The Republic of Dissent

Gingrich ...really?

I must confess that I  am puzzled by the state of the Republican primary.

As I said before, there is something about Romney that I like, which doesn't mean that I would vote for right, but solely only that I think that he would be to the tough and frozen right what Obama has been to the intellectual and wishful left: an empty symbol. The fact that the GOP or rather its voters are resisting makes him more and not less attractive.

Having said all that, I'm having a tough time taking Gingrich seriously. I mean are we still in 1994 and doesn't everything known about Gingrich show that he is just a more substantive version of Herman Cain?

I heard the argument about Gingrich so called seriousness and my reaction is that the only thing that Gingrich constantly takes seriously is his belief that America desires and desperately needs him.

Come on, 'Red America' can you look at Huntsman or even Raul Paul before you look to the lover that scrupulously took advantage of you?

Political times

Sugary excerpt of the day from Vivian Gornick, whose book on Emma Goldman, which is on my must-read list for the holidays :

We are not living in political times. This is not a time where you can make a speech to 10,000 people out in the street as you could in the Sixties. Everything that’s happening in Washington, the horrors that have occurred, they wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t at one, in some terrible subterranean way, with the times. Obama is always being compared with FDR and the Great Depression, but when Roosevelt opened his mouth and suggested this reform and that reform, the whole country was behind him and people cheered in the streets. Obama—who is indeed a frighteningly disappointing president—nevertheless is made weaker by the fact that he doesn’t have the country behind him.

Doesn't it take a leader to make a country follow her/him? We were told by the Obamaniacs in 2008 that he was the one, the best thing since sliced bread or just John Kennedy (I don't think that JFK was a gread president, he was Chirac befre Chirac) and now, we are told that he is the victim of the times and of the dysfunctions of America when he is contributing to them.

That being said we are living in political times, it is just that the public is not longer up to it because it is fed up with politics and it isn't always equipped to see past the bling bling and the syrupy nail polish.

Obama should close his mouth as much as possible

Interesting stuff from Elvin Lim :

We may soon have to consider the grand irony that a person brought in to reconcile differences and to put red and blue states together has actually been spectacularly bad at doing so. It is almost as if it is precisely in those areas where Obama does not need to open his mouth to convince either side that he has met with the most success. That is to say, Obama has been most successful when he has been unilateral, picking and choosing what works and what does not and not really having to sell his selection to either party. And he has been the least successful when he has attempted to be persuasive, pragmatic and deliberative, trying so hard in town hall meeting after meeting to sell his domestic program — the putative virtues he brought to the political table in 2008, no less. Talk works in campaigns, but it appears perfunctory for the successful conduct of foreign policy and practically counter-productive when it comes to selling the president’s domestic agenda.

The problem of course is that Obama talks a lot because he knows that his words make people feel good and enables them to see him as a good guy who is trying  even though the point of being POTUS isn't to try but to succeed. I was watching Michael Moore on CNN tonight and I was amazed by how unwilling he was to make Obama responsible when during the Bush years, he knew just where the buck stopped, but today it is just against his liberal ideology to blame the 'black' guy!

Great politics and the war on terrorism

The beginning of Noah Feldman's must-read article on Obama's war on terrorism :

Killing terrorists with drones is great politics. To the question, “Is it legal?” a natural answer might well be, “Who cares?”

But the legal justifications in the war on terrorism do matter -- and not just to people who care about civil liberties. They end up structuring policy. As it turns out, targeted killing, now the hallmark of the Barack Obama administration’s war on terrorism, has its roots in rejection of the legal justifications once offered for waterboarding prisoners.

For some reason, this worries me more than Wall Street's greed and it isn't because I think that greed is good.

On American democracy

Sugary excerpt from David Cole on this Columbus Day

As American citizens we have a right to know when our own government believes it may execute us without a trial. In a democracy the state’s power to take the lives of its own citizens must be subject to democratic deliberation and debate. War of course necessarily involves killing, but it is essential that at a minimum, the lines defining the state’s power to kill its own are clearly stated, and public—particularly when the definition of the enemy and the lines demarcating war and peace are as murky as they are in the current conflict. Leaked accounts to The New York Times are no substitute for legal or democratic process. As long as the Obama administration insists on the power to kill the people it was elected to represent—and to do so in secret, on the basis of secret legal memos—can we really claim that we live in a democracy?

The issue is that the Obama administration is solely focused on protecting Americans by any means necessary for it knows that what would be said if another terrorist attack happens on American soil. It is sad to say but the fact that Obama is a democrat and has been made into an exotic creature by the media, his own supporters and himself condemns him to be dumbly Cheneyan when it comes to national security.

Obama is too good of a politician not to realize that the minute after America is hit on his watch, he will become the other and that notion would become threatening and frightening even to liberals who love to embrace the illusory exoticism of apparent difference.

Hubris

I'm so happy that the Yankees lost last night (it doesn't redeem the collapse of the Sox, but it makes it easier to find an existential reason to it all) that I'm indulging myself with the conclusion of Greg Grandin's article on American foreign policy and its containment-liberation complex:

Through their inability or unwillingness to question first principles, politicians such as Obama and policy intellectuals such as Samantha Power and Paul Wolfowitz complete the circle linking pragmatism, idealism, and arrogance and keep the wheel of containment-liberation spinning.

It's pouring

Just because the Red Sox broke my heart , I'm using this sugary excerpt from a German's newspaper reaction to  Obama's words on Europe and its euro crisis as a bandage for my deep wound:

The fact that Barack Obama, who is a brilliant thinker, knows full well that things are much more complicated in reality does not help. Indeed, it does the opposite. In the desperate battle for his re-election he'd rather construct myths, such as claiming that the Europeans alone are responsible for the American mess. Not only is this fundamentally wrong, but -- coming as it does from a friend -- it's downright pitiful and sad.

Jesus was never here

Pic of the day, (hat tip: Kevin Jon Heller)

Liberal electoral racism

Another sugary excerpt , this time from Melissa Harris-Perry on Obama as the victim of the racism of people who not only didn't vote for him, but who voted for him, but are not disappointed:

The 2012 election may be a test of another form of electoral racism: the tendency of white liberals to hold African-American leaders to a higher standard than their white counterparts. If old-fashioned electoral racism is the absolute unwillingness to vote for a black candidate, then liberal electoral racism is the willingness to abandon a black candidate when he is just as competent as his white predecessors.

Plus ça change...Wasn't the argument in 2008 that Obama was the best thing since sliced bread and is it really racists to be disappointed and to feel that you voted for Jesus and that all you got is Lot, a decent ma who can neither change nor lead America, but can solely speak, dazzle, fizzle, disappoint, but survive.

Anger and the 'black' president

Conclusion of John McWhorter's interesting article (I swear that I don't go looking for articles on Obama and race, they are just finding a way to me) advising Obama to become angry for America needs an Angry Black president:

Don't worry about people saying you're an Angry Black Man. For one thing, your supporters think Angry Black Men are prophets anyway. As for the other side, almost none of them will dare haul this out, just for fear of alienating the center with racially unsavory language of too obvious a nature.

And as for those who will -- and they will -- just own it. Again, the sky will not fall. After all, you are angry (I presume), and you're black, too. The country could use an Angry Black Man president just about now.

I have a lot of respect for John McWhorter, but his words make me uncomfortable they are racializing an issue that is  already very polarized. Lastly, I have to admit that it's extremely tiresome to have too many Americans make race the essential element of Obamism (which partly confirms its vacuity) and to put on the shoulders of Obama all the frou -frou of an imagined and superficial blackness. What is alarming is that the fact that many Americans are advising Obama to play a role and to become someone else just shows that for them, race skin color trumps/kills/negate/obliterate individuality.

By the way, America doesn't need an angry black president, it just needs, as always, a good president.

Obama and invisibility

Sugary excerpt from a Michael Moore's interview with the Financial Times :

“I was overcome with emotion, voting for [Barack Obama] on that day,” he says, suddenly looking down, jowls bulging under his chin’s pale stubble, arms folded as if hugging himself. “I think he’s a person of good heart and he means well, but ...” There is a long pause. “I thought he’d come in swinging ... come in like Franklin Roosevelt ... What an opportunity to go down as a great president – squandered.” He looks pained.

The Republicans “decided to treat him as the invisible president”, he adds bitterly, making sure I catch the reference to Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel about racial injustice.

What year are we again? Well, it's alarming to realize that Obama doesn't exist for too many people for they never take into account what he does since they are so certain that they know who he is or rather who he cannot be not matter what he does/says. 

I wonder if Michael Moore realizes that fo him too Obama is an invisible president.

Obama doesn't act black...

Sugary excerpt of the day from Ta-nehisi Coates:

If you paid more attention to Obama's skin color, than to his speeches, the voluminous amounts of journalism noting his moderation, his two books which are, themselves, exercises in moderation, then you have chosen to be ignorant. 

You are now being punished for that ignorance. No one should feel sorry for you. Try not being racist.

I agree with Coates except that voluntarily and disingenuously, he stops in the middle of the road in order not to drive his truck in the ditch. Obama is indeed what he does as I have always argued and the fact that he is black/says that he is black or African-American doesn't change that. However, too many are making race a part of his presidency to either objectify him by making him a victim or an intelligent little man or to  give him a pass for his failures and for the fact that he has shown that to the contrary to he argued in 2008 experience does matter and that he is afraid to lose. The point is that Obama is the POTUS and his actions or inactions speak louder than his words or his 'race.'

Acting black and being black in America and unfortunately in most of the world is about nothing more than following stereotypes and submitting to traditional and nonsensical notions about what blackness is when it is nothing more than an illusion created to soothe thoughtlessness and ideology.

In short, Coates and America are going to realize when the love/lust is really gone with the help of Obama that there is such as things as black people. Obama has so much more in common with Mitt Romney than he does with Ta-nehsi Coates!

Obama too is condemned to be free

Sentence of the day from Jonathan Stein rebutting the comical, moronic and disingenuous arguments from some people such as Jonathan Chait that Obama has been as progressive as he can be:

(...)Obama’s constraints have been largely ideological, not institutional.

I found it hysterical that the people who were tough on Bush for being a lousy president because he was successful in implementing his agenda for America are arguing that the present POTUS is handcuffed, boy what a cynical way to walk back the Yes, we can and the hope and change rhetoric!

Obama is Mitt Romney

I'm supposed to be on vacation, but nothing was going to stop from quoting this sugary excerpt from Paul Krugman:

(...)the point is that if you ask what Mitt Romney would probably be doing if he were in the White House and not trying desperately to convince his party that he shares its madness, it would look a lot like what Obama is doing.

Boy, yes we can indeed or rather yes they (liberals) did swallow another pot of manure for the sake of style, eloquence and bling bling! My guess is that they like so much the taste of Obamanian crap that they are going to keep on swallowing arguing that it can't be shit because it comes fro their chosen one and not from the evil/dumb/zeal/crazy other side.

Quand on est con....

This sugary excerpt from Gary Younge is infuriating because it shows that people who have grand theory about identity politics without acknowledging its frivolity are cons:

Thinking of identities as being part of a fixed hierarchy is a terrible mistake. Being gay and black doesn’t mean that person has it twice as bad as a straight white woman. That’s the kind of mess some white feminists got into with the 2008 presidential debates between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They suggested that somehow a black male candidate had it easy, and that it was much worse to be a white woman candidate, which is just crazy. Not that it was more difficult for Obama than her. It’s just that the terms of the discussion weren’t helpful to either of them.

One of the many reasons this is an obstacle is that identities aren’t fixed in place and time. Their meaning and relevance is always shifting. As much as anything, this book is an attack on essentialism, because one thing essentialists have always tried to do is suggest there is a fixed notion to who and what we are. Actually, we are many things to many people while also being one thing to ourselves. Whatever else is said about Hillary Clinton, no one questions her being born in America or claims she is a Muslim. They have certainly said other things – demeaned her on the basis of her relationship with her husband or etched out every laugh line, crease and wrinkle – but identity should not be a competition. And if it is made a competition, then everybody loses.

Hey Younge leave Hillary Clinton alone, isn't Black the new president ? So deal with it and explain to us one more time why the One had to be the One.

Losing...

Mohsin Hamid, the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, on the US's involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan:

For Hamid, by launching wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and funding the highly compromised Pakistani security forces – he calls them the “insecurity forces” – America has fallen into bin Laden’s trap. The fatal mistake, he says, was to take seriously the notion that al-Qaeda could somehow establish a “caliphate from Morocco to Indonesia”. That was always a chimera. By launching the unwinnable “war on terror”, Washington has curbed the civil liberties of its own people, stretched its finances to breaking point and helped radicalise the Middle East. In other words, it has done exactly what bin Laden wanted.

“He was one crazed mass murderer. His was not a coherent political, economic, social ideology and certainly not a particularly attractive one to most people between Morocco and Indonesia, or even a significant minority of them.” Bin Laden must have been surprised at how fully America rose to the bait, he says. “You’re sitting in your cave thinking, ‘You know, I’d really like to change how things in America work, I’d kind of like to create this new rift.’ And to get halfway there, or whatever, is an incredible success.

The indication that Obama, no matter how well he pronounces Pakistan, and is curious about the world around him, is like Bush on this issue is the fact he is obsessing about winning or rather about not losing any ground even if it means sacrificing the long term for the short-term.  My argument isn't that neither Obama nor Bush understood the issue, but rather that they were too afraid of taking punches in the short term to make the right decisions.

It isn't enough to be smart to be a good president

Sugary excerpt of the weekend from Jack Balkin:

The fact that Obama is a former professor of constitutional law does not justify his scuttling practices that are designed, over long periods of time, to improve legal deliberations and help ensure that presidents conform to the law. Former professors of constitutional law, like current ones, have been known to disagree among themselves about what the law requires; they have even been known to make mistakes and engage in serious misjudgments.

The fact that Obama may think he is smarter and more learned than George W. Bush also does not justify his practice. The next President, or the one after that, may think themselves smarter than Obama. They will certainly find a group of able lawyers somewhere in their Administration to tell them so. Obama came into office promising to reform the abuses of the Bush Administration and its manipulation of the OLC. The best way to do that is not to create entirely new abuses of one's own.

What alarms me is the deepening silence of some of Bush's biggest critics on Obama's actions and those people who were convinced that the One was going to bring them change they could believe in. Oh, I forgot American politics is about identity and about voting for people who can do wrong as long as they are "one of us."

Race men

I like John McWhorter and Glenn Loury and their conversation on race is fascinating especially for somebody like me who believes she got beyond race. That isn't to say that race doesn't matter, but rather that it does because people want it to matter in order to make the world simple and to put people within tiny and beautiful boxes.

To talk about Cornel West, I think he epitomizes of the fact that race forces people to be inauthentic and to hold on to bad faith in a pointless, vile and desperate attempt to make race matter more than anything else.

Obama, the protector

Sugary excerpt of the day from David Bromwich:

Obama apparently has come to share with Bush the belief about Americans that (in Bush’s words) ‘we are good’. But the danger of the surveillance state has nothing to do with the goodness or badness of the American people or our unseen protectors. It has to do with the psychology of power, and what power does to life. That power tends to corrupt is a law of human nature that does not alter whether one favours the power to punish the guilty or to protect the innocent. Corruption goes nicely with the idea of enhancing the secret powers of the state, for benevolent and protective purposes, on behalf of a people who are supposed incapable of judging how to protect themselves. The presumption of the knowing protector could be read in the upright posture of George W. Bush as he announced the retaliatory launching of American troops into war after war. It can now be read in the imposing sobriety of Barack Obama as he speaks of ‘targeted assaults’ by special forces, or of American ‘kinetic activity’ in support of air strikes by America’s allies. The embrace of protection goes with an unconscious love of euphemism.

I'm surprised that people are surprised that Obama is following the Bush/Cheney policies to fight terrorism and 'protect' America. Such a course of action was all too predictable for Obama lacks the political courage to take a different course of action (he also knows that identity politics will always offer him the opportunity to get away with shameful and hypocritical acts), he is too smart and political savvy not to know what  terrorist attack would do to his legacy and lastly, as I always say, Obama is a 'typical' American president no matter how exotic and Michael Jordanesque some believed that he was.

Convenient lies

Only one word comes to mind after reading these words from Alexander Cockburn:

(...) Obama only had one bloodied feather in his cap when he gave one of the most morally repellent speeches I have ever heard delivered from the White House. Bush at least had the crude brio of a semi-literate jock when he vaunted America's prowess. Obama's "we nailed him" paragraphs of mendacity concluded with Dickensian Heepishness: "Tonight we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to. That is the story of our history." Alas, the actual story of the "our history" is an unrelenting ability to lie about everything, while simultaneously claiming America's superior moral worth.

Cockburn isn't right, but it is difficult to say that he is  totally wrong (even though he can't help being over the top and needlessly mean about his truth) and that is the problem  for anybody who loves american as much as I do.

Crickets!

Well it's Obama day on this blog. I will meditate and remain dignified.

Via hhurr (hat tip: Juan cole)

The trouble with anti-ideological pragmatism

I agree with this:

In practice Mr Obama's anti-ideological pragmatism amounts to little more than carrying on the policies of his more ideological and motivated predecessor. No doubt Bush administration vets are gratified to learn that Mr Obama has implicitly conceded that their foreign policy approach is in fact "what actually works". But those who supported Mr Obama over John McCain precisely because he promised to get America out of Iraq and Afghanistan will be rather less pleased.

More people are realizing that the trouble with Obamamism is that it has no odor, no taste, no color, and yet, the prevalent argument remains that it is good for Americans because it has all the required vitamins and nutrients to be healthy and because the people who know nothing about gastronomy and just love bacon hate it.

Of mice and conspiracy theories

For those of us too cerebral even in their passions to believe in conspiracy theories and to understand why on earth, the POTUS has to prove that he was born in the good old USA when he is as American as apple pie, Daniel Drezner puts it all in perspective:

Think of conspiracy theories like international institutions -- they don't actually explain much, but they never go away either.  Even global governance structures that have longed outlived their usefulness do not disappear -- they just persist with fewer adherents.  Popular conspiracy theories work the same way, because there will always be a hard core of believers who can sustain their belief regardless of things like "facts" and evidence."  Indeed, scorn from the mainstream just fuels their conviction that they must be onto something.

The only conspiracy theory that I ever believed in was that my parents made sure that I was born in December just not to give me two great presents at the end of the year.

The vision gap

Sugary excerpt of the weekend from Ervin Staub:

In difficult times like today, people need a vision or ideology that gives them hope for the future. Unfortunately, groups often adopt destructive visions, which identify other groups as enemies who supposedly stand in the way of creating a better future. A constructive, shared vision, which joins groups, reduces the chance of hostility and violence in a society.
A serious failure of the Obama administration has been not to offer, and help people embrace, such a vision. Policies by themselves, such as health care and limited regulation of the financial system, even if beneficial, don’t necessarily do this. A constructive vision or ideology must combine an inspiring vision of social arrangements, of the relations between individuals and groups and the nature of society, and actions that aim to fulfill the vision. A community that includes all groups, recreating a moral America, and rebuilding connections to the rest of the world could be elements of such a vision.

I'm not sure that I agree with Staub. I don't that America is suffering from a lack of constructive vision by its political leaders, but from the fact that they believe that vision, which is nowadays another for express ideology is everything.

Libya as Obama's failure

Ouch ! It's another way to say that I agree with Professor Bainbridge when he makes this solemn and sullen proclamation this:

I don't think anybody can trust Obama's judgment on military matters anymore, if they ever could.

I wanted this intervention to turn out better than it has (watching Bernard-Henri Lévy on American TV defend it forced me to question the thoroughness and seriousness of the decision making behind it). Things may still work out at the end, but it is obvious that there was too much faith, hope, wishful-thinking and not much hardcore analysis on the ways to intervene in Libya because doing so felt not only good, but it felt right and was telegenic.

Damn Barack you make it so hard for me to trust you ! It's another way to say that I wish I knew how to quit my Obama-skepticism.

Obama, Libya and American exceptionalism

Long sugary excerpt of the day from Glenn Greenwald on Obama, Libya and American exceptionalism:

The fact remains that declaring yourself special, superior and/or exceptional -- and believing that to be true, and, especially, acting on that belief -- has serious consequences. It can (and usually does) mean that the same standards of judgment aren't applied to your acts as are applied to everyone else's (when you do X, it's justified, but when they do, it isn't). It means that you're entitled (or obligated) to do things that nobody else is entitled or obligated to do (does anyone doubt that the self-perceived superiority and self-arrogated entitlements of Wall Street tycoons is what lead them to believe they can act without constraints?). It means that no matter how many bad things you do in the world, it doesn't ever reflect on who you are, because you're inherently exceptional and thus driven by good motives. And it probably means -- at least as it expresses itself in the American form -- that you'll find yourself in a posture of endless war, because your "unique power, responsibilities, and moral obligations" will always find causes and justifications for new conflicts.
It's a nice political point on the President's behalf to insist that he has proven his belief in American exceptionalism. That insulates him from a political vulnerability (i.e., from the perception that he rejects a widely held view), which is nice if politically defending the President is an important goal for you. But the harder -- and far more important -- question is whether this American exceptionalism that you attribute to him is actually true, whether it's well-grounded, and whether it should serve as a premise for our actions in the world.

I have never had a problem with American exceptionalism, maybe that's because I believe in it almost as much as believe in the exception française or that le Cameroun c'est le Cameroun. I think that the trouble comes when one defines exceptionalism as having rights and not as many responsibilities. The question isn't about Obama's belief in American exceptionalism for all American presidents come to believe in it at some point especially when it gives them a justification to do what they want to do,. The issue is about whether American exceptionalism will ever make Obama do something that  requires something more than idealism and is expensive not only to him, but to its short term goals.   America exceptionalism becomes a problem, when it becomes  an excuse not to justify the problematic  because then it becomes about faith and not much else.

In short, the issue isn't hat Obama says or believes, but again what he does, how well he does and how he reacts to failure and to adversity.

Women and wusses

This sugary excerpt from Gideon Rachman is the best remedy to the headache I feel after a short weekend :

There has been a certain amount of sniggering about the fact that it was Obama’s female advisers who were most prominent in pressing for military intervention in Libya, while the men hung back. Amongst the interventionists were the evocatively-named pair of Power and Slaughter – that is Samantha Power on the National Security Council and Anne-Marie Slaughter, who recently stepped down as head of the Policy Planning staff at the State Department and tweeted effectively from her new perch at Princeton. And then there was Susan Rice, the US ambassador at the UN and, finally (and decisively), Hillary Clinton.
The implication of all this is that it was the women who turned out to be the real men – prepared to get tough – while the men were wusses, who hung back. In this account, Obama is cast as the hesitant king, with Hillary as Lady Macbeth, hissing – “Infirm of purpose, hand me the dagger.”

Ahhh I wish I could take all of this seriously, but I cannot because we are in 2011 and that I am over gender. That said I think the bigger point of Rachman's point is about Obama and about the fact that America needs its commander in chief to be firm and to look in command when it is 'at war.'  Obama  doesn't look in command because it is obvious that he knows that the Libyan intervention os problematic for America because it increases the  uncertainty  and the instability in a region key to its strategic interest.

 

Obama, the Imperial president

I agree mostly with Eric Posner on this:

Thanks to Bush, Obama enjoys the legal authorities he needs to conduct the conflict with Al Qaida—and so, until our next crisis, we don’t know how Obama would have acted under similar circumstances. The Obama lawyers are certainly less inclined to bloviate than the Bush lawyers were but again where it counts—have Obama’s lawyers ever stopped him from going beyond the edge of legality?—we have little information and some reason for skepticism. Obama has vigorously expanded the drone program, taken the war into Pakistan, robustly defended his right to kill American citizens abroad, and opposed litigation that could expose secrets about the treatment of detainees. What is most interesting is that there is currently little comment on the left about Obama’s extensive uses of executive power. There are some outliers who were celebrated during the Bush administration for their attacks on the presidency and who have persisted in their views now that Obama is in office, but who today are ignored. The only public apology from the left for the Obama administration’s executive branch jurisprudence that I am familiar with is this one by David Cole, who starts off vigorously enough but ultimately falls back on legalisms and ends up undercutting his defense in the second half of the article, where he laments Obama’s dependence on secrecy, which raises the question how we know what to make of Obama’s actions as an executive if we don’t know what they are. And that was before the Libya intervention.(...) On Congress’ tomb should be inscribed this epitaph, courtesy of a democratic congressman: “They consulted the Arab League. They consulted the United Nations. They did not consult the United States Congress.” As for the Republicans, with some trivial exceptions, they range from complaining that Obama did not communicate with them (nothing about consultation let alone a vote of some sort) to complaining that he did not act aggressively enough!

Isn't comforting to realize that Obama is as American as  George W. Bush in his exercise and consolidation of executive power? Somebody should tell Charlie Rose and others that spending a few years in Indonesia as a child and having a Kenyan father who was never around don't necessarily make a 'full blooded American male' (he spent most his life in America) so different that he gets foreigners intuitively without the need of knowledge and give him peculiar views of America and of power.

In short, as I like to say often with smugness, Obama is what he does and he is for all intents and purposes an Imperial American president.

The devil you know...

Juan Cole on the Obama's position on Libya:

Washington appears to have decided it slightly preferred the devil it knew, and that may well be what it gets– though now a wounded devil talking crazily about global jihad against the West if things don’t go his way.

I'm surprised that people are surprised by what's happening in Libya and by the fact that Obama believes in real politik especially when idealism or doing the right thing is about something other than giving speeches and singing  "we have something in common."

Hope and Ethics

Okay, this is the last sugary excerpt of what must have seemed as 'bash Obama week' and it is from Glenn Greenwald:

(...)in Barack Obama's administration, it's perfectly acceptable to abuse an American citizen in detention who has been convicted of nothing by consigning him to 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement, barring him from exercising in his cell, punitively imposing "suicide watch" restrictions on him against the recommendations of brig psychiatrists, and subjecting him to prolonged, forced nudity designed to humiliate and degrade. But speaking out against that abuse is a firing offense. Good to know.

Well, I guess none of this matters since there is no alternative to Obama as John Quiggin and others would argue. Yeah, doesn't it feel great to live in a world where hope and the one killed ethics?

 

American foreign policy and the United Nations

Interesting point from Professor Kenneth Anderson on the Obama administration 's reliance on the United Nations in the 'Libyan crisis':

We’ve got lots of problems in Wisconsin and Ohio and California and New Jersey and Indiana, and just so we’re clear, here’s the deal.  If we agree that the UN is the place to deal with all your funny and hard to figure out and frankly not very relevant or interesting foreigner stuff, will you all just sod off and let us get on with figuring out our new VAT tax and our grandchildren’s interest payment schedule to China?

Since the Obama's administration has no good choices in the Libyan crisis, it is trying to let the UN take the lead to avoid having to take responsibility for the worst and to be able to take credit for the good.

In short, we are in 2011, next year is a presidential election year, that fact is having disastrous effects on the foreign policies of both America and France (the french presidential election is in also next year).

This is love calling earth

I have to admit that I love to crow when I read sugary excerpts such as this one from John Quiggin:

In the short run, and within US politics, there is little choice but to support Obama and the Dems as the lesser evil, at least as regards domestic policy.

Wow, hope is dead and the people who were drunk on it are nevertheless still in love or rather hate too much reality to accept that it is about neither good nor evil. Boy is it dangerous to fall in love in politics!  Hey Quiggin the point of waking up is to stop swollowing the kool-aid believing that it is holy water!

Obama is Swiss

The sugary excerpt of the day is from Mick Hume's interesting take on Obama, Libya and interventionism:

The response of US president Barack Obama, aka the West’s commander-in-chief, has apparently evolved from speechlessness to impotence, leading one veteran commentator to wonder, in an ironic reference to the debate over Obama’s ‘true’ nationality, whether he might actually be Swiss. The administration quickly shot down European kite-flying about setting up an immediate no-fly zone over Libya. US commanders pointed out to their European partners that this would involve a full-scale military operation against Gaddafi’s air force. Some might naively wonder why that would pose such an insuperable obstacle to the mighty US air force. But after the damage done by Iraq and Afghanistan, the US authorities lack the political authority and will to impose themselves on Libya and fear getting dragged into another civil war.

The trouble is of course that Obama suffers from a lack of imagination due to the fact that in spite from what people wants to believe about his "difference" he is a typical president who has trouble accepting powerlessness and not making every crisis about America and his own political legacy. When I hear Charlie Rose for example repeating his delusion that the fact that Obama spent some time in Indonesia when he was a kid gives him a different world view, I shake my hand and realise how americancentric even the most cultured and most worldly American are to be able to transform insignificances because they seem peculiar into essentialities.

Good sense starts at home

The sugary excerpt is from Juan Cole's interesting post on Mubarak and his humiliation of Obama and America, I don't agree with a lot of Cole's assertion, but he is onto something and his main point ihat foreign policy has domestic repercussions and vice versa is valid:

As long as the president and the Congress are willing to lie down and serve as doormats for America’s supposed allies in the Middle East– out of a conviction of the usefulness of their clients and the inexpensiveness of putting them on retainer– there will be anti-Americanism and security threats that force us to subject ourselves to humiliating patdowns and scans at the airport and an erosion of our civil liberties every day. We are only one step away of being treated, with “protest zones” and “Patriot Acts” just as badly as the peaceful Egyptian protesters have been.

Obama's Tunisia

Sarkozy's handling of the events in Tunisia was widely criticized. I'm simply wondering what will be said of Obama's handing the events in Egypt.

Real politik may be effective, but it has a price especially for leaders who had the audacity not of hope, but to declare themselves different/better/more moral than their predecessors to end up shamelesslly continuing too many of their policies. Ah the illusions of change !

Obama and the Cheesecake factory

I didn't watch the SOTU. Why? Because it doesn't matter and because I don't want to get fat (metaphorically speaking).  The trouble with Obama's speeches is that they are cheesecakes: there is always something good to eat within them, but the trouble with cheesecakes is that they aren't healthy and that one should eat them with moderation and without thinking that they are the best food on earth for people

I have always argued that Obama's gift to giving speeches was a liability not for him, but for America. It makes Americans because that it doesn't take a village,  a person, actions, orcourage under fire, but simply a speech for change to come. That's a dangerous belief. My beef with all this fluff is that Obama is getting more from America than America is getting from him, it isn't because he doesn't love his country, but because he believes that his country just needs him, not the best of him.  I happen to love America and so I can't enjoy this movie.

The death of the debate on terrorism

I almost totally agree with Greenwald when he makes the folloing assertion:

Obama has single-handedly eliminated virtually all mainstream debate over these War on Terror policies.  At least during the Bush years, we had one party which steadfastly supported them but one party which claimed (albeit not very persuasively) to vehemently oppose them.  At least there was a pretense of vigorous debate over their legality, morality, efficacy, and compatibility with our national values. Those debates are no more.

It isn't just Obama who eliminated all mainstream debate, the Democrats and the America public are at fault too for the focus has been on the rresults and thus the consensus is that America can be protected at nay cost even the one of its Americanness. That said Greenwald is right, Obama has completed on the terror side the Cheneyisation of America.

A divided and uncivil country

I agree with Paul Krugman on this:

(...) the truth is that we are a deeply divided nation and are likely to remain one for a long time. By all means, let’s listen to each other more carefully; but what we’ll discover, I fear, is how far apart we are. For the great divide in our politics isn’t really about pragmatic issues, about which policies work best; it’s about differences in those very moral imaginations Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs over what constitutes justice.

And the real challenge we face is not how to resolve our differences — something that won’t happen any time soon — but how to keep the expression of those differences within bounds.

The problem in America and elsewhere is that people no longer know how to debate and to discuss issues because everything has been religionized.  When everything is sacred, there can only be blasphemy and blasphemers, true believers and faith looking to obliterate people who disagree. Will things change? No or at least not yet for the simple fact that change when it is more than Obamastic (symbolic) takes time and having a civilized society requires a committed belief in education and in intelligence rather than in faith and churches.

The Sarah Palin fantasy

Alex Massie affirms with too much satisfaction and guile for his statement to be true that Sarah Palin is done:

Palin is tarnished goods at the moment. More than any other would-be candidate in the prospective field she needs to build an inevitability strategy. She lacks the chops to win a policy battle (or even the appearance of one) and needs instead the kind of whirlwind operation that whips up a storm in state after state. That requires massive enthusiasm and persuading people to ignore their suspicion that she cannot win a general election. Unfortunately that also creates a collective action problem for Palin: people might vote for her if they think other people will too. But they don't think other people will and so they won't either.

I have to admit that I don't understand the rationale of Massie's assertions for Sarah Palin never begun. She has always only been the witch that liberals needed to convince themselves that they were good and that Obama was the best s*it !

To the contrary of many, I have never thought that Palin was stupid or that she was an abomination, I thought that she was likable enough as Obama once said arrogantly and with spite of Hillary Clinton, but that the problem was that she was never as good as her defenders thought that she was and more importantly as bad and evil her detractors believed. Palin is a legitimate political figure, but saying that doesn't mean much for she has yet too become real rather than a fantasy in the mind of her friends and her foes. 

Is Sarah Palin done ? Of course, she isn't. She just isn't real, that's the problem. Sarah Palin doesn't exist. Elle n'existe pas !

2012

The sentence of the day is from Paul Krugman:

(...) the tax cut deal makes Obama less likely to win in 2012.

I agree, but 'less likely' just means in my opinion more difficult for I think that, for now, Obama's most potent adversary is himself.

On another note, how tragically and comically ironic is it that Obama is governing like he argued that Hillary would govern and that wasn't good enough for the Dems and America?

Barack Obama, moderate republican

Insightful and almost on point analysis from Jonathan Zasloff :

Perhaps one way to explain President Obama’s inability to stake out more strongly progressive positions on — well, just about anything, from tax cuts, to health care reform, to foreign policy (think Afghanistan) — is that he essentially is not a progressive Democrat but rather that extinct breed, the Rockefeller Republican.  It is not quite the same thing as modern-day moderate Republicanism, because it is slightly to the left.  But the more I think about it, the more that I have to conclude that all those who for the last two years have been calling Obama a moderate Republican have some justice on their side.

Obama has more in common with Lincoln Chafee and Olympia Snowe than with Dennis Kucinich and even Bernie Sander. However, I think that the fact that he was elected by pretending to be something/someone else is a problem because it makes unable to stand for something rather than to stand against something or rather someone. Obama needs enemies and that's disconcerting, so Sarkozy and thus not good for America. It means that the political battles aren't going to settle anything for they will solely be about power and identity politics.

The Obama administration is so tough

David Bernstein's witty point on Wikileaks's latest:

I’m glad Koh is sending Julian Assange of Wikileaks a stern letter of reprimand, that will show him! Who said the Obama Administration wasn’t tough enough to protect American interests?

Bernstein's point is fair except that the problem here is that the Obama administration is  both a victim and  a prisoner of its image and of the fact that Americans or at the very least the Obamabots and Obamaniacs and the world assume and expected that it was going to live up to its own hype and be different. Obama's biggest problem is that people assume that he is what they believe he represents or that he is a symbol, when he is what he does in spite of what his grand, preachy, and often beautiful speeches say. When I think back of Obama's Berlin Speech during his campaign when he asserted his citizenry to the world with as much sincerity as Sarkozy when he claims that he is changing or rather growing up, I chuckle and wonder how people bought that farce.

The consequences of symbolic indulgence

I agree with David Bromwich on this:

The truth is that Obama exposed himself to the worst the Republicans can do by his conciliatory tone from the first days of his administration. He gave assurance when he entered office that he would not look exactingly into the conduct of the last administration. Bush and Cheney received from him a legal indulgence for any conceivable transgression, on the theory that after the bombings of September 2001, anything that public servants did was a hasty but honourable response to a dreadful emergency by well-meaning persons. To Obama at the time, this must have seemed a magnanimous deed as well as a signal of non-aggression to tamp down the savagery of the Cheney circle. Yet his decision to make justice begin today achieved a different end. It made sure that none of the people from whom Obama had most to fear would ever fear him. It also robbed of reality all his talk of a profound commitment to justice – a justice which he had suggested went beyond considerations of bridge-building for the sake of domestic policy or national expedience. By broadening the claim of state secrets to prevent the disclosure of evidence of torture and extraordinary rendition, the Obama administration has lent credence to the original claim of Bush and Cheney that their actions were dictated by necessities of state. In doing so it has foregone the only assurance the law affords against the repetition of such acts.

I believe that in a way Obama gave himself very little choice but to support the statu quo ante when he became president because of the fact that he ran as the change candidate and that he never had it in him to die, politically that is, for what he ran on, which I don't think is what he believes.  To become Potus, Obama made himself more exotic than he really is, but because he is a great politician and a typical American, he realized that Americans only really likes the appearance and the symbols of change. Those symbols give American the complaisant impression that they don't have to pay and to work hard to improve/change their country.  In short, because Obama was never different than the people he riled against, he was always going to govern as most of presidents did before him by doing everything not to rock the boat and not appear to un-Americanize America by governing as the Change President.

It is sad to admit but out of all of the credible people who ran for president in 2008, the one who was always going to be the least able to 'change' America was Barack Obama. That fact is ironically one of the reasons he won because people thought that he was change.

Is Left the south of Nowhere?

The sole question that I'm asking myself concerning Obama, the One, is where will he go ideologically after Tuesday.  I don't think that he is in the same position as Clinton (Bill) in 1994 because he has governed from the center and cannot move further to the right without losing some of his most loyal worshipers (that said, it is possible to argue that the Left is so passionately in love with Obama that it wouldn't mind be a cuckold if it means saving Obama's marriage to America). In short, to the contrary of many pundits, my view isn't that Obama is in a tough situation because he gave too much to the Left, which has been incredibly generous and patient with him to the point of becoming of losing itself in its marriage and becoming masochistic. Obama cannot move to the right without becoming even more flavorless and fluffy than he is already. How long can soufflé with flashy garnishes but pumped mostly with air rather than succulent ingredients be eatable? 

My advice to Obama would be to find some backbone and to embrace a political identity or be who he is by giving his base, those who thought that he would give America more than Clintonism with a multiracial face (Clintonism was good in the Nineties, America needs something else), some red meat and to stop being solely a masterful tactician. However, I don't think that Obama has it in him to take the risk not to get reelected. Thus, he will wait patiently for the Republicans to overreach and will run against their method of governing in 2012 by making arguments against rather than for some things. My fear is that the 2012 presidential election will be similar to the Nevada Senate Race between Harry Reid and Sharon Angle, which means that the race will be negative and about picturing the other side as extreme or unAmerican (I believe that Obama is going to win in 2012 because I don't think that there is a republican out there that can be the finesse necessary not to look like an extremist or a buffoon, but it is possible that one will out of nowhere). It's going to be a pitiful spectacle to observe and one, which will not be good for America. That what's a country gets when it believes that governing isn't helped by experience and substance, but is solely about the identity of its leader.

Uneasy fusion

Pertinent:

If the contemporary right is an uneasy fusion of conservative and libertarian articles of faith, the contemporary left is an uneasy fusion of technocratic progressive and liberal-democratic conviction. One sees progressive managerial elitism most clearly in the left's public-health and environmental paternalism. The rarely uttered idea is that the people who know best need to force the rest of us to do what's good for us. Whatever you think of this sort of state paternalism, it isn't liberal or liberty-enhancing in any non-tortured sense. The progressive technocrat's attitude toward liberty is: "Trust us. You're better off without so much of it." The more the left is inclined to stick up for this sort of "activist government" as a progressive, humanitarian force, the less it is inclined to couch its arguments in terms of liberty.

It is the fact that I value too much my liberty and that I hate to be told what to think that I am more than uneasy about the American left; it is too self-righteous and increasingly shallow because it wants to be fashionable, which makes it too complacent for it is convinced of its grandeur.  So what will 'change' (ah the magic word, America is discovering doesn't mean anything) after the left gets a spanking tonight? Not much, it will just wait for Republicans to overreach and Obama will remain at the center right of the political spectrum and get reelected if he doesn't get in his own way.

Obama is what he does

Shelby Steele (whom I like more and more even though he is so often wrong) on Obama and his Americanness:

Barack Obama is not an "other" so much as he is a child of the 1960s. His coming of age paralleled exactly the unfolding of a new "counterculture" American identity. And this new American identity—and the post-1960s liberalism it spawned—is grounded in a remarkable irony: bad faith in America as virtue itself, bad faith in the classic American identity of constitutional freedom and capitalism as the way to a better America. So Mr. Obama is very definitely an American, and he has a broad American constituency. He is simply the first president we have seen grounded in this counterculture American identity. When he bows to foreign leaders, he is not displaying "otherness" but the counterculture Americanism of honorable self-effacement in which America acknowledges its own capacity for evil as prelude to engagement.

The simple fact that people are obsessing about who Obama is shows that American politics is about personality and that Obama chose purposely to be a symbol to be able to use freely and shamelessly identity politics. Nevertheless, the narrative about who Obama is too complaisant and indulgent because it is solely one about flash, symbolic gestures, and words, as Obama would say matter.  The catch for Obama, of course, is that being a symbol means also facing irrational and gross fantasies about his identity, which are in part a backlash to the  fact that he made himself the issue because he knew that the Left likes flair and intellectual brilliance and elegance and that Americas have trouble resisting super-men. What is getting lost in this debate, because the game is about identity, racialism, and Americanism , is the what, the how, and the inescapable reality that a person, especially a politician is what s/he does.

In short, it was always a pleasing and self-indulgent fantasy for America and even for Obama himself to believe that he would 'redeem' America solely by becoming president because of who he is. Obama is what he does, all the frou-frou, the brouhaha don't and won't matter in the long run for experience shows that in the United States election politics is solely about the short term and that politicians who are good a winning elections are not necessarily good presidents and can even be awful ones.

Change is so hard !

Some sour piece of conventional wisdom from Elvin Lim to ponder all day:

The Republicans and the Tea Party Movement are running the risk of doing what Barack Obama did in 2008. They are promising change in the campaign, but they do not realize how difficult, by design, change is in Washington. But politicians aren’t usually in the habit of thinking about the election after the one right before them.

Should Republicans take over the House in 2011, they will quickly learn, as Obama has learned, that change does not come via elections in American politics. Elections only change the publicly visible personnel at the top; at best they open the door to potential change. The permanent government persists, the political parties survive, the interests endure. Most important, the constitution and its precise method for law-making remains. The political candidate who promises wholesale change makes a promise that cannot usually be delivered in a few years, and s/he runs the risk of becoming the victim of a new political outsider, a Beowulf who will promise to slay Grendel, but who shall soon find out that with Grendel dead, a dragon still remains to be slayed.

In short, change, political change is extremely difficult in the US because of its system of government. Well, I'm not buying it! If one  had used the same logic as Lim in the past, one would have believed that either the American and the French revolutions were impossible because the colonial system was too inflexible and the King too powerful. Blaming the system is always a hypocritical cop-out to refuse to accept the fact that even in a nation of laws or in one with a broken system of government, people and thus, leadership matter. Change doesn't start with  a magic, sudden and complete transformation, it begins with small steps and at the very least a reluctant desire to do what's right whatever the political cost. Obama asserted, with the flashy arrogance that incredible skills and talent give to those who possess them, that he was special when in fact he is a Bill Clinton (the trouble is that what was good for nineties isn't necessarily what's good for America now), I'm still waiting for him to show through his actions and not with what/who he is or appears to be that he is.

I am Glenn Loury

In this video, Glenn Loury explains perfecty and coherently what are my feelings towards Obama.

Obama, blood, origins and symbols of change

Self-indulgent fluff from A.Jay Adler which proves that America is stuck in the cesspool of identity politics and culturalism:

The Untied States, as now a long-time great power, is not aligned in the world political mind, or in the conservative mind, with one-time colonies, but with the civilization of their colonizers that it leads – and (here, now, is the point) their European, Western culture. However independently American culture may have developed from its European origins – so that Europeans themselves love to hate it and hate to love it – there are its origins nonetheless.

But we know that the nation is changing, if not in its origins – which cannot literally, and should never in its ideas and cultural foundation, be altered (we are always unalterably, in part, what we have been) – in its current and developing character. As much as the Right would seek, in its unceasing reactionary nature, to stave off modernity, the waters of the world flow and mix with ever diminishing impediment, to form new seas and spring new rivers, and nothing in the geopolitics of the earth, or the Untied States, will stop it.

Nothing represents the change more visibly than the election of the first Black president, a president whose father was born in Africa, not emigrant Europe, and whose place of birth was colonized in the post-Columbian era, not a colonizer in it. That is profound change. This president – this son of a man born in the colony when it was still a colony – takes office and (ah, you were wondering what Churchill had to do with any of this) returns to Britain a bust of Winston Churchill that had been lent to George W. Bush, as a symbol, after 9/11.

At some point, can we get over the fact that the artificial categories in our minds created by prejudices and received ideas that make us believe that change is about race, culture, and whatever are subliminal and nonexistent? When I read that Obama represents change because of his absent Kenyan father, the ways he looks and due to the fact the United States are changing because its 'racial' makeup is changing, I laugh  and shake my head in despair. I understand that some still have to understand that people aren't no their 'origins,' their 'race' or their gender, that culture isn't about genetics, and that people 'are'  being for themselves because of their blood unless of course, they stop thinking.

Ethnicity, origins and one's politics

Because I respect Ilya Somin, I'm still munching on the following sentence that is part of his post on the craziness of Dinesh D'Souza's and Gingrich's assertions about Barack Obama's ideology (it's funny how America's race obsession can make normalcy appear alien and foreign. Obama is so American and so mainstream that people believe that he is hiding his true self and hiding his peculiarities  when he is in fact a normal and unremarkable American president):

It’s not inherently bigoted to assume that a person’s ethnic background or national origin played a role in determining their politics.