Tag Barack Obama

Unfinished Business, Indeed

Earlier this year, when the health care reform bill finally made it through Congress, Representative Patrick Kennedy left this little card at the gravesite of his father, Senator Ted Kennedy. The card reads “Dad — The Unfinished Business is done”. Universal health care was the grand cause of the last thirty years of Ted Kennedy’s career, and his death at this time last year came just as the final battle for passage was beginning.

Charlie Pierce (or Charles P. Pierce, as he is usually styled in print), who writes mainly for the Boston Globe, wrote this blog post for Esquire magazine on the anniversary of Ted Kennedy’s death, asking a very real and very important question: who exactly will step up to the plate and be the voice of liberal conscience in the enormous void left by Kennedy’s death? A pullquote:

The former could be replaced, and has been, most notably by a president whose official crest ought to be half-a-loaf of bread, and who now finds himself battling the forces not only of an intractable political opposition, but also the undeniable power of clear and uncompromising public bullshit. It is the latter Teddy that this president needed the most but, looking around at his putative allies within his own party, and assuming that the president is unwilling or unable to do it himself, there was nobody willing or able to step into the role. While it was unquestionably surprising that Kennedy was replaced in the Senate by a stealth Republican named Scott Brown, it is altogether shocking that he has yet to be replaced within his own party by someone willing to be the obstreperous lefty voice to counter an increasingly shrill and increasingly manic Republican Right.

There is an enormous amount of unfinished business to be accomplished, and yet once again the noise machine of the right has brought everything to a (literally) screeching halt over building a “mosque” (or, what Pierce equally mischaracterizes as a “culinary school”; it is neither) two blocks away from the World Trade Center, and STILL not one progressive leader can find a spine or a set of testicles to put the howler monkeys in their place and get refocused on problems far more likely to sink us all than the opening of a cultural center. The vacuum of leadership in this country is palpable, and with each passing day the lack of a strong countervalent force to undo the machinations of the right draws us to a point of no return into chaos. I don’t think that the presence of Ted Kennedy would be the only thing forestalling that, but clearly the role he played was critical and can’t go unfilled much longer. I just wish I had the slightest idea who might do that.

(tip o’ the hat to blog-buddy Steve for clueing me in on the Pierce post)

War, Peace, And Whatever The Fuck This Is

Of all the meaningless gestures from the Obama Administration regarding our illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, none is more meaningless than the declaration that “the last combat troops have left Iraq”.

Fifty thousand troops remain in Iraq and the number of mercenaries used in lieu of U.S. military personnel will nearly triple from 2,700 to 7,000. An American military presence in Iraq is unlikely to disappear for decades to come. Just ask the Germans, who still have 68,000 American soldiers in their country even though their war ended 65 years ago. Or the Japanese, who have 47,000 U.S. troops. Or the Koreans, with 37,000. “They need us to maintain order”, “they need us to defend them”, “the strategic value of forward placement is critical to our national security”, “we have to fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here”, and so on. The lies evolve as the situation changes, but there is always some rationalization for permanent occupation.

John McCain had the temerity to say this on Twitter: “I think President George W. Bush deserves some credit for victory.”

Somebody should kick John McCain in the teeth. While it’s not the first time the United States trumped up some bullshit reason to invade another country, the outright lies from Bush and his allies used to gin up a case for a completely unnecessary war are nothing short of war crimes themselves. Bush, Cheney, Powell, Tony Blair, every last one of them should be hauled in front of the same sort of kangaroo court that Saddam Hussein was tried in, summarily found guilty, and hanged for their crimes against humanity. Crowing triumph after seven years of unadulterated misuse of power should be seen as the craven act of a coward and a bully, and the bootlicker McCain deserves to have some sense smacked into him.

During the 2008 election campaign, Barack Obama received a great deal of criticism for using the phrase “putting lipstick on a pig”, but the news spin on this troop reduction is exactly that. Meanwhile, Obama himself deserves a pretty good smack for continuing and expanding the war in Afghanistan, now nearly ten years old and with even less legitimacy than the invasion of Iraq.

There will, of course, never be any proper accounting for all of this. The trillions of dollars squandered, the lives lost or ruined, the incalculable damage done to not just the people of Iraq and Afghanistan but also the people of this country. But neither should there ever be a banner raised in triumph, a head held high in honor, or a page written in history that portrays these last seven years and however many more to come as anything less than a disgrace and a shame.

Your Own Personal Oil Slick

If you’re having a hard time grasping the scope of the sheer size of the Deepwater Horizon oil slick, this looks like a job for Google Maps! Someone has whipped up a website called “If It Was My Home.com” that superimposes the current dimensions of the oil slick onto whatever geographical coordinates you might call home (or whichever ones you type into the interface).

Placing the epicenter of the spill on Boston, the current slick would extend as far north as Brunswick, Maine, as far south as Hartford, Connecticut and Providence, Rhode Island, and as far west as Albany, New York…and then some.

While I appreciate the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” position this situation has put Barack Obama in, I was still more than a little disappointed to read this Daily Beast story yesterday that reveals that he was briefed at the outset about the actual severity of the leak and the length of time it would take to properly correct it and chose to play a waiting game before public opinion forced him to “get angry”. Erich Vieth at Dangerous Intersection points out that it’s SOP for Obama to sit back rather than act, and then when he does get around to doing something it’s usually the weakest possible response.

He’s A Secret Muslim, He’s Got A Rock Star Wife — THEY FIGHT CRIME!

“Quick, Boy Wonder, to the Obamamobile!”

Shades Of Red

Okay, let’s get this over with once and for all: Barack Obama is not a socialist. The Democratic Party is not the Soviet Politburo. Even the most left-leaning member of Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders, is only a little bit socialist, even though he used to call himself socialist back in his days as mayor of Burlington, VT. Mainstream American politics is firmly entrenched in the center-right, and only because the noise from the extreme right has gotten so loud that the whole kit and kaboodle has shifted rightwards does anyone even remotely centrist look like Lenin.

You know it’s gotten out of hand when the Socialist Party USA itself has to send out press releases pointing out this basic fact and reminding everyone that the health care reform legislation jut passed is nowhere close to what real socialists have proposed.

This piece from OpenLeft.com blogger David Sirota tries to further parse out the differences between the more common left-leaning political labels “liberal” and “progressive” in the context of American politics. Because the conservatives were so thoroughly successful in their effort to make the word “liberal” a pejorative (which is what brought them to having to call Obama a “socialist” in the first place), many liberals rebranded themselves as “progressives”, but Sirota argues that there is indeed a fundamental difference between the two, although he finally concludes that you cannot have one without the other.

A similar distinction is at the core of this article at Dissent Magazine by the noted scholar Michael Bérubé, wherein he describes a correspondence with someone over his latest book (via 3QuarksDaily. The person made the distinction between the “liberal” mainstream leftism of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and the clearer traditional “leftism” of Noam Chomsky. Bérubé refutes his correspondent’s observation, putting Chomsky more in the camp of contrarianists, citing the social theorist Stuart Hall as perhaps a better example of the left as alternative to the right rather than just a critical mirror (Hall was influential in British Labour Party politics in the Thatcher era), but I think his refutation helps further refine the spectrum.

An Aggregation Of Nincompoops

According to Alex Massie, writing in Foreign Policy, that’s how the Obama Administration is seen by counterparts in Europe, having piddled away the enormous political capital among those groups much the same way he has with the American public: an inability to turn an overwhelming legislative majority into forward progress, lack of follow-through on foreign policy reforms and initiatives that were seen as “must-haves” by the European public after eight very long years of George Bush, and waffling on global issues like “cap and trade” policy for climate change…all due to what is perceived as political incompetence. What we see as “insider baseball” with stories about in-fighting between Obama advisors like Rahm Emanuel, the rest of the world sees as fiddling while Rome burns.

Posting at True/Slant, journalist Jamie Malanowski brings a more American perspective:

Sometime, somewhere, some friend of the president needs to give him a swift kick in the ass. Somebody ought to explain to him that the country is hopping mad, and it’s mad not because `government is too big’ but because people don’t have jobs and the government isn’t doing anything about it and—here’s the kicker—highly bonused investment bankers whose skins were saved by the public continue to wager and collect without impunity. It would do the president a world of good if instead of inviting Republicans to come over for milk and cookies, he began directing throwing his weight around—ordering this, directing that, opening an investigation on something else. He must stop yielding his authority to compose the national narrative to tea baggers and Fox Newsmen.

The publisher of Harper’s Magazine, John R. MacArthur, suggests that maybe what Obama needs to get his skinny ass in gear is a primary challenge in 2012, and he offers a specific suggestion: Howard Dean. Dean, who got the boot as DNC chairman after his 50-state campaign strategy helped Obama win in 2008, has been very vocal as the progressive opposition to the hopeless health care reform legislation, and has been winning back support from the disaffected liberal Democratic voters who feel badly betrayed by Obama. MacArthur implies that Dean would only be needed to rattle Obama’s chains a little, not actually offer any stiff resistance to Obama’s re-election bid, but this Politico profile from a few weeks ago points out that Dean might have the juice needed to be a serious contender. Either way, what should be painfully obvious to anyone is that appeasing the Republicans and continuing to try to move to the right is a losing proposition, and if Obama won’t take the hint himself, then maybe somebody else needs to.

Three Must-Read Articles

Of interest:

The December issue of Vogue has an excellent interview/profile of Hillary Clinton by Jonathan Van Meter. It’s gotten most of its attention from the behind-the-scenes explanation of how she came to accept the offer to be Secretary of State when she really did not want the job. The piece really shows Hillary’s ability to keep moving forward despite being tossed around by political misfortunes not entirely of her own making, and leaves me genuinely feeling like the Democrats picked the wrong nominee. For all the Hillary Hatred that the right would have mustered up against her, it couldn’t be near as bad as the batshit-insane stuff they’ve plastered Obama with, and I think she would probably have made more headway by now than Obama. Most insiders expect that she won’t stay if Obama wins re-election in 2012, but unlike Bill Clinton, who’s massive ego keeps him going and going and going, it’s hard to see what she would do ex officio.

Last week’s New Yorker takes a peek inside the world of Michelin restaurant reviewers. While all restaurant reviewers have to struggle with maintaining anonymity, the people who work for Michelin are a whole order of magnitude more secretive about it. Author John Colapinto’s description of meeting one of the reviewers who covers New York City for lunch at Jean Georges reads like the machinations of a James Bond novel…and it seems the Michelin people prefer it that way. There’s some criticism of the guides and their old-fashioned biases toward traditional French restaurant cuisine, and after reading the challenges the reviewers themselves face in having to maintain their secret identities, having to live up to the demands of the guide’s management, and having to eat everything on their plate everywhere they dine, I think I won’t be applying for that job.

This original post at the group blog 3Quarks Daily by Evert Ciliers gets down to brass tacks about Afghanistan: it was stupid to go to war there in the first place, everything we do there is back-assward, and Barack Obama is only making things worse by prolonging the conflict in order to look tough. Here’s the money pull-quote, which is actually a quote from John R. MacArthur at Harper’s:

“’Fighting terrorism’ in Afghanistan ‘to prevent another 9/11′ simply isn’t a serious argument, and I suspect that even the deluded Gen. Stanley McChrystal understands that his men are shooting at indigenous Afghan rebels, not Osama bin Laden or his followers. No, the more likely reason for killing all those people and wasting nearly $3.4 billion a month is an ugly mixture of vanity, misplaced pride, crass politics, and liberal self-righteousness. The Army still wants to prove it can defeat a guerrilla army and erase the shame of Vietnam. The politicians, Obama included, want to look warlike and tough, so they can’t be accused of being ‘soft on terror’ in 2010. And then there are the civil servants and think-tank denizens known as ‘humanitarian interventionists’ — now led by Hillary Clinton, who think that America’s ‘civilizing’ mission in the world includes not only establishing ‘democracy’ but also ‘freeing’ Afghan women from being required to wear the burqa.”

If you’re still operating under the delusion that Barack Obama is Superman, hopefully this article will dissuade you of that once and for all. If you’re operating under the delusion that Our Soldiers are Fighting For Our Freedom, this probably won’t change your mind because you’re too big a dumbfuck to get it.

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