RSS

Tag Barack Obama

An Aggregation Of Nincompoops

0 comments By Brian Filed in Links, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , March 3rd, 2010 @ 12:22 pm

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.

See Also

Three Must-Read Articles

By Brian Filed in Blogs, Food, Links, News, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , November 23rd, 2009 @ 12:23 pm

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.

See Also

To End All Wars

By Brian Filed in Links, News Tagged with , , , , , , , , November 11th, 2009 @ 10:26 am

woodrow wilson

Ninety-one years ago, in a railroad car in Compiegne, France, an armistice was signed between Germany and the Allied Powers that ended the conflict we now call the First World War. Several months later, as Woodrow Wilson sailed to France to preside over the negotiations to formalize the peace and impose reorganization and reparations on the demolished empires of Europe, he did so with the promise that the conflict would become “The War To End All Wars”. His grand designs would, of course, sow the seeds of the Second World War to come twenty years later, which, in turn, would result in thirty years of confrontation that threatened a Third World War big enough to destroy the entire planet.

armistice09

And so it comes to pass that today the Chancellor of Germany, herself a prisoner of that unwaged war, would become the first leader of Germany to stand side-by-side with the President of France at the Arc de Triomphe to commemorate the fallen soldiers of both nations in the very same week when she also stood in Berlin to mark the end of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the reunification of her country.

Though Wilson was disasterously wrong in his schemes at Versailles, in the long term the notion of a Europe in peace, with self-determination for many of the people who for centuries had been subjects of empires, has largely come to pass. Even the upheavals in the Balkans, which were the precipitating events that led to World War I in the first place, have not seriously threatened the security of the continent. Today, the European Union, largely driven by the co-operation of the French and the Germans, covers the breadth and width of the continent. As the last remaining veterans of that War To End All Wars have finally been laid to rest, perhaps so has a war-driven Europe once and for all.

Meanwhile, on this day we have co-opted to celebrate our military might rather than to reflect on the horrors of war, the current President of the United States stands poised to send tens of thousands of troops to a war initiated by his predecessor eight years ago, with neither an achievable objective nor a justifiable rationale for continuing a struggle that has cost several thousand soldiers their lives, bankrupted the nation, and called into question whatever moral authority this country might once have had. How many wars will this nation fight until it realizes that in the long term the way of peace is the only right one?

See Also

Waking Up In Bizarro World

By Brian Filed in Links, Misc Tagged with , , , , October 9th, 2009 @ 10:15 am

I can’t be completely sure, but I *think* I woke up in Bizarro World this morning. These are the clues:

I think I might go back to bed and see if I can’t shake this.

See Also

We’re All Socialists Now

By Brian Filed in News Tagged with , , , , , , May 14th, 2009 @ 10:18 am

The Republican Party has spent the last 20 years transforming the word “liberal” into a slur and has been so successful that liberals themselves have struggled to find a replacement for that term. It seems that “progressive” has won out as the most commonly used substitute, although whenever I hear anybody use that term to describe their politics, I presume they are too spineless to own up to the real definition of liberal in the first place. John F. Kennedy’s timeless quote is the touchstone that I personally always look to when I want or need to define liberal to anyone:

“What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label “Liberal?” If by “Liberal” they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer’s dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of “Liberal.” But if by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a ‘Liberal.’”

It is possible to reclaim the word, of course. African-Americans have reclaimed a word that never had a positive connotation in the first place, “nigger”, and turned it into a subversive idea that throws the hatred of its original use back in the face of those who would use it and at the same time reframes it as an expression of solidarity. The transformation of the word “gay” is so complete that it has lost any of the negative connotations it was meant to convey and has simply become the standard term, but the gay community has similarly reclaimed the word “queer”.

Since the results of the 2008 election demonstrate a clear trend back toward liberalism, the Republicans have had to turn up the heat a little bit. The early actions of the Obama Administration to deal with the banking debacle found Republicans and other right-wingers trotting out the term “Socialist” to apply to the TARP bailout, and that worked so well in their echo chamber of madness, they’ve decided to run with it. The Republican Party has decided, against the objections of its own chairman Michael Steele, to refer to the Democratic Party as the “Democratic Socialist Party” in all of its official communication and in talking points for the media. According to that report, they are going so far as to convene a special meeting of the RNC next week to enact this resolution, making it official policy of the Republican Party, and also delivering a great big “Fuck you, nigger!” to Michael Steele in the process.

Calling Barack Obama, a thoroughly middle-of-the-road politician who shows no inclination toward anything resembling liberal politics, a “Socialist” was ridiculous in the first place. Applying that term to the entire Democratic Party, which, like the Republican Party, has so many corporate lobbyists up its ass that all they can see is the first guy’s shoes, transcends ridiculousness. But that’s the state of affairs in the GOP these days: “let’s take the most outrageously stupid thing we can do and do it harder.”

I’m sure you’ve probably read by now, though, that 20% of the American public now thinks socialism is probably a better idea than capitalism, and that among voters under 30 that shoots up to 33%. And, at the same time, the percentage of people willing to identify themselves as Republicans to a national pollster is down to around 20%. So maybe the Republicans could take a clue from those polls and jump on the Socialist bandwagon. If they did, they could double their numbers overnight!

Of course, they’d need to rebrand themselves a little bit. “Republican Socialist” just doesn’t have a ring to it, but Republicans like to paint themselves as the “defenders of the nation”, so maybe they could go with “National Socialists”. Hey! I think that works! Check it out:

Democratic Socialist National Socialist

Real Democratic Socialism as embodied by the Socialist Party USA is quite a different beast entirely from the “free handouts to the rich and powerful” socialism that the Republicans are complaining about. You’d also have a very hard time pegging social democracy to the excesses of the Soviet state and its satellites. In practice, social democracy long ago became the norm in Western Europe and learned to play nice with the status quo, while establishing broad-based social welfare systems that have made people throughout the EU better educated, given then better medical care, and improved their standards of living to rival or exceed those of Americans. So maybe it’s a pretty good deal to be a Democratic Socialist. And if you can’t deal with being called a “Socialist”, I guess “liberal” is probably up for grabs again now that the Republicans have moved on from it.

See Also

Waist Deep In The Big Muddy

By Brian Filed in News Tagged with , , , , , , , , , May 6th, 2009 @ 3:34 pm

Speaking of Barack Obama’s middling 100-Days report card, we’ve all been so distracted by the shitty economy that not much attention has been paid to his willingness to pour money, people, and materiel into Afghanistan to continue the same war against the Taliban that ultimately bankrupted the Soviet Union. And, it seems reasonably apparent that this same war is going to escalate from the current situation of border raids into Pakistan to a pretty-much full-fledged battle theater in Pakistan before its all over.

Now, you may not realize it, especially if you’re not over the age of 50, but that’s not a lot different from what happened with Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos all those years ago before Hanoi Jane lost the war. Lyndon Johnson took JFK’s little adventure in Southeast Asia and turned it into a big ol’ mess thinking he could just muscle his way through it (which was LBJ’s standard M.O. and had worked for him up to that point in his career). You know a war has turned into a debacle when a guy like Richard Nixon has to be the one to get out of it.

Back in the 1960s, public sentiment was generally in favor of the war in Vietnam until things started to go wrong. Legend has it that LBJ himself knew the jig was up when Walter Cronkite came out against the war in a news commentary. In the heady days of 1968, folk singer Pete Seeger got himself and the Smothers Brothers into a heap of trouble by singing a song called “Waist Deep In The Big Muddy”, which was a thinly-veiled swipe at LBJ (oh, and Happy 90th Birthday to Pete Seeger, while I’m thinking of it).

Even though Nixon won in 1968 with a “Secret Plan” to get out of Vietnam, by 1972 we were still there, albeit not for too much longer, and George McGovern ran against Nixon in the presidential election by also running against Lyndon Johnson. That didn’t work out too well for McGovern, unfortunately. But, unlike Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, George McGovern is still with us today and he’s a little bit concerned that Barack Obama could be setting himself up for the same sort of debacle in Afghanistan that Johnson did in Vietnam. Here he is in a recent interview:

Frankly, I think it’s working to Obama’s long-term advantage that this is not a front-burner topic, because it does give him some room to change his mind; I’m just not sure if he will get a dose of sense and actually change his mind before he commits us to yet another quagmire.

See Also

How To Create Terror

By Brian Filed in News Tagged with , , , , , , , , May 6th, 2009 @ 3:16 pm

bobby

You could strap a belt full of sticks of C4 and a detonator on your waist and blow yourself up on a crowded bus. Or, you could do what the London Metro Police have done: under the rubric of the so-called “Section 44″ anti-terror law, London police stopped and searched more than 170,000 people in 2008. Of those 170,000 stopped, only 65 were actually arrested under suspicion of terrorist activities. However, apparently nobody at New Scotland Yard, the Ministry of Justice, or the Home Office was able or willing to say if any of those 65 arrests resulted in convictions, which almost assuredly means that NONE of those 65 people were convicted of being terrorists.

A couple of years ago, I ranted a bit about the random bag searches that the MBTA police were conducting as an “anti-terrorism” measure, and what I said about the T cops then applies to the London police now. By abusing their powers for the sake of creating a good show of things, or by misapplying the law as a catch-all to deal with any situation that doesn’t neatly fit into a category of actual crime, not only do the London police diminish the value of actually looking for real terrorists, they are creating their own version of terror through the intimidation of the general public. The people of the U.K. do not have the same broad set of constituional protections of civil liberties that we have in the U.S. in the first place, and modern Britain seems particularly fond of an astonishingly high degree of state coercion in the lives of its citizens, from “ASBO” laws to the vast network of CCTV cameras constantly surveilling the public and now to capricious application of broadly-drawn “anti-terror” laws. About the only thing America still has over Britian in the brutality and opression race is throwing more people in prison.

During the 2008 election season, much of the overblown adoration for Barack Obama came from an assumption that immediately upon assuming office he would sweep away all the encroachments on American civil liberties that Bush (whom my daughter has dubbed “George Asscrack Bush”) and Cheney shoved through the Justice Department under the guise of “anti-terror” policy. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out in a recent Salon article, though, BarryO hasn’t exactly been in all that much hurry to undo things, and has even maintained the previous administration’s assertions for things like wiretapping anyone and everyone. That change we were supposed to believe in still hasn’t found its way off the campaign trail, I guess. What this particular bit of news out of London does, though, is act as a reminder on a couple of levels: first, it reminds us that our own civil liberties are not nearly as curtailed as they could be, which is a good thing. Second, it reminds us that the path from freedom-loving society to ham-fisted police state is a short one with only a few easily-abused justifications, and that even a velvet-covered fist is still a fist. Third, it should scare us all senseless that the transfer of power out of the hands of people committed to abusing it into the hands of people who promised to end that abuse not only hasn’t taken place but that the new administration seems to want to hang on to some of those powers. If you’re a nerd, let me give you the metaphor of Luke Skywalker and his robotic hand and his eventual temptation by the Emperor to destroy Darth Vader as the final push to the Dark Side. Even if you’re not a nerd, I’ll leave you with that thought and the suggestion that Britain is Anakin Skywalker.

whoever-lays-his-hand-on-me

See Also

Read previous entries

Copyright © BrianKaneOnline

Built on Notes Blog Core
Powered by WordPress