Extremists to the Right of Me! Extremists to the Left of Me!

Speaking of Tabloid Friend, he linked to this image today:
With this text below it:

Register residents to vote, get out the vote and insure that there is a high electorate turnout in 2012 because President Barack Hussein Obama needs to be re-elected, 70 democratic U.S. senators and 300 U.S. representatives need to be elected to perform the "People's" work.

The 112th U.S. congress will go down as the worst congress ever, thanks to the republicans and T.E.A. republicans that would rather insure that Obama is defeated than legislating for the majority while protecting the rights of our minorities.

Replace All republicans, T.E.A. republicans and some democrats with those individuals that will work for America and NOT for the special interests and their respective political party.

Of course, we'll be so much better off with moderates in Congress and the White House -- nice, murderous, warmongering, public education-undermining, Social Security-eroding, indefinite detention-craving, Wall Street-dependent moderates.

So, let's see: Obama will need seventy Democrats in the Senate and three hundred Democrats in the House to do anything? Would you like a new iPod and a pony to go with that? Odd; Bush was able to destroy the economy, shred civil liberties and invade Iraq with far fewer Republicans. But unless the economy takes a sudden and drastic upturn, I think stasis is the best Obama and his worshipers can hope for.

Extremists to the Right of Me! Extremists to the Left of Me!

Speaking of Tabloid Friend, he linked to this image today:
With this text below it:

Register residents to vote, get out the vote and insure that there is a high electorate turnout in 2012 because President Barack Hussein Obama needs to be re-elected, 70 democratic U.S. senators and 300 U.S. representatives need to be elected to perform the "People's" work.

The 112th U.S. congress will go down as the worst congress ever, thanks to the republicans and T.E.A. republicans that would rather insure that Obama is defeated than legislating for the majority while protecting the rights of our minorities.

Replace All republicans, T.E.A. republicans and some democrats with those individuals that will work for America and NOT for the special interests and their respective political party.

Of course, we'll be so much better off with moderates in Congress and the White House -- nice, murderous, warmongering, public education-undermining, Social Security-eroding, indefinite detention-craving, Wall Street-dependent moderates.

So, let's see: Obama will need seventy Democrats in the Senate and three hundred Democrats in the House to do anything? Would you like a new iPod and a pony to go with that? Odd; Bush was able to destroy the economy, shred civil liberties and invade Iraq with far fewer Republicans. But unless the economy takes a sudden and drastic upturn, I think stasis is the best Obama and his worshipers can hope for.

Also, Chocolate Rations Will Be Raised From Thirty to Twenty Grams

What a shameless liar he is.

President Obama: "Today also begins a new chapter in the relationship between our two countries. Two years ago we saw a coup in Honduras that threatened to move the country away from democracy and, in part because of pressure from the international community, but also because of the strong commitment to democracy and leadership by President Lobo, what we have been seeing is a restoration of democratic practices and a commitment to reconciliation that gives us great hope."

When an American president talks about "restoration of democratic practices," you know he's just blowing smoke. This phrase only gets used of regimes where there was never democracy to begin with.

P.S. Will Obama speak out against the violence in New York City by anti-democratic forces? Of course not. Incidentally, this video, which shows Wall Street types waving cluelessly from fortresses while sipping champagne, is amusing. We're getting mixed signals from the corporate media, though: on one hand, let them eat cake; on the other, is there a personal safety problem for us? But the champagne video is from September 23. I guess the bankers are taking the protests more seriously now.

Also, Chocolate Rations Will Be Raised From Thirty to Twenty Grams

What a shameless liar he is.

President Obama: "Today also begins a new chapter in the relationship between our two countries. Two years ago we saw a coup in Honduras that threatened to move the country away from democracy and, in part because of pressure from the international community, but also because of the strong commitment to democracy and leadership by President Lobo, what we have been seeing is a restoration of democratic practices and a commitment to reconciliation that gives us great hope."

When an American president talks about "restoration of democratic practices," you know he's just blowing smoke. This phrase only gets used of regimes where there was never democracy to begin with.

P.S. Will Obama speak out against the violence in New York City by anti-democratic forces? Of course not. Incidentally, this video, which shows Wall Street types waving cluelessly from fortresses while sipping champagne, is amusing. We're getting mixed signals from the corporate media, though: on one hand, let them eat cake; on the other, is there a personal safety problem for us? But the champagne video is from September 23. I guess the bankers are taking the protests more seriously now.

Our Used-Car Salesman

I'm still not sure there's any good reason to write about this -- I mean, everyone who reads this blog must surely be aware of what's wrong with Obama's budget deal, right? -- but I've been collecting links and thinking about this for over a week now, and seeing the defenses of Obama by his slobbering fans, so I might as well get this off my chest.

Of course, it's not only liberals and Obamaristas who are twisting the story to their own ends. The right-wing media have aimed for balance by pretending that it's only the Democrats, and Obama, who are obstinate and unyielding; the New York Daily News front page here (via) is a good example. RWA1 linked on Facebook to a column by George Will, "Congress Stands Its Ground", with the comment "Right on target." George Will! George Will, who couldn't hit a target three feet away with a shotgun! First Will praises Speaker Boehner:

Amid these tawdry episodes, House Speaker John Boehner signaled constitutional sanity regained: “Congress will forge a responsible path forward.” Congress. Obama has marginalized himself.

Then he attacks Obama:

When he was a lecturer on constitutional law, he evidently skipped the separation-of-powers doctrine. But, then, because this doctrine impedes the progressives’ goal of unleashing untrammeled government, they have long loathed it: Woodrow Wilson, the first president to criticize the American founding, considered the separation of powers the Constitution’s “radical defect.”

But for Congress to go it alone is also to ignore the separation-of-powers doctrine, and Boehner conveniently forgot that there are two houses of Congress, and his party only controls one. It would have been more honest to speak of the Republican Party instead of Congress. A couple of days later, it emerged that Boehner didn't even control his own party: those eighty-seven Teabagging Congressional freshmen whom Will praised for their principled intransigence handed him his ass on a platter. (Another reminder that it's not enough to have principles, you have to have good ones.) And, of course, it's not just the executive who unleashes untrammeled government: Congress has also been the right-wingers' scapegoat for their supposedly out-of-control spending.

Considering the source, I make free to doubt whether Wilson was the first president to criticize "the American founding," but in any case he wasn't the last. George W. Bush denounced the Constitution as "just a goddamned piece of paper," and few Republicans objected to his trampling on our sacred charter while he was in power, just as few Democrats object to Obama's doing it now.

RWA1 also linked to "Debt Ceiling Chicken," a Town Hall column by Thomas Sowell, arguing that the debt ceiling should be repealed. This one was a little better; though Sowell is a fierce a partisan as RWA1. Sowell blamed only Obama and the Democrats for out-of-control government spending, with not a word about Bush or Reagan, both of whom had to raise the debt ceiling in order to continue their out-of-control spending.

One thing that became very tiresome early on was the fake even-handedness of much of the media and the ordinary citizens they liked to quote, accusing "both" sides of refusal to compromise. It was pretty clear that neither the media nor their people in the street had any idea what issues were involved, but it didn't help that Obama played the same game. Anyone who paid attention saw that Obama "compromised" at every turn, giving the Republicans what they asked for, even offering to outdo them in terms of spending cuts, and getting nothing back - which is not compromise. Whatever It Is I'm Against It cited his own critique of Obama's position from last December, which was eerily prescient: Obama is saying the same stupid things he said then:

“This country was founded on compromise.” Er, the American War of Semi-Independence? (Update: Rick Perlstein writes on his Facebook page, “Give me liberty or give me illness.” “Loosen my restraints somewhat or give me death.”) “I couldn’t go through the front door at this country’s founding. And if we were really thinking about ideal positions, we wouldn’t have a union.” Oh, I see, the compromise of slavery. That’s your standard for a really good deal, is it? I guess the unemployed should be happy the Republicans weren’t demanding a repeal of the 13th Amendment. Yet.

And Obama's apologists are rushing into the breach to defend the Collaborator in Chief. I waded through a couple hundred comments under this post at alicublog on Sunday night, and watched them thrashing around. Accusations of "conspiracy theories" flew at Obama's critics, even after it was pointed out that no conspiracy was involved where the malfeasance was carried out in plain sight. "You'd rather they addressed the debt ceiling a year and a half ago?" Well, yes; and "they" could have.

Then it was time to blame the "masses": "In all of this, there is one segment that cannot be fixed or even addressed: The overwhelming ignorance and apathy of the voting public." No explanation, or any recognition that polls show consistently that overwhelming majorities of the voting public oppose entitlement cuts and favor raising taxes on the rich. The trouble is that there's no one for them to vote for. After pointing this out I commented:

Both parties like the "overwhelming ignorance and apathy of the voting public," and spend a lot of effort making sure it continues. The question, then, is to figure out how to get candidates who will represent our interests. That's not going to be easy, but unless it's impossible I'd like to know how to make it happen. As others have already suggested here, I don't think it's going to happen through voting, or even through getting involved in local politics, though local politics can be more responsive to voters' wishes. It's going to include direct action of various kinds.

Another alicublog regular replied:

I'm not a believer in the idea of destroying everything so a perfect Utopia can arise from the ashes; if I were, I'd be out there in the Tea Party screaming about getting gubmit tyrants out of my Medicare. When you mention "direct action" you make me very, very nervous ... although I admit that sometimes, the thought of pitchforks and lampposts is heartening.

I asked who had endorsed destroying everything, because I hadn't. As for her reaction to "direct action," I asked:

Do you know what "direct action" means? Ever heard of this guy called Martin Luther King, Jr.? Some other folks called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee? I'm not calling for "pitchforks and lampposts." If you are, you're dreaming, to put it nicely.

"Acting at the grassroots level" is direct action. Of course, it makes the bosses/rulers very, very nervous. Consider both national party conventions in 2008, and 2004: any serious grassroots action will be met with state violence, and if you think Obama would never do such a thing, think again.

This is why liberals are so useless. I admit, I'm not sure what sorts of direct action, or where. But we've seen very forcefully how useless voting by itself is at bringing about change.

Funniest, though, was alicublog regular Chris V, who kept asking people what they thought should be done. When someone invited him to answer his own question, this was his response:

You may wish to drop a line to the Washington Post, explaining that decreasing revenue is also a way to get to a debt crisis, for fuck's sake, and although opinions are welcome, this clown's [referring to Teabag leader Judson Philips] contribution is not informed opinion, it's stupidity, and their readers (that's us) are not served by a moron lying in their faces.

Repeat as needed. Apply as necessary to other infected areas as well.

Whoa! Radical! That'll get their attention! Someone else replied, "Repeat as needed? This is The Washington Post you're talking about. Repeat forever is more like it." The Post, it will be remembered, has on its staff such intellectual luminaries as Dana Milbank, William Kristol, and George Will, and it has continually urged Obama to move to the center.

And then longtime Obama groupie (I'm using the term advisedly) aimai offered up this startling comment:

I'd also like to add that Obama seems to invoke in his Republican opponents an almost sexual panic, a fear of seduction. Good negotiating includes a large element of seduction--read any account of Teddy Kennedy or any of the old masters of the Senate. But Obama's opponents are for a variety of reasons chief among them race but also including class, age, religion, and modern partisan culture wars, absolutely predisposed to reject any kind of negotiation with him. They are deathly afraid of liking him, of doing what he wants because he convinces them and seems reasonable. That's partly because they know their caucus and their voters think he's black satan. And its partly because he's very seductive and they fear being seduced because they know it loses them the upper hand. I really can't imagine what it must be being Obama and being forced to work with this hysterical, ugly, meanspirited, bigoted, lying, corrupt group of intransigent Senators and Representatives. I mean I literally can't imagine having to go to work every day and work to get anything done with people who do not scruple to sit with you and eat your food and then go out and lie about you and attack you personally on the steps of your house.

Obama? Seductive? This is one thing that continues to baffle me. He's a good speaker only by comparison with Dubya. I avoid listening to his speeches (and read them instead, which makes his dishonesty even more blatantly obvious) because I can't stand his hectoring tone. Obama loyalists really need to get rid of the idea that because they find him adorable, everybody else (except Republicans) does too.

[P.S. Let's also try plugging some other values in for those variables there. Imagine being asked -- no, demanded to support and vote for someone who does not scruple to sit with you and beg money from you and assume that he's entitled to your vote, and then goes out and lies about you and attacks you personally on the steps of your house. To say nothing of acting, consistently, against your interests and needs, while collaborating assiduously with the other party. That's what Obama does to so much of his constituency, not just the "left." Maybe if this commenter looked at the situation from this perspective, she'd understand why the Democrats lost the House in 2010, and why Obama's approval numbers have dropped.]

Yes, the Republicans are insane. The trouble is, Obama isn't: he's quite sane. (IOZ did a good post on that after one of the debates with McCain.) But that's not a recommendation. He's highly pragmatic, he's as dishonest as Nixon (and increasingly as full of self-pity), he's looking out for number one, and if the Tea Party didn't exist, he'd have had to invent it.

Look: I heart lust. But this is sheer projection. aimai, you may recall, was the wannabe courtier who gushed, earlier this year:

Whatever my feelings about Obama's centrism I've got to say that he and Michelle really adorn the White House. As a couple they are just...well...magnificent and the children are fucking adorable (same age as my two so I really feel for them). The huffpo lineup of former first ladies and their dresses at these state dinners was like the evolution of humanity from grotesquely old and billowy faux victoriana to blooming, statuesque, youth.

What's depressing is that these people are intelligent, well-educated, capable of rationality. But party loyalty and adherence to a cult of personality, even of Fuhrerprinzip, have taken their toll. Or as Glenn Greenwald put it, more kindly,

A mere three years ago, huge numbers of people invested substantial time, attention, energy, emotion and "hope" in fighting to put Barack Obama in the White House. The very human incentives not to reach this conclusion are both obvious and overwhelming.

Our Used-Car Salesman

I'm still not sure there's any good reason to write about this -- I mean, everyone who reads this blog must surely be aware of what's wrong with Obama's budget deal, right? -- but I've been collecting links and thinking about this for over a week now, and seeing the defenses of Obama by his slobbering fans, so I might as well get this off my chest.

Of course, it's not only liberals and Obamaristas who are twisting the story to their own ends. The right-wing media have aimed for balance by pretending that it's only the Democrats, and Obama, who are obstinate and unyielding; the New York Daily News front page here (via) is a good example. RWA1 linked on Facebook to a column by George Will, "Congress Stands Its Ground", with the comment "Right on target." George Will! George Will, who couldn't hit a target three feet away with a shotgun! First Will praises Speaker Boehner:

Amid these tawdry episodes, House Speaker John Boehner signaled constitutional sanity regained: “Congress will forge a responsible path forward.” Congress. Obama has marginalized himself.

Then he attacks Obama:

When he was a lecturer on constitutional law, he evidently skipped the separation-of-powers doctrine. But, then, because this doctrine impedes the progressives’ goal of unleashing untrammeled government, they have long loathed it: Woodrow Wilson, the first president to criticize the American founding, considered the separation of powers the Constitution’s “radical defect.”

But for Congress to go it alone is also to ignore the separation-of-powers doctrine, and Boehner conveniently forgot that there are two houses of Congress, and his party only controls one. It would have been more honest to speak of the Republican Party instead of Congress. A couple of days later, it emerged that Boehner didn't even control his own party: those eighty-seven Teabagging Congressional freshmen whom Will praised for their principled intransigence handed him his ass on a platter. (Another reminder that it's not enough to have principles, you have to have good ones.) And, of course, it's not just the executive who unleashes untrammeled government: Congress has also been the right-wingers' scapegoat for their supposedly out-of-control spending.

Considering the source, I make free to doubt whether Wilson was the first president to criticize "the American founding," but in any case he wasn't the last. George W. Bush denounced the Constitution as "just a goddamned piece of paper," and few Republicans objected to his trampling on our sacred charter while he was in power, just as few Democrats object to Obama's doing it now.

RWA1 also linked to "Debt Ceiling Chicken," a Town Hall column by Thomas Sowell, arguing that the debt ceiling should be repealed. This one was a little better; though Sowell is a fierce a partisan as RWA1. Sowell blamed only Obama and the Democrats for out-of-control government spending, with not a word about Bush or Reagan, both of whom had to raise the debt ceiling in order to continue their out-of-control spending.

One thing that became very tiresome early on was the fake even-handedness of much of the media and the ordinary citizens they liked to quote, accusing "both" sides of refusal to compromise. It was pretty clear that neither the media nor their people in the street had any idea what issues were involved, but it didn't help that Obama played the same game. Anyone who paid attention saw that Obama "compromised" at every turn, giving the Republicans what they asked for, even offering to outdo them in terms of spending cuts, and getting nothing back - which is not compromise. Whatever It Is I'm Against It cited his own critique of Obama's position from last December, which was eerily prescient: Obama is saying the same stupid things he said then:

“This country was founded on compromise.” Er, the American War of Semi-Independence? (Update: Rick Perlstein writes on his Facebook page, “Give me liberty or give me illness.” “Loosen my restraints somewhat or give me death.”) “I couldn’t go through the front door at this country’s founding. And if we were really thinking about ideal positions, we wouldn’t have a union.” Oh, I see, the compromise of slavery. That’s your standard for a really good deal, is it? I guess the unemployed should be happy the Republicans weren’t demanding a repeal of the 13th Amendment. Yet.

And Obama's apologists are rushing into the breach to defend the Collaborator in Chief. I waded through a couple hundred comments under this post at alicublog on Sunday night, and watched them thrashing around. Accusations of "conspiracy theories" flew at Obama's critics, even after it was pointed out that no conspiracy was involved where the malfeasance was carried out in plain sight. "You'd rather they addressed the debt ceiling a year and a half ago?" Well, yes; and "they" could have.

Then it was time to blame the "masses": "In all of this, there is one segment that cannot be fixed or even addressed: The overwhelming ignorance and apathy of the voting public." No explanation, or any recognition that polls show consistently that overwhelming majorities of the voting public oppose entitlement cuts and favor raising taxes on the rich. The trouble is that there's no one for them to vote for. After pointing this out I commented:

Both parties like the "overwhelming ignorance and apathy of the voting public," and spend a lot of effort making sure it continues. The question, then, is to figure out how to get candidates who will represent our interests. That's not going to be easy, but unless it's impossible I'd like to know how to make it happen. As others have already suggested here, I don't think it's going to happen through voting, or even through getting involved in local politics, though local politics can be more responsive to voters' wishes. It's going to include direct action of various kinds.

Another alicublog regular replied:

I'm not a believer in the idea of destroying everything so a perfect Utopia can arise from the ashes; if I were, I'd be out there in the Tea Party screaming about getting gubmit tyrants out of my Medicare. When you mention "direct action" you make me very, very nervous ... although I admit that sometimes, the thought of pitchforks and lampposts is heartening.

I asked who had endorsed destroying everything, because I hadn't. As for her reaction to "direct action," I asked:

Do you know what "direct action" means? Ever heard of this guy called Martin Luther King, Jr.? Some other folks called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee? I'm not calling for "pitchforks and lampposts." If you are, you're dreaming, to put it nicely.

"Acting at the grassroots level" is direct action. Of course, it makes the bosses/rulers very, very nervous. Consider both national party conventions in 2008, and 2004: any serious grassroots action will be met with state violence, and if you think Obama would never do such a thing, think again.

This is why liberals are so useless. I admit, I'm not sure what sorts of direct action, or where. But we've seen very forcefully how useless voting by itself is at bringing about change.

Funniest, though, was alicublog regular Chris V, who kept asking people what they thought should be done. When someone invited him to answer his own question, this was his response:

You may wish to drop a line to the Washington Post, explaining that decreasing revenue is also a way to get to a debt crisis, for fuck's sake, and although opinions are welcome, this clown's [referring to Teabag leader Judson Philips] contribution is not informed opinion, it's stupidity, and their readers (that's us) are not served by a moron lying in their faces.

Repeat as needed. Apply as necessary to other infected areas as well.

Whoa! Radical! That'll get their attention! Someone else replied, "Repeat as needed? This is The Washington Post you're talking about. Repeat forever is more like it." The Post, it will be remembered, has on its staff such intellectual luminaries as Dana Milbank, William Kristol, and George Will, and it has continually urged Obama to move to the center.

And then longtime Obama groupie (I'm using the term advisedly) aimai offered up this startling comment:

I'd also like to add that Obama seems to invoke in his Republican opponents an almost sexual panic, a fear of seduction. Good negotiating includes a large element of seduction--read any account of Teddy Kennedy or any of the old masters of the Senate. But Obama's opponents are for a variety of reasons chief among them race but also including class, age, religion, and modern partisan culture wars, absolutely predisposed to reject any kind of negotiation with him. They are deathly afraid of liking him, of doing what he wants because he convinces them and seems reasonable. That's partly because they know their caucus and their voters think he's black satan. And its partly because he's very seductive and they fear being seduced because they know it loses them the upper hand. I really can't imagine what it must be being Obama and being forced to work with this hysterical, ugly, meanspirited, bigoted, lying, corrupt group of intransigent Senators and Representatives. I mean I literally can't imagine having to go to work every day and work to get anything done with people who do not scruple to sit with you and eat your food and then go out and lie about you and attack you personally on the steps of your house.

Obama? Seductive? This is one thing that continues to baffle me. He's a good speaker only by comparison with Dubya. I avoid listening to his speeches (and read them instead, which makes his dishonesty even more blatantly obvious) because I can't stand his hectoring tone. Obama loyalists really need to get rid of the idea that because they find him adorable, everybody else (except Republicans) does too.

[P.S. Let's also try plugging some other values in for those variables there. Imagine being asked -- no, demanded to support and vote for someone who does not scruple to sit with you and beg money from you and assume that he's entitled to your vote, and then goes out and lies about you and attacks you personally on the steps of your house. To say nothing of acting, consistently, against your interests and needs, while collaborating assiduously with the other party. That's what Obama does to so much of his constituency, not just the "left." Maybe if this commenter looked at the situation from this perspective, she'd understand why the Democrats lost the House in 2010, and why Obama's approval numbers have dropped.]

Yes, the Republicans are insane. The trouble is, Obama isn't: he's quite sane. (IOZ did a good post on that after one of the debates with McCain.) But that's not a recommendation. He's highly pragmatic, he's as dishonest as Nixon (and increasingly as full of self-pity), he's looking out for number one, and if the Tea Party didn't exist, he'd have had to invent it.

Look: I heart lust. But this is sheer projection. aimai, you may recall, was the wannabe courtier who gushed, earlier this year:

Whatever my feelings about Obama's centrism I've got to say that he and Michelle really adorn the White House. As a couple they are just...well...magnificent and the children are fucking adorable (same age as my two so I really feel for them). The huffpo lineup of former first ladies and their dresses at these state dinners was like the evolution of humanity from grotesquely old and billowy faux victoriana to blooming, statuesque, youth.

What's depressing is that these people are intelligent, well-educated, capable of rationality. But party loyalty and adherence to a cult of personality, even of Fuhrerprinzip, have taken their toll. Or as Glenn Greenwald put it, more kindly,

A mere three years ago, huge numbers of people invested substantial time, attention, energy, emotion and "hope" in fighting to put Barack Obama in the White House. The very human incentives not to reach this conclusion are both obvious and overwhelming.

The Blame Game; or, A Hard Package Is Good to Find

According to this poll, "67 percent of respondents said any debt deal out of Washington must include tax hikes for the wealthiest Americans." (According to the same poll, 54 percent blame Bush for the state of the economy, while only 27 percent blame Obama; and "that voters will largely blame Republicans, rather than Obama, if the debt limit is not raised."

According to President Obama (via), he isn't listening:

And I think it’s important for the American people that everybody in this town set politics aside, that everybody in this town set our individual interests aside, and we try to do some tough stuff. And I’ve already taken some heat from my party for being willing to compromise. My expectation and hope is, is that everybody, in the coming days, is going to be willing to compromise.

Because it turns out poll after poll, many done by your organizations, show that it’s not just Democrats who think we need to take a balanced approach; it’s Republicans as well.

The clear majority of Republican voters think that any deficit reduction package should have a balanced approach and should include some revenues. That’s not just Democrats; that’s the majority of Republicans. You’ve got a whole slew of Republican officials from previous administrations. You’ve got a bipartisan commission that has said that we need revenues.

That would be the Catfood Commission, which called for cuts in Social Security and Medicare. As does President Obama. Those polls also consistently show that most Americans do not want cuts in Social Security and Medicare, nor do they care about the deficit nearly as much as they care about jobs.

So he's not listening, or he doesn't care:

We simply need to make these tough choices and be willing to take on our bases. And everybody knows it.

La la la la he can't hear you! -- Not unless you donate a lot more than five measly dollars to his campaign war chest, anyway. Then he suddenly can hear you. Obama knows he's at odds with his base, if by that he means the people who voted for him as opposed to the people who paid for him. He wants to give them spending cuts while pretending that he's interested in cuts that won't hurt them.

And that’s, by the way, what I said in the meeting two days ago. I was very blunt. I said the American people do not want to see a bunch of posturing; they don’t want to hear a bunch of sound bites.

Which is why he's provided us with a bunch of posturing and a bunch of sound bites, no doubt.

It may be that it's not "politically possible" for Obama to do the right thing; he certainly isn't competent to do it, though he seems competent enough as a servant of the wealthy. Thanks to his frittering away the mandate he had when he took office, his party lost their majority in the House, which does make his job harder; but if he'd cared, he'd have done something else. But it's not his fault, it's somebody else's: the Republicans (not all of them, just the radical extremists -- he seems to see Boehner as a moderate), the professional left, those who see the glass as half empty instead of half full, who need to have their heads examined. Obama isn't just the new Reagan, he's the new Nixon.

The Blame Game; or, A Hard Package Is Good to Find

According to this poll, "67 percent of respondents said any debt deal out of Washington must include tax hikes for the wealthiest Americans." (According to the same poll, 54 percent blame Bush for the state of the economy, while only 27 percent blame Obama; and "that voters will largely blame Republicans, rather than Obama, if the debt limit is not raised."

According to President Obama (via), he isn't listening:

And I think it’s important for the American people that everybody in this town set politics aside, that everybody in this town set our individual interests aside, and we try to do some tough stuff. And I’ve already taken some heat from my party for being willing to compromise. My expectation and hope is, is that everybody, in the coming days, is going to be willing to compromise.

Because it turns out poll after poll, many done by your organizations, show that it’s not just Democrats who think we need to take a balanced approach; it’s Republicans as well.

The clear majority of Republican voters think that any deficit reduction package should have a balanced approach and should include some revenues. That’s not just Democrats; that’s the majority of Republicans. You’ve got a whole slew of Republican officials from previous administrations. You’ve got a bipartisan commission that has said that we need revenues.

That would be the Catfood Commission, which called for cuts in Social Security and Medicare. As does President Obama. Those polls also consistently show that most Americans do not want cuts in Social Security and Medicare, nor do they care about the deficit nearly as much as they care about jobs.

So he's not listening, or he doesn't care:

We simply need to make these tough choices and be willing to take on our bases. And everybody knows it.

La la la la he can't hear you! -- Not unless you donate a lot more than five measly dollars to his campaign war chest, anyway. Then he suddenly can hear you. Obama knows he's at odds with his base, if by that he means the people who voted for him as opposed to the people who paid for him. He wants to give them spending cuts while pretending that he's interested in cuts that won't hurt them.

And that’s, by the way, what I said in the meeting two days ago. I was very blunt. I said the American people do not want to see a bunch of posturing; they don’t want to hear a bunch of sound bites.

Which is why he's provided us with a bunch of posturing and a bunch of sound bites, no doubt.

It may be that it's not "politically possible" for Obama to do the right thing; he certainly isn't competent to do it, though he seems competent enough as a servant of the wealthy. Thanks to his frittering away the mandate he had when he took office, his party lost their majority in the House, which does make his job harder; but if he'd cared, he'd have done something else. But it's not his fault, it's somebody else's: the Republicans (not all of them, just the radical extremists -- he seems to see Boehner as a moderate), the professional left, those who see the glass as half empty instead of half full, who need to have their heads examined. Obama isn't just the new Reagan, he's the new Nixon.

ITMFA

Ten days since my last post. I can't believe it; I can't remember when I last let so much time lapse between posts around here. I don't even really have an excuse. I haven't been sick, haven't been working extra. I've just been looking idly at all kinds of stuff on the Web, and felt a strange sick dread at the thought of starting a new post. I have been reading offline quite a bit, which has eaten up lots of time and energy, and I don't feel bad about that. And I've been getting plenty of ideas, maybe too many for me to choose from.



Anyway. "ITMFA," of course, means Impeach the Motherfucker Already. The abbreviation derives from the edgy advice columnist Dan Savage, who of course had George W. Bush in mind. That would have been a good idea, but of course the Democratic leadership made sure it never got off the ground, and Savage abandoned the call after a few months. Now we have a new Criminal-in-Chief violating the U.S. Constitution and just begging for removal from office, though we all know that accountability is for ordinary schlubs like you and me, not for the rich and powerful. But -- judging by the reactions of Obama apologists online -- it seems that increasing numbers of people are discussing the possibility anyway.



I first became aware of this when my friend the ambivalent Obama supporter e-mailed me a link to Michelle Bachmann's latest antics, adding:

This is the only reason I wouldn't want to see President Obama impeached. She or someone like her (or worse) might become our next President. Considering her record of homophobia and xenophobia, it could be a MUCH worse disaster than what we have now...

I wrote back:

I agree, but only to a point because it means impunity for his crimes. I know Bachmann is a pig, but the point is that Obama is a criminal. Yes, it could be worse. We could have Bachmann. We could have Stalin. We could have Hitler But that doesn't make Obama any less deserving of impeachment.

My friend replied:

If I had any faith in the people running the system, I'd happily lead the charge for him to be impeached. I have no faith in them at all. :(

Then one of my Facebook friends complained about Glenn Greenwald's detailing of the grounds for impeaching Obama: "Why does Greenwald want to impeach Obama? I didn't know he wanted to have a Republican president instead." I took the easy way out and retorted in comments that Obama is a Republican president, continuing and extending many of Bush/Cheney's worse policies. The trouble with Rob's complaint, though, as I found when I read Greenwald's comments, is that Greenwald didn't call for Obama's impeachment. What he said was this (emphasis added):

AMY GOODMAN: By your analysis, do you consider this an impeachable offense, Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I mean, anytime the president violates the law in a significant way, impeachment is supposed to be one of the leading remedies. So I think the President is clearly violating not only the War Powers Resolution, but also the Constitution. Article I, Section 8, assigns the war-making power to Congress, not to the executive. And even executive-power-revering jurists like Antonin Scalia have said that Article II, the Article II power that makes the commander — the president the commander-in-chief, really means nothing more than, when there’s a war that starts, the president is the top general. He directs how the war is prosecuted. But the idea that presidents can start wars on their own, without any congressional authorization, violates not just the law but the Constitution. So, sure, in theory, when the president violates the law and the Constitution, that’s an impeachable offense. At the same time, we’ve set a very low standard for our tolerance of rampant presidential law breaking. If George Bush and Dick Cheney weren’t impeached for their rampant crimes, it’s hard to see Obama being impeached for this.

That's not exactly a clarion call for putting Obama in the dock; it's more of a weary acknowledgement that, given American contempt for the rule of law where the powerful are concerned, it's not going to happen, even though Obama has committed impeachable offenses.



So it would appear that my friend Rob, like so many Democrats, owes the Republicans an apology. They don't really object to Bush's crimes -- indeed, they don't really consider them crimes, or they'd consider them crimes when a Democratic President commits them -- but they wish they could have had an excuse for removing him from office. (Shades of the Republican coup against Bill Clinton.) Since they don't appear to believe that Bush really did anything wrong, their only reason must be that he is a Republican. I'd like to believe that I have better reasons for hating Bush, or Obama, than mere party loyalty, especially since I don't belong to either party.



At times like this I realize all over again that despite what many people consider my gross cynicism about the government of the United States, I'm really a naive little boy who believes what he learned in Social Studies class: that people who commit crimes should be punished for them, no matter if they are rich or powerful, because everyone is supposed to be equal under the law. I now see that people in government, and many outside of it, think that the law is a tool for settling personal or partisan scores. The Republicans who went after Clinton wanted payback for the impeachment of Richard Nixon, aside from hating Clinton for all kinds of convoluted reasons. (I should mention that I think Clinton had committed some serious crimes, possibly impeachable ones, but having an affair with an intern wasn't one of them.) The only reason anyone who mattered could have seen for trying to impeach George W. Bush was something similar; it couldn't be because he'd actually done something wrong.



Now that President Obama has made his own contempt for the Constitution blazingly clear, his acolytes choose almost consciously not to see it. Why, Rob cried, would Glenn Greenwald want to impeach Obama? Considering that Greenwald had carefully explained how Obama is flouting the law and the Constitution, I have to say that's a willfully stupid question. The answer would be, because he's committing impeachable offenses even as we speak. What better reason could Rob ask for?



Which takes me back to my friend the ambivalent Obama supporter. I've written a few posts in the past in which I've addressed the problem that a president's success is commonly measured in terms of passing legislation -- any legislation, even bad legislation. If he fails often enough, he's weakened politically, though come to think of it that's only a problem if he then tries to pass some good legislation, which Obama hasn't shown much interest in doing. But once again I am rubbing my own nose in the fact that the political classes don't care about the quality of the legislation: it's not how you play the game, it's whether you win or lose.



At which point the cry goes up: But then you're siding with the Republicans! What will happen if the Republicans take over? O waily waily waily ... One other problem with Rob's position is that impeaching Obama will not give the US a Republican president -- Joe Biden is still a Democrat as far as I know, and as Vice President, it would be he who would become President if Obama were removed. So Rob's objection is mere alarmism; two strikes against him. Even granting that there are marginal differences between the Republicans and the Democrats, the net effect of this approach to politics is to let the Republicans win. As Avedon put it at The Sideshow the other day, quoting Chris Floyd:

"Again, I say what I have said here over and over (and will keep on saying): This is what you are supporting, enabling and continuing when you support the Obama Administration. Whether that support is wholehearted -- if you, like Kevin Drum, proudly shut down you own brain and defer supinely to Obama's superior wisdom -- or whether it is reluctant, defensive, 'to keep the other guys out' because you desperately hope the Democrats might possibly be marginally better, the results are still the same: murder, brutality, violence, corruption, chaos and suffering." Like I said last week on Virtually Speaking Susie, I have been voting against Republicans all my life, and it hasn't worked. This all has to change.

I'll go on voting against Republicans, as I presume Avedon will, but I know that if any real change is going to come, it won't come from voting. It'll come from some form of direct action, because that's where change has always come from.



Meanwhile, though, the Obama apologists are confusing the issue, perhaps deliberately, though they do seem to have surrendered to irrationality too thoroughly to realize what they are doing and saying. I basically agree with the Ambivalent Obama Supporter that impeachment would let the Republicans look like they have principles, so it's probably a bad idea. But that doesn't for a minute require me to pretend that Obama isn't a criminal, just like Bush, or hasn't committed impeachable offenses, just like Bush. Anyone who pretends otherwise, given the overwhelming evidence, is a cheap party hack who deserves and will get my eternal contempt. That might be a place to start: attacking Obama and his groupies with principled arguments. "You're either for us, or you're against us" was another Bush line that the Obama groupies have embraced, but they shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. I can call Obama a criminal without thinking that the Republican aren't criminals too.

ITMFA

Ten days since my last post. I can't believe it; I can't remember when I last let so much time lapse between posts around here. I don't even really have an excuse. I haven't been sick, haven't been working extra. I've just been looking idly at all kinds of stuff on the Web, and felt a strange sick dread at the thought of starting a new post. I have been reading offline quite a bit, which has eaten up lots of time and energy, and I don't feel bad about that. And I've been getting plenty of ideas, maybe too many for me to choose from.



Anyway. "ITMFA," of course, means Impeach the Motherfucker Already. The abbreviation derives from the edgy advice columnist Dan Savage, who of course had George W. Bush in mind. That would have been a good idea, but of course the Democratic leadership made sure it never got off the ground, and Savage abandoned the call after a few months. Now we have a new Criminal-in-Chief violating the U.S. Constitution and just begging for removal from office, though we all know that accountability is for ordinary schlubs like you and me, not for the rich and powerful. But -- judging by the reactions of Obama apologists online -- it seems that increasing numbers of people are discussing the possibility anyway.



I first became aware of this when my friend the ambivalent Obama supporter e-mailed me a link to Michelle Bachmann's latest antics, adding:

This is the only reason I wouldn't want to see President Obama impeached. She or someone like her (or worse) might become our next President. Considering her record of homophobia and xenophobia, it could be a MUCH worse disaster than what we have now...

I wrote back:

I agree, but only to a point because it means impunity for his crimes. I know Bachmann is a pig, but the point is that Obama is a criminal. Yes, it could be worse. We could have Bachmann. We could have Stalin. We could have Hitler But that doesn't make Obama any less deserving of impeachment.

My friend replied:

If I had any faith in the people running the system, I'd happily lead the charge for him to be impeached. I have no faith in them at all. :(

Then one of my Facebook friends complained about Glenn Greenwald's detailing of the grounds for impeaching Obama: "Why does Greenwald want to impeach Obama? I didn't know he wanted to have a Republican president instead." I took the easy way out and retorted in comments that Obama is a Republican president, continuing and extending many of Bush/Cheney's worse policies. The trouble with Rob's complaint, though, as I found when I read Greenwald's comments, is that Greenwald didn't call for Obama's impeachment. What he said was this (emphasis added):

AMY GOODMAN: By your analysis, do you consider this an impeachable offense, Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I mean, anytime the president violates the law in a significant way, impeachment is supposed to be one of the leading remedies. So I think the President is clearly violating not only the War Powers Resolution, but also the Constitution. Article I, Section 8, assigns the war-making power to Congress, not to the executive. And even executive-power-revering jurists like Antonin Scalia have said that Article II, the Article II power that makes the commander — the president the commander-in-chief, really means nothing more than, when there’s a war that starts, the president is the top general. He directs how the war is prosecuted. But the idea that presidents can start wars on their own, without any congressional authorization, violates not just the law but the Constitution. So, sure, in theory, when the president violates the law and the Constitution, that’s an impeachable offense. At the same time, we’ve set a very low standard for our tolerance of rampant presidential law breaking. If George Bush and Dick Cheney weren’t impeached for their rampant crimes, it’s hard to see Obama being impeached for this.

That's not exactly a clarion call for putting Obama in the dock; it's more of a weary acknowledgement that, given American contempt for the rule of law where the powerful are concerned, it's not going to happen, even though Obama has committed impeachable offenses.



So it would appear that my friend Rob, like so many Democrats, owes the Republicans an apology. They don't really object to Bush's crimes -- indeed, they don't really consider them crimes, or they'd consider them crimes when a Democratic President commits them -- but they wish they could have had an excuse for removing him from office. (Shades of the Republican coup against Bill Clinton.) Since they don't appear to believe that Bush really did anything wrong, their only reason must be that he is a Republican. I'd like to believe that I have better reasons for hating Bush, or Obama, than mere party loyalty, especially since I don't belong to either party.



At times like this I realize all over again that despite what many people consider my gross cynicism about the government of the United States, I'm really a naive little boy who believes what he learned in Social Studies class: that people who commit crimes should be punished for them, no matter if they are rich or powerful, because everyone is supposed to be equal under the law. I now see that people in government, and many outside of it, think that the law is a tool for settling personal or partisan scores. The Republicans who went after Clinton wanted payback for the impeachment of Richard Nixon, aside from hating Clinton for all kinds of convoluted reasons. (I should mention that I think Clinton had committed some serious crimes, possibly impeachable ones, but having an affair with an intern wasn't one of them.) The only reason anyone who mattered could have seen for trying to impeach George W. Bush was something similar; it couldn't be because he'd actually done something wrong.



Now that President Obama has made his own contempt for the Constitution blazingly clear, his acolytes choose almost consciously not to see it. Why, Rob cried, would Glenn Greenwald want to impeach Obama? Considering that Greenwald had carefully explained how Obama is flouting the law and the Constitution, I have to say that's a willfully stupid question. The answer would be, because he's committing impeachable offenses even as we speak. What better reason could Rob ask for?



Which takes me back to my friend the ambivalent Obama supporter. I've written a few posts in the past in which I've addressed the problem that a president's success is commonly measured in terms of passing legislation -- any legislation, even bad legislation. If he fails often enough, he's weakened politically, though come to think of it that's only a problem if he then tries to pass some good legislation, which Obama hasn't shown much interest in doing. But once again I am rubbing my own nose in the fact that the political classes don't care about the quality of the legislation: it's not how you play the game, it's whether you win or lose.



At which point the cry goes up: But then you're siding with the Republicans! What will happen if the Republicans take over? O waily waily waily ... One other problem with Rob's position is that impeaching Obama will not give the US a Republican president -- Joe Biden is still a Democrat as far as I know, and as Vice President, it would be he who would become President if Obama were removed. So Rob's objection is mere alarmism; two strikes against him. Even granting that there are marginal differences between the Republicans and the Democrats, the net effect of this approach to politics is to let the Republicans win. As Avedon put it at The Sideshow the other day, quoting Chris Floyd:

"Again, I say what I have said here over and over (and will keep on saying): This is what you are supporting, enabling and continuing when you support the Obama Administration. Whether that support is wholehearted -- if you, like Kevin Drum, proudly shut down you own brain and defer supinely to Obama's superior wisdom -- or whether it is reluctant, defensive, 'to keep the other guys out' because you desperately hope the Democrats might possibly be marginally better, the results are still the same: murder, brutality, violence, corruption, chaos and suffering." Like I said last week on Virtually Speaking Susie, I have been voting against Republicans all my life, and it hasn't worked. This all has to change.

I'll go on voting against Republicans, as I presume Avedon will, but I know that if any real change is going to come, it won't come from voting. It'll come from some form of direct action, because that's where change has always come from.



Meanwhile, though, the Obama apologists are confusing the issue, perhaps deliberately, though they do seem to have surrendered to irrationality too thoroughly to realize what they are doing and saying. I basically agree with the Ambivalent Obama Supporter that impeachment would let the Republicans look like they have principles, so it's probably a bad idea. But that doesn't for a minute require me to pretend that Obama isn't a criminal, just like Bush, or hasn't committed impeachable offenses, just like Bush. Anyone who pretends otherwise, given the overwhelming evidence, is a cheap party hack who deserves and will get my eternal contempt. That might be a place to start: attacking Obama and his groupies with principled arguments. "You're either for us, or you're against us" was another Bush line that the Obama groupies have embraced, but they shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. I can call Obama a criminal without thinking that the Republican aren't criminals too.

We'll Meet Again, Don't Know Where, Don't Know When

Roy Edroso at alicublog has a post about right-wing reactions to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, with a focus on Japanese nuclear power plants.

These lunatics are saying that the Japanese reactors got through the tsunami "without a dent," which proves that we should get nuclear plants up and running now. Among the choice quotes: "Regulations don't make ya safe, safety makes ya safe!" Also they claim wind power is more dangerous than nuclear because a hawk flew into a turbine.

I've tried for years to figure out what motivates them, but I'm leaning toward the explanation that they were sent by aliens to destroy the human race.

But he forgets this wingnut, who just a year ago was calling for a threefold increase in public financing for the construction of nuclear power plants, while nixing funds for storage of nuclear waste.

"It's ironic, but Obama could end up being the biggest pro-nuclear power president since Dwight Eisenhower," says Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, a nuclear deterrence expert who served as deputy for nonproliferation policy in the Department of Defense from 1989-1993 under President George H.W. Bush.

Maybe the President will change his mind in the light of current events, but probably only until the next news cycle.

Meanwhile, a reporter at Obama's latest press conference actually dared to question him (via) about the brutal and degrading treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning at Quantico brig. (For which he, as Commander-in-Chief, is ultimately responsible.) The Saint replied:

With respect to Private Manning, I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are. I can't go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Private Manning's safety as well.

My point here is that a good many liberals prefer to look at the dementia of the far right, while doing their best to ignore the dementia of their own near-right heroes. While I enjoy Edroso's surveillance of the fringes, most of the time he forgets how deranged and evil the mainstream is.

We'll Meet Again, Don't Know Where, Don't Know When

Roy Edroso at alicublog has a post about right-wing reactions to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, with a focus on Japanese nuclear power plants.

These lunatics are saying that the Japanese reactors got through the tsunami "without a dent," which proves that we should get nuclear plants up and running now. Among the choice quotes: "Regulations don't make ya safe, safety makes ya safe!" Also they claim wind power is more dangerous than nuclear because a hawk flew into a turbine.

I've tried for years to figure out what motivates them, but I'm leaning toward the explanation that they were sent by aliens to destroy the human race.

But he forgets this wingnut, who just a year ago was calling for a threefold increase in public financing for the construction of nuclear power plants, while nixing funds for storage of nuclear waste.

"It's ironic, but Obama could end up being the biggest pro-nuclear power president since Dwight Eisenhower," says Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, a nuclear deterrence expert who served as deputy for nonproliferation policy in the Department of Defense from 1989-1993 under President George H.W. Bush.

Maybe the President will change his mind in the light of current events, but probably only until the next news cycle.

Meanwhile, a reporter at Obama's latest press conference actually dared to question him (via) about the brutal and degrading treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning at Quantico brig. (For which he, as Commander-in-Chief, is ultimately responsible.) The Saint replied:

With respect to Private Manning, I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are. I can't go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Private Manning's safety as well.

My point here is that a good many liberals prefer to look at the dementia of the far right, while doing their best to ignore the dementia of their own near-right heroes. While I enjoy Edroso's surveillance of the fringes, most of the time he forgets how deranged and evil the mainstream is.

Come With Me If You Want To Live

Avedon at Sideshow links to an excellent post on Obama by Ian Welsh, and adds:

Obama had the power to do many, many good things, and he refused every opportunity to do them. He refused to even attempt the most basic steps of negotiation with the opposition, asking not for a higher goal than what we really needed, but a lower goal as a pre-compromise, thus lowering the bar further still. He alleged (when he was trying to get elected) that he believed single-payer was the best way to go, but then he started babbling about the public option before he'd even started making a case for single-payer, having simply declared that passing single-payer wasn't politically feasible. (Oh, yeah? Start pounding it into the general public that everyone in America can get effectively free health care without raising taxes, and see how far Congress gets trying to resist it past the next election.) He even telegraphed to the press that he wasn't even really trying to get his so-called "compromise" of the public option, but instead was hoping the threat of the public option would frighten the insurance companies into slightly softening their viciously predatory and fraudulent practices - which it didn't. If he'd really wanted single-payer, he could of course have spent a lot of time explaining how real socialized medicine actually works in Britain and used it as the scare image of what "the left" was demanding, forcing the not-so-left to welcome single-payer as a longed-for compromise. And that has been his pattern with everything.

And more.

I read through the comments on Welsh's posts, and it seems to me that the Obamabots, while present, are fewer in number and somewhat less vitriolic than they used to be. Maybe they have bigger fish to fry elsewhere, like showing their cojones by jeering at Glenn Beck in comments at alicublog, but maybe they're losing the faith just a bit. But where will they go? The wilderness is cold and scary, and Robert Gibbs will call them names, and they can't stand that. (It's okay for them to call other Democrats names, of course, to say nothing of The Terminader.)

Come With Me If You Want To Live

Avedon at Sideshow links to an excellent post on Obama by Ian Welsh, and adds:

Obama had the power to do many, many good things, and he refused every opportunity to do them. He refused to even attempt the most basic steps of negotiation with the opposition, asking not for a higher goal than what we really needed, but a lower goal as a pre-compromise, thus lowering the bar further still. He alleged (when he was trying to get elected) that he believed single-payer was the best way to go, but then he started babbling about the public option before he'd even started making a case for single-payer, having simply declared that passing single-payer wasn't politically feasible. (Oh, yeah? Start pounding it into the general public that everyone in America can get effectively free health care without raising taxes, and see how far Congress gets trying to resist it past the next election.) He even telegraphed to the press that he wasn't even really trying to get his so-called "compromise" of the public option, but instead was hoping the threat of the public option would frighten the insurance companies into slightly softening their viciously predatory and fraudulent practices - which it didn't. If he'd really wanted single-payer, he could of course have spent a lot of time explaining how real socialized medicine actually works in Britain and used it as the scare image of what "the left" was demanding, forcing the not-so-left to welcome single-payer as a longed-for compromise. And that has been his pattern with everything.

And more.

I read through the comments on Welsh's posts, and it seems to me that the Obamabots, while present, are fewer in number and somewhat less vitriolic than they used to be. Maybe they have bigger fish to fry elsewhere, like showing their cojones by jeering at Glenn Beck in comments at alicublog, but maybe they're losing the faith just a bit. But where will they go? The wilderness is cold and scary, and Robert Gibbs will call them names, and they can't stand that. (It's okay for them to call other Democrats names, of course, to say nothing of The Terminader.)

And the Beat Goes On

Though they perpetrate more than their share of outright falsehood, a lot of what is wrong with corporate media is distortion, tone, and viewpoint.



A good example of what I'm talking about is this AOL.com post, "Commando Raid May Be Strategic Blow to Israel Itself." Joseph Schuman, Senior Correspondent, writes that the attack "may have played right into the hands of Hamas and the Islamist Palestinian group's principal sponsor, Iran." It would be nice if Israel's malfeasance were to backfire, but what about the people Israel just killed, and for that matter what about the Palestinians? No, it's all about Israel, and a little later it's all about Obama too. This writer makes it clear right off the bat which side he's on.



He laments that "even the most moderate Palestinian leaders [are] unwilling to talk to Israel," and that Obama's "international effort to impose tough new United Nations sanctions on Iran over its suspect nuclear program is now likely to be overshadowed by a Middle East agenda dominated by the Israeli raid for weeks or months to come." Considering Israeli rejectionism and the manifest falsehood of Obama's charges against Iran, these are not necessarily bad outcomes.

Israel has enforced the blockade of Gaza partly in response to the rockets regularly fired from there into Israel since 2007, when the militant group Hamas gained control of the territory.

First, rockets were not "regularly fired into Israel" -- the assaults were sporadic at most -- and Hamas has stopped them from being fired into Israel at all for the past couple of years, even after Israel's vicious attack on Gaza at the end of 2008. If that were the rationale for the blockade, it no longer exists. (If violence against civilians justified a blockade, by the way, Israel should have been blockaded decades ago.) And Hamas actually "gained control of the territory" by winning the 2006 elections, for which the Palestinians were harshly punished by the US and Israel. The US and Israel then encouraged the other Palestinian faction, Fatah, to attempt a coup against Hamas. The coup failed. But all this, as Noam Chomsky would say, cannot be acknowledged in the official media.

Once the passengers resisted with force, Netanyahu said, "our soldiers had to defend themselves."

As I have said before, aggressors and murderers have no right of self-defense. The legal situation, as John Caruso writes, is clear enough.

But the footage of slingshots and the marbles they launched are just as likely to be used as propaganda by Hamas to argue the passengers faced a David-vs.-Goliath fight against the heavily armed Israelis.

It isn't just Hamas who will use that footage as "propaganda"; after all, the video was intended to be Israeli propaganda, but it may have backfired. The world just doesn't understand that a civilian with a slingshot is Goliath, and an Israeli soldier with an automatic weapon is David.

Other details of the flotilla may point to what seems to be a clear mission of provocation, such as the inclusion among passengers on the Mavi Marmara of "women, children, and the elderly, all of whom are organizers," as a correspondent for Al Jazeera reported before communication from the ship was cut.



But the consensus of international opinion was overwhelmingly against Israel.

It couldn't possibly be, could it, that Israel was in the wrong and that the consensus of international opinion (often appealed to by US propaganda against Iran and North Korea) might just be right for once? And I'm not entirely clear as to how including "women, children, and the elderly, all of whom are organizers," constitutes a "mission of provocation." By this logic, establishing a Jewish state in the Middle East, including women, children, and the elderly, would have to be seen as a mission of provocation.



Aside from the misrepresentations about Hamas, then, there are few outright lies in this article. It's the way that the writer takes for granted that gallant little Israel and her ally Barack are the good guys, beset by "propaganda" and "missions of provocation" as they engage in "self-defense" and try to bring peace to the Middle East.



P.S. This post at FAIR.org details more distortions elsewhere in the corporate media's coverage of the attack, and quotes Glenn Greenwald: ""Just ponder what we'd be hearing if Iran had raided a humanitarian ship in international waters and killed 15 or so civilians aboard."



Incidentally, at the United Nations (via) the US has blocked a strong condemnation of the attack by Turkey:

The Obama administration refused to endorse a statement that singled out Israel, and proposed a broader condemnation of the violence that would include the assault of the Israeli commandos as they landed on the deck of the ship.

It's only to be expected, of course, given Obama's enthusiastic support for Israeli crimes, but that doesn't make it less appalling.

And the Beat Goes On

Though they perpetrate more than their share of outright falsehood, a lot of what is wrong with corporate media is distortion, tone, and viewpoint.



A good example of what I'm talking about is this AOL.com post, "Commando Raid May Be Strategic Blow to Israel Itself." Joseph Schuman, Senior Correspondent, writes that the attack "may have played right into the hands of Hamas and the Islamist Palestinian group's principal sponsor, Iran." It would be nice if Israel's malfeasance were to backfire, but what about the people Israel just killed, and for that matter what about the Palestinians? No, it's all about Israel, and a little later it's all about Obama too. This writer makes it clear right off the bat which side he's on.



He laments that "even the most moderate Palestinian leaders [are] unwilling to talk to Israel," and that Obama's "international effort to impose tough new United Nations sanctions on Iran over its suspect nuclear program is now likely to be overshadowed by a Middle East agenda dominated by the Israeli raid for weeks or months to come." Considering Israeli rejectionism and the manifest falsehood of Obama's charges against Iran, these are not necessarily bad outcomes.

Israel has enforced the blockade of Gaza partly in response to the rockets regularly fired from there into Israel since 2007, when the militant group Hamas gained control of the territory.

First, rockets were not "regularly fired into Israel" -- the assaults were sporadic at most -- and Hamas has stopped them from being fired into Israel at all for the past couple of years, even after Israel's vicious attack on Gaza at the end of 2008. If that were the rationale for the blockade, it no longer exists. (If violence against civilians justified a blockade, by the way, Israel should have been blockaded decades ago.) And Hamas actually "gained control of the territory" by winning the 2006 elections, for which the Palestinians were harshly punished by the US and Israel. The US and Israel then encouraged the other Palestinian faction, Fatah, to attempt a coup against Hamas. The coup failed. But all this, as Noam Chomsky would say, cannot be acknowledged in the official media.

Once the passengers resisted with force, Netanyahu said, "our soldiers had to defend themselves."

As I have said before, aggressors and murderers have no right of self-defense. The legal situation, as John Caruso writes, is clear enough.

But the footage of slingshots and the marbles they launched are just as likely to be used as propaganda by Hamas to argue the passengers faced a David-vs.-Goliath fight against the heavily armed Israelis.

It isn't just Hamas who will use that footage as "propaganda"; after all, the video was intended to be Israeli propaganda, but it may have backfired. The world just doesn't understand that a civilian with a slingshot is Goliath, and an Israeli soldier with an automatic weapon is David.

Other details of the flotilla may point to what seems to be a clear mission of provocation, such as the inclusion among passengers on the Mavi Marmara of "women, children, and the elderly, all of whom are organizers," as a correspondent for Al Jazeera reported before communication from the ship was cut.



But the consensus of international opinion was overwhelmingly against Israel.

It couldn't possibly be, could it, that Israel was in the wrong and that the consensus of international opinion (often appealed to by US propaganda against Iran and North Korea) might just be right for once? And I'm not entirely clear as to how including "women, children, and the elderly, all of whom are organizers," constitutes a "mission of provocation." By this logic, establishing a Jewish state in the Middle East, including women, children, and the elderly, would have to be seen as a mission of provocation.



Aside from the misrepresentations about Hamas, then, there are few outright lies in this article. It's the way that the writer takes for granted that gallant little Israel and her ally Barack are the good guys, beset by "propaganda" and "missions of provocation" as they engage in "self-defense" and try to bring peace to the Middle East.



P.S. This post at FAIR.org details more distortions elsewhere in the corporate media's coverage of the attack, and quotes Glenn Greenwald: ""Just ponder what we'd be hearing if Iran had raided a humanitarian ship in international waters and killed 15 or so civilians aboard."



Incidentally, at the United Nations (via) the US has blocked a strong condemnation of the attack by Turkey:

The Obama administration refused to endorse a statement that singled out Israel, and proposed a broader condemnation of the violence that would include the assault of the Israeli commandos as they landed on the deck of the ship.

It's only to be expected, of course, given Obama's enthusiastic support for Israeli crimes, but that doesn't make it less appalling.

This Man Must Be a Prophet

October 10, 2008, end of post:

"If Obama wins the election, the next four to eight years could make the Clinton administration look like a tea-party."
(image source)