out the inevitable onerous bits, as with the intellectuals from all over the world who bought Leninism and Stalinism, especially Stalinism, hook line and sinker. It seemed in public that they fully supported the Party line and all that entailed.

This raised the question of whether there is such a thing as a non-public intellectual, since we gauge one another publicly in periodicals like the NYRB and others. It is mentioned that the sorts of bright and lucid men and women who gave themselves over to Stalinism were thought to harbor private reservations, for example. But, what the hell is a "private reservation," anyway? If we know about it, it is public. If, on the other hand, it remain invisibly or inaudibly private, then is it actually a reservation? I think not. But the point is also made that these people accepted the full doctrine and faith out of some kind of mental laziness, which strikes me as both too true and yet hard to pin down.

And now, of course, there is the problem of what party politics really means. Does belonging to a political party mean that you believe in and support everything that goes on among party members or every word of party manifestos, platforms, planks, and so forth? Of course not. So what is the difference we Americans make of subscribing to Stalinism versus being a Yellow Dog Democrat who would vote for a yellow dog if it were nominated? See, the problem seems to lie somewhere in the moral texture of affiliation to organizations. Democrats are not malevolent characters and their party platforms, at least, are rarely (any longer) prescriptions for legal or social injustices or for deliberately bilking the public treasury.

Stalinism, I can say from years of study, was known internally differently than externally to the Soviet Union. Many Soviet citizens had no clue that Stalin was responsible directly for the enslavement and murder of literally (not figuratively!) millions of hapless and innocent dissidents. Then, again, there were many who actually did know about the horrors, thanked their lucky stars that they had not (yet) been ratted out, and saw some sort of physical "progress" being made in the relic regime that Lenin and Stalin "inherited."

The key to living with Stalinism was to be vocal as an advocate and absolutely quiet about dissent. The key to being a Democrat ... as opposed to being a Republican ... is that you can be vocal about your dissent, but in a democracy you count in the polls as a Republican when you do. So, the question is: what constitutes being a Democrat, if Republicans act with more party discipline?

Well, the ending of the Tony Judt piece is that there are "ideologies" like Libertarian "Market Fundamentalism" that appeal to intellectuals, capture their minds, and lead them off cliffs, just as Stalinism led intellectuals to their deaths and modern Republicanism is leading non-intellectuals into the clever trap of an (Orwellean) ideology of rugged individualism that does not exist in fact or reality.

The point is that there must be a place lying between faithful slavery and captivity to an ideology (Stalinism, Market Fundamentalism, Christian Fundamentalism, Yellow Dog-ism, and Corporate-sponsored American Individual-ism on the one hand, and "mere anarchy" on the other.

Bob Kall polled his readers to see if (my criticism) OpEdNews is too critical of the Obama Administration and, lo!, the poll revealed that OpEdnews is not. What a surprise! He did not offer to have ME write the polling questions, and he has no credentials for writing them himself, so I am going to let the poll rest in its own lack of authenticity and veracity.

But, this is treacherous ground, folks. Republicans get themselves into lots of trouble and into relationships with mad-hatters like Dick Cheney for the lack of spontaneity among the faithful. Republicans have the tradition to refuse to speak ill of a fellow Republican despite the fact that it is obvious that he might, like Cheney, be less a Republican than a Fascist ... a believer in corporate will over the government in a mutual symbiosis of money and power.

Journalist Bernstein's new book, about which I have read (only), suggests that the issues within the White House, (as I have speculated for two years now,) have been divisive and have put the Obama Administration into the public view in a very strange and uncomfortable light, namely, that perhaps Obama and his advisors were bought out by the ailing financial sector. Occam's Razor argues against that, and most thoughtful analysts know it, but it is popular conspiracy-minded (pseudo)-journalism and earns practitioners a living.

Bernstein also makes public the idea ... which should be obvious to everyone ... that there are many more things on the president's plate than are ever reported publicly, especially national security issues, including a torrent and deluge of threats against the president and his family and relatives. Why any analyst or pundit believes they can know the mind of government when they discount the weight of all this, is beyond me, except that such pundits are captive of their own livingroom couch imaginations. No less so than the intellectuals who got themselves sucked into Stalinism or Market Fundamentalism.

There is a way to approach a sitting president with criticism that does not go for knee-caps and next of kin. You read Frank Rich and you see it. You can even read Brooks and see its effect. Many writers, honed in the Bush era where hyperbole lost all meaning missed those opportunities for responsible criticism relentlessly. But, the final point must be made that their lack of party discipline will have consequences, a point that was crucially obvious all along.

Finally, I must answer whether my own mind is captive of Democratic Party ideas. No, it is not. It entertains each platform of ideas and chronicle of events, statements, and rulings on a daily and weekly basis, subjecting every last idea to the method of multiple working hypotheses. This is, as we noted a few weeks ago, the very meaning of liberal, in the expression "liberal democracy" bequeathed to us by the men of the Enlightenment. It is the scientific method applied to politics. And, it is a burdensome chore, believe me, but it is the only way to land somewhere sanely between having a captive mind and the irresponsible, undisciplined anarchy of the ego-centric existence.

JB

9/15/10

In Delaware yesterday, as predicted over the weekend when I was enjoying myself in Los Angeles, a "TeaParty" candidate on the Republican primary list beat out a nine term, until then, very popular centrist candidate. This is happening here and there across the nation, not so often that you could call it viral, but clearly there is "movement" in the winds. Sarah Palin and Karl Rove ... as unhealthy and swinish pair as I could imagine while cold sober ... are very much a part of this movement and so is News Corp the parent of Fox and its "fair and balanced" approach to presenting GOP and Libertarian propaganda as news.

Well, I don't write about this stuff much because it is mostly a figment of the imaginations of a few wild-eyed ultra-conservative Emersonian-individualist klepto-anarchists, who believe that the national economy is a dog fight into the midst of which innocent and unwary civilians are thrust to see how they fare. Dog eat dog is the pseudo-Darwinian con they have perpetrated on the public, red and grizzly, but masquerading under the garb of biological science fitted to their brand of deliberate deceit to achieve riches beyond the imagination of or the need of anyone.

But, I have to write. It is a "movement" and it has consequences for the election in November, widely trumpeted to be a potential disaster for the Democrats who have been unable without the help of the GOP to manage our way clear of the Great Recession. Columnists like Brooks in the NYT recently declared the Democrats to be on a spending spree the likes of which no one has ever imagined or dreamed. The "bail out" was signed into law by Geo. W. Bush, remember. The bailout was too small to accomplish what it needed and the small part came from the GOP and conservatively trained Democrats.

Well, Christine O'Donnel in Delaware is on the November ballot because she has ranted sufficiently to convince middle-class and working class (often the same people) that they are being screwed by corrupt politicians who look out for themselves first. This message is true! American politics is decidedly ugly and disingenuous. The problem is that O'Donnell and Palin and all the rest of the "TeaParty" folk have their examples of corruption mostly wrong. The take-away from them and the Fox folk, however, is that you cannot trust government and those in it. That's what people are voting ... distrust ... fear!

The biggest question is whether this will split the unthinking Republicans in the electorate from those who see through this fog occasionally. A few pundits think this will happen and that the GOP will continue to destroy itself on the racist and anarchist axes that it has embraced on the far right. I tend to agree, but I am worried that Democrats will become complaisant and not get out the vote.

You see, the furor over on the GOP side is more than slightly disorienting to Democrats, who like most voters understand that politicians are likely to be disappointing in the short-, mid-, and long-term. Politicians are people who must compromise their agendas and schedules, so they always disappoint someone. They also tend to become fatheaded about themselves and protective of those things that make their ugly job bearable ... the trappings of power and the elite.

So, the O'Donnell victory is a mixed bag. It does spell trouble inside the GOP which is good, but it does also spell a more generalized distrust of politics in general and that usually means that Democrats quietly do not vote. That is bad!

JB

9/5/10

2/13/10A Fatal Flaw Rooted in Naivete

Charles M. Blow is one of the newer columnists at the New York Times. He is astute, and in this case—today's column—he absolutely nails an essential feature of the ineptitude and paralysis that President Obama cannot blame ... or we cannot blame ... on anyone else but Barack Hussein Obama, himself.

Read the article and know that Obama brings a lot of "community organizing" baggage into the White House, luggage the efficacy of which is problematic at best and toxic, as we have seen. You just do not set up shop in the White House like it was a glib store-front operation designed to boost the self-confidence of neighborhood people. Yes, of course, if you treat semi-rational people as if they had the capability of understanding and emulating, they will respond. Some of them, even, will turn a corner, but many will not. In Washington the semi-rational are different from the ghettos of Chicago. Ideology is their main problem and no amount of kissy coddling will change that.

The year is moving along rapidly. The Olympics will drain attention to the fetes and feats and soon it will be March and then April Tax Time. By then Obama should have understood that, like Mr. Blow says, he must change to accomplish Change. I will give him until the Ides of March to get a new methodology out into view, and I will give him until the federal tax deadline to have accomplished something. No accomplishments and I go to Dr. Howard Dean with a public open letter and ask him to stand up and be counted. There are many like me.

JB

---

1/21/10

About a week ago I got one of several calls I will get this year from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). I detest that organization, but I understand the party-political need for recruitment of good candidates, especially those (like Gavin Newsome of San Francisco) who without help from seasoned coaches and a fast course in how to take it on the chin and survive, ... would (like Gavin Newsome) not survive. But, the DSCC and its counterpart (equally corrupt) in the House have become "incumbency rackets" rather than recruitment organizations or miniature bootcamps for aspiring pols. I told the nice lady that I disagree almost all the time with what DSCC does, and lo! she admitted to me that they have made quite a few mistakes recently. The name Joe Lieberman came up. I told her I would never again contribute to the DSCC ... crossing my fingers ... and hoping that someone of the 65 Democrats begins to understand what the real purpose is. It is not prolonging incumbency!

So with that rolling around in mid-term memory in an exchange of emails with my colleague in Massachusetts I am told that the Coakley campaign was not Obama's fault. The Boston Globe says as much with quite a bit of detail, including Ms. Coakley's unfortunately timed Caribbean holiday.

I read the piece and noticed that there was a subtext. The White House is trying to get the burden of failure off Obama's back ... as you might easily suspect. And, there is the drift of the article to the conclusion that Coakley just was not ready for prime time, which the voters quickly understood, and so they acted accordingly. So much for running naked through the streets of Boston and the rest of a locked-down, stalwart Democratic state. Well, so much bullcrap!

The DSCC dropped the ball by not telling Coakley that she must win the election and that she should not take anything ... ANYTHING ... for granted. DSCC should have forwarded a copy of that message to DNC so that they could remind Coakley about the New Jersey and Virginia losses ... and that the public is angry ... very angry! They apparently did not, or if they made the effort they made very little impact. DNC needs help and quickly. Do not even think about Rahm as the leader of DNC!

The White House, being tacked toward the political center by Rahm, should have made it plain to DNC that Obama's agenda very much depends on the Senate being filibuster-proof. When the Massachusetts campaign began Rahm should have made double sure that DNC and DSCC were in cammies and conducting bootcamp for Coakley. Apparently, Mr. Emanuel did not see the underlying and obvious urgency. Mr. Emanuel is not the brightest guy in the White House, by the way. It is a shame that President Obama cannot see that everything that goes through Rahm's office becomes less. Obama knows that Emanuel is more conservative than himself, but with a good Chief of Staff, the message of the leader, not the stiff in the Chief of Staff's office, would be the message we hear. Apparently ... all too apparently ... this is not the case.

This is not to let Axelrod off the hook, either. He is a politically savvy guy and should have a reflexive interest in anything that threatens or threatens to threaten the power structure in Washington vis-à-vis his charge as chief political advisor. Apparently he does not see it that way or cannot get his voice heard.

The up-shot of the Massachusetts debacle is not that Coakley was arrogantly and publically advertising that she thought herself to be a "shoe in." The real conclusion is that the top leadership of the Democratic Party——beginning at the very top ... in the White House——is failing, flailing, and inept. President Obama should make changes to his staff, not his ... and our ... agenda!

JB

1/20/10

It is impossible not to write something about the loss of a U.S. Senate seat to a Republican in ... of all places ... Massachusetts. Everyone is writing something and most of it makes sense, except that all the reasons posed seem to contradict one another in the end. Coakley ran a lazy and "I've been chosen" campaign, and Brown—another pinhead from the teaparty branch—ran an aggressive, if sophomoronic, campaign. The White House assumed wrongly that Coakley could not lose. The DSCC continues its path of wandering in the desert. Etc. Etc. The truth is that the voters are fed up with Washington and particularly the failure of the Democrats to be Democrats ... and believe me Massachusetts understands what a Democrat is supposed to be and do.

My thesis is that voters absolutely hate Congress ... both sides of the aisle. They are faced with the paralyzing prospect of a binary choice among candidates who become immediately sold out to special interests ... most recently the heath care and pharmaceutical industries, both of which are fabulously wealthy and without conscience when it comes to purchasing a few key legislators. The paralysis is relieved by shoving it up the butt of bi-partisan demagogues. Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama, please take notice. You're next.

There is a strong sense abroad in the land these days that the federal government is beyond redemption. The parade of assinine pontificating during endless months of Health Care Reform legislating, the ugly display of whorish Senators cavorting with their sugar-daddy lobbyists, the lies and the lame excuses, they all add up to a revulsion that the Massachusetts voters displayed. They (and we, I maintain) are sick to death of this crap, and if it takes a complete transformation of the House and Senate ... a complete up-ending ... a term-by-term kicking of legislative asses both sides of the aisle, then that's what we are going to do.

The Senate has rules of procedure that are anti-democratic and they must change. The House is a little better, but jackasses like Murtha are much too burdensome to defend anymore. The White House has Rahm Emanuel and a clique of financier-ass-kissers, and they must all go too. Obama really needs to understand that the first Black American president is very likely to be the last for a good long time, if he doesn't get is own butt straightened out and f*****g remember who elected him—a coaltion of progressives and independents.

Yeah, I am mad. Let the morons in the Democratic Party understand this: January 19th, 2010 the Progressive movement becomes the Progressive Party ... and devil take the corrupt and feckless and heave them into the dustbin of history!

JB

1/19/10

At OpEdNews Rob Kall, the proprietor there, posted an article from CNN's "Politics Ticker" about Progressives digging in to unseat Rahm Emanuel from his job as Chief of Staff in the Obama White House. This is the best news I have heard in months! How long does it take Democrats to understand that the Obama we see is the result of heavy-handed manipulations by a person whose qualities of character are so negligible as to call into question the character of those who associate with him. Rahm Emanuel is bad for Obama, bad for Democrats, bad for America because he is an arrogant, slithering, cockroach of a politician, one whose chief claim to fame is that he can brow beat members of Congress both sides of the aisle.

Rahm works through fear. He is supposedly a centrist in an era where the center is where the media says it is, but not where the hearts and minds of the public are. The center is functionally sterile. This suits Rahm because he actually has no program or values other than himself.

Rahm demands obedience from everyone, cabinet secretaries included, and one wonders how he gets away with this. So, wonder. When you are finished wondering, you have to understand that Obama lets him.

Obama did not have control of his own government on day one. He still doesn't. He has a mighty rival in the military industrial apparatus, much of which is represented directly in Congress in both parties. He has Bush-era appointees still in office sprinkled "liberally" throughout the departments and agencies. He has appointments stalled in the U.S. Senate by Republicans whose game is simply to resist anything whatsoever that Obama might do. He has a press corps that cannot be trusted by him or public. And so, Obama, fully aware that his administration would be one of the most nitpicked in the history of human government, chose Emanuel to be his "whip." It was an awful decision, and it will surely spell the end of Obama politically if he does not do something about it and soon.

The issue is not actually or only a "progressive" one. It is an issue of attempting to come close to the Obama of the campaign, a persona that evaporated the moment Emanuel took office. There is no reason for this to have happened, except that Emanuel is totally unscrupulous and, in addition to being a foul-mouth of the first order, is a martinet. My personal feeling is that Obama is slightly afraid of Emanuel and has been "blackmailed" by references to "losing control" from Rahm. He is as one commenter on the CNN article said of his crooked character, '... should not be within 100 miles of Washington.'

We have all been trying to understand why President Obama is so different from Candidate Obama. Rahm Emanuel is the reason. He is the bottleneck and filter for everything that happens in the WestWing. He likes it that way, but Democrats inside and outside of Washington need to say otherwise. We do not like it that way!

What, I ask you people inside the beltway, do you know about Emanuel and why are you so afraid to speak up? Do you not understand that not only the fate of the Democratic Party, but clearly the fate of the nation hangs on you telling the truth about your fear of Emanuel?

It is time, waaay past time, to remove this cockroach from the White House. Speak up, join the chorus, understand that Rahm Emanuel is a cancer on this administration and must be removed.

JB

1/14/10

Among progressives there is a fair amount of angst these days. Rahm Emanuel has convinced Barack Obama that the left progressive wing of the Democratic Party can be essentially ignored ... mostly because they have no place to go. Rahm is wrong ... again ... of course. Obama announced this before the inauguration, by saying that he would "govern from the center."

We all understand that governing a diverse nation should take into account the dispositions of the many, but it is pure hogwash to believe that the center is any one place, especially in routine politics in Washington, and moreover, with Republicans taking a trenchant and often mindless approach to the Obama administration that results in 100% non-cooperation on any detail whatsoever, politically "center" is meaningless. Obama still does not think so, so we have a problem Houston!

Here is the essential agenda for 2010 for progressives and classical liberals, you know, the educated elite from universities and the left media and literary circles and so forth. The agenda is to quietly pick a successor to Obama and being to place this person (say, Howard Dean, for instance) into conversations where Dean looks and sounds like he knows what is going on by comparison to the current White House. I say that this must be done quietly and deftly so as not to tip off the far right, which will begin to hurl insults, lies, crap of all descriptions at the successor. We don't want that, of course. Campaigns are long enough as it is without shifting the successor's moves toward a campaign in second, third, or high too soon.

But it can ... and must ... be done. We need to be able in November if the news is really bad to tell Obama straight out that he must fire Rahm and Summers and Geithner immediately or else. Believe me, it will be "or else" because Rahm has Obama captive and Obama wouldn't believe it if you rubbed his arrogant face in it. Meanwhile as we are selecting several and then one standard-bearer who is a realistic candidate for 2012, we are waiting and listening intently to the White House for signs of their magical cure for plummeting popularity polls. Democrats in the House and Senate are going to demand that ... and Rahm knows it.

What Rahm's idea of a magic potion to save the election and come close to satisfying progressives and liberals will, probably, not be enough. He is a moderate along the lines of a foul-mouth, Capone-era lawyer with some Evan Bayh in there for the ladies. Obama will fail to turn the election the way of the Democrats and, I believe, only a disaster of some sort that galvanizes the imagination of voters in the fall ... that is well-handled by the White House ... will do the trick. I think they will not handle it any better than they handled the Christmas terror incident, i.e., there will be off-hand things said and done that the rightpress will blow out of proportion and, yet, dominate the coverage.

This is a very disturbing situation. Rahm is the root of it and the proof is that Obama was considerable a different personality and presence before Rahm became his chief of staff. The "before" and "after" pictures are starkly different. Yes, of course, he became President, too, but you don't see this kind of change very often. It is the image of a powerful and malign personality at work.

Our agenda is flexible and based on evidence and keen observation. It is a workable plan to keep the GOP out of the Executive as long as possible. There are some keys to observation that I will detail in coming essays.

JB

12/20/09

Two op-ed columns on Sunday morning struck home the idea that President Obama has lost perhaps irrecoverable ground with his "base" in just one short year. The first one I read was by Neal Gabbler in the Boston Globe decrying the lack of passion in Obama (as compared to candidate Obama) and his staff. It is, as Gabbler sees it, not listless, but rather seemingly afraid to rock the boat too much, to be seen as an angry Black, to unnecessarily jostle some vote in the gray middle of political opportunists. Gabbler's is not quite an indictment. But if you are looking for causes for these effects, you really need go no further than the Chief of Staff, whose martinet style and gushing profanity has effectively subdued his boss and the rest of the staff. It sounds preposterous, but every organization run by a martinet soon learns to avoid the pain and becomes insensitive to the pain of others.

The second and perhaps more profound of the columns is by our favorite columnist in the New York Times, Frank Rich. I had to pause and go about my morning business before I realized that Rich's use of Tiger Woods as stalking horse for a fundamental problem in American culture is, in fact, a long-awaited statement of a problem we as a culture and as individuals have with the news and information media: we trust it too much, too broadly and too deeply. We allow ourselves to be deceived and it is frankly having more consequences than we are able to deal with.

There is no question that Americans are not well-educated when it comes to discerning pepper from fly-specks. We tend to take things on hopeful face value and sort the world into categories that are comfortable for us. We have categories for crime and faithlessness, but these are bound categories with sharper edges than really exist in real life. We are hood-winked, as Rich says, all too often, and we accept spin as having a strength of truth in it, despite much evidence to the contrary. We don't like disagreement and the feeling of being talked into or being talked down to. In defense of what self-conscious awareness we have of our limitations, we prefer to accept a web of deceit than to challenge the messenger and risk being defeated in argument.

Frank Rich ends his essay with what I think is a memorable sentence, memorable because of its utterance as much as its content. It represents a departure that the White House had better begin to understand soon.

... Though the American left and right don’t agree on much, they are both now coalescing around the suspicion that Obama’s brilliant presidential campaign was as hollow as Tiger’s public image — a marketing scam designed to camouflage either his covert anti-American radicalism (as the right sees it) or spineless timidity (as the left sees it)....

JB

11/13/09

The following essay/diatribe, complete with foul language (which I have "bleeped,") appeared the other day in Salon. It is the sort of thing that echoes around in certain precincts, but contains, in my opinion, the seeds of a nasty surprise for Liberals and Progressives, especially those who think that Marty has recovered his senses and will be a companion in the coming struggles. Not so much, I think. But, it is good to see the radical right buckling and imploding. JB

Hi, I'm Marty, and I'm a recovering Republican

I was a feminazi-hating, liberal-bashing loudmouth who tried to befriend Bill O'Reilly. Man, I was such a (bleep)

By Marty Beckerman

Every day I wake up with the same thought: "I used to be such a (bleeping) idiot."

I am a former Republican. And I wasn't merely the libertarian, live-and-let-live, fun-at-parties kind of conservative whose primary concern is balancing the budget; I was a spiteful, narrow-minded, fire-breathing paranoid lunatic who questioned the patriotism and morality of my liberal fellow citizens. Recognizing the error of my ways has done wonders for my mental health but left me with constant, unremitting remorse; I really want to go back in time and kick my own (bleep).

Surely I am not alone: Earlier this year independents sympathized with Democrats two-to-one over Republicans, whereas they were evenly split five years ago; a slim majority of young voters voted for Sen. John Kerry in 2004, but nearly 70 percent chose Barack Obama in 2008, the widest margin in electoral history. Traditionally people shift rightward as their bank accounts expand and their flesh wrinkles, but my generation is seemingly the first to move leftward with age.

Actually, I was a passionate liberal when I entered college in September 2001, and I initially resisted the GOP's post-9/11 fury and propaganda. I decried the suspension of habeas corpus and the 2003 Iraq invasion and feared for our country when dissent was equated with treason in the popular imagination. And then a few things happened:

• A handful of my friends joined the College Republicans. As our drunken nights accumulated -- with Fox News always in the background and a stack of vitriolic books cracked open -- I found myself questioning my assumptions. Craving the acceptance of my peers like any other insecure college kid, I gradually accepted their self-reinforcing groupthink, slowly but surely inching toward the Dark Side.

• A handful of my fellow campus left-wingers appeared to excessively sympathize with right-wing Islamists, rationalizing the violence of suicide bombers, for example, but refusing to criticize (on multicultural grounds) heinous civil rights abuses across the globe. The starry-eyed George W. Bush acolytes who called for the expansion-by-explosion of worldwide freedom -- despite opposing countless domestic liberties -- seemed righteous in comparison.

• A handful of my professors injected their utopian and hypersensitive politics into the classroom, calling for a "socialist revolution" and grading me poorly for using "heteronormative" language. Rebelling against their authority, as they had rebelled against conservative professorial authority in their student days, felt as natural as doing a keg stand at a fraternity party.

• A super liberal girlfriend dumped me, sparking my testosterone-fueled bitterness toward everything that reminded me of her, such as left-wing politics and basically all human females.

Very few people in their late teens and early twenties seek justice in moderation. The hormone-soaked college years are a time of extremes, our changing identities often defined by dissent-quashing affiliations, leaving us to later cringe at our frenzied "Goldfish Liberation phase," "Castrate the Phallusocracy phase," "Noam Chomsky phase" or "Ayn Rand phase." (Yes, I spent a summer vacation trying to finish reading "Atlas Shrugged," ultimately throwing in the towel around page 75,000.)

Much like our previous chief executive, I should have seen the danger of sealing myself in an echo chamber to prevent contamination from outside viewpoints; I began only hanging out with conservative true believers, only reading conservative books, only getting my news from conservative media outlets. In order to avoid journalistic "left-wing bias," I embraced right-wing bias, foolishly confusing sensationalist entertainment with debate and truth-telling. Outrage became my drug of choice.

There was no single moment when I transformed into an unhinged, raving authoritarian; propaganda works in repetition -- in accumulation -- and worldviews rarely change overnight. However, as your skepticism weakens, a new understanding of history develops. Whereas Liberal Me viewed America improving over time with the progression of civil rights and sexual liberation, Conservative Me viewed history as an unfolding catastrophe: In my mind, "socialist" handouts threatened our laissez-faire way of life, as if public roads/schools/libraries were no different than Stalin's gulags, and hedonistic decadence -- facilitated and encouraged by scheming left-wing nihilists -- threatened individual self-control. I mistakenly came to believe that America had not progressed toward justice but fallen from grace.

I railed in conversation and on my website against "freedom-hating hippies," "activist judges who overturn the will of the people," "pro-abortion feminazis," "Marxist Democrats," "elitist, so-called intellectuals," "greedy welfare queens," "environmental whack jobs" and other perceived bogeymen. I lost sight of grayscale and instead saw the world in black and white; I labeled Terri Schiavo's husband a money-hungry murderer for pulling the plug on his comatose wife, lumped all Palestinians together with the few terrorists among their population, uttered racial/sexual/ethnic slurs with a little too much enthusiasm for simple prurience and approvingly repeated Michael Savage's book title "Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder." I even argued that women belong in the home, not the workplace! (Now a self-employed author, I cook dinner for my girlfriend nightly and perform household chores -- groceries, laundry, dishes -- when she heads to the office. Truly I am a domestic goddess.)

My sudden transformation mystified my friends and family, many of whom tried to talk sense into me when they didn't outright disown me. Even my conservative father said I was going overboard. For example: wondering if my 90-year-old grandmother was a Commie for cashing her Social Security checks. In order to heed your inner Joe McCarthy, you must first squelch your inner conscience.

Strangest of all, I developed a finger-wagging puritan bent, which made absolutely no sense for a 20-year-old guy who was getting laid and intoxicated on a steady basis. I blamed "the anti-family Left" for encouraging couples to divorce and youngsters to fornicate, as if liberals were all conspiring together to destroy the traditional family, as if liberal states do not have lower rates of divorce and teen pregnancy than their conservative counterparts. My hypocrisy is mystifying in retrospect -- why would I bash sexual liberation while having sloppy drunken unmarried sex whenever possible? -- but perhaps conservative politicians such as John Ensign, Mark Sanford, David Vitter, Larry Craig and Newt Gingrich can explain.

You might imagine my moralizing stemmed from our cultural anxiety about sexuality, but it actually came from a longstanding need to position myself as superior to others; I got off on presenting my fellow millennials as pleasure-seeking, unthinking/unfeeling animals while my life had Truth and Meaning. It was incredibly self-righteous and self-congratulatory, and it was only about 50 percent accurate.

None of this would haunt me so deeply if I did not have a national platform to air my histrionic, uninformed opinions. However, I was uncommonly lucky for my age. In 2004 MTV/Pocket Books published my book "Generation S.L.U.T.," which described the anonymous hook-up culture among contemporary American youth and unleashed a storm of publicity. Although I am proud of the book's emotional nakedness (apart from its amateurish didacticism), the book's promotion is another story: In Salon, the New York Times, and countless other interviews (newspaper, radio, TV, blogs) I blamed the psychological turbulence of modern teenagers -- from wrist-cutting to school shootings -- on the 1960s feminist revolution. I sounded like a bitter middle-aged man; I even flattered the ultimate bitter middle-aged man, Bill O'Reilly, whom I asked to "be my friend" during a Fox News Channel appearance. (O'Reilly appeared confused by the request. For the record: I am friends with every Irish person, minus the nondrinkers, who do not exist.)

I completely understand why conservatives-turned-liberals such as Arianna Huffington and David Brock and liberals-turned-conservatives such as P.J. O'Rourke and David Horowitz spend decades walking back their youthful ramblings. When millions upon millions of people remember you for something that you no longer represent -- if you think they remember you anyway, which they probably do not -- the shame is unbearable, the desire for a time machine pathological. The temptation is to become an extremist in the opposite direction -- LOOK how much I've changed, everybody! -- which is hardly an act of maturity. The dilemma remains: You have evolved, yet the perception of you remains stuck in a misguided past. (At a recent literary event someone asked me, "Aren't you the guy who thinks women shouldn't have sex?" I'm misanthropic, yes, but willing to concede that humanity should probably reproduce.)

However, I might have never recovered from my right-wing fever if not for the controversy I caused. Readers sent me hate mail following a Salon interview with Rebecca Traister, in which I bashed feminism and articulated such thoughts as: "Men don't see women as clean and pure but as a means to an end, a nice little (bleep)-hole." One Salon reader even threatened my physical safety.

But middle-aged liberal psychologist Steve Edgell took another approach: calmly and gently talking me back to earth. Over the course of many e-mails and phone conversations, Dr. Edgell -- who had been an Ayn Rand junkie at my age -- explained the reasons for his own political evolution and guided me through the myriad inconsistencies of my rabid philosophy. Just as I was beginning to understand how unbalanced I had become, Edgell died of a heart attack. He did not live to see me completely return to planet Earth but must have known he had planted the seeds of doubt. I never met the man, and I don't necessarily agree with everything he believed, but I owe him my sanity. (He was an atheist, but I hope he is looking down from the cosmic void with amused satisfaction.)

Just as morphing into an extremist took a couple years, un-becoming an extremist happened over time. One by one I saw the flaws in conservative orthodoxy: attempting to fight terrorism with torture, which only aided our enemies' propaganda efforts and thus created more terrorists; seeking to liberalize the Muslim world while curtailing rights for gay people at home; criticizing public schools for lackluster results and therefore cutting funds further; disdaining the weak while never analyzing why they are weak; always seeing the effect but never the cause, which on a mass scale perpetuates the effect.

The 2008 financial crash further proved to me the necessity of an economic safety net within the market system; tying health insurance to employment suddenly made no sense, for example, when millions of people lost their jobs due to conditions beyond their control. Capitalism with a few safety pads -- or a condom, I suppose, since the recession has fucked us all -- is a far cry from a Marxian worker's paradise.

I am not an extreme leftist by any means -- I still dream of swimming in a vault of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck, I would die to protect the First Amendment from censorial progressive overreach (the same goes for theocratic conservative overreach), and I would consider voting for moderate Republicans if any still existed -- but I've learned to see the big picture. It doesn't matter whether you are liberal or conservative, but it's dangerous to always think with exclamation points instead of question marks. Your stance on any particular issue is far less important than whether your worldview is a product of inquiry or incuriosity, whether you feel more comfortable questioning the crowd or blindly marching with it. No ideology has a monopoly on reality -- including my rediscovered left-wing politics.

No longer drunk on jingoism and bloodlust, I feel like a German in 1946, wondering what the hell happened to me, what the hell I supported when I harbored no doubt that we should "nuke 'em all" and measured people by standards other than their character. The years pass, but I cannot reconcile my former and present selves; in my early 20s I made the worst mistake of my life --injecting poison into a world that desperately needed the antidote -- and while it's impossible to undo that error, perhaps my penance is remembering and therefore not repeating it. Just as Dr. Edgell steered me back to the shores of lucidity, I can encourage mellowness in others -- no matter their cause -- and discourage the inevitable craziness that resentment and overgeneralization breed.

Paul of Tarsus, the most famous convert in history, commented long ago: "Even though I was once … a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief." I don't know if anyone, deity or human, will show mercy on me, but I will try to have mercy on myself, and -- even if I continue to fail -- maybe that's enough.

8/6/09

I was going to entitle this essay "The Wrong Guy at the Right Time," but reconsidered. Bromwich quickly provides alternative titles and at one point says,

... Obama's two opposing traits, the caution and the presumption, have joined with results that are deeply unhappy. He arrogates. He does not indicate. And when the argument is well underway, he starts his major explanation as an afterthought.

Obama cherishes the ideal of a frictionless transformation of society. It is a wish for aesthetic harmony, which he mistakes for a political goal. Its attainment would be a beautiful thing. But no matter how much he appeals for comity, Obama is certain to give offense to some. Better to choose your times and targets than allow others to force that choice.

In plainer language this means that Barack Obama is failing at being President ... because he is, apparently, constitutionally unprepared to go into the fray and break a few knee caps if necessary. He continues to believe his fantasy about bipartisan solutions. As Bromwich puts it Pragmatic justifications have been offered to explain his aversion to any contest that implies a clash of opposing interests. Thus Rahm Emanuel said of the disastrously time-wasting courtship of Republican support for the stimulus package: "The public wants bipartisanship. We just have to try. We don't have to succeed." But try every time and you will waste your life. And when did the public say it wanted bipartisanship? The last fair measure was the election of 2008; and the public then gave a convincing majority to one party. (emphasis added)

Barack Obama wants to please everyone. That's his fantasy, but it is our cross. As my colleague in New York City put it the other day when we were discussing the Bromwich essay, particularly the part regarding Obama's fixation with bipartisan solutions ...

One additional point that Obama does not understand is that there is no functioning Republican Party to have bipartisanship with. There are no statesmen in the shell that passes for a political party. There are no intellectual thinkers with any ideas in the empty shell party. But most of all, there are no American patriots in the party. Their patriotism is only to their excessive wealth while using the vast numbers of uninformed voters like the "birthers," gun-nuts, and varieties of sociopaths to demonstrate for them.

I might not have been as kind to the Republicans as Tony, but his points are well taken. Republicans are in a tail-spin of psychological and political withdrawal from the horrendous lies and bullying of the Bush/Cheney administration, still believing that racism is a reasonable core position for a 21st century political party, and rudderless and virtually hopeless and clueless. The yelling and screaming of their minions at public meetings show the Party reduced to a frothing tantrum ... AND YET Barack Obama is helpless to take advantage of it ... or even extricate our country from the pollution from it suffered for the past ten years and now on into his own administration.

Bromwich ends with the hope that Barack Obama can reverse himself and wise up. He says that if he does not this Presidency will be a failure and all semblance of his leadership foreclosed. We can survive that domestically, with pain, but with a world-wide recession still in progress, with Putin's shirt off on horseback in Siberia and his submarines eerily patrolling our coasts, with Israel hovering over its own little red button, with fanatics in Muslim countries afraid to bring their own cultures into the 21st century, continuation of Obama's failure could be fatal. In any case it will be ugly!

JB