Uncharitable

The Komen Foundation is backing down from their stance on Planned Parenthood for one reason and one reason only - it's costing them money. They will try to figure out some way to reimpose the ban, probably by lumping PP with a group of other donation recipients and declaring that this type (what ever the criteria) will no longer get donations. Or they might declare that they will only donate to accredited research institutions.

Homework

There is a post brewing around here. Probably a couple of posts. Here's a little background reading for what is coming up.

Modes of Reaction and Revolution

I am all about distinctions. It matters that we study differences between political actors and correctly identify points of congruence as assiduously as we try to separate the political world into the members of the Beloved Community and those who are beyond the Pale. That's why I was very pleased to read a deceptively simple article in the latest New York Review of Books by Mark Lilla, Republicans for Revolution. It is a review of a Corey Robin's book "The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism form Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin," and it gets to the heart of many of the observations and criticisms I've posted on this blog about misapplication of political labels, though with fewer polemics and greater elegance.

Revolution 2.Oh Dear

Well, shit. I spend a month mourning a death in the family and all hell breaks loose around the world. That'll teach me to take a break.

Count me among the jaundiced observers of everything from the protests in Madison to the civil war in Libya.

 As someone who makes her living from creating and deploying large scale web-based collaboration sites and always thinking of new ways to incorporate differing communications modes into those sites, I'm distinctly unimpressed by the breathless rah-rah promotion of "social network" tools as some kind of key to a new kind of revolution. If you can Tweet it, they can track it.

Like, duh.

What Did You Think Was Going to Happen?

Way too many people out in Ye Olde Blogosphere are getting their collective knickers in a twist over the reality that - GASP! - wikileaks is getting shut down by a combination of government and commercial actors.

Grow. The. Fuck. Up.

Prisoner of Conventional Wisdom

This is one of a set of posts I plan on writing up over the next who knows how long. Like my set of posts identifying the Truman-Stevenson split in the Democratic Party, this will be a partly historical, partly analytical, partly irascible look at the question of how the hell the Democrats in particular and the Left more generally have ended up in such a shitty place, politically speaking. It’s going to be a bit dense.

A word of caution before I get going. I will be using Obama as an example quite a bit because he is an exemplar of a certain political type. Aside from his use as an example, I’m not interested in the person himself because, well, he’s the exemplar of a political type I don’t have much patience with. Claims about his “real” political agenda, or his secret scheme to hand the country over to Wall Street, or his true political alliances, or his cynical selling out of the country, etc., aren’t very interesting to me, though others disagree. I’m writing political theory here, not a political agenda, and my target is not Obama – he’s the person he is and nothing I say is going to change that – but a political culture that doesn’t comprehend its own fault lines and blind spots.

Primary Objective

I've been reading lots of yak-yak in the blogosphere about how there needs to be a primary challenge to Obama. OK, let's talk about that in some real terms. For shits and giggles, we'll toss in 3rd party/independent challenges, too. This gives us two different modes of challenge, one internal to a party and another intended to cut across institutional coalitions.

There are a few models of what an internal challenge can look like. The classic is a moderately powerful insider taking a run at an incumbent who is clearly failing or is perceived to be weak. In recent times, that gives us Teddy Kennedy's challenge to Carter, Bill Bradley's challenge to Gore, who, as Vice-President, was the default choice for the nomination on the Democratic side, and Ronald Reagan's 1976 challenge to Ford and Pat Buchanan's 1992 challenge to Bush I for the Republicans.

The Truth of the Bitter White Elite Class

In the 2008 primaries, I wrote an article The Myth of the Bitter White Working Class that, using the work of Paul Krugman and Larry Bartels, poked holes in the moronic claims by Stevensonian elites that the white working class in America, Bubbas and Bunkers, are collectively responsible for perpetuating Republican rule because they are such knuckle-dragging, low-life, racist, anti-intellectual rubes, clinging to guns and God, as Obama (in)famously put it. I pointed out, way back in April 2008, this was little more than projection:

The basic problem is that two similar reactions to frustration - anger and bitterness - are getting conflated and transposed in an attempt to explain away Obama's failure at the polls.  ... What we are seeing is the way in which Obamacan bitterness over not getting what they want (and a pony) results in them crudely projecting their biases and fears onto people who are simply voting their interests. Bitterness is a reaction to having been stymied or betrayed, and is not an automatic reaction to having to work hard. I suspect a lot of working class people, regardless of color or gender, look at the shit life throws them pretty much the way I do, which is to sigh, daydream a bit about winning the lottery, and then just getting on with the business of making do with what life has handed you. It's only if you feel entitled to something you haven't received or burdened by things you do not deserve that you become bitter. Anger can be empowering. I have never encountered bitterness that is not corrosive and destructive.

Taking the Lead

After reading a post on Corrente and having some email exchanges with Lambert (who deserves great thanks for his patience and reasonableness when confronted by crabby bloggers), I'm going to have to call bullshit on the claim that Girl Scouts are rejecting leadership because of endemic lying (and that this is a valid political stance) for a number of reasons. My reasons break into two sets: the structure of the argument itself is fatally flawed and the substance of the argument is tripe.

Let's talk about structure first.

The Unwashed

I watch the current electoral folderol with mixed feelings. As for my local charade, I'm voting Yes for most Democrats (but not Jerry), Yes on legalizing pot, Yes on removing the 2/3 super majority vote to pass a state budget, No on most else, and a bothered No on Prop D in San Diego, which asks for a half cent sales tax increase, but only after the mayor has satisfied certain conditions for regulating the city budget, chief of which are union busting and outsourcing. The money gathered is not allocated for correcting any of the budget shortfalls, such as public safety staffing or reductions in public services, and is tied to a midnight pigs-at-the-trough deal with the state giving large sums of city money to a redevelopment agency that has some ethics problems with keeping track of the dough. Isn't Prop D the Stadium Initiative? is how one local small business person (runs a very nice restaurant in my neighborhood, in fact) discusses the proposition, which in this formulation manages to get cover for putting local people out of a job (the union-busting) and hand bags of cash to the local Republican-dominated developer elite who want their downtown taxpayer funded football stadium, damn it!

Back to the unease.

Attacking the 50 Foot Woman

While much of the blogosphere is talking about the audacity of Virginia Thomas trying to shame Anita Hill into taking back her testimony against Clarence (read Historiann's take on the matter), I want to bring up something that isn't online as far as I can tell, but needs some analysis. And it's kind of related to the nonsense being inflicted on Ms. Hill.

The Spousal Unit reads Mother Jones online a fair amount, mostly to follow Kevin Drum's blog and for the occasional article. A family member gave him a subscription to the dead-tree version of it as a birthday present and the first issue arrived yesterday.

The cover, which I looked for but could not find posted on the web site, is a variation on the iconic movie poster pictured here. In this pulp classic, a wealthy woman who is being abused and cheated on by her scumbag husband has a run in with an alien from outer space and is transformed into a 50 foot tall giant. Her husband attempts to murder her with a lethal injection, but fails. She goes after him and his mistress, kills the mistress and seizes him. She is killed by an explosion and her homicidal spouse is crushed when she falls with him grasped in her hand. Good cheesy fun.

The Mother Jones cover has turned the scantily clad, rampaging female into Sarah Palin standing over a suburban street and crushing a house in her left hand while minivans and SUVs careen in the street and tiny human figures (of tastefully multi-ethnic skin tones) flee in a panic.  The headlines emblazoned across the cover say "ATTACK ON THE MIDDLE CLASS!" "A confused & frightened citizenry votes against its own self-interest" "They say they're taking back America, but really they're taking... your money!!!"

No, really. It's just like that.

Reunion

As a partial antidote to the Nobel news that the committee decided to cast a vote that made them feel good about themselves and their moral superiority rather than recognize people who have literally risked their lives for years to bring stability and peace to their part of the world, I offer up a photo essay from Big Picture on the Boston Globe web site:

The Berlin Reunion

"Earlier this week, 1.5 million people filled the streets of Berlin, Germany to watch a several-day performance by France's Royal de Luxe street theatre company titled "The Berlin Reunion". Part of the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Reunion show featured two massive marionettes, the Big Giant, a deep-sea diver, and his niece, the Little Giantess. The storyline of the performance has the two separated by a wall, thrown up by "land and sea monsters". The Big Giant has just returned from a long and difficult - but successful - expedition to destroy the wall, and now the two are walking the streets of Berlin, seeking each other after many years apart. "

The photo essay is spectacular. Take a few minutes to view it.

The reunion of Berlin, and the eventual reunion of Germany itself, was accomplished by ordinary people seizing a "moment of madness" (to cite my old professor Ari Zolberg's classic essay) to make the impossible real. I remember being crammed into a dorm room, watching a tiny TV with horrible reception showing people pounding away at the Wall with hammers, axes, steel bars, or just using their own hands, ripping down the will of the dictators that they should be a subject and sundered people. We passed around alcohol and screamed in delight every time someone whacked another chunk away or reached through a gap to embrace someone on the other side.

The next day, the school was in party mode. Every class held was about the Wall. Ari was grinning from ear to ear, and we teased him to tell how his essay explained this particular moment, which he did. Reagan had challenged Gorbachev to "tear down the wall", but it was the ordinary person who made it happen. What Gorbachev did do was refrain from doing anything, refusing (whether through principle or necessity is irrelevant) to send in force to quell the uprising. Action and inaction combined to create a world altering event.

I am, perhaps, not as dismayed as some over awarding the prize to Obama. The committee is composed of Whole Foods Nation types and their action says far more about their personal narcissism than it does about anything else. They selected their fantasy of making the world into their image through sheer cool awesomeness. The award itself has a checkered past. As Tom Lehrer wryly commented, awarding that prize to Henry Kissenger made political satire obsolete.

I also note that the actual people in the administration doing the hard work of peace - Clinton, Holbrooke, Mitchell, and the hundreds of State Department staff who don't get their names in the papers but who get the job done - are steadily giving me hope for an effective, humane and coherent US foreign policy. I add in the work done by Robert Gates and Jim Jones and their respective staffs, too. Their tasks are made more difficult by operators like Biden and McChrystal, who try to game policy through leaks and public posturing to force the President's hand and thwart the efforts of the policy team.

If Obama was politically savvy, he would have declined the award. In truth, it is a greater burden than a support*, setting expectations on situations like Afghanistan that won't be met because national interests and political ideals do not coincide, and adding another log to the fires of resentment against Obama for being The Precious; the object of obsessive desire by a sheltered, privileged, powerful socio-economic class and a person whose real world accomplishments are negligible compared to the hype that surrounds him. It would have served him better politically for the committee to have leaked that he had been nominated but declined. I am curious as to who submitted the nomination as it would have to have been done before he even took office. The nomination submission period closed two weeks after the inauguration, but a nomination is not just sending in a name. It involves a nomination package that takes some work to prepare and submit. The groundwork for the nomination came well before the inauguration. That piece of information could also become a political negative.

Overall, the award strikes me as a tone-deaf and politically stupid move on the part of the awards committee. It comes across as hubristic and self-indulgent. It talks to those already in agreement about the superdoublegood wonderfulness of Obama and distances those who are waiting to see tangible results. To the degree that it may complicate the actual work of the State Department, it is harmful.

It does not unify the sundered people.

Anglachel

*Contra the effect of the award for Al Gore, which provided greater legitimacy to his efforts as well as slapped the Bush/Cheney administration in the face.

A Taste of Things to Come

I think a lot about food.

I like to eat. I like feeling full after feeling hungry. I like the way certain foods feel in my mouth, the taste they leave on my tongue, the way they scent my kitchen and my hands while I cook. Now that I have a really good kitchen for cooking, I think even more about what I cook and how. My recipe collection is expanding by leaps and bounds. I think about menus and kinds of beans and if it will be too hot to cook when the Santa Anas blow and how to use the left overs.

I think a lot about food.

I think about what it was like to grow up not being able to afford the kind of food "normal" people ate. I think about cans from charity. I think about having to shop at cut-rate food stores, buy day-old ("used" in my family's lexicon) bread, have only non-fat dry milk on the shelf, cheap off-brand margarines on sandwiches, big cans of peanut butter we had to stir to keep the oil from separating, and lunch boxes that had books in them because sometimes there wasn't lunch. I think about a mother too far gone in depression to care what she served her family. I think proudly about eating Hamburger Helper because I could make it myself and have it ready when Dad got home. I think about the way our meals improved as Dad finally got seniority at his job and his pay inched up. I look at the pantry shelf and wonder if I'm hoarding again.

I think a lot about food.

I think about the varying quality of produce between the IGA, the Trader Joe's the Ralph's and the Henry's Market where I live. I remember, living in New York as a grad student, walking around Balducci's, eyeing the perfect red bell peppers, then sighing and going to D'Agostino's or the A&P. I remember bunches of fresh arugula at the little Korean grocery down the block near the corner of Prince and Mulberry. I think nothing of buying off brands of pantry staples and splurging on bulbs of fresh fennel. I grin when the check out clerk at the IGA just says "Three today?" as she pushes the plastic bag past her because she knows I always buy that many bunches of radishes each week. I think I need a new container as I prepare a small plastic tub of cut-up vegetables and a single hard-boiled egg every morning for lunch, but don't want to spend the money.

I think a lot about food.

I think about the way in which grocery stores and shopping lists become political markers of having "made it." I think about socio-economic classes in terms of where they buy their potatoes and what color they are - red, white, gold, purple. I read the comments on food blogs and ponder the arrogance of the people who write almost as much as I wonder whether they know what they sound like. I think about why food allergies are so chic. I wonder where the hell do I get sherry vinegar because no store I go to carries it. I think about rewards cards and tracking purchases. I think about union busting at grocery stores.

I think about food a lot.

I think about the gendering of our interactions with food - real men eat meat, real women watch their weight, famous chefs, unpaid housework, hunters and gatherers. I think about the way a woman's mouth is regarded when she puts something into it. I think about stepping on a scale and having my worth reduced to three digits. I think about beefcake and cheesecake. I think about the bones in shoulders and clavicles. I think about preparing dishes you don't dare consume, fearful of what it will say about you, both the making and the consuming.

I think a lot about food.

I think about the desire to tax "junk food". I think about the industry of shaming fat people. I think about scarfing down ice cream, ashamed I am doing so because I'm fat. I think about the self-indulgence of watching rock concerts to stop hunger. I think of the anxiety about not ingesting the courant food of the month. I think about the miracle elixers that will save us all from the heartbreak of some obscure condition. I look at case after case of frozen convenience foods and their bar codes. I think about quaint little groceries in the Oakland Hills with prices written by hand onto the shelf tags. I think of relatives who sneer at stores I rely on. I think about the medicalization of food, turning eating as such into a pathology. I think about the transformation of food into a visible sign of personal rectitude.

And because I think about food a lot, I think I'll be writing about it quite a bit.

Anglachel

What do you want?

I got a hell of a giggle out of the predicament of Whole Foods Nation shoppers who were suddenly presented with the reality of corporate America, but this leads to a serious political question:

What do you want?

As far as I can tell from the article, there is nothing political at stake. It is all about feeling outraged that power dropped its marketing mask and spoke bluntly about interests, making crystal clear what it believes to be the economic and political interests of the corporation. While I don't like those interests because they are in opposition to my own, I can appreciate the material calculation that backs it up. It is real and I can take action.

The problem here is that the people who have become personally, emotionally invested in a brand have nothing actionable. The outrage is over the damage to the shoppers' self-perception as morally upright because they shop at the right place. He damaged the brand! Oddly enough, that damage can be fixed with the right kind of kiss ass marketing campaign done with feel good imagery and some well timed back-to-school sales. It is individualized and solipsistic to a breathtaking degree. The CEO is talking about power and they are talking about appearances.

Cynical iconoclast that I am, I wonder at the outrage. Did you honestly think this grocery store chain was anything except a cold-blooded expansion into a specific marketing demographic? Why does anyone attibute to a corporate, profit-making entity any motive except the bottom line?

What do you want? The CEO has presented claims about the material interest of a corporation. Do you want an apology or a retraction? How would that change the calculus of power? Do you want the company as a whole to reject this CEO? Why would they do that if he is the reason they are succeeding? The labor union in the story asked for Mackey's ouster, which is a clear action. What is the next step if that does not happen? Perhaps more importantly, is there any action to take with regards to the corporation? It strikes me that the only action available is to refuse to participate in your own self-deception, and that's not really Whole Food's problem, is it?

The Incomparable One, Bob Somerby, continually reminds us that the Right has no monopoly on Teh Dumb. The difference is that when they act in ways we think of as dumb - such as a CEO writing an op-ed in complete opposition to his company's public image - they do so to gain political power. When the Left suffers from Teh Dumb, it does so in ways that fritters away political power, focusing on the most shallow end of identity politics.

John Mackey has made a move to defend his interests and advance right-wing political power. The protesters at Whole Foods want someone to "take it back" and stop making them feel their brand has been cheapened. What do you think will have the larger or more long lasting impact on the lives of American citizens?

The deep problem with Whole Foods Nation is their determined substitution of political power with social appearance.

Anglachel

Madam Secretary

I don't do a lot of blogging on Hillary directly as Alegre really has that corner of the blog market sewn up (and not just Hillary - Alegre's Corner is a must read every day for political junkies. Give her the hits and throw her some change, 'kay?) and because my political blogging interests are more about the condition of political thought than about any specific politician, no matter how admired.

I do, however, have a list of Hillary sites linked in the sidebar, with State Department links first. One link I have begun to click on routinely enough that I've added it to the streamed blog section (Just Click Already, OK?) is Madam Secretary, "an obsessive blog about all things Hillary Clinton. From her policies to her pantsuits, Madam Secretary delivers up-to-the-minute news, analysis, and gossip about America’s top diplomat." The blog is part of the Foreign Policy website.

What I find interesting about this blog is the mix of policy analysis and domestic political commentary. For example, in a post accompanied by the above photo, Hillary hitting the phones to talk North Korea, Preeti Aroon, who writes the blog, notes:

The Associated Press reports that Clinton has spoken on the phone with foreign ministers in a number of countries, and the Washington Post reports that she is asking them for a "strong, unified" response. As Clinton proved last April, she knows how to handle those 3 a.m. phone calls.

Zing. The SNL skit about The Precious calling Hillary at 3 AM on what he should do about this or that crisis has come true in more ways than one.

Aroon spends time blogging about the details of the Sec. of State's travels and appearances. It may not rate highly as "serious" foreign policy news, but it provides context to the work HRC is doing and the tone of her State Department. Aroon has also been documenting in post after post Hillary's very outspoken and aggressive diplomatic presence, as well as some of the inside baseball of who in the White House does or does not want her doing what:

• Hillary lays the smack down
• Is the White House keeping Clinton off Sunday TV?
• Was Clinton too verbally hard on Pakistan?
• Is Hillary Clinton too outspoken?
• U.S. being 'out-communicated,' Clinton says
• Clinton: no more settlements, no exceptions

I keep thinking about the cartoon (no, I'm not giving it any eyeballs) drawn by Oliphant after the "tearing up" incident during the New Hampshire campaign where he portrayed her as sitting at a table and crying about how mean the foreign leaders on the other side of the table were being to her. And now the Village is having vapors over how pushy she's being.

Which leads to an older post by Pat Lang which I did not blog about at the time, Jim Jones, Sally Quinn and the neocons, where he discusses a WaPo Op-Ed written by Sally Quinn about the whisper campaign being conducted against NSA Jim Jones by unnamed people in the State Department and the White House. Quinn tossed in this statement, "Reporters are protecting their sources, but Hillary Clinton is apparently not behind the stories. She likes her job, those who have been spun say, and gets along well with Jones. " Lang himself didn't pick up on Quinn's CDS, being more concerned about the neocon attack on Jones, but it jumped off the page at me.

Quinn, who just cannot shake her anti-Clinton psychosis, introduces what was never a question in the first place, a division between Jones and Clinton. This is another example of a Villager trying to create a conflict by innuendo - the "apparently" qualifier is the dead give away. The second sentence diminishes the professional, diplomatic and policy authority of the Sec. of State. HRC "likes her job," as though this is a mid level manager at some tech firm in a Silicon Valley office park who is denying stirring up trouble for Bob, the project manager down the hall, because they "get along well." Quinn is too smart not to know that she's trying to solicit information from "those who have been spun" to give her a call and dish some dirt.

But Quinn's petulance points to something interesting once you strip away the psychosis. One of the foreign policy conflicts that has dogged the US is an internal one - turf wars between the State Department and the White House advisors. In the Bush administration, the State Department was deliberately humiliated when it was not simply ignored. As I wrote way back in November when Hillary's name was first being bandied about for SOS, the determining factor for her taking the job was having a policy team she could work with:

But there are a few conditions under which it makes no sense for her to accept. The four most powerful positions in the cabinet are Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Treasury and National Security Advisor. Gates will be Sec. Def. for the time being. In the past, the SOS and the NSA have engaged in power struggles that have worked to the detriment of foreign policy. If Obama has the sense to put HRC in as SOS, he may suffere a failure of nerve and decide to divide powers by putting an opponent in the NSA slot to "counter balance" her influence, and we would end up with political infighting. Unless that position is filled by someone who would work with the SOS and not be a pawn in some passive-agressive game, it would be foolish for Hillary to leave the Senate. It would need to be someone like Wes Clark or Richard Clarke. Likewise, if the Sec. Tres. is filled by some tired Wall Street insider hack, there will not be a partner to work with on economic concerns. (I myself would love to see Stiglitz. He's run the World Bank, he won't be bullied, and Wall Street has no attractions for him.)

So, the Sec. Treas. position went to a hack, but the other players in the foreign policy team, Gates, Jones and Panetta, all work well with Hillary. Sally Quinn's vengeance fantasies aside, there really does not appear to be any significant division or power struggle between the leaders of the agencies (which is not to say that there are not disagreements between the leaders, nor conflicts in the lower ranks), and that the US has a fundamentally unified foreign policy team. This is a good thing for the nation.

However, this makes me ask a very serious question - just where is the resistence to deconstructing the Bush administration's terror regime originating? Obviously, the Republicans are frantically trying to keep the terms of the debate within a language game of fear and revenge, but the problem is larger than defunding Guantanamo. It has to do with the nature of executive power, the way the US's relationship to other nations and their citizens is conceptualized, the use of military and CIA power abroad to achieve domestic objectives, the constitutional constraints (and the ways in which such constraints are ignored) upon the exercise of power by the executive branch, the balance between competing claims of sovereignty, and so forth.

As I pointed out obliquely in the Guantanamo post, when dealing with the use of the state monopoly on large scale violence, "them" and "us" is not such a clear distinction in our modes of political life. We cannot arbitrarily ascribe bad motives to only part of an administration without evaluating how the whole enables the part.

Who is developing the theory of state and executive power for the Obama administration? Who is signing on to it? Who disagrees but executes? If the SOS, Sec. Def, NSA and head of the CIA are fundamentally in agreement, then does this mean they are the ones who have crafted this theory of power?

I know where I want Hillary to be on these questions. We'll see if my hopes are borne out by facts.

Anglachel

Admiring Reagan

Paul Krugman is one of the best in the business when it comes to political snark. His put down today of Posner's epiphany that modern conservatism is intellectually bankrupt is both succinct and funny as hell.

But it is the middle two paragraphs of the post, where he goes after the actual ideology, should be required reading for anyone who would call themselves a liberal:

... And yet — why, exactly, should we listen to people who by their own admission completely missed the story? I mean, anyone who actually listened to what Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey were saying in 1994, let alone what passed for thought in the Bush administration, should have realized long ago that if there ever was an intellectual basis for modern conservatism, it was long gone.

And the truth is that the Reaganauts were a pretty grotesque bunch too. Look for the golden age of conservative intellectualism in America, and you keep going back, and back, and back — and eventually you run up against William Buckley in the 1950s declaring that blacks weren’t advanced enough to vote, and that Franco was the savior of Spanish civilization.

Krugman makes two crucial points here. The first is how could anyone with three functional brain cells have ever found anything compelling, let alone admirable, in the political ideology of the Movement Conservatives? They were as incoherent and intellectually compromised in 1994 as they were in 2004. There is nothing here that should be treated with anything except derision should it dare show its face in public.

The second point is the more telling. No matter how far you go back in the Movement Conservative history, you cannot find anything that is not poisonous. The founder of this ideological nightmare, William Buckley, used racism and fascism as foundations for his shining city on a hill. 1994, 1984, 1980 and the Gipper himself; it doesn't matter where you try to locate the golden era of this creed, Movement Conservatism has always already been allied with the worst impulses of the nation.

The third point he leaves as a lesson for the reader to draw - And just why does anyone on the Left feel a need to compromise with this most compromised intellectual agenda? How can anyone with the conscience of a liberal express any admiration for a faction that is rooted in socio-political commitments antagonistic to the rule of law and the fundamental premise of human equality?

Who indeed.

Anglachel

What I Did on My Winter Vacation

Yes, I'm back. Not that I ever left, mind you, but I am back to do some blogging.

After the intense blogging of last year, I needed a break. My life was out of balance, so I did a lot of other things, very non-blogging, non-political kinds of things like watch a bunch of movies and TV shows I'd missed the first time around, collect a whole new set of recipies, put in herbs, walk all over the neighborhood, and build a few web sites.

I've also had my raise from last year rescinded in a company wide pay cut and am waiting to see what other measures may be needed to keep the company afloat. We have a good CEO and an excellent senior team who are working their butts off to keep everyone employed with benefits that are more than just window dressing.

I had a round with the flu a few weeks back, maybe even swine flu (I do live in San Diego), but have finally shaken that. The whole famn damily is doing well. Last week, we put geraniums into pots and put them on the front porch. The bright red blooms are neon against the yellow stucco.

So now I'm back to put blogging into the mix once more. Fewer posts, without a doubt. My goal is to keep up the political theorizing I began last year about the shifting cultural and political alignment of the nation, and how the netroots, even with Facebook and iPods thrown in, will not rescue the Republic.

Anglachel

The Political Question

I was prompted to this thought by an email from a friend who sent me a link to a Joan Walsh piece on Salon. Walsh is more right than wrong in the article, though she misses (or deliberately overlooks) the use of institutional power within the Democratic Party to bring about the desired nomination outcome.

However, the big political question is not being asked, let alone answered, and that is why did Obama end up running for the presidency not against John McCain but against Sarah Palin?

I'm going to continue my blogging hiatus a little while longer, but that question has been nagging me since September.

Anglachel

Losers

Kevin Drum recently posted from his new digs at Mother Jones, complaining about Bob Somerby:

But here's what I don't get: why does Bob think that liberals are giving away a "giant political advantage" by not harping on this constantly? Frankly, I'd be delighted to harp away if I actually thought this was one of the top 100 issues that might help the future of liberalism, but it's not, is it? Media criticism in general helps our side, but what exactly would it gain us to relate everything back to Al Gore's decade-old mistreatment with the Ahab-like intensity that Bob does? Wouldn't it just cause everyone to tune us out as cranks and fogeys? Anyone care to weigh in on this, on either side?

C'mon, Bob, stop being a crank and an old fogey! You're really harshing the mellow here. Can't you just move on, like the rest of us Iraq War supporters have, and understand that we don't care if Al Gore was robbed? I mean, he's a boring crank, too, and it really puts a damper on the cocktail weenie circuit if you bring up his name.

Bob Somerby may take the treatment of Gore a little too personally, given that he is a close friend, but the foundation of his argument is far more sound than the shaky underpinnings of the Blogger Boyz. Indeed, haven't we just watched a repeat of the same phenomenon, with the press going apeshit about the horrible, lying, murderous Hillary monster who wants our Precious destroyed? Kevin asked for a response, and Bob provided one:

And no, there really aren’t “100 issues” that would better serve “the future of liberalism.” It’s absolutely, completely absurd that Kevin would say such a thing.

Repeating: Most voters have never heard a word about the situation Kevin described. For that reason, they’re strongly inclined to believe the GOP’s relentless complaints about bias. They hear endless claims about bias toward Palin; they never hear a single word about what was done to the Clintons and Gore. Surely, Kevin knows why that is. Once again, let’s make sure that we all understand:

In the early 1990s, conservative power was sweeping through Washington. In large part, this took the form of endless, nasty attacks against both Clintons. They were both liars; they were both sex fiends; why, they hung decorative condoms on the White House Christmas tree. Beyond that, of course, they were murderers. By 1999, large blocks of cable “news” time were being devoted to this insanity. And go ahead, Kevin—when you “come down,” you can check it out! When Hardball and Hannity pimped those vile murders, not a single career liberal player offered one word of protest.

By 1999, there was simply nothing you couldn’t say—as long as you said it about the Clintons. And then, about Candidate Gore.

The mainstream press corps accepted all this; indeed, they were the principal malefactors. So, of course, did your “liberal leaders”—weak, unprincipled, hackworthy men who run with the Sally Quinn crowd.

And they refused all enlightenment. In 1996, Gene Lyons published Fools for Scandal (How the Media Invented Whitewater), the most important political book of the decade. But go ahead—try to find a single reference to Lyons’ book in your “liberal journals.” And go ahead—see what those same fiery journals did when Gene and Joe Conason published The Hunting of the President in early 2000. Of course, you probably know what they did—they all agreed to keep their traps shut. By that time, these broken-souled losers had completely rolled over for those joint RNC/MSM narratives. They had adopted their masters’ commands. To this day, they have never looked back—or wanted you to do so. Candidate Gore had every advantage, Josh told you in 2002.

Beyond that, see what they did when the MSM turned its sights on Candidate Gore. In March 1999, it seamlessly happened—the venom aimed at President Clinton was instantly, seamlessly transferred to Gore. And what did your liberal leaders do? Some ran and hid—and some played along! Indeed, the Bradley campaign was built around dishonest panders to the insider press corps about their hatred of Clinton and Gore. And the “left” of your party played this sick game. By December 1999, the Bradley campaign was even pretending that Gore had been responsible for the gruesome Willie Horton debacle. Disgracefully, Bradley himself began to say this the next month—even though he’d said the opposite, in some detail, in his own 1996 book. But so what? One pundit challenged this balls-out lying. Sadly, it was Morton Kondracke. Every good “liberal” shut up.

That’s right! The weak-willed men at your “liberal journals” went along with this deeply unprincipled trashing. You can still find their names on those mastheads. And oh yes! You can find the U.S. Army deeply entrenched in Iraq.

Sorry, kids! The American public will never think we’re “cranks and fogeys” because “we harp on this so much!” Let’s be frank: The public will never hear this at all, because our leaders will never tell them about the disgraceful things they did in thrall to MSM power and influence. They won’t mention Ceci or “Kit;” indeed, when Ceci and Kit got briefly criticized in the summer of 2000, Jane Mayer heroically jumped in the stew, saying it was all due to sexism! (Happy with how that bullsh*t worked out?) For these reasons, “media bias” remains a powerful tool—a powerful tool for the GOP. They’re playing this card very hard this week—because it’s one of their strongest.

Last week, Naomi Judd began telling voters that no one has ever been trashed like Palin. Quite naturally, voters tend to believe such claims, because they’ve never heard anything different. In our view, Mother Jones should call Mother Judd and tell her the things he wrote in that post. We’ll offer this one small guess to Kevin: You’ll likely find Judd a damn sight more honest than the players who work in your yard.

“Liberal bias” is a powerful card, a card they’ve spent fifty years perfecting. They play this card because it works; it keeps working because our side has refused to debunk it. As we’ve long said, we refuse to tell the public the truth about the press corps’ recent conduct. One side keeps saying things which are bogus. And one side won’t say what is true.

Conservative power blew into town—and the millionaire “press corps” bowed down before it. To this day, the career liberal world won’t tell the public the facts about what happened next. Mother Judd has never heard a word about the matters Kevin described. And, with Mother Jones fretting so hard, it’s quite clear that she never will. ...

One side plays this game to win. On the other side, Kevin is palling around with careerists.

We've seen it happen all over again this year, except that it was conducted inside of the so called liberal political arena.

If I have a criticism of the Incomparable One, it is that his analysis does not extend much beyond his presentation of the fact of the Left's cooperation with the Right's maniacal jihad against the Clintons and Al Gore. Then again, that's not his objective. He has set for himself the sisyphean task of simply telling the truth. It is people like Bob that Hannah Arendt means when she says "Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs." He is a trustworthy witness testifying about the facts on the ground, no matter the desire of the courtiers to dismiss the destruction of political accountability.

But the question remains - why has the intelligentsia of the Left turned so implacably against people whose stated policies and observable acts are not substantively different than those who won that group's support? The embrace of The Precious shows that it is not merely the media being anti-Democrat - they loved him from the get-go and are eager to see him coronated in exactly the way they lusted for Bush in 2000. I think the answer has come out this year that the bias is class and acculturation. Upper class, cool, urbane, and not too interested in the details. That's for the underlings to handle.

It's the politics of people whose need for government resources and services are at a remove but substantial, like defending a financial system, rather than immediate and actually fairly modest, like some help paying the heating bills when the fuel companies price gouge. It is a politics that is disdainful of people in need. It doesn't like people who aren't from the right class and culture, and is suspicious of people who think too much about how to fix things that threaten people in need. It admires those who use power to take what they want.

As I said before, it is a politics of catering to the winners rather than defending the losers. What offends the Drums and Marshalls and other "pro-war before we were anti-war" suck-ups on the Left most about Somerby is that he keeps defending a "loser." Al may have won back some of these guys with the environmentalism and Nobel prize, but fundamentally they all still despise Gore as a loser, and they thought of him this way before the debacle of 2000.

They want their own Reagan, someone who will make them stop feeling like losers, even if it means losing touch with the principles they claim to hold.

Anglachel

Update - Also read Vast Left's latest on Corrente, When windmills attack, is it quixotic to notice?

Sullied

The Incomparable Bob Somerby is one of the very few voices in Left Blogistan who rejects all truthiness and is willing to turn his criticism on his fellow bloggers for their unseemly desire to move out of remote blogospheric hamlets and into The Village. His take down today of Josh Marshall (no more jokes about who kidnapped him) is a thing of beauty, "Will someone stop Josh Marshall before he defends Bush again?"

Somerby reviews Josh's bizarre insistence that John McCain's campaign is worse than anything seen in American politics in 35 years, including Marshall's casual defense of both Bushes' excrable campaigns. I think Somerby misses a small point, that Marshall is not thinking of Nixon as the worst campaign, but of George Wallace. Why? Because it fits with the meta-narrative of dividing the electoral world into racists and non-racists, instead of into conservatives and liberals, or Republicans and Democrats, or some other issue-based form of political categorization.

Key Somerby quotes (but read the whole thing, it is powerful):

Here’s the rest of Josh’s original post—a post which helps define the broken soul of emerging “progressive” culture: [long cite of how the Bushes weren't involved in the Willie Horton or the Swift Boat Veterans smears.] That concluded Josh’s original post. It’s why this guy has to go.

First, it’s astounding to see the way Josh keeps defending the campaign of George Bush the elder. We know, we know—within the framework of the Village, this sort of thing makes you a Serious Person. But is there no end to the insults we must endure from these transparent strivers? ... Josh may be too young to remember these things; he may be too dumb to have read about them. But with his repeated defenses of Bush the elder, he is misinforming a whole generation of younger readers. We know! We know! Within the Village, this sort of thing makes you a Serious Person. But it’s time for this bullsh*t to stop. ...

Is the current campaign “the most dishonest” of the past 35 years? For a liberal or a Democrat, it’s insane to address that question without discussing the twenty-month War Against Gore—and yes, Josh understands that fact (link below). But Josh is making himself a career—and he’s willing to disinform you to do it. Within the Village, you become a Very Serious Person by disappearing what the Villagers did for twenty straight months during Campaign 2000. Josh understand that history well—and he knows enough not to discuss it. ...

Josh has played for you for many years on this score. In the process, he is emerging as the Sully of the pseudo-left. It’s long past time for this weird, creepy man to pack his satchel and go. At any rate, will someone please stop poor Josh Marshall before he boo-hoos, blubbers and cries defending Bush the elder again? Josh! George Bush 41 ran a scuzzball campaign! It was the start of modern GOP campaign culture. Our advice: Go away and grow some stones. Come back when you’re ready to say it. ...

[Cite of Josh repeating lies form Drudge] Good God! To this day, Josh continues to air that highlighted claim, which originally came from Drudge—a claim whose absurdity became clear within about ten minutes. (As an adept of The Cult of the Offhand Comment, Josh is also eager to throw in the "hard-working, white" quote.)

Hasn’t the public suffered enough from the actual Andrew Sullivan? Defending Bush, avoiding Campaign 2000, Josh makes himself a Serious Person. But you can’t build a progressive politics by respecting the need of people like this to shape-shift the recent past.

I don't think Somerby is wrong on any of these counts, I would simply push him further. He keeps hinting at it when he talks about the broken soul of emerging "progressive" culture, insults from transparent strivers, the frantic desire to become a Very Serious Person, the pseudo-left (a phrase Somerby has been using for several days), shape-shifting the recent past, and so forth. His focus is on the blogosphere and the straightforward lies of people like Marshall, Yglesias, Markos, Kevin Drum, Hamsher, Huffington, Atrios, Steve Benen, and Digby, the people who started exactly in the same place as Somerby (well, not Arianna) and who all of them, every last lying scumbag one, found out that the way to get invited onto TV, interviewed in big name news papers, sucked up to by political campaigns, was to join in the defamation of the Clinton/Gore administration.

It is more important to this group of the wanna-be punditocracy to be seen beating up that administration than to be critical of any Republican one. As we have seen over the last year, it is also more important to the Unity Democrats to defame these people than to actually unify the party into an electoral super-majority. It is this fact that Somerby criticizes by proxy in his contempt for Marshall and for the forces arrayed against Gore. He presents the media lies to expose the political lies.

To me, as I have been writing for months, the key lies with the psychosis of the Stevensonian crowd, who hate all things white and southern and who have seized the presence of racism (real and imagined) as the source of evil in the body politic. No lie is too much, no threat of violence too far, no manipulation of the process too crude in the Battle Against the Bubbas.

This is why we have the weird opposition to McCain and Palin, almost identical to the trashing of Hillary, focusing on racism and social status to the exclusion of substance. It can work if you have already decided that the poor and working class as such are not worthy of political representation. Exactly in the way that the Republicans have tried to make urban black populations stand in for everyone below upper middle class, trying to sully programs for lower classes by forcing programs benefitting those classes into grotesque blackface, now the Democrats are coming at this group from the other side, whitewashing their own class bigotry with the specter of the KKK.

Before Somerby guts, skewers and shish-kebabs Marshall, he nails Richard Cohen on Cohen's incoherent bloviating:

But why should anyone pay attention to anything Richard Cohen says? Having left the Republican Party for dead, this is the way he describes the modern Democratic Party:

COHEN (10/21/08): Ah, I know, the blues are not all virtuous. They are supine before self-serving unions, particularly in education, and they are knee-jerk opponents of offshore drilling, mostly, it seems, because they don't like Big Oil. They cannot face the challenge of the Third World within us—the ghetto with its appalling social and cultural ills—lest realism be called racism. Sometimes, too, they seem to criticize American foreign policy simply because it is American.

Still, a Democrat can remain a Democrat—or at least vote as one—without compromising basic intellectual or cultural values.

Talk about the lesser of two evils! According to Cohen, Democrats refuse to stand up to the teacher unions and indulge in irrational hatred of big corporations. They don’t have the guts to stand up to “the ghetto”—our own “Third World within.” And of course, they sometimes “seem to criticize American foreign policy simply because it is American.” This is an astounding portrait. And yet, despite these astonishing flaws, a person can be a Dem today “without compromising basic intellectual or cultural values!”

Look at who Cohen goes after - environmentalists, unions, black (ghetto) poor, and critics of American hegemonic power. Hmm, sounds like he doesn't like liberals. Sounds like he equates being against those things with being a real Democrat, calling people who want unionization (defense of working class) and policies to alleviate poverty (refusing to pathologize urban blacks or rural whites), protection of the environment and development of renewable energy (defense of life itself), and object to smacking around small countries (diplomacy, not bombs and assassinations) lacking in intellectual power and cultural values. Praising Reagan? Excusing the Bushes? That's all good.

Bob has it right. What this last political year shows us is how the Unity Democrats have Sullied liberalism.

Anglachel