The Republic of Dissent

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

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.

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).

 

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.

Conservatism and amour propre

Interesting stuff from John Holbo:

(...)I persist in thinking there’s a strong, quite stable, and really quite distinctive cognitive dissonance that has characterized American conservative thought since at least the 1960’s. I don’t think anyone – including me – has ever really pinned down it’s distinctive characteristics. It’s not right to say it’s just hypocrisy, or lying. (There is that, of course. But it’s not just that.) It’s self-serving double-think, to be sure, but its double nature is of a fairly high philosophical order. The self that is consistently served illegitimate double-portions is not just the electoral self, that wants to win or get paid, but the philosophical self, that wants to be right, in principle. It’s a status thing. An amour propre thing, in Rousseau’s sense.

Holbo's point is well taken except that it can be said about American liberalism for after all, what else than amour propre can characterized an ideology that cares more about knowing the good than doing the good?

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Grow up, America sex isn't always political!

I have to admit that I don't care about the Anthony Weiner's story. I don't even find it titillating and having to see clips of another public apology by an American politician succumbing to the child-like need that Americans have to believe that their leaders are cleaner/purer than them is creepy. I'm happy that Weiner didn't resign. He shouldn't have to for that would be enabling an American public that doesn't vote, that is apathetic to real politics and make it feel good about its ability to have the political class it wants without working for it, without getting involved.

In short, America should grow up, hopefully not into France when it comes to politics and sex, but into a mature country where lying about sex isn't the worst thing that a politician can do and where what matters isn't purity, but rather political deeds and principles.  Anthony Weiner lied about sex and honestly, I don't have the energy to care about that. As long as his conduct wasn't illegal and that the two adjectives to describe his behavior are stupid and destructive, he should remain a congressman. Jerks and flawyed people have the right to be politician as long as they do their job effectively and don't break the law.

The personal isn't always political and the fact that it is int the US gives America a poltical class that isn't up to par with its greatness.

Fury!

Sugary excerpt of the best article I read last weekend, Amy Kazmin's portrait in the Financial times of Arundhati Roy:

(...) her fiction writing has been on the backburner, while she has dedicated herself to political activism, travelling to remote corners of the country, attending political meetings and writing essays on topics from India’s dam-building to its judicial corruption and its abuses in the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir. “You get drawn into a world where people realise, here is somebody who is not frightened of saying something. All of the last 11 years has been unplanned. It’s been a process of deepening your understanding,” she says.
In her political writing, Roy has been scathing in her description of India’s two-decade old economic liberalisation programme – which is widely credited with bringing unprecedented opportunities to many – and seemingly contemptuous of the emerging middle class.
Her diatribes have made her something of a hate figure for many Indian nationalists. There is also a feeling among a number of liberals and left-leaning activists, who have a concern for social justice – and for many of the issues she raises – that her strident polemics are too extreme. “I know I alienate people, but there isn’t any possibility of writing about these things where everybody is going to agree with you,” she says. “I am not scared of alienating the middle class. I am saying what I think. I know the entire establishment obviously disagrees with it, and would like me to shut up, or soften it or be more tactical, but I am saying things in a space that no one says.”
“When I write something, I have to spend a few days filtering out the fury,” she adds. “I don’t do anything to be deliberately provocative.”
Certainly there is plenty in India to be angry – even outraged – about. I ask tentatively whether she really feels that economic reforms have brought no benefits at all. I am thinking of the remote villages, and impoverished slum dwellers, now connected to a wider world by mobile phones. After a moment’s reflection, she answers.
“It’s as though you had this churning,” she says, slowly. “You had a feudal and very unequal society. In this churning, this thin milk separates into a thick layer of cream, and a lot of water that can be just slop. The thick layer of middle class that has been created becomes a great market. Suddenly, there are so many people who need cars and A/Cs and TV, and that becomes a universe of itself. Of course it looks great. Then there is this unseen thing that’s just being drifted off.”

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.

Old and new lefties

Interesting stuff from Chris Dillow:

We old lefties see politics as one activity among others. We see no connection between Marxist politics and Marx’s, ahem, colourful sex life. And I, for one, have combined leftist politics with jobs in the City and non-political journalism.
The newer left, though, is less compartmentalized - hence the slogan, “the personal is political” and the desire to politicize everyday life.
On this point, though, I’m conflicted. On the one hand, I’m tempted to defend my conception of politics on the grounds that it is more liberal: seeing everything as political is the road to fanaticism and totalitarianism.

I'm just confused about one thing, does being a Leftie is about politics or something else? Does it matter? I have to admit that I'm bothered with the idea that the personal is political because it makes politics sentimental. It reminds me of the 2008 Democratic primaries or even of George W. Bush in the 2000 election when in response to critical examinations of his record as Governor in Texas, he would talk about how hurt he was that people could question his heart. In short, the idea that 'good' people are good politicians bugs me and is moreover dangerous. That isn't to say that the personal doesn't matter or is irrelevant, but simply that more often than not, it is a part of a wider context and can be unessential, but titillating.

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.

Obama as a man who loves policy and politics like a fat kid loves cake

Well, reading these words from Alex Massie makes me want to gloat, but I resist that urge because I'm not sure that Americas or at least those who ought to know better that it isn't good for Americans to have a president who loves cake:

No Obama speech is a proper Obama speech unless it contains a rejection of "false choices". Often the choices he deems "false" are actually the choices you'd think a President must make. But, again, Obama doesn't see it that way. Much of his presidency is oddly, perhaps unusually, conditional. He's for or against a public option for health care as circumstances demand or allow. He's certainly in favour of closing Guantanamo but only if it can be done without fuss or too much opposition. Like everything else, it just depends. That was then but this is now. Judge me on what I do, not what I say. Except there are times when you should judge me on what I say, not what I do. And so on.
In some respects this produces an administration that can be impressively nimble. The speed with which the Americans ditched Mubarak was impressive in its own way. But Obama's style also makes for a White House that can sometimes seem strangely passive or reactive. What does the President really believe?

I have to admit that I'm fed up with people asking questions about where Obama was born, who is he is, what he believes as if his actions in the last few years haven't answer those questions.  Obama is as American as Clinton or as George Bush for he is one of those few Americans who was able to go to Columbia and to Harvard and to get elected to high office and to believe that he could raise the money to become POTUS.  He is a centrist who masquerades a leftist who is playing the role of centrist because he is a prisonner of the system. In short, there is nothing revolutionary new about Obama because he has never been a revolutionary and was always just a 'dude' who looked different, but who was always an acceptable representative of the system he  was supposed to change.

Trivia and triviality

Sugary excerpt from Chris Dillow:

The belief that society is perfectible and fully controllable causes our rulers to fail to accept that there will always be plenty of ruin in a nation, and causes them to think they can eliminate even small costs. (...) Politics has become about the revelation of character, and trivial issues serve as dividing lines here.

I have the feeling that I'm going to love 20112 which are election years in both France and the US. I wish I could get use to mediocrity and triviality in politics. I made a bet with somebody that both Obama and Sarkozy are going to get reelected, why? Because they are the best, for now, at the politics of trivia.

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.

The dangers of loyalty in politics

I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

One thing is for certain: right now, the Democratic Party is absolutely correct in its assessment that kicking its base is good politics. Why is that? Because they know that they have inculcated their base with sufficient levels of fear and hatred of the GOP, so that no matter how often the Party kicks its base, no matter how often Party leaders break their promises and betray their ostensible values, the base will loyally and dutifully support the Party and its leaders (at least in presidential elections; there is a good case that the Democrats got crushed in 2010 in large part because their base was so unenthusiastic).
In light of that fact, ask yourself this:  if you were a Democratic Party official, wouldn't you also ignore -- and, when desirable, step on -- the people who you know will support you no matter what you do to them?

Well to paraphrase David Mamet, that is in part the reason I am no longer a brain-dead liberal and I have decided to be an independent. Politics should never be about loyalty or to be more accurate partisanship but about thought and action.

John Quiggin has a take on Greenwald's post that makes me wonder why politics has become about good and evil and about saying that the others are scarier and therefore should be kicked to the curve. More people should fight the talibanisation of American politics by refusing to make it about good and evil and solely about actions and no empty words such as hope and exceptionalism.

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.

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!

Reaganmania

I agree with Alex Massie on this:

The gushing nonsense that has accompanied the centennial of Ronald Wilson Reagan's birth can be no surprise to anyone even if, no especially if, you consider it mildly unseemly. "A Republic, if you can keep it" said Benjamin Franklin and Reagan's beatification is another reminder that the United States long ago became a republic in name only.

Still, I'm wondering if the fact that the US has stopped being a republican is its biggest problem? To talk about Reaganmania, I have to admit that I don't get it and it puzzles me. I feel exactly the same about it that I feel about Obamania, it makes me incredibly sad for Americans and America.

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.

Truth and fluff in politics

The statement of the day or rather of the late evening is from Chris Dillow:

Politics is about power, not fluffy things like truth and trust.

Chris Dillow should have a conversation/debate with Glenn Greenwald. I don't want to agree with him, as a matter of fact, I won't but he is isn't wrong. I wonder whether Dillow would make a distinction with a difference between politics and governing. What would Hannah Arendt say?

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 !

Paradoxes and liberalism

The first sugary excerpt of the day of the year is from the great Norm Geras:

It is indeed paradoxical, as a liberal, to think that other people should have to dress as you prefer or dictate; but it is not at all paradoxical to think - as a liberal - that people are most likely to be able to 'grow and thrive' best in societies in which they are guaranteed a wide space of personal freedom. I'd say that the liberal was a strange one who thought that growing and thriving could take place equally well anywhere - under tyranny just as well as not, oppressed within the home as well as not, with not enough to eat, etc.

It is those kinds of paradoxes who make me wonder whether liberalism can remain true to itself if it becomes solely political (in the Obamanian sense of the word) and thus a form of devotion.

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.

Reality is no longer a tough dude

Sunday's sugary excerpt is from Scott McLemee:

In the 1970s, conservatives liked to say that their ranks were filling up with “liberals who had been mugged by reality.” That phrase suggested that reality is one tough dude -- totally indifferent to anybody’s mere opinion.

It was quite another matter when a leading Bush administration official (unnamed but often assumed to be Karl Rove) told a reporter for The New York Times Magazine in 2004: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Nor was this merely the judgment of a solitary solipsist. In his chapter "Creating Their Own Reality,” David Greenberg -- an associate professor of history, journalism, and media studies at Rutgers University -- maintains “the Right under Bush found itself promoting a view of knowledge in which any political claim, no matter how objectively verifiable or falsifiable, was treated as simply one of two competing descriptions of reality, with power and ideology, not science or disciplined inquiry, as the arbiters.” (Or deciders, if you will.)

There was no reality, only interpretations of reality -- and the existence of weapons of mass destruction was a function of who controlled the narrative. Little surprise that there were jokes about the rise of conservative postmodernism during the ‘00s. If Fox denied that climate change was taking place, who had the right to insist otherwise? Not some elitist, anyway.

Victims of change

David Shribman on the US mid-terms:

This year’s congressional elections – and the gubernatorial races that attracted less attention but followed the broader national trends – were fuelled by an anger rarely seen in the United States. Anger is not an ideology, but it did provide the Republicans with an ample margin of victory this week.

That victory is a leadership challenge not only to the President but also to the new power brokers – the Republican rebels and their Tea Party shock troops. Both came to office as self-proclaimed agents of change. Now they have seen that the winds of change can shift with astonishing speed and force – a warning to the new Republicans and perhaps a comfort to the Democrats, who discovered this week that the beneficiaries of change can swiftly become the victims of change.

Plus ça change...the most alarming thing about American politics is that its purposeful inculture. People want to believe and not to know. The 'just the facts Mam' motto has been replaced by 'feel my pain and make me feel good.' It is for that reason that fear and rejection are what determine the results of an election.

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.

Inside jokes

I agree with Helen Searls on this:

(...) conceitedly poking fun at the ignorance and stupidity of the right is all that excites liberals today. In the run-up to Tuesday’s congressional elections, there are no political causes to unite or inspire Democrats. There is nothing to stand up for. Democrats are as turned off from politics as everyone else in the country. But while the Tea Party folk try to make something vaguely political out of such disillusionment, many liberals seem to have given up. Inside jokes are all that remain.