Real Seriousness

Glennzilla sums it up in a paragraph.

There very well may be some small number of individuals who are so blinded by religious extremism that they will be devoted to random violence against civilians no matter what we do, but we are constantly maximizing the pool of recruits and sympathy among the population on which they depend. In other words, what we do constantly bolsters their efforts, and when we do, we always seem to move more in the direction of helping them even further. Ultimately, we should ask ourselves: if we drop more bombs on more Muslim countries, will there be fewer or more Muslims who want to blow up our airplanes and are willing to end their lives to do so? That question really answers itself.

This reality has been evident to me for some time now. Yet there are apparently reams and reams of Serious Foreign Policy Analysts carrying unassailable validation of their rationality from America's finest universities who are nonetheless dedicated to the simplistic proposition "America good! You bad!" Of course it's possible to acknowledge, as Glennzilla does, that there are a handful of fanatics who would "hate the West" or whatever the hawks are saying today regardless of our actions and still realize that our actions have had the undeniable effect of making those fanatics look right to a great many of their fellow believers. And yet, the torch-bearers of cold realism and careful, reasoned judgment have, in their pursuit of denying any negative consequences of their actions, reached the same moral capacity of a four-year old: It's awesome, because I did it!

Help me out here

Creating/expanding government-operated health plans to cover the uninsured = totally unacceptable to Serious Centrists.

Paying predatory private companies a premium to do the same thing and hoping that, golly, they just play nice and don't use their lobbying power to strip out whatever useful controls are in the deal = just fine and dandy.

Politics sure are weird.

The trouble with Taibbi

The latest front in the long war between Hippies and Sensible Liberals is threatening to go nuclear over the half-assed Big Pharma handout posing as health care reform as well as the Afghanistan escalation, but the biggest shot so far has been fired by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone documenting Obama's wholehearted embrace of neoliberals in his economic policy team.

The debate is pretty much the usual for this sort of thing. The Sensible types accuse us of naive, puritannical immaturity who are interfering with Obama's 32-Dimensional Ninja Chess Mastery. Alternatively, we're putting undue pressure on Obama to do more than what apparent political realities allow. (This varies depending on which Sensible you ask.) Of the numerous things written on this topic, Taibbi himself has the most succinct reply:

First of all, we should get one thing out of the way — it’s not any citizen’s job to give a politician credit for his political calculations. In fact, that should rightly be part of the calculus of any political calculation; a politician should have to weigh the benefits of making, say, an unsavory insider alliance against the negative of public criticism for that move. If a leader doesn’t have to earn the admiration you give him, then a) that admiration doesn’t mean anything, and b) he will surely spend all his political capital on the people who do make him earn it.

Progressive activists should be fanatical puritans. That is the role they play in the political system; that is, insofar as Sensible Liberals share the goal of moving the range of what's attainable to the left. It seems to me that the Sensible folks are the naive ones. On the health care bill, for example, they happily followed the lead of moderate Democrats in declaring the most progressive solutions off the table by the outset. Then they are apparently surprised when Republicans and Blue Dogs cut out all of the remaining progressive elements of the bill during the inevitable bargaining phase. Why can't they see that our original bill was so rational and Sensible?

Ideally, Democrats and liberal apologists could use progressives to give them a left flank to use as a hammer in policy negotiations. They won't. Democrats won't care about alienating their base because they care more about losing corporate money than losing elections. And Sensible Liberal pundits want to be on the teevee next to Bob Schieffer, angling for a future campaign job with one of said Democrats by burnishing their anti-hippie bona fides.

Shorter Barack Obama

Full text of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize speech.

• Hey guys, I've got to justify having this big hammer, so I'm going to keep whacking at everything vaguely nail-shaped, because that's working out brilliantly so far.
  

Didn't really fit into the previous post, but it was screaming out for a "shorter" treatment.

Don't make me do this again

Behold, I have uncovered the secret of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize speech and it is...that the first draft was written by a high school freshman who has learned just enough from world history class to make himself dangerous on the internet. Or so it seems. This may just be the level at which the American foreign policy establishment operates. Witness these gems:

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism - it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

I have seen this sort of thing on bulletin boards before; wankers who muse with barely-concealed ruefulness what good fortune Gandhi's independence movement had by not meeting up with Imperial Japan. Not that they wish that would have happened, of course. Not at all.

Semi-related note on this passage: Glennzilla points out that Obama botches this section by saying he is sworn to defend and protect "his nation" when, in fact, he is only sworn to defend and protect the Constitution. (Huh, I could've sworn I read this in Greenwald's post, and it seems like the kind of thing he'd say, but now I can't find it.) This may as well be deliberate; if so, Obama should get some credit for dropping the pretext that American military adventurism has some relation to pie-in-the-sky ideas of American "values" or altruism, and is merely about perpetuating the empire in itself.

the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.

Well, it's finally happened. An American leader has gone before all the world and made a prettied-up version of the dick-slapping "if it weren't for us you'd all be speaking German-Russian-Japanese now" argument. Most of our arms at present are doing very little to "underwrite security," whether they are used by us or someone else.

I -- like any head of state -- reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation.

I'll leave this to Jonathon Schwarz, who, in his unique way, notices that all Obama apparently sees of the past six decades is that he'd prefer to undo them.

This machine kills corporate Democrats

People who follow my Facebook feed know I've been on a Woody Guthrie kick lately. You can probably guess why I'm trying to keep Woody alive, but to reiterate, here's a story I ran across on Truthout today.

here are at least eight million daily followers of Glenn Beck in America, and a good chunk of them are people like my grandmother and my uncle Billy - well-intentioned people that care about their country, their families and their communities, otherwise they wouldn't watch a show about politics. However, to label all these Glenn Beck followers as unreachable, bigoted racists is an extraordinary dangerous and misleading move for the progressive movement, which aims to include all people.

My grandmother's own vocal protest for gay rights in her church disproved that Glenn Beck followers tend to vote Republican merely because of gods, gays and guns. Sure, this wins over a large portion of them, but it doesn't explain how the Republican Party is able to win over people like my grandmother, who were once hardcore Democrats and never fell prey to such hate-baiting tactics in the past.

The divide-and-conquer tactic of keeping the working class divided on superficial grounds of racial or cultural identities is as old as time itself, yet liberals will gladly play along by marginalizing the white working class as an irredeemable mash of ignorant, bigoted rednecks who can only be reached by surrendering progressive stances on racial justice or women's rights. Witness the recent outrage over Stupak-Pitts, where liberals raised a great moan over conservative Democrats selling out abortion rights in an attempt to hold onto their supposedly conservative rural districts. The response in the libosphere was a great finger-wagging "this is what you get for 'reaching out' to working-class white voters." Well, no. That is what you get for allowing Democrats whose commitment to neoliberalism is non-negotiable to do the reaching. The liberal wing of the business party knows who butters its bread, and it isn't the great social causes favored by campus liberals.

On a related note, here's Taibbi on Sarah Palin and the media.

It’s much easier to figure out who’s “left” and who isn’t using cultural litmus tests than it is using position papers. What’s the left position on monetary policy? I have no idea. What’s the left’s position on American Idol? Easy: it rolls its eyes.

This is the crux to the perversion of populism unleashed by Palin, Beck and like. You should have solidarity with your boss rather than fellow workers from the city because neither you or your boss can figure out what the hell Un Chien Andalou is about. This stuff is catnip for liberals, of course, who cannot in their smugness resist the delightful idea that there are countless rubes out there who hate them just because they are so gul-durned smart. That they may actually be doing their alleged enemy's work for him probably doesn't cause them to lose much sleep.