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Sometimes people chastise me for focusing so much on Obama’s sins, and Democrats in general, and hardly ever on the loyal opposition’s. My current understanding of the roles of everyone who holds elected federal office is that they’re all the opposition. My goal these days is to try to alter the perspectives of . . . → Read More: Yes, they’re despicable, and so are they All of your woes can be traced to that one moment of missed opportunity. President Obama said the day of the 9/11 anniversary that in the decade following the 9/11 attacks, Americans have preserved our values and our character. He’s right. America’s history is of a whiny, over-privileged, self-aggrandizing and self-victimizing bully, and the decade since 9/11 has been clarifying. The perils of a co-presidency become plain. Continue reading President Obama blames bank policy failures on President Geithner Just wondering. If workers went out on a general strike and marched on Washington en masse and government violence ensued, would NATO step in to help the workers? Yesterday I wrote this somewhat carefully considered thing about how Obama’s reelection prospects aren’t as bad as a lot of people think because he’ll have many boatloads of money and the only official GOP candidates who aren’t too obviously insane to win in the general election are saddled with a Mormon problem that will probably doom them in the primaries. That could change, but so far none of the Republicans who don’t have those problems seem to think they can win, so they’re not running. What never occurred to me is that Obama might run on his record; I just assumed he would run a two-pronged effort to paint Republicans as the slavering sociopaths they are while he proposes popular legislation that he can’t and probably doesn’t want to get passed. I forget that some people still take him seriously, and that presumably he and his staff do as well. Barack Obama has two huge disadvantages going into the 2012 election: The economy and the economy. He also has two huge advantages: The Republicans and the Republicans. Despite the administration’s addiction to neoliberal crack, economic conditions could, possibly, in a perfect world, by accident, improve before the election; the Republicans can’t, and they’re what’s driving the Obama fundraising machine so far. Make that three advantages: Few of his potential supporters seem to care much about his militarism—imagine the infuriated cries of liberals had George Bush been the president who decided to exclude the (no doubt furiously protested) bombing of Libya, and hence future air campaigns against whichever states are pissing him off, from Congressional oversight the way Obama did—or his national security excesses, or his refusal to prosecute even publicly confessed war criminals, or that he claims the right to execute Americans without due process. Turns out Democrats aren’t much different than Republicans when it comes to forgiving the hypocrisies and sins of their own. So all is well on that front. From Lenin’s Tomb, a lefty Brit blog run by Richard Seymour, comes this on the recent London riots:
Continue reading Blogs on Parade: “The Negro’s Revenge” edition All but 25 of the 954 words in Warren Buffett’s recent New York Times column are devoted to explaining why the new 12-member congressional Politburo charged with sending a deficit reduction bill to the full Congress for a December vote must include tax increases on rich people in their legislation. This isn’t the first time Buffett has remarked the absurdity of low tax rates for the rich. Neither is it the second, third, fourth or fifth time. He shows up whenever Congress is reconsidering tax policy and invariably gets applauded by liberals as the rare conscientious rich man and vilified by reactionaries as an economic illiterate who must have Forrest Gumped his way to those billions. A question for you: From what authority does anyone derive the power to decide whether or not you can have a job when you want one, or a doctor when you need one, or a decent place to live? News for you: A rail transit provider in the United States disabled mobile phone services to prevent a planned protest on [August 11], attracting criticism and unflattering comparisons to crackdowns on dissent in the Middle East. A friend told me a few weeks ago that the 2004-2009 incarnation of Battlestar Galactica is worth watching, so I have been. A few days ago I got into a huge dustup (culminating in my regrettably profane and Nixon in ’62-like withdrawal from the field) with a few progressive sorts over whether or not a long-time antiwar activist had said, in connection with their disinclination to participate in the civil disobedience actions planned for October 6, that they were Nazi sympathizers. (He hadn’t.) That same night, I happened to arrive at the Battlestar Galactica episode in which one of the characters reprised the conclusion of Mario Savio’s famous 1964 speech at Sproul Hall on the University of California at Berkeley campus.
Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? I read the transcript of the Obama debt-ceiling speech and aside from killing any lingering hope for a jobs program and the preservation and improvement of our social safety net, it didn’t seem too awful. And I’ve been told by professional progressive persons who watched the speech and the response to it from Orange John that Obama came off like an adult and Boehner like a petulant, oddly tinted child. Still, I think it’s ultimately more useful to think of the debate principals in the context of the hit musical and film, Sweeney Todd. Which of them is Sweeney Todd, the demon barber who will slit our throats, and which is Mrs. Lovett, the baker who will make us into meat pies for our masters? |
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