The Republic of Dissent

It isn't right and it isn't ok

For so many reasons this sugary excerpt from a Guardian piece on Maya Angelou bugs me:

Reflecting on that presidency, what did she expect? "I was hoping for the best. And I think I have gotten the best from him." What of his detractors? "Those are people who didn't see the morass into which he stepped."

He is America's president. But he also describes himself as America's first black president. That, says Angelou, speaking from her home in North Carolina, has had an extraordinary impact on black America. "His physical self, just being there, his photograph in the newspapers as president of the United States; that has done so much good for the spirit of the African American. We see more and more children wanting to be like President Obama, wanting to go to school."

Oh man am I glad I am not a race woman! I have to admit that the fragmentation of American society scares me almost as much as it irks me.

Authenticity is a crock!

I agree with Rich Yeselson on this:

The authenticity obsession about Romney has become a national, wasteful pursuit like the Iraq invasion and occupation without the laughs.

As I have said before a part of me likes Mitt Romney (liking somebody and voting for him are two different things, although the former fact makes the latter one possible). My uneasy 'fondness' (the word bugs me, but I can't find another one) for Romney has to do precisely with the fact that he isn't as good as Obama is at faking authenticity and that tells me that most of his life, his focus hasn't never been on ideology, but on success and results.

To put it simply, I think that Romney might just make a decent president for the same reason that he is a mediocre republican candidate (so far), his obsession with the end might make him govern adequately.

Authenticity in politics  is like purity in love/sex, it serves only the deviants and those seeking godliness or who believe ferociously that that they are god-like and like neither politics  nor love/sex because they love God or humanity simply to avoid liking people. 

Loose cannons and politics

I want to agree wit Nathalie Rothschild on this, but I cannot mostly because I believe that there is a meaningful and essential difference between being a loose cannon to refuse to pander  and being commercially authentic (which both Gingrich and Obama are) by pretending to be oneself at  the cost of political calculations:

(...) being a loose cannon should not be seen as such a problem in the world of politics. On the contrary, it would be refreshing if more political candidates were less concerned with having carefully crafted images and with watching their words. At least then the public would be in a better position to judge a candidate’s genuine character and opinions.

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?

Herman Cain's African-Americanness

As always great stuff from Glenn Loury and John McWhorter.  Didn't I make the point since the beginning that Herman Cain was a race man?

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.

Race and race card

Ta-nehisi Coates on Conservatives, Herman Cain, and their reaction to his 'small' problem:

(...) conservatives don't really understand racism as a force in history, but as a political attack. Racism isn't something that you, say, discuss the Confederate flag. It's something you use to deflect an attack.

Coates isn't wrong, but he is iased and as always restricting a legitimate point of view to fit his ideology. It isn't just conservatives who use race to deflect a punch or rather to just attack, liberals do it too and very effectively. I cannot forget the fact tat Bill Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro became racists in the primaries of 2008.  In short, race in America is mostly/almost solely about politics and ideology.

Intellectual American politics is becoming an oxymoron

Valuable insights  from Conor Friedersdorf commenting on George Will's anti-Romney article (I will find the time soon to explain why I like Romney)

There is no good alternative to Romney -- the Tea Party has failed to produce a credible candidate -- in large part because the conservative movement (as distinct from the political philosophy of conservatism) has been intellectually bankrupted by talk radio and cable news hosts who make millions of dollars per year dressing up catharsis as serious analysis -- and the folks who know better at National Review, the Weekly Standard, AEI, the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and elsewhere have, with a few notable exceptions, failed to challenge the cults of Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Andrew Breitbart, and their ilk, because at one time they seemed like useful tools to fire up the base, and at some point they became sufficiently powerful that to take them on is to lose fans and money and friends within the movement and time reading hate mail and why go through all that?

The rise of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and Herman Cain weren't accidents. They were the logical products of an ideological movement whose leading voices place no value on governing experience, credible policy proposals, or any other quality needed to be a successful general election candidate or president; the rise of Rick Perry is no accident, but the logical product of a movement that identifies fellow travelers by their cultural cues and proclivity for zinging liberals, rather than the policies they implement and the principles that undergird them. Conservatives like to accuse liberals of condescending to regular Americans with their paternalistic policy proposals and machine politics; there is truth to the accusation, but only in the conservative movement will one find learned men and women who have convinced themselves that voters on the right can only be marshaled for electoral victory with the help of bombastic, intellectually dishonest blowhards, none of whom were on air when Reagan won. 

Let's expand Friedersdorf's short-sighted views by making the following statement, which isn't a boutade:  Obama is what Romney would have been if he had defeated Ted Kennedy for the senate in 1993 and ran successfully for POTUS in 1996. What does that say about Intellectual liberalism?

The point is that intellectualism is absent from almost any part of American politics (increasingly alas from world politics) because people don't want to think and meditate, but to feel good and dream.

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!

America has political Alzheimer

I agree with Kris Coffield on this:

Nonetheless, the historical inaccuracies perpetuated by the many of the Tea Party's most prominent voices, now including presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Tim Perry, beg an interesting, and important, question: Wtf? Oh, sorry, I meant: How can, or why does, a movement gain nationwide traction through a continual abuse of the movement's purportedly foundational thinkers? Does America have political Alzheimer's?

Yes, Alzhemer's, a disease affecting 5.3 million people in the United States, according to the Alzheimer's Association. More than memory loss is implied by the analogy. Try some of the illness's other common symptoms, such as an inability to acquire new memories, problems recalling recently observed facts, confusion, mood swings, and, eventually, long-term dissociation. To varying degrees, the Tea Party exhibits all of these attributes. Through slurs indicting President Obama's birth in Hawaii and a permanent revolutionary era gaze, the conservative insurgency's capacity to image the American present has been neutered. In denying the appropriation of their movement by corporate interests, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Tea Partiers have demonstrated difficulty recalling recent information. When ralliers vehemently denounce entitlement programs, such as Medicare, from which they and their families benefit, they're clearly confused. Rebuke the establishment before embracing establishment candidates? Flip-flop, mood swing. Then there's long-term dissociation, manifested in the movement's abnegation of judicial precedent and documentary research.

My point would be that it isn't just Tea Partiers who have Alzheimer and that there is something within the American political psyche that makes forgetfulness, willful ignorance and savagely stupid idealism (hope and change) irresistible whether one is from the left or the right.

I love to say that Americans when it comes to politics are just like Richard Gere (that's a great reasons to love them and to want to be them), the millionaire in Pretty Woman marrying Julia Roberts, the prostitute. They believe that the marriage will work because of love when they ought to know better and when everything else in their history show that they hate change especially  when they have to do more than to hope for it or realize that it may actually be chaotic.

 

Embarrassment, race, and identification

Ta-nehisi Coates is embarrassed by Herman Cain:

Fallows finds Herman Cain likeable. I feel utterly embarrassed by him. It's not his politics -- I've never felt embarrassed by Condi Rice, Colin Powell, or Clarence Thomas. It's more akin to feeling I got when Jesse Jackson got caught claiming he wanted to cut Barack Obama's nuts off. Or watching Marion Barry attack black people for moving out of the city. There's a hucksterism there that transcends.

I agree that with the assessment that Cain is not a serious candidate for POTUS, but Coates's embarrassment makes me cringe because of what it shows about America, Americans, and identity politics. 

To the contrary of Coates, I'm not embarrassed by Herman Cain because I do not/cannot identify with him. I don't think he represents me and more importantly, I do not feel that I have to delegitimate his point of view to show that he is wrong and that he is just a race man and wrong on the issues.

In short, I think the unseriousness of Herman Cain's candidacy doesn't mean that he is an embarrassment for he is just wrong.  That fact makes very much like Obama for there is a lot to admire about him, but very little that shows that he would make a good POTUS unless you agree/identify with him

Illegal immigration and America's interventionism

I agree with Jeremy Harding on this:

The battle against illegal migration is a domestic version of America’s interventions overseas, with many of the same trappings: big manpower commitments, militarisation, pursuit, detection, rendition, loss of life. The Mexican border was already the focus of attention before 9/11; it is now a fixation that shows no signs of abating even as Obama draws down the numbers abroad. Despite war-weariness at home, war has remained the model for curbing illegal immigration; territorial integrity and the preservation of national identity are the goals. Unlike the invasion of Iraq, this is a respectable struggle – all nation states assert the right to secure borders. Yet watertight security is becoming harder to achieve as the global era brings new pressures to bear on the frontier, adding to the older challenge posed by people wishing to move freely. At fortified boundaries, frailty lurks beneath the show of strength.

Most people who are obsessed with illegal immigration want the issue not the solutions for talking about it enables them to talk about an America that either never existed or that is far gone. Illegal immigration is an issue about identity, about the fear of being invaded by others who not only are different, but savages for they don't have any manners or are not cultured for they didn't even have the decency to knock on the door before starting to make themselves at home.

The hot exchange between Perry and Romney (I like Romney, I always have, he reminds me of my sister's dog Blackie which I like as much I can- because it just wants so much to be loved- in spite of the fact that I am not an animal lover.  I just don't want to hear him tell me how I should live my life and that I should keep my baby if I become pregnant) in the Las Vegas Debate last night told us everything: illegal immigration to true believers isn't a law enforcement, but an identity issue.

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.

Mad men and race

Another munchable quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Mad Men, as I've said before, has taught me a lot about race -- even though there are virtually no black people on the show.

My smart-ass response is : may be it is because race is the best political fiction of all!

 

Merit and reverse racism

Words to munch on this weekend from Mitsuko Uchida:

For me, what counts is judging things on their merit. That’s why I am against positive discrimination for African-Americans. [In the US] every board has to bend over backwards to select African-Americans. It’s a fact – they really need to push it. Music schools and orchestras have to be seen to have them. If there are two people applying for a place, they take the African-American, even if the other is a little bit better. That’s reverse racism. I don’t go for colour, race or sex. I don’t give a damn. I’m not a feminist. If there is a heaven – I’m not a Christian – and if I arrive at the gate and they ask me what I am, all I will say is, ‘Musician.’”

I'm going to have to find out why Uchida's words don't offend me [even though they make me uncomfortable].

Rising Cain

Jennifer Rubin on Herman Cain:

He’s a novice in Washington. He has no national security experience. He’s charismatic but, frankly, ignorant. He bristles when challenged on his errors. And yet we elected Barack Obama in 2008. So with that experience in mind, why would Republicans contemplate nominating Herman Cain?

I don't disagree with Rubin, I'm stuck with the conviction that the difference between Herman Cain and Barack Obama is the same one between Roseanne Barr and Rosie O'Donnell. If you catch my drift, email me for you know how my mind works.

That said, I don't understand I don't understand why Republicans are behaving like Liberals and are suddenly in love with falling in love with a candidate?  Come people grow up!  Love in the time of terror is like bad sex thus the importance of the need for substance and experience!

Occupy Wall Street and consumer politics

Nathalie Rothschild just made my morning with the following sentences (I'm still trying to figure out whether I agree with her or not, but I think that she is onto something):

The anti-corporate agenda that is so central to the OWS [ Occupy Wall Street] movement is actually largely about defining which kind of consumption is acceptable and which isn’t. So, organic food – good; genetically-modified food – bad. Locally-sourced products – good; stuff made by multinational companies – bad.

In essence, OWS is a campaign for consumer politics. It’s about a belief that we can change the world by making ‘smart’ consumer choices. It’s about expressing your politics and your identity through what you do and do not eat, where you shop and which brands you refuse to wear. So while today’s consumption critics love to hate chainstores and big corporations, they always choose to direct their ire at companies that make stuff they don’t like (McDonald’s, Shell, Wal-Mart) rather than at companies that make stuff they do like (Ben & Jerry’s, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods).

I may be too cynical, but there is something very Comtesse de Ségur about OWS or rather very Harry Potter like to use a more contemporary metaphor. It looks good and feels good when you are a Paul Krugman's fan as I am, but then you have to wonder how much of it isn't a fantasy.

I'm trying to suggest by taking short cuts that Americans don't do revolts well, they do it beautifully, loudly and for a short periods of time.  Then something or someone comes along and they forget or rather learn to live with what irks them by focusing on their dreams and the pursuit of happiness. 

It's always, as Reagan reminded us, morning in America again. (I still can't believed that empty political ad worked or at least I couldn't until 2008).

 

Seriousness, facts and terror plots

Glenn Greenwald on the 'Iranian terrorist plot" to kill the Saudi Ambassador to the US:

[...] why would Iran possibly wake up one day and decide that it wanted to engage in a Terrorist attack on U.S. soil when it could much more easily kill Saudi officials elsewhere? and if Iran and its Quds forces are really behind this inept, hapless, laughable plot, then nothing negates the claim that Iran is some Grave Threat like this does [...]

I, for one, am waiting for something more conclusive and convincing than assertions by Holder and co. about what the facts show for I have learned in the Bush and the Obama years not to take claims about terrorism and national security threats at face value for they have become too influenced by ideology and politics.

Skepticism is required for it cools down things to make the issue facts rather than fears and beliefs.  In short, I'm waiting for the Obama to show me the money instead of trying to scare me by appealing to my conviction that Iran is a country with a dangerous government!

J'aimerais pouvoir aimer Herman Cain...

Jonathan Capehart on Herman Cain and racial politics:

Cain is now the second African American Republican of late to brand the Democratic Party a plantation. Rep. Allen West (Fla.) said so during a Fox News interview in August. He also likened himself to Harriet Tubman. File that one under “delusions of grandeur.”

There are plenty of things to say about the Democratic Party and how it has let down people of color in general and blacks in particular. But invoking slave imagery is unnecessary. And it is especially galling coming from a member of a party whose policies and politics generally speaking haven’t been exactly welcoming to African Americans.

Is Capehart right? Yes, but Herman Cain isn't disgustingly wrong, he is just wrong and not playing racial politics in  the expected way. I'm trying to say that Capeheart is slamming Cain solely for using racial politics to support the 'wrong policies' when he should be slamming him for being as much a race man as Cornel West and Harry Belafonte for they agree that race matters, but just disagree as to how and as to the consequences of what for them is an existential fact. Those three manly men  have another thing in common: a huge ego who convinces them that anybody who kind of looks like them ought to think like them.

My problem with Cain is that he loves too much Hermain Cain and can't get out of his own way to see the big picture and to have empathy for those who in spite of their best efforts, not because of race or anything else, can't be Herman Cain. In short,  Herman Cain is too Hobbsian for  his own good and not really able to get past race because of his ego-centrism.  I would love to be able to love Herman Cain for he almost has the right tune when it comes to affirming that individuality matters, but I cannot.  He is too comfortable playing racial and identity politics instead of sticking to what matters.  Cain takes too much pleasure in fighting perpetually old and passé rumbles in the jungle (it is a sign of a lack of imagination) and desacralizing an undivine and unsavory histoiry.

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.

Being afraid of 'the Mormon'

Sentences from David Kopel to munch on this Sunday:

I find it disgusting that a Gallup Poll found 22% of Americans (18% of Republicans, 19% of Independents, and 27% of Democrats) say that they would not vote for a well-qualified candidate of their party who happened to be a Mormon. That’s actually an increase compared to 17% who gave the same answer in 1967.

Another argument for politicians making their religious faith private instead of showing it off as they do their wives.

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.

The Wall Street protests and the Man

The Economist's Democracy in America blog on the Wall Street protests  :

HERE's my two cents on the Occupy Wall Street protests: Woo!

Maybe that's one cent. Anyway, I am not by disposition a joiner, but I'm nevertheless inclined to smile upon attempts to stick it to the man, even if the attempt is quixotic or confused and the man in the end remains unstuck. The Burkean horror of social upheaval is fine in its place, but there is no apparent danger of upheaval. And who among us doubts that the man deserves a good sticking to? So why not try?

I don't find the whole Occupy Wall Street stick compelling for the simple reason that it seems to me that the idealists willing to come to New York to protest against corporate greed are the same who fell in love with Obama in 2008 and who, instead of holding him responsible for his actions, are looking elsewhere to  blame for the state of the American economy and society.

In short, the Occupy Wall Street movement represents a unsettling manifestation of identity politics for as in the Salem Witch Trials, the priority is to stick it to certain people while refusing to acknowledging the responsibility of the others who look/think/feel as the 'occupiers' but never take a definite stand by acting and fighting back.

The genius of America's political culture and the means

Glenn Greenwald on the death of the American Born Al Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki by American drones (Kenneth Anderson must feel that he is winning the argument on the necessity and effectiveness of drones):

Many will celebrate the strong, decisive, Tough President's ability to eradicate the life of Anwar al-Awlaki -- including many who just so righteously condemned those Republican audience members as so terribly barbaric and crass for cheering Governor Perry's execution of scores of serial murderers and rapists -- criminals who were at least given a trial and appeals and the other trappings of due process before being killed. 

From an authoritarian perspective, that's the genius of America's political culture.  It not only finds way to obliterate the most basic individual liberties designed to safeguard citizens from consummate abuses of power (such as extinguishing the lives of citizens without due process).  It actually gets its citizens to stand up and clap and even celebrate the destruction of those safeguards.

I'm going to munch on Greenwald's words, but it is pretty clear that in the so-called war on terror (I have to come to hate that term because it implies that war is the only way to fight terrorism), the end justifies the means and as a long time Camusian that fact bothers me.

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!

The corruption of the American character

 

 

Interesting conversation as always between John McWhorter and  Glenn Loury. I just have one question or rather two. What is American character?  Does it exist?

I might be trying to suggest with these questions that there isn't such an American identity, that Americans are what they do and that America is an ideal, a noble idea that alas cannot remain good in itself because of Americans aren't always able to live up  to it.

Horror is horror

Sugary excerpt of the day from Glenn Greenwald:

Yes, the 9/11 attack was an atrocious act of slaughter; so were many of the violent, horrendous crimes which executed convicts unquestionably (sometimes by their own confession) committed.  In all cases, performing giddy dances over state-produced corpses is odious and wrong.

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.

Race and American delusions

I have a problem with Bill Benzon's post on Chinua Achebe and Joseph Conrad at the Valve in which he compares them to Ike Turner and Sam Philips and finishes by suggesting that the solution is to get beyond the boundaries of language. Sugary excerpt:

The point of this exercise, no, this demonstration, is that language and its reasonings and arguments cannot, in principle, encompass everything. That life itself is greater than language goes without saying – or does it? What matters is how we conduct ourselves around and about, in the shadow of, language.

Because I believe as Eluard that les mots ne mentent pas, I have a problem with  what Benzon is demonstrating.  The attempt should never be to get beyond the boundaries of language, but to acknowledge them and to break them down. 

I know I promise to stop bashing constantly Obama (I believe that I'm doing it rationally and analytically), but I believe that his 2008 campaign showed that Benzon is wrong and that America's problem with race isn't about its people not being able to get along, but rather about their need to believe that race is all encompassing and that  it is about something grand, when it is about petty stuff and about that itch that Benzon seems to have to want Achebe and Conrad get along.  It is far too obvious that Achebe didn't want to get along with Conrad, but needed to punch him in the gut to affirm his own existence and to define in his own terms what it meant or rather didn't mean to be 'african' (my contention is that it doesn't mean anything for Achebe has much more in common with Joseph Conrad than he does with Ferdinand Oyono).

In short, my point to Benzon, to America, and to Americans  is get over it already! Race isn't about race and instead of obsessing about getting along or pretending that you want to or that you do get out your own way and stop being so self-involved!

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.

Wars of choice and patriotism

I agree with Professor Bainbridge on this:

Supporting wars of choice where no vital national interests are at stake is not a very good litmus test of one's patriotism.

Even though I agree with Bainbridge, I wonder whether it is possible to be a dove even in cases of wars of necessity and to be a patriot. Does patriotism has anything or rather everything to do with wars or rather with supporting them? I have the feeling the answer is much more complicated that suggested above, but at least Professor Bainbridge begins to denounce the simplistic and vile notion that in wars,  there are only two sides the patriotic and the unpatriotic ones.

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.

Journalistic and Puritan perversions

I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

This isn't a case of illegal sex activity or gross hypocrisy (i.e., David Vitter, Larry Craig, Mark Foley (who built their careers on Family Values) or Eliot Spitzer (who viciously prosecuted trivial prostitution cases)).  There's no lying under oath (Clinton) or allegedly illegal payments (Ensign, Edwards).  From what is known, none of the women claim harassment and Weiner didn't even have actual sex with any of them.  This is just pure mucking around in the private, consensual, unquestionably legal private sexual affairs of someone for partisan gain, voyeuristic fun and the soothing fulfillment of judgmental condemnation.  And in that regard, it sets a new standard: the private sexual activities of public figures -- down to the most intimate details -- are now inherently newsworthy, without the need for any pretense of other relevance.  I'd really like to know how many journalists, pundits and activist types clucking with righteous condemnation of Weiner would be comfortable having that standard applied to them.

It's astonishing to me that the media and most of America have trouble with the idea that sex can be perverted, destructive, and disturbing without being illegal and becoming a public matter. Nobody seems to be asking the question, why should the public are or rather why  is it something that should concern Weiner's constituents and that is because it is a private matter between a man who like most of the people I know lied stupidly when his private life was exposed for no reason. That's my opinion, but it may change if Anthony Weiner broke the law, but still this scandal is silly, childish and an indication that the media love sex stories because it offers it an excuse to become tabloidlike and because int the post 9/11 world  hasn't found ways to educate and to inform the American public on matters that affect the future of the US such as Afghanistan.

Winning

Sugary excerpt of the day is the beginning of David Hawkes must-read article in the Times Literary Supplement :

A Martian visiting the United States early in 2011 could have been forgiven for assuming that the most momentous event taking place was the public disintegration of the actor Charlie Sheen. The nation was captivated by Sheen’s YouTube broadcasts, in which he repeatedly insisted that, despite his manifest problems, he was nonetheless “winning”. This seemed to strike a chord in the popular mind. It was as if Sheen had happened upon a fundamental, but generally unstated, truth about our current condition. Where competition is the basis of social life, “winning” is an end in itself. If the purpose of life is success, then “winning” automatically brings redemption from any kind of turpitude or disgrace. The pejorative effects of megalomania or drug addiction are negated by the simple, irrefutable fact of “winning”

For some weird reasons, those sentences takes me back to a segment on last Sunday's 60 minutes about the war in Afghanistan in which Lara Logan asked a high ranking officer whether the US was winning the war. The question was odd, because the question isn't about winning and losing, but rather about justice and means. The point is that in America and increasingly in the rest of the world the focus placed on winning shortchanges the debate and encourages short-termism.

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.

DSK conspiracy believiers and birtherism

Interesting words from Ilya Somin on l'affaire DSK with which I agree:

Like America’s “birthers” and “truthers,” many of the French reflexively bought into conspiracy theories about the DSK case, despite the absence of any proof supporting them. They did so at least in part because there is little incentive for citizens to objectively evaluate political claims. Like many Americans, the French are more likely to accept political conspiracy theories that reinforce their preexisting political views. For example, some 70% of Socialist Party supporters agree that DSK is the victim of a conspiracy, compared to a much lower percentage of French rightists who think so.
In fairness to the French DSK conspiracy believers, we don’t yet have definitive proof that DSK was not the victim of a conspiracy. The New York authorities have only just begun to investigate the case. Thus, the belief that DSK’s arrest was the result of a conspiracy is not (yet) as ridiculous as birtherism or 9/11 conspiracy-mongering. Nonetheless, many of the French are still giving conspiracy claims far more credence than they deserve. Even if such theories can’t be definitively disproved, there is no evidence to justify the belief that DSK’s arrest was “certainly” (as believed by 22% of the French poll respondents) or “probably” (35 percent) caused by a conspiracy.

 

Appropriatenesss

Scott McLemee on the celebrations in some corners of America following the announcement of OBL's death:

As someone living near enough to the White House to take the mission of the Flight 93 hijackers rather personally, I did not wish Osama bin Laden well. But celebrating his execution as a rite of closure seems both barbarous and bad magic; the spirit of revenge, once summoned, is hard to control. If the people in the subway car don’t start giving each other high-fives, that’s because some are already preparing themselves for the worst.

 

Justification

No need for commentary after reading this:

Though the targeted killing of Osama bin Laden by American special forces strikes those of us to the right of Noam Chomsky as an act of retributive justice, our collective certainty of his guilt and our longing to balance the moral scales cannot justifty the sovereignty-defying military raid and seeming execution ordered by Barack Obama. If the aim had been to try and punish Mr bin Laden for his enormities, it would have been imperative at least to attempt to take him alive. However, despite conflicting reports, the official position seems to be that capture was not on the agenda; death was the the order of the day. The justification for the killing must be that Mr bin Laden was not only an "enemy combatant", but a dangerous one.

Counter-overreaction

Christopher Hitchens on Noam Chomsky's reaction to the death of Osama Bin Laden:

It's no criticism of Chomsky to say that his analysis is inconsistent with that of other individuals and factions who essentially think that 9/11 was a hoax. However, it is remarkable that he should write as if the mass of evidence against Bin Laden has never been presented or could not have been brought before a court. This form of 9/11 denial doesn't trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and its civil society. After all, as Chomsky phrases it so tellingly, our habit of "naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk … [is] as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes 'Jew' and 'Gypsy.' " Perhaps this is not so true in the case of Tomahawk, which actually is the name of a weapon, but the point is at least as good as any other he makes.
In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn't even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade.

It's indicative of the despairing state of the social and political dialogue in America that Hitch and Chomsky live in two different planets and can neither communicate nor exchange ideas.

Bin Laden's death and Justice

I almost agree completely with this:

Bin Laden’s killing is very likely justified under the laws (such as they are) of war. But, as best as I understand them, these laws are not intended to conduct towards justice; instead they are intended to conduct towards a minimization of those regrettable little side-effects (massacres of prisoners; the deaths of multitudes of civilians &c) that tend to go together with military disputes. It may also possibly be justified in purely pragmatic terms – very possibly, many more people would have died over the longer run had he been captured rather than killed. But it cannot be justified in terms of the procedural requirements of justice as practiced by democracies, which usually do require trials, evidence, judgments that can be appealed and so on.

Left and critical thinking

Quote of the week from Noam Chomsky:

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

There are times when I wonder whether Chomsky isn't too smart for his own good to understand that the world isn't a MIT classroom. That's said what he affirms isn't irrelevant, he just went again too far.

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.

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.