Jack Crow on the threat to traditional marriage:

If you’re looking for what degrades or corrupts the, heh, marriage bond, you ain’t ever going to find it the affections and affectations of homosexuals. But, you will find a whole lot of sundered wedded union in the wake of deployment, military industrial centralization and the austerity which follows war upon war. That shit is disruptive. The gays, not so much.

I already mentioned this in my own universally praised assessment of the State of the Union speech, but the IOZ take on the Obama invocation of the US as the “indispensable nation” deserves immortality.

Did he say anything interesting? Jobs, mortgages, jobs, business, taxes. I seem to recall some generic bellicosity toward Iran and I definitely remember hearing that hoary Albrightism, “the indispensable nation.” I have always enjoyed that phrase. It suggests a single, sad bag of Cheetohs resting lazily between the coil and the glass, refusing to fall into the hopper, and a single, sad, very fat man banging a futile palm against the other side of the vending machine.

And anyone who says otherwise is probably wrong about everything else, too.

Way back when, the day after he got elected, I characterized Obama as the compassionate conservative that people goofily pretended George Bush would be. Avedon Carol thinks I was wrong about that.

Remember, George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security, but he failed, and he failed because people – with liberals leading the charge – fought back, to the point where even registered Republicans realized what was going on and called their GOP Congresscreeps and let them know they’d never get another vote from them if they signed on to this outrage. Now Obama is trying to wreck Social Security, and where are those people? Well, they’re not telling people to call their Congressmen, because they are still too busy telling us how awful the Republicans are, as if only the Republicans were doing anything outrageous.

Left I on the News scientifically proves that Syria’s Bashir al-Assad is just like Hitler.

Today on the news, a Syrian defector was talking about the “genocide” taking place in Syria, where an alleged (but hardly proven) 5000 deaths (of both opposition forces and government troops) have taken place. I have yet to hear on the news anyone applying the word “genocide” to the 1.3 million Iraqis who have met their fate at the hands of the U.S. government.

You’ll have to read it to get the context for the 1.3 million, but no matter which way you lean there are lots of people in Iraq whose fates turned all the way bad when the US invaded.

And so on. Coming soon, it turns out that at some point in the not-too-distant future, the machines did in fact win.

The speech can be divided into two parts: the part that recognized and cashed in on all the pressure toward economic justice that Occupy created* during the past four months, and the part that didn’t.

The first part you can just write off to the campaign. Come January 20 of next year—which is a Sunday, so the actual public inauguration might be held on Monday the 21st, but that’s Martin Luther King Day, so maybe it’ll be the 22nd—the Fierce Urgency of Those People will either be misplaced by President Obama or murdered, chopped into bite-sized nuggets and eaten by President Romnich and guests at the inaugural dinner.

The defining issue of our time is how to keep [the basic American promise that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement] alive. No challenge is more urgent. No debate is more important. We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules. (Applause.) What’s at stake aren’t Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. And we have to reclaim them.

Let’s remember how we got here. Long before the recession, jobs and manufacturing began leaving our shores. Technology made businesses more efficient, but also made some jobs obsolete. Folks at the top saw their incomes rise like never before, but most hardworking Americans struggled with costs that were growing, paychecks that weren’t, and personal debt that kept piling up.

And then there’s a bunch of other economic populist stuff, and the thing about how he’s created a commission to investigate and prosecute financial piracy, and it will work hand-in-hand with the Justice Department task force that has been charged with shielding financial pirates from investigation and prosecution and sending them off with a slap on the wrist and a cup of sweet tea, and some other things, and if for a moment the president thought any of this stuff would put a crimp in his campaign’s capacity to raise pirated funds from the pirate industry, he wouldn’t say it or do it. High-level campaign operatives were dispatched to strategic locations in Manhattan and various Caribbean isles with DVDs of a more realistic speech, along with gift bags containing bottles of 50-year-old single malt whiskey and bags of dried, salted peasant ears.

So you can write all that shit off. Then there was the Pinky and The Brain stuff about taking over the world. He praised the troops that were sent off to fight the war that he called wrong and stupid at the time but now says “made the United States safer and more respected around the world.” I guess that was inevitable;  it would be challenging to stand up and tell all those soldiers and such that their lives, vaporized limbs and brutalized minds had contributed mightily to the deeply screwed condition in which we find ourselves today, and incidentally killed, displaced, maimed or permanently traumatized almost everyone who lives in Iraq.

And Iran. We can’t forget Iran. The president stopped short of the full John Bolton on Iran, but did his best to convey the impression that contrary to the opinions of intelligence agencies in the US and, incredibly, Israel, and that of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran has a nuclear weapons program and the US will smite the Iranians hip and thigh (old-timey for “nuke the shit out of ‘em”) before we’ll let them get away with building the nuclear weapons that they’re not trying to build.

All props to John Bolton, by the way. Among all the people who imply or insist that Iran is building nuclear weapons and can’t be allowed to succeed, he’s one of the few who advocate what the delusion (or lie) truly demands, which is an all-out attack on Iran to end their ambitions forever. Sanctions? Pfffffft.

And finally, for the best formulation to date, and likely forever, addressing any aspect of the speech, I turn to IOZ:

I seem to recall some generic bellicosity toward Iran and I definitely remember hearing that hoary Albrightism, “the indispensable nation.” I have always enjoyed that phrase. It suggests a single, sad bag of Cheetohs resting lazily between the coil and the glass, refusing to fall into the hopper, and a single, sad, very fat man banging a futile palm against the other side of the vending machine.

2007: 116 instances.

2008: 112 instances.

2009: 54 instances.

2010: 106 instances.

2011: 3,270 instances.

You’ll notice there’s a roughly 3,000% jump in the 2011 period from the previous high. Hey, I wonder what could account for that?

Just for good measure, here’s the result from the three-month period immediately preceding the beginning of the Occupy protests, from June 18 of 2011 to September 18 of 2011: 44 instances.

So I don’t want to hear no shit about the lack of clarity or effectiveness of the Occupy message and protests. If the president is Newton and economic justice is gravity, then Occupy is the dude who walked up behind Newton and slugged him with a branch and shouted “Gravity!” just as the apple fell upon his head.

Willard M. Romney: This is easy. If Mitt wins the GOP nomination and the general election, he’ll sell off all the Soul’s assets. Whatever remains of the Soul after that, he’ll trade to the Devil for future considerations.

Barack Obama: Obama seems almost certain to win the Democratic party nomination for president and, given the sudden carnivorous turn the Republicans have taken, only slightly less certain to win the general election.

If he does win, he’ll probably lodge the Soul in comfort at Camp David, careful to keep it away from newspapers and the internet—what if the Soul developed a taste for news or porn on the president’s watch? We don’t need another custody battle so soon—and promise it a job in a year or two, maybe three, four tops. He’ll trot it out for feel-good state functions involving one-legged champion wrestlers or universally beloved school teachers or the opening of a solar panel manufacturing facility, and fit it with a pair of custom-made blinders to wear on those occasions when the president is about to do something truly depraved, like strike a deal with Republicans to reduce Medicare benefits or blow up a bunch of third-world women and kids for no good reason. Because there are some things you don’t want the Soul of America to see, for the good of us all.

Ron Paul: If Ron Paul wins the battle for the Soul of America, the Soul is pretty much on its own and will likely end up as a massively pregnant stoner panhandling on a street corner and passing out fliers warning against an impending assault by forces of the outlawed Federal Reserve.

Vote wisely, vote well and vote often.

We have not a single prominent political figure to the left of your average John Birch Society aficionado speaking out against eternal war and our increasingly predatory national security state. People who oppose those sorts of things are desperately parched. The overwhelming number of Obama supporters glide past these issues as though they don’t exist; once Paul is off stage again, you will not hear a whisper of anti-imperial criticism from them aimed at the president. And that is precisely why those outraged liberals want him off stage again, and want any attention or praise paid his rhetoric in the meanwhile to be seen as beyond the pale.

Barack Obama believes the national security state and the American military empire are good and valuable things. He likes them. He uses them enthusiastically. Ron Paul believes all sorts of weird and unsavory shit, but he doesn’t believe that the national security state and the American military empire are good and valuable things. You don’t want Ron Paul siphoning off liberal/left enthusiasm? Then take those issues away from him and make them your own; they are, after all, progressive bread and butter issues. Can’t, though, can you?

(Obama also used his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance lecture to mount a stirring defense of the Bush doctrine of preemptive war, which makes him not only an imperialist and authoritarian but an enormous asshole as well. And doesn’t say a lot for the Nobel selection committee either. But that’s another story.)