12/21/21

The Purpose of Political Parties: Manchin, though!
~1025 words

If one looks around the world at political parties one can easily see that parties are for people of like interests and goals. This goes for them all, including the old, defunct CPSU of Lenin, Stalin, and even Gorbachev, as well as the Labour Party in the UK, the Social Democrats in Deutschland, the Democratic Party in the US, and all of them. As you scan through the list you notice that some of these "common interest" parties are exclusivist, like the CPSU with its Leninist "democratic centralism," aka "fake democracy" to camouflage a dictatorial elite group. The CCP, Chinese Communist Party, is such a party.

Some of these parties like the US Democratic Party is of the big tent, inclusivist type, such that its common goals are described by a Venn diagram where, as in this tripartite diagram there are three major components, the social-program-democrats, the progressives, and the moderate conservatives, and each sphere shares a central idea and central purpose and draws its strength from the sector shown as a rounded-side triangle in the middle. Each shares common goals and principles with one other of the groups members, but not the other, and in each of these, as shown, there is a large sector not shared by the others. The reason they are all in the same party is that they recognize the goals of each of the others as reasonably congruent with their own ideas, partly because one might just be the extention of- or the historically related idea of their own. This Venn diagram assumes there are approximately the same number of members in each sphere, but in politics that happens very rarely. Right now in the Democratic Party Progressives of various intensities are the largest sub-group.

One of the major tenets of parties is that, either democratically—by simple majority vote—or by edict from the strongest leader in the groups, the party comes to an accord and ... in exchange for their vote "along party lines" they will receive ample or at least some support for their next candidacy for office. But this is less spoken of than their allegiance to common ideas of how the government should be organized and what it should be doing for those citizens back home who elected them—by a simple majority vote.

The other thing about parties is how they protect themselves and also do not play into the hands of parties that oppose them. So, in the history of the US Senate occasionally a Senator would be so exercised by the inadvisability of passing a certain piece of legislation that he would stand up and talk endlessly, as per the rules of the Senate, yielding the floor only to clear up matters of courtesy and parliamentary procedure, but always returning to the dais to hold forth on such things as the names and addresses in the Chicago telephone directory of that time. This became known as the "filibuster." Eventually, the filibuster rule was modified so that the person need not stand and talk, but merely threaten to, given that the filibusterer represented the will of his party and could depend on relief, under the rules, at the dais, all of which often ended all consideration of the legislation, which is then deemed to have failed.

It should be apparent at this point that the filibuster serves the minority party, which changes often enough for it to be considered a life-preserver, especially for any party expected to go into the minority at the next election. Currently, the filibuster requires 60 votes for passage of any bill or vote on procedure, with some exceptions. The party having just taken the majority in Congress and the Presidency seems always to lose Representatives in the House and Senators in the Senate, thus lives in jeopardy of becoming a legislative minority unable to support its President.

So where on the Venn diagram is Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia? Well, he is a single dot in the crotch of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, which has a caucus of only 50 members, including two Independents and probably three, if Manchin leaves the Democratic party. But not necessarily. He could declare himself a member of the Republican caucus and by that act shift the majority to the Republicans, relieving Sen. Schumer of his duties as Majority Leader of the Senate, and relieving VP Kamala Harris of her all-important tie-breaking authority. The VP may not vote to create a tie. It goes without saying that WV, being a red state, would appoint a Republican replacement for Manchin were his yacht and himself sink fatally into the Potomac River, or he were to fall ill and die from the current variant of the Covid-19 virus, or something else.

At this moment Sen.Manchin seems to have sabotaged the Democratic Party's main legislative initiative—and threatens all future Democratic legislation, including the all-important and filibuster-fettered voting rights and election rules legislation. The worse he is treated for his "sabotage," the less likely he will be amenable to anything the Party wants. If they eject him from the party and the caucus, that will destroy the Democrats majority. He has President Biden and every other member of the House and Senate firmly in his grip and seems willing to continue this hold on the Party and the Administration. Of course, Joe Manchin believes strongly that the social programs in the BBB Bill are wholesale socialism and that as such represent a serious long-term threat to the social and economic status quo. The major part of the Biden Plan to effectively confront Climate Change is in the Bill, also. So, Manchin's position is, for him and us, a very difficult one. He will come around, but at costs that the AOC-wing will not take lightly.

As in "Breaking Bad" it must be that his future is assured by fatal lung cancer or its equivalent, BECAUSE the show always goes on and the Party has a long memory. Most Representatives and Senators already understand the un-mentioned principle of political parties, to wit, if you and your state ever need something from the federal government or Party do not attempt figurative carnal intimacy with it!

JB

(National Politics)

12/18/21

Walking Pennsylvania Avenue: And Chewing Gum
1000 words

Being a conservative, Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times columnist like Bret Stephens in the waning days of an incredibly tumultuous year like this one has to be more difficult than usual. People like Bret have to hang on to the idea that what was known as the Republican Party does actually exist and that it can be cleansed of Trump and Trumpism in fairly short order once the perp is dressed in orange and residing in St. Helena or Guantanamo or some other place where the incarcerating authority has a reasonable chance of keeping him safe from a lot of very angry, disappointed, disgusted people, some of whom are already guards in various federal prisons. The idea is not completely ludicrous. Justice might work out that way, if Liz Cheney and Adam Schiff, and you and I have anything to say about it. Nevertheless and ironically, Bret just wrote an opinion piece in the Times suggesting that Joe Biden should not run for a second term, reflecting the echos of a growing antsy & discontented rumor mill idea in D.C. to almost the same effect. But stand back from his essay a minute: he wrote as a conservative hoping the Democrats will field a more dynamic duo next time around!

Having scanned the piece you too, probably, have come to the conclusion that Mr. Stephens's real meaning of "short order cleansing" is that it probably takes place after 2024 and not before. So Mr. Stephens is pretty sure that the GOP will be Trumpist for a few more years. Accordingly, the nation would be better served if Joe and Kamala were to give way in January 2025, and instead of them a team of Democrats more vigorous and younger, and less feminine and Black, could run away with the election and prove that Joe was a transitional figure and Kamala a token or some sort, someone real Republicans do not need around while dealing with the bulk of White Supremacists in much of the local leaderships of their "cleansed and revived" party.

Yes, but Bret's critical eye—the right one—is focused on things that look quite different with the other eye. Even the vigorous version of Joe Biden has a speech impediment, still, and he never will be an orator like Jack Kennedy or have writers like Jack's Ted Sorensen, or be sufficiently awesome in any way to inspire people to hurl themselves at problems just because they are difficult (and aerobic) like Jack and his family. Joe is by no means plodding, but he and his Chief of Staff may well be in over their heads in their duty to provide a meticulous political nurture of a female Vice President, who herself has more high-level executive administrative experience than Joe, and four well-spent years in the US Senate. They have no experience in this. The male privilege and implicit chauvinism they both bear inhibits them from getting "that close." Well, they have to get over that immediately!

The more scintilating rumors about Kamala rebounded and passed along by Mr. Stephens are that she was (ironically) conservative as Attorney General of California, when in fact she was repairing a huge department of Justice as any "institutionalist" with the big picture in mind would have. And the idea she might be a political light-weight is compound foolishness, an amnesia of her "taking on" Biden himself in the primaries campaigns, and a complete retreat to male befuddlement over the exquisite and superior social maturity of the female, particularly the well-educated Black American woman. There are, of course, rumors that her VP staff (and relatives) have not always had her back. To all those re-rumored thoughts I will offer the explanation foreshadowed above, but with a somewhat wider view of the situation.

I have gone to the trouble and personal pleasure of writing about this because I believe that Joe and Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, both good men with heaps of merde on their plates, have not done their best to shore up and prepare for the peaceful and obviously necessary transfer of power from Joe's generation to Kamala's. Neither of them know how to treat her and have instead offered impossible jobs to her as places and problems where she could earn her spurs. Gentlemen, she already has beautiful spurs! They need to treat her as the heir-apparent in 2024, because it is crystal-clear that Joe really does not have a second term in him ... but, you know, Ron may.

Yes, the world is on fire. Ron and Joe and Kamala all know that, but the first and most important thing they must do is stay in power. That means—as Joe has finally realized—that Build-Back-Better is meaningless, if we lose our democracy. These three people should be and act as a triumvirate privately calling one another out on the priorities and issues, and publically showing themselves to be one very impressive and astute triumvirate. Kamala needs to enunciate this clearly to both of these men.

Joe has the hardest job. He has to face retirement and old age. It ain't that much fun, I can tell you. Ron and Kamala need to understand among themselves that Ron is interested in staying on as Chief of Staff and that Kamala will run for President in 2024. Ron Klain could be the best presidential advisor since Harry Hopkins guided FDR through the most perilous times (to that era) since the Civil War. The hardest part for Joe is to be President until he has replaced himself with Kamala, but that is how he must be and what he must do. It is a process of letting go. He has experience in letting go, so I am confident he can. If Kamala is seriously contested by any of the long, long list of super-qualified people we saw on stage in 2020, that contest must show the strength of the leadership in the Democratic Party and not dilute the fact that VP Kamala Harris is the obvious successor.

JB

National Politics

Suicide Pact: Part II
~1300 words

Is the United States Constitution in fact and practice a suicide pact? Or, does it contain a safety net or a provision for sustaining itself and the democracy it enables, which will automatically pop out at just the right time? Or, on the contrary, does the Constitution exhort us to provide to a political party or person who may actually be a deadly enemy, whose choice of free speech is to lie, prolifically, incessently ... all the rights and privileges of good citizenship? Is this protected by the Bill of Rights, and must we forbear anti-democratic scheming and insurrection? Do we injure our own rights by thinking of removing theirs? These are my questions. The meta question glimmering above these questions is why do I even have to ask?

I think you will agree that George Monbiot put it well. Please listen to this important statement now. I agree with every word. I have thought this way since I got out the Navy and began my graduate studies in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, of revolutions, of humanity's search for ways to govern or be governed.

But now many of us are having thoughts we never before imagined we would have. Most of us have concluded that the Constitution does not have a safety net. A weakened President may not have the courage to suspend Civil Liberties to rid the nation of a deadly cancer. It is not that the Constitution is a suicide pact exactly; it is that the Framers never foresaw the situation our fecklessness and a demagogue's will to power have created

What on earth are we individuals going to do as the courts twiddle, and the Trumpists carve away the guard-rails of the election system so to install a government that is deliberately not democratic with the excuse proffered that democracy is too fragile, excessively weak, and incompetent in the modern age—And while in the near background the white supremacist, anti-Semitic, and other militias threaten our very lives with mayhem and death? Is the Constitution of the United States such an idealist concept that we must follow its deliberately slow and messy processes right up to the point that "anti-democracy" is accorded civil rights that we individuals are about to lose? The answer is no, simply no, dispassionately and very passionately NO! We must prepare now to act soon, probably sooner than most of us realize.

One of the main features of the French Revolution of 1789-1793-1799 was the Reign of Terror, in which the guillotine consumed 17,000 citizens, most of them simply and abruptly alleged by Maximilien Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety to be counter-revolutionaries. The other very distressing occurance was the Grande Peur or Terreur (The Great Fear or Terror), a panic that began with the inevitable economic dislocations in 1789, spread from one part of the country-side to another among the recently de-feudalized peasants, occasionally creating irregular armies, some of members of which were perhaps outright brigands, which with feudalism now cast off, surged through the provinces creating havoc and worse for the former nobility and the rich bourgeoisie. Such a panic is almost inevitable here soon enough or certainly by 2024.

There are several already defined historic moments in our future at which times we will all be taking our personal bearings. There are also endless numbers of random and semi-random moments possible, too. The defined moments will certainly generate controversy and probably violence, perhaps uprisings, of various kinds. How these moments will define the Trumpists' large-scale momentum to destroy democracy is yet to be seen. Some outcomes will be forboding, some will give us hopeful relief, some will be defined by who lives and who dies, some will affect every last person in this nation. The result will be, as Mr. Monboit himself said, a new and different nation for good or for ill. Nothing will ever be the same again. If it looks the same, the moment is NOT over.

Here are the known unknowns:

1. The outcome of the case of the State of Georgia v. Trump for felonious attempts to change the outcome of the 2020 election in Georgia. The result—either way or both—will create havoc.

2. The Report of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol will be a tipping point. The insurrectionists will panic—those who have not be apprehended—and they will invoke mayhem.

3. The outcome of the Congressional, state, and local elections in November 2022 will be contentious and probably remain unresolved for months. The Constitution and the Law have no provisions for ignoring the votes of states which cannot provide honest elections.

The unknown unknowns are the sort of abrupt, seemingly ad hoc, events created by the Trumpists and Trump himself: speeches, exhortations to violence, orders to not vote, then orders to vote in an attempt to lull their opposition into complacency. The activities of highly Trumped up state legislatures, conducted by Trump acolytes, or "separate" events by Proud Boys, Three-Percenters and other facists, White supremacists, anti-Semites, and the mentally unstables will destabilize state after state. What the federal, state, and local security forces do about it will determine the effect and what you should be ready for. At present it looks like security forces have already been compromised by the insurrectionist Trumpists.

What you should be ready for is this:

Safety for you and your immediate family. Arm yourself only if you are already competent with firearms and absolutely ready to use them. The point of using them is to remove an antagonist from the field of action.

Safety for your extended family, including that crazy uncle, who voted for the end of democracy. He will tell what your plans are to his friends and your enemies, so don't tell him everything, but try to neutralize him. When the insurrections begin tie him up in the basement or, you know, take him to the edge of town and leave him.

Safety for your neighborhood. Bring your trustable neighbors closer and devise with them Neighborhood Watch programs appropriate to an armed insurrection.

Become active in the local Democratic Party. Make friends now, so you will recognize them in the shopping areas, parks, and local watering spots. Recognize that you are not alone.

Support Democratic candidates for local, state, and federal office. Set yourself a budget for it and respond to pleas for funds beyond your own locality and state. There are key elections that will change the face of the contested ground. Please accept the fact that there is no Republican Party left worthy of the name, so if you usually vote for them, vote for Democrats or Independents, but not for the Trumpist insurrectionists.

Recognize that, if you do nothing, others will also do nothing. Leadership even on a small scale is important.

Keep your car gas tanks at least half full. Make sure your cellphones are charged. Purchase charging batteries like those for trips. Stay tuned on social media, cable and broadcast news. Do not overdose on any of it.

Keep your eyes and ears open for signs of things going south and have a family and group plan for how much is too much. There will be martyrs, so make sure their sacrifices are not swallowed up by fear and hesitancy.

Make sure a good journal is being kept. Writing stuff down helps to put things in perspective.

Yes, it could get really bad, especially if there are significant repeat failures by DoJ, DHS, FBI, DoD, DNI and other federal agencies. Right now I am giving 51% odds that one or more agency will fail significantly. I see no evidence whatever that President Biden or VP Harris is doing anything to avert this probable failure. So, within the largest local group you trust, talk about whether things that look like failures really are failures, or whether necessary actions are just going to occur at a more propitious and effective moment in time. Establish deadlines and communicate them to other local groups. After the 2022 election in November, listen carefully to authoritative summaries and especially about warnings. Fox news is not authoritative, but they do give themselves away!

The most important thing is to be recognizably prepared and fairly open about it. Fight Fear with Preparedness.

JB

(National Politics)

11/23/21

Biden's Burden
(slightly longer than I planned, but you will see why)

The media, especially print media, have produced a dozen or two pieces recently that suggest Biden's current standing in many of the polls has weakened him so thoroughly that he could not win a second term three years from now in the November 2024 election. There are a number of things that can be said about this onslaught of media opinion. The first thing to be said is that three years is a long way away and therefore this noise is designed only to chasten a floundering president ... but it seems to be causing some of the floundering.

The media, The Fourth Estate, is always full of itself. Reporters and editors do not make much money compared to the elites they report on. So the worker-bees in the media extract from society this tax on our patience and forbearing. The media, despite lots of affect designed to disguise it, are for-profit enterprises. As such, the media must draw attention to themselves at the expense of other media companies and sometimes fairness and truth, and the best or most common way is to kindle bits of tinder that are lying around near their subject to excite, incite, and to taunt and worry. People are drawn to controversy, even if it is manifest that it has been concocted to draw them in. Ben Franklin understood this and carried on anyway.

Here is a classic example of the current press about Biden's standing from U.S.News and the Associated Press, which you could scan before continuing in my essay.

The article, if you actually read it sort of closely, is a little weak on the reasons for Biden's standing in the polls, but is a little strong on the possible effects, as seen by others in politics. Paraphrazing the Rev, Al Sharpton, who is the iconic national Black leader in this era, perhaps out of context or out of school, criticizes Biden for not being both the Congress and the President. Such is the burden of a guy who spent 36 or so years in Congress, but is no longer there mixing it up on a daily basis. To be fair when the BIF (Bipartisan Infrastructure bill) passed, Biden was happy to take presidential credit for the passage, even when it was pretty clear that the factions and parties in Congress were responsible for the press-agonizing deliberate progress and then for passing the bill. Congress's standing in the polls is so low that congratulations for passing the bill were ignored by the press. As I have written earlier here, the press is largely to blame for at least half of the bad press the legislative process gets. It is complicated. We are a large and diverse country, and there's always going to complications. Get used to it media!!

This essay is not a white-wash of the Biden-Harris Administration, however. There are fundamental things wrong with the administration as there were with Barack Obama's. In that case it was Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, who was the rotten apple in the mix (and later in Chicago, after Obama finally got rid of him.) We have all assumed that Rahm was there to swear at people and take names, kick ass, and protect the first Black president. Rahm was incompetent dealing with Wall Street's self-inflicted collapse.

Biden has detailed Kamala Harris to do jobs that would provide her with excellent credentials later on if she chose to run for President, especially if she were Wonder Woman and had magic powers to deal with Covid, immigration, or any problem that would take scores of people to handle. The Black community, especially, rightfully expects Harris to be brought up to speed, but also respected for what strength she brought to the Democratic ticket in 2020. She is NOT an outside contractor, like SERVPRO, a fix-it person. She needs to know everything about everything the President knows.

Biden was confronted with Trump's deal with the Taliban to exit Afghanistan by May 2021. He chose, in error, only to extend the exit to September, rather than abrogating the deal entirely. He should not have accepted the deal, but did, thus demonstrating that his emotions related to his deceased son, Beau, were the key to his decision to exit. Just as important was the error to exit without adequate preparation of the American people for the event and the rationale for leaving, and without adequate preparations on the ground in Kabul or anywhere else in Afghanistan, particularly to respect American pledges to suddenly-vulnerable friends and helpers during 20 years of egregiously failed military presence as state-builders. Biden came off as self-righteous and both bull-headed and wrong, especially at Fox and the "network" of baby Foxes. And Trump.

For me though the most troubling thing is Biden's wasting of time regarding the Supreme Court. He has only a short/small window in which to repair the damage done by Mitch McConnell to the entire Judiciary, but especially the Supreme Court. The Biden-appointed commission to study the expansion of the court is packed with people known to be against the idea of expanding the Court, but all of them oblivious to the obvious damage that the Trumpist SCOTUS will wreak on our country, aided by very right-wing judges appointed all over the country. If he lets this go until it is too late for the fix to be effective, I am moving to British Columbia! The Court for this country in this era should be at least 13, best at 15 members appointed and approved while Democrats have control in the Senate.

Promises. First though, 2021 and the immediate future is nothing like 2010 or 1990. Bipartisan is a joke today, and Joe should recognize that it is a joke, and not to make it a joke on him and us. What I know about Biden promises is only those reported by the national inside-the-beltway press. He promised that the BBB Act will pass the Senate. Did he say whether it was during your lifetime? How does he get by Senators Manchen and Sinema? He needs to recruit the Senator from Alaska, who ran as an Independent, to the Democratic Caucus. The way to do that is to flood Alaska with largess in her name. A billions-worth would satisfy them and get the BBB past Sinema. The same for West Virginia. Mr.Manchen will be happy to have statues erected in his state for getting President Biden to confer lots of largess upon them. If we have to buy it, we should. The BBB is essential to the continued existence of the United States and the planet Earth.

People like Professor Jason Johnson on MSNBC say that the main problem with Joe Biden is that he is not addressing the issues that got him elected in 2020, namely the perilous situation regarding our democracy. I tend to agree with Jason on this. Biden cannot blame Merrick Garland if the perps of January 6th go scott free or, worse yet, are never charged, nor if the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act does not pass Congress in time to thwart the anti-democracy policies of the Republican Party. Or, if nothing is done to curtail gun violence ... even a stab at it. Or, police brutality and anti-Black behaviors. It is time to walk and chew gum, Joe! Your administration should be mobilized as if we were at war, a war to the finish, and all these issues must be successfully addressed long before the summer of 2022.

I understand Biden's need to get the Build-Back-Better legislation through. I wish he would abandon his childish ideas about bipartisanship and act more like Lyndon Johnson. All of the shilly-shallying around strikes me as a failure to share governance with Kamala Harris, rather than treating her as a special tool to be used when he cannot move a Secretary of a department fast enough. And this worry I have leads me to believe that the ever silent Ron Klane, Chief of Staff in the White House, whose comments made before the election seemed normal, may be overcome by the complexity of it all. His duty is to country before his duty to Joe Biden.

Joe needs the media on his side and he is not getting it, partly because of what the media really is. No one in the media wants to be publically acknowledged as beholding to the government. But, of course, they are! Jen Psaki is important and seems to be competent. Nicolle Wallace may reveal what she thinks about Jen someday.

The problem is that the situation confronting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and any other person who will be at this level is unbelievably complex. So, as a thought experiment consider what kind of plans and deployments of key and on-the-ground personnel you would have begun the moment you were inaugurated. The Secret Service will loom large in your plans, but is it safe to assume they are committed to your safety? Take it for granted and keep a weather eye out for signs of trouble. The international situation is volatile, so spread diplomatic and personal oil on the waters, yet move the goal posts back to human rights from where Trump left them. Acknowledge to your emergency people that the Republican Party no longer is a constitutional entity, i.e., pursuing Justice or Democracy, which means that your plans for imposing Martial Law have to be 1000% better than the cluster-mess on and immediately preceding the January 6th Insurrection. But, also, please, design and carry-out a New Deal that will repair fifty or sixty years of neglect to infrastructure, social justice and safety nets, insane theories of finance and investment, and confront endemic racism with a sure and steady hand, using both sticks and carrots. The next question is: Are Biden, Harris, Klane, Garland, Blinken, Austin, Yellen, and the rest, including Buttigieg, Pelosi, Schumer, and even AOC on board and doing their all-time best to keep this country moving forward?

I think the answer is secret—and must be—but also that it is likely to be a hollow no. I do not think Joe Biden will run for a second term and all his avowals to the contrary are head-fakes to throw off the Republicans. It isn't working. It could not work against the current Republican cult. Biden could choose an heir, and should, and Kamala Harris has first dibs, so he should support her and follow her thinking publically. If he does not, then we Californians will take her back as Governor and support Cory Booker or Elizabeth Warren or two of the many other intellectually qualified people out there who are grinding their teeth, too.

JB

(National Politics)

9/11/21

At the beginning of the 21st century I lived in rural Texas for five years, roughly. I built a house there, enjoyed the weather in spring and fall, met many snowbirds from the upper-midwest, some few of whom had decided to stick it out twelve months a year. The Governor of Texas at the time went on to run for president of the country, but quickly failed at that, despite having lots of nearby voters supporting the idea of getting him out of the state. He became the US Secretary of Energy, and as far as we know did not touch the nuclear warhead situation for which he was modestly responsible. Now they have Governor Greg Abbott, who is much further along the path to outright Fascism than seems possible in our country. That undercurrent has been with us since the rise of trade unions--not because, but against them. Fascism is decidedly not labor's friend. And that is the irony of our times.

Abbott was trained as a lawyer. Bachelors from UT Austin and JD from Vanderbilt. He is "partially paralyzed" from a tree that fell on him while jogging. (I don't understand how someone as fleet as a jogger lets this happen, so I quietly suggest that there is more to this story than we have.) He is widely rumored to be seeking the presidency of the United States--but, or so, he seems to be jockeying to replace Donald Trump as leader of the political party they have converted to a decidedly anti-democracy cult of personality, a horse-race that involves at least one other Texan and several other governors and US senators like Lindsey Graham, all of whom are all in a race to the bottom of politics and normal civility, that is, fully and fiercely a rules-and-norms-free fascist form of governance that depends on the kind of unholy alliance that Benito Mussolini fabricated between the business sector and himself under what are usually called Leninist principles of "democratic centralism."

Most of the foregoing is less relevant than the appearance that Abbott deliberately creates of being a white supremacist. That is his dog whistle and the real engine of his politics. Texas is full of white supremacists. They are pink and white and disdain everyone else. They do not like the term "white supremacist," but that's what it is. These racists came innocently from Europe in 1840's and later to found a new country in North America, one that would share the continent with the US, just like the latter-day German bishoprics, margravates, duchies, and kingdoms came to share what in 1870, under the Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, became "modern Deutschland." North America would look like Europe, only better, because the frontier sought people who knew what to do with the liberty they were handed. I hope you know that present day Texas, post-WWI and post-WWII, has a huge German-heritage population!

Abbott's white supremacist dream is genetic and cultural, but intermingled with it is a more profound idea that the emergence of women to equal status with men has gone much too far. How else would you explain the recent passage of an anti-abortion law that enlists civilians as "legal" terrorists, vigilantes--armed with lawsuits--to crush the reproductive rights of women? Well, the real idea is to crush ALL of women's rights, losing reproductive rights is a sufficient warning to all Texas women to back down and shut up, not just the poor women who cannot afford to go out of state for care. The aim, of course, is to re-establish the patriarchy model of governance and society. It is an outright assault on one hundred years of progress to acknowledge women as equal before the law and with equal opportunity for a life of their own choosing including their reproductive freedom!

Donald Trump has created a large part of this in his own "will to power" trek trampling the Constitution. Trump is a minor (almost laughable) "don" from Queens, but a vicious mobster, and at that he is adept at the lie, the deceit, the ability to evade consequences, but his chief skill is to sow uncertainty, chaos, and fear in the weaker minds around him, and to enlist the modestly stronger minds into a "feudal" cabal to achieve endless political power, power to then extort from the public and private whatever they want. Abbott loves that the ground for his own ego trip has been basically cleared by Trump. So do Cruz, DeSantis, Josh from Missouri, and hundreds of others currently in and out of politics.

What propels most of them are delusions of ego, but often even more is the fear of the old order crumbling to dust as women and cultural and ethnic minorities achieve seats at the table. They are afraid for the destruction of the old patriarchal order in which they were raised and without which they cannot imagine themselves!

This is the crux of America's woes and has been since the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Many males believe that history proves they are the best leaders of cultures and societies. The simple and only element of truth in that often tacit assertion is that males have been in charge all along because they are larger and steeped in the belicose bully role from childhood. The rest of the historical truth is that on the whole they have done a totally unacceptable job of it. Patriarchy is fundamentally flawed because it is rarely meritocratic and always based on "might makes right." That concept has not been useful since the Bronze Age, but rather the source of most of civilization's woes, acknowledging the rest to be caused by bacteria and viruses.

What we have now in America is an agglomeration of people, male and female, who have given up their courage to do the real work of making our Republic possible. The 9/11 attack scared them nearly to death; it erased the easy confidence that America was essentially impregnable. The recent Great Recession ruined many, and they saw the perps (bankers) get away with it. It destroyed the confidence of these people and gave cover to the denial of their own short-comings and actual misdeeds. Now they have decided to trade our representative democracy, our often-flawed, but freedom-filled Republic, for the empty calories and emotions of a fascist autocracy, based not on the Great Man Theory of history, but on the slick simplicity of a dictatorship. They are tired of and incompetent to adjust their lives to rapid change and, now, they are overwhelmed by the Covid pandemic and the idea that a President of the United States would deliberately lie to them about nearly everything, which he did because he thinks they are easily confused and dumb as rocks.

These people from the "other America" know in their foggy brains and churning guts that the patriarchy has failed, but they do not know how to save it, short of installing a Juan Peron or Adolph Hitler or Huey Long as the personification of simplicity and for the slowing of change they seek. They have decided that everything is false and cannot be trusted, because they have been told to believe that, and they do. The rest of us--the clear majority--must stop them--cold.

(Society, National Politics)

11/18/10

Last time I wrote about Nobelist Paul Krugman's "report card" on Barack Obama as president. I can tell you that I am not alone in echoing these remarks and the sentiment of sadness that is coming with the ever more insistent option of beginning the dumping process. The prospect for Democrats in the next election depends very much on the progress of the economic recovery. If Krugman and Stiglitz and many others are correct, the economy will not recover the jobs lost, although the stock markets may flourish and the rich get richer. The fundamentals of the economy will remain stagnant because there is no chance that the GOP politicians and plutocrats will provide Obama with anything like a legislative win. Obama will not be elected because he will be seen (aside from the racism and ideological fury of the radical right) as inept and ineffective ... at least half of which will be his own fault (and the other half the cynical obstructionism of the GOP.)

Perhaps a good place to start the opinion review is with the New York Times and the letters received about Krugman's column. These are short and pointed letters. Read them now.

Perhaps the most important of the recent comments on the failure of Obama to abandon his weak-kneed centrist compromising, however, is the comments by George Soros yesterday in Huffington Post. Mr. Soros represents the brighter side of extreme wealth, that is, the intelligence that understands the difference between a rational cooperative and competitive economy and a tooth and claw, abandon the masses, all competition and no significant cooperation point of view. He sees Obama as lacking the fundamental qualities of character that would direct his energies toward the needed solutions. You should read this now.

A good vantage point of view is the description of the context in which we and Obama are embedded, as described by Nicholas Kristof today (Thursday) in his column entitled "A Hedge-Fund Republic", for clearly (with notable exceptions like Soros) the United States is very much a plutocracy, a corporatist state with the flywheel of a military-industrial-congressional complex feeding the hungry mouths of the top 10% of income in the population. Read this: this 10% owns 70% of the United States, including the current president ... who being owned by selfish money must go.

Dumping Barack Obama is going to painful for Democrats, because he is the de facto leader of the Democratic Party, ex officio. The process of detaching him from this role would best by accomplished, I think, by the process that Lyndon Johnson detached himself, by declaring his future for the war in Vietnam (rather than with keeping the Republicans out of office and away from their sabotage of the Great Society they so effectively achieved). For anyone, even Howard Dean, to rise up against him for control of the "hearts and minds" of the party in any other way is going to be bloody. Pundits may rant, but Obama remains insulated and, frankly, isolated with the ex officio role in his pocket. Maneuvering the president into the situation where he accepts the fact that one way or another he is a one-term president is not going to be easy, but ... and this is important ... he has already made a statement to this effect, so the ground is already partly prepared for him to release the Party leadership to Howard Dean, who, of course, can choose to run or find another who will galvanize the despondent masses in our Party. The other side of this is us. We must begin the hew and cry for him to step aside. Now! The next two year are going to be quickly spent on this process, so we must begin now!

JB

11/1/10

The American Liberalism Project that I (and my distant cousin Susan B. Goodwin) founded years ago was not intended as a bully pulpit for individual political campaigns. It was originally meant to combat the insidious campaign by the GOP and all the stripes and spots of rightwing ideology to smear the very name of Liberal and Liberalism. It is a testament to the courage of today's Liberals that they have largely failed to win over the center of American politics to their creed of mendacious distortions.

American Liberalism is alive and well, and one need only have read the "Interview" section of the Sunday New York Times and have read Gary Wills's parting comment about voting. You may not like the guy who is running, but voting for his opponent to prove that is a complete folly, Wills said in so many words. You not only bring in a guy from the other side, but you bring in all the trappings, apparatus, and ideology that follows along. In the case of the Republican voters of New York state, the choice of Paladino for Governor presents a special case. The man is a throwback to the 19th century, a man of rigid prejudice, and a liar. It would be hard to vote for Paladino, but should the honest GOP voters then vote for Cuomo, who is going to have his hands full with some of the jackasses in Albany of both parties?

My answer is that if voters understand that Liberalism is exactly the ideology upon which this country was founded, that welfare is not the central position of Liberalism, that the five elements of Liberalism—Individual Liberty, Progress, Humanity, Ethics, and The Rule of Law—are the essence of a Liberal view of government, then "hell yes!" they should vote for Cuomo. Why not? If you understand that these essential principles are in deliberate daily conflict and that politics, particularly Liberal politics is the reasoning and bargaining of solutions that give more than lip service to each element ... always, then you are a Liberal and should vote that way.

If on the other hand you prefer the guidance and money of corporate board rooms and executives to the reasoning of an educated electorate, if you believe that government is there to provide special favors to special interests, if you believe that government has no business safeguarding the civil rights of people whose rights are being trammeled, if you believe that Progress is a myth and that the purpose of life is to get as rich as you can and buy as many toys as you can manage, then you are not a Liberal. Vote for Paladino or not.

This election may contain a few surprises for the corporate press. I have been closely monitoring the major publications in this country for the past year with an eye to the subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) attempts to influence tomorrow's election by insinuating opinion onto their front pages as if it were news. The main way they do this is through poll taking, where they design the questions and interpret the results. Believe me, reports of these activities are not "news." They are opinion, and most of it is untruthful, deceptive, and misleading. The main thrust of corporate press interference in our political process is to suggest to Democrats that they have already lost the election, so they might as well stay home. The pressure on this message has been relentless ... and it has been based on polls the media news organizations produce for themselves. You can bet that the money it takes to do this is a concern at the highest levels of the corporations and their money pool, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

And so we have an article today in the Times that suggests that young voters feel abandoned by politics. Horsefeathers! They cannot possibly know whether young people are feeling "abandoned," "bewildered," "patronized," "propagandized," or any other thing. Polling data on young people is notoriously inaccurate, as young people frequently "play" the pollsters for the reckless fools they certainly are. There is only one reason that an article like this appears the day before an election. They mean to keep young voters home and feeling "abandoned" so they tell them they are "abandoned." It just isn't so.

I have spent hours on the phone banks here and young people are the heart of the operation along with middle-aged and retired persons. Liberal politics is not about special groups or special interests, it is simply about us trying to accomplish our democracy as best we can. We believe in it, and we reject categorically the idea that corporations and the rich know better than we.

JB

10/31//10

Maureen Dowd, in the New York Times this fine Halloween Sunday writes on the two-year report card on Barack Hussein Obama. She is not happy!

Lots of people are unhappy ... and out of work, lost their homes, changing college plans or dropping out, keeping the clunker for a couple more years, indulging their petulance, and even cosying up to the far right ... to teach those bums in Washington a lesson. But, anger and disappointment are not good political motives, and replacing Representatives and Senators with members of the OTHER party just indicates that the primary system does not work. Why, if you believe that Cheney and Bush started all this mess, would you believe that people to the right of them would do better?

Obama has lots of reserve goodwill on this day two days before the election. There are those who believe that if he shapes up his own act in the next two years, they will forgive him the last two. But, Maureen is relentless in her criticism and goes for the throat several times. And, yes, there is a sense that Obama is arrogant, but is he more arrogant than anyone else that has inhabited the Oval Office? I think not. I think that the hubris of being elected "leader of the free world" went to his head like it does ALL the others, but that his failures were more political than personality problems.

I will say it one more time: Obama, Geithner, and Summers had to save Wall Street. They had to save the world financial system by saving the hub and brains and US reserve currency position. Yes indeed this wrankles the rank and file. It was not a populist move and it sticks sideways in our national throat. But it had to be done, and it is foolish indeed for Obama to have been so quiet about these reasons. Shot himself in the foot, he did!

JB

10/29/10

Paul Krugman, Nobelist, Economist at Princeton, and columnist at the New York Times, whom we have quoted endlessly these past two years, has one more chance to dissuade you from your dogmatic irritability, your vent on the Democrats because they were asked to do too much with too little. He tells you, and I am repeating it, a Republican sweep on Tuesday will be a disaster for our country and for the economy. And, I think Krugman's diagnosis is spot on. The Republican rightwing, the TeaParty, will go for the throat of the hapless Barack Obama. He will be a one-term president.

There are a lot of things that you can say about this, and most of them land at the President's desk in the Oval Office.

My take is that Obama's fingerprints are all over the insane "bipartisanship policy" he took. He read Rahm Emanuel as a person who could work miracles across the aisle, and that was wrong. He understood his victory in November 2008 as coming from support he garnered in the center of the political spectrum and assumed that this meant people expected a centrist administration, and this was wrong. People knew Obama to have the highest liberalism rating in the Senate, and they expected him to produce change that reflects the core tenets of American Liberalism.

The bipartisanship issue led to a health-care bill that has too many deficiencies to remain unassailed when the Republicans take over the House. Health care is a huge part of the national economy, so throwing it into chaos by pulling the rug before the good parts of the bill come on line will do what chaos always does. It will retard the recovery, which is inching along right now at 2% growth. We need 4%.

Krugman's dread will be fulfilled. There will be disruptions to government and good, innocent people will be damaged as the swash-buckling TeaParty flexes its muscles and corporate America lines up at the trough they have so assiduously built for the Republicans to feed them. The descent into corporatism will be painless, as all quiet revolutions in government tend to be. All you will have lost is the democracy and the republic.

JB

10/23/10

No one said that the American republic had to be a direct democracy. Franklin is alleged to have answered the question of what the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had come up with the almost tart answer: "A republic, if you can keep it." Most people have no idea what the definition of a "republic" is and how it (the one they thought they came up with) differed from life as they knew it in 1763 or 1665.

A republic is a "A republic is a form of government in which the people or some portion thereof retain supreme control over the government and in which the head of government is not a monarch.". Yep. That's the core of the definition. You can see there are already some provisions for latitude on who "the people" are. And, typically, the people of a republic are "represented" by persons elected specifically to carry out the wishes of those who elect them.

But it is not all transparent. The Franklin story reveals something that should not go unnoticed. The fellow who asked Franklin what sort of government had been created had almost nothing to say about it. The Constitution was written as a fait accompli, albeit by well-meaning, well-educated, successful, and earnest men (no women) whose intent was to replace the Articles of Confederation form of weak central government (designed in a period of backlash against the central authority of King George III and the Parliament in London). They came up with what is an amazing compromise about power and posed the question of the ages: can human beings govern themselves in an enlightened way (remember all of this happened in the full maturity of The Enlightenment in Europe and North America)?

The question is partly about monarchs and father figures and whether we can in our inner selves do without this imagery of authority. If you read the newspapers from then and now you will see a constant strain of thought that looks to the father figure, the President in our republic, for his (her someday) talismanic effect, the embodiment of authority the likes of which many feel must be transcendent and superior to the daily appetites and dishonesties we all know about.

The question is also partly about the nature of representative government and, specifically, whether a "representative" can a) truly represent a congeries of opinion such as existed in, say, Philadelphia or Charleston at the time ... or now? And b) whether a "representative" has a talismanic honesty that he (or she) self-appreciates and holds transcendent to all the other forces and pressures that come along during endless days of compromise?

The answer, class, is that, no, we did not keep the republic. It turns out that the transcendent ideas of political and moral equality were barely present at the beginning, rotten from the compromise over slavery that continued for three more generations of Americans, disabled by the exclusion of women, and given a back seat by the financial interests of the day, including dear old Ben Franklin himself with his press empire. Good thing he was an idealist, eh!

It turns out that money owns the Constitution and money owns the press and money owns the hearts and minds of those for whom daily bread is a bounty from those with money. So, you will not be surprised ... no matter how angry you get ... at this report of the latest in the two hundred years of corporate efforts to undermine the essential element of our republic, that is, who the government represents. It boils down this question, class: if in a republic the sovereign power resides in the people or a sub-set of them, who are those sub-set people today? In the 18th century they were white males who were literate and owned property. But are they now the unelected, unsupervised, unaccountable, fabulously rich and insulated CEOs of corporations whose money absolutely drowns the voice of the guy down on the street, ... or will it finally be us?

JB

10/17/10

Frank Rich is one of the most respected columnists in America. He is the dean of OpEd in the New York Times and very much the wiser man compared to Gary Wills in the corporate press represented by the Washington Post. Rich's essay today, Sunday, is about what I have been writing about all week. He even turns of couple of phrases from my lathe, interestingly. The subject is rage and the antidote ... well, Frank and others do not have it.

But, rage there is in the public about the destruction of our economy by the greedy bastards on Wall Street and scattered throughout the financial sector of this country ... and other countries. I was not kidding when I wrote that there is going to be an explosion. If it is organized and not just a dozen hotheads somewhere, it is going to mean big trouble. I have been pondering the reasons for a long time, and would like to try this reasoning out on you.

People are fucking mad about losing their homes. No question about that. They are angry and afraid, and they don't know whom to kick in the groin about it. Most people have not lost their homes, but they have seen their retirements go down the tubes. They have seen their children having to select less expensive, less prestigious, and presumably less capable colleges, thus diverting their hopes and dreams into shallower waters and evaporating ponds. Most people have someone in the household or slightly extended family who has lost their job and cannot find work. I have! I am righteously pissed off about all of this, because it was avoidable in theory ... if not in the by-play of national politics and national mythologies.

The people need expiation, a release, an event, a reason they can call their own for the disaster. They are mad at Washington for the bail-out, but are TOTALLY MISINFORMED about who is going to pay off the 760 billion dollars of debt. Do you know who?

Paul Krugman has been trying to explain to you that deficit spending to buoy up and stimulate an economy is paid for by the economy. It is quite simple. The gross domestic product is taxed by the federal government at many levels. When the economy gets percolating, it pays for itself. DUH!

Do you think this knowledge is widely known? Of course it isn't and, equally, it is unlikely that if it were it would have any effect on the rage that Obama has not quelled or even given a reasonable chance to die of its own irrationality. No ... Rage is rage. It is the hind-brain in action, the seat of fear and hubris tormented by the certain knowledge of personal failure to foresee how crooked the American economy really is, considering the rampant amorality and the emptiness of Adam Smith's "hidden hand" that is supposed to check human failings and keep the boat afloat.

The event, as Rich and Brett are saying, will happen. As an historian I am saying "it has to happen." You can quote me. Study the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and the American Civil War carefully and explain to yourselves the Grand Peur and the bloody guillotine, the doggedness of the Red Army under Leon Trotsky, the loss of 40 million people to starvation at the hand of Mao. Study Pickett's Charge and Reconstruction. Get down in the guts of those histories and study and know fully and with appropriate apprehension how very savage we are.

This election is about to put the likes of John Boehner into the 3rd spot in American government. Can you think of anyone else you would rather have there? I am pretty sure you can, and if you can, you know now why the rage is bipartisan. We are about to have a debacle.

JB

10/11/10

Paul Krugman is a columnist and economist I trust. So, perforce, you see me writing about his writing a lot. In the Monday New York Times Dr. Krugman addresses three aspects of the current political-economic situation in which were are wallowing: the disappointing response of the Obama Administration to the recent Crash, the persistent drum beat of lies from the Republicans about the response, and the more than disappointing lack of response from Obama and his friends.

This column by Krugman is too late to have much of an effect on voting in about 20 days ... and begun already where I live. Summers, Geithner, Obama, and Emanuel flubbed their opportunities to read the situation in late 2008 correctly ... not without plenty of advice, by the way. They listened to the politicians who did not want to be obliged to explain to their constituents the nature of sovereign responsibility for the economy and their participation in government programs. They chickened out.

The Republicans, girded to the hilt, found themselves with a "power point presentation" against the expected "socialization" of the economy, and when it did not materialize, the just presented their arguments anyway, making up the evidence and facts as they went along. It was and is the worst behavior of a political party since the days of Jim Crow.

Then, Obama did not want to sully his "above politics" mythology in a scrap with the Republicans so the drum beat of lies persists to this day and will throw the election of many a liberal. Obama is central to this failure of leadership ... and, frankly, he does not deserve another term. He, personally, has been found wanting and that's that.

JB

10/6/10

There is no question that Barack Obama has played his intra-party cards very poorly. It is understandable that he very much did have a pile of shit on his plate when he took office, as Mr. Emanuel noted time and again. And, he had fifth columnists sprinkled (sometimes "packed") throughout his rambling Executive Branch agencies, and to add misery to that, hundreds of his appointments were held up in the Senate because Harry Reid could not find a handle on the Republicans who were deliberately sabotaging the Democratic Adminstration. Of course the Republicans were being "Obstructionist"; they had little other choice without a leader, with eight years of disaster to cover up, with no viable plan to bring the government back to an even keel ... except by way of removing the masts, keel, and engineroom.

But, Obama made decisions that sorely vexed the liberal and progressive wings of the party. Some commentators think that he truly believed that a new age of bi-partisanship had arrived and he was going to preside over that. Well, Obstructionism from the Republicans was evident enough early on that Barack should have ditched that bi-partisanship mythology quickly. He didn't. Emanuel had something to do with that.

In issue after issue, however, Obama took the line of least resistance. He could have closed Guantanamo political prison in a trice, moving the internees to mainland prisons. He could have done this early and the blame for holding these people would have still rested on the Cheneyites. But he did not.

And so it goes up and down the agenda, one miscue after another, and nothing by way of apologies or explanations from the guy who is now hiding behind that pile of shit on his plate. He now own the stuff and as this political note details he wants the liberals and progressives to have a bite. Sorry Charlie!

The liberals and progressive may stay home for this election. They can assure themselves that two things will happen if they do. First, a large number of long-term incumbent Democrats are going to flame out and crash into their native hills. Good riddance, is the sub-text of this election. Second, as a result of the Democrats coming in massively behind, one or both houses of Congress will revert to the Republicans, who will probably not have a 61 vote super-majority in the Senate, nor will they have a sufficiently strong position in the House to have their way with the Republic. And, (my point), Barack Obama's plate of shit will loom larger and larger as nothing substantive gets done in the next two years.

Well, something substantive will happen, but it will not be legislation. The world will do its best to recover from The Crash, but without U.S. leadership, de facto strength (pronounced "China") will begin to prevail. The U.S. economy will languish, because Republicans are wrong about temporary public stimuli, dead wrong.

So, Barack Obama will not have any believable momentum going into his re-election year and at the Democratic National Convention he can expect a serious challenge from the liberal and progressive wings, which will have momentum from the terrible two years the Republicans are about to give us.

Yes, these things are on our minds. Yes, this essay is the very sort of anti-Obama stuff that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and yes this breaks the sort of party discipline that I have been calling for for two years. Well, the point is that no one listened and party discipline never existed (as is the tradition in the Democratic Party) and the corporate press has intervened with the help of the more outraged and frankly tantrum-throwing liberals and progressives and we have a debacle roaring down on us.

The take-away is this: if you thing we are strong enough as a Party and a nation to handle two years of Republican posturing and trouble-making, then stay home in November. I have outlined the most probable outcome of that. If you think the country and the Party are too weak then, of course, you must vote for our Party and weed out only the most egregiously corrupt of our own.

JB

9/23/10

I was reading in the New York Review of Books a posthumous article by Tony Judt in which he argues that among the "literati" of our world there has been a problem of selling one's mind over to a system of thought, perhaps an ideology or an economic theory. The piece is called "Captive Minds", and it struck me as instructive and probably wrong in some sense. You have to read it for yourself to get your own drift of it.

A captive mind is one, Judt says (along with an impressive bunch of European public intellectuals who, btw, have much to answer for), that gives over its discriminating and critical faculties to the cause represented. Judt notes that for these men and women one part of the cause seems to cloud out the inevitable onerous bits, as with the intellectuals from all over the world who bought Leninism and Stalinism, especially Stalinism, hook line and sinker. It seemed in public that they fully supported the Party line and all that entailed.

This raised the question of whether there is such a thing as a non-public intellectual, since we gauge one another publicly in periodicals like the NYRB and others. It is mentioned that the sorts of bright and lucid men and women who gave themselves over to Stalinism were thought to harbor private reservations, for example. But, what the hell is a "private reservation," anyway? If we know about it, it is public. If, on the other hand, it remain invisibly or inaudibly private, then is it actually a reservation? I think not. But the point is also made that these people accepted the full doctrine and faith out of some kind of mental laziness, which strikes me as both too true and yet hard to pin down.

And now, of course, there is the problem of what party politics really means. Does belonging to a political party mean that you believe in and support everything that goes on among party members or every word of party manifestos, platforms, planks, and so forth? Of course not. So what is the difference we Americans make of subscribing to Stalinism versus being a Yellow Dog Democrat who would vote for a yellow dog if it were nominated? See, the problem seems to lie somewhere in the moral texture of affiliation to organizations. Democrats are not malevolent characters and their party platforms, at least, are rarely (any longer) prescriptions for legal or social injustices or for deliberately bilking the public treasury.

Stalinism, I can say from years of study, was known internally differently than externally to the Soviet Union. Many Soviet citizens had no clue that Stalin was responsible directly for the enslavement and murder of literally (not figuratively!) millions of hapless and innocent dissidents. Then, again, there were many who actually did know about the horrors, thanked their lucky stars that they had not (yet) been ratted out, and saw some sort of physical "progress" being made in the relic regime that Lenin and Stalin "inherited."

The key to living with Stalinism was to be vocal as an advocate and absolutely quiet about dissent. The key to being a Democrat ... as opposed to being a Republican ... is that you can be vocal about your dissent, but in a democracy you count in the polls as a Republican when you do. So, the question is: what constitutes being a Democrat, if Republicans act with more party discipline?

Well, the ending of the Tony Judt piece is that there are "ideologies" like Libertarian "Market Fundamentalism" that appeal to intellectuals, capture their minds, and lead them off cliffs, just as Stalinism led intellectuals to their deaths and modern Republicanism is leading non-intellectuals into the clever trap of an (Orwellean) ideology of rugged individualism that does not exist in fact or reality.

The point is that there must be a place lying between faithful slavery and captivity to an ideology (Stalinism, Market Fundamentalism, Christian Fundamentalism, Yellow Dog-ism, and Corporate-sponsored American Individual-ism on the one hand, and "mere anarchy" on the other.

Bob Kall polled his readers to see if (my criticism) OpEdNews is too critical of the Obama Administration and, lo!, the poll revealed that OpEdnews is not. What a surprise! He did not offer to have ME write the polling questions, and he has no credentials for writing them himself, so I am going to let the poll rest in its own lack of authenticity and veracity.

But, this is treacherous ground, folks. Republicans get themselves into lots of trouble and into relationships with mad-hatters like Dick Cheney for the lack of spontaneity among the faithful. Republicans have the tradition to refuse to speak ill of a fellow Republican despite the fact that it is obvious that he might, like Cheney, be less a Republican than a Fascist ... a believer in corporate will over the government in a mutual symbiosis of money and power.

Journalist Bernstein's new book, about which I have read (only), suggests that the issues within the White House, (as I have speculated for two years now,) have been divisive and have put the Obama Administration into the public view in a very strange and uncomfortable light, namely, that perhaps Obama and his advisors were bought out by the ailing financial sector. Occam's Razor argues against that, and most thoughtful analysts know it, but it is popular conspiracy-minded (pseudo)-journalism and earns practitioners a living.

Bernstein also makes public the idea ... which should be obvious to everyone ... that there are many more things on the president's plate than are ever reported publicly, especially national security issues, including a torrent and deluge of threats against the president and his family and relatives. Why any analyst or pundit believes they can know the mind of government when they discount the weight of all this, is beyond me, except that such pundits are captive of their own livingroom couch imaginations. No less so than the intellectuals who got themselves sucked into Stalinism or Market Fundamentalism.

There is a way to approach a sitting president with criticism that does not go for knee-caps and next of kin. You read Frank Rich and you see it. You can even read Brooks and see its effect. Many writers, honed in the Bush era where hyperbole lost all meaning missed those opportunities for responsible criticism relentlessly. But, the final point must be made that their lack of party discipline will have consequences, a point that was crucially obvious all along.

Finally, I must answer whether my own mind is captive of Democratic Party ideas. No, it is not. It entertains each platform of ideas and chronicle of events, statements, and rulings on a daily and weekly basis, subjecting every last idea to the method of multiple working hypotheses. This is, as we noted a few weeks ago, the very meaning of liberal, in the expression "liberal democracy" bequeathed to us by the men of the Enlightenment. It is the scientific method applied to politics. And, it is a burdensome chore, believe me, but it is the only way to land somewhere sanely between having a captive mind and the irresponsible, undisciplined anarchy of the ego-centric existence.

JB

9/15/10

In Delaware yesterday, as predicted over the weekend when I was enjoying myself in Los Angeles, a "TeaParty" candidate on the Republican primary list beat out a nine term, until then, very popular centrist candidate. This is happening here and there across the nation, not so often that you could call it viral, but clearly there is "movement" in the winds. Sarah Palin and Karl Rove ... as unhealthy and swinish pair as I could imagine while cold sober ... are very much a part of this movement and so is News Corp the parent of Fox and its "fair and balanced" approach to presenting GOP and Libertarian propaganda as news.

Well, I don't write about this stuff much because it is mostly a figment of the imaginations of a few wild-eyed ultra-conservative Emersonian-individualist klepto-anarchists, who believe that the national economy is a dog fight into the midst of which innocent and unwary civilians are thrust to see how they fare. Dog eat dog is the pseudo-Darwinian con they have perpetrated on the public, red and grizzly, but masquerading under the garb of biological science fitted to their brand of deliberate deceit to achieve riches beyond the imagination of or the need of anyone.

But, I have to write. It is a "movement" and it has consequences for the election in November, widely trumpeted to be a potential disaster for the Democrats who have been unable without the help of the GOP to manage our way clear of the Great Recession. Columnists like Brooks in the NYT recently declared the Democrats to be on a spending spree the likes of which no one has ever imagined or dreamed. The "bail out" was signed into law by Geo. W. Bush, remember. The bailout was too small to accomplish what it needed and the small part came from the GOP and conservatively trained Democrats.

Well, Christine O'Donnel in Delaware is on the November ballot because she has ranted sufficiently to convince middle-class and working class (often the same people) that they are being screwed by corrupt politicians who look out for themselves first. This message is true! American politics is decidedly ugly and disingenuous. The problem is that O'Donnell and Palin and all the rest of the "TeaParty" folk have their examples of corruption mostly wrong. The take-away from them and the Fox folk, however, is that you cannot trust government and those in it. That's what people are voting ... distrust ... fear!

The biggest question is whether this will split the unthinking Republicans in the electorate from those who see through this fog occasionally. A few pundits think this will happen and that the GOP will continue to destroy itself on the racist and anarchist axes that it has embraced on the far right. I tend to agree, but I am worried that Democrats will become complaisant and not get out the vote.

You see, the furor over on the GOP side is more than slightly disorienting to Democrats, who like most voters understand that politicians are likely to be disappointing in the short-, mid-, and long-term. Politicians are people who must compromise their agendas and schedules, so they always disappoint someone. They also tend to become fatheaded about themselves and protective of those things that make their ugly job bearable ... the trappings of power and the elite.

So, the O'Donnell victory is a mixed bag. It does spell trouble inside the GOP which is good, but it does also spell a more generalized distrust of politics in general and that usually means that Democrats quietly do not vote. That is bad!

JB

9/5/10

... Yes, I am aware of the myth of Sisyphus, and I know that giving unrequested advice to younger people is likely to fulfill King Sisyphus's quandary. But, you see, the rock must be pushed up the mountain despite gravity, not to prove gravity, but to prove a different point. It is necessary to understand what the political moment is right now, and why this moment is so disappointing to so many people.

First, I guess it would be fair and balanced to dispose of the disappointment of the racist right wing in America. Okay, that's done! Now, the thinking right, the people who arrive at the conclusion that human beings are so utterly fallible that we are better off not having lots of them in government running programs approved by Congress and telling us what to do ... or not telling us what they are doing and ripping off the Treasury.

Yes, of course, they are disappointed because the Congress is and the White House is run by people who do not hold such a strongly pessimistic view of human beings. Or, at least, they believe that inherent checks and balances will ward off the worst of abuses. So, the pessimistic right and the racist right are really disappointed because there is no one like themselves in power right now; they are out of power.

For two plus years they have been doing a lot of scurrilous things and telling outlandish lies to persuade people that their view of things is correct. The good thing, from my point of view, about their tactics and strategy is that it is so outlandish and so dismissive of the intellectual power of the average American that it will certainly backfire. Virtually no one in their right mind or having reasonable critical thinking skills believes all the crap that Fox and the GOP are putting out. People listen to see how outrageous it gets, risking the well-known effect that a lie told a thousand times becomes "conventional wisdom" regardless of the facts, but in their hearts they know is all bald-faced lies.

The people whose disappointment really interests us are the Liberals and Progressive Liberals in America, people whose view of humanity is that we can and must get along and do our best and be vigilant against corruption and crime. The optimistic left is disappointed currently because its hope was for radical overturn of the Bush/Cheney philosophy of American political and commercial hegemony over the world. The overturn has has not happened, and you can blame the Great Recession for that. It would be virtually impossible to withdraw American support from the global financial systems when such a move would result in a world-wide collapse and a dire depression. But, it is hard to see the house from one room, so all these people are really disappointed and can point to scores of things that Obama's teams should have done, but did not.

There is another group on the left that I hesitate to label because I am surely going to offend a friend or reader by doing so. Nevertheless (he writes plunging into the fray as never before), there is a sector of American Liberal thinking that tends to emphasize just one of the five foundational tenets of Liberalism over the others. They do not ignore "Individual Liberty," or "Ethics," or the "Rule of Law," or even the belief in "Progress" for its promise of improvement. They give more energy into the "Humanity" tenet than others on the left. They have been called the "bleeding heart" Liberals for decades, at least since Eleanor Roosevelt expressed her chagrin and horror at the way miners were living in West Virginia and sharecroppers in Mississippi and garment workers in New York City, and so on.

Unlike the rich on the right who give a smaller and smaller percentage of their income as charity the richer they get, these left wing "bleeding hearts" cannot stop giving. But, currently they are disappointed because the kind of programs they create and love, but have not in he past imposed vigilance over, are not high on the agenda. Obama is trying to make a point here: no more free lunch, or at least no more "welfare queens" to haunt the Democrats for decades after.

This brings up another disappointment shared across the American left—"the disappointment of rising expectations." When Barack Obama gave the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention over six years ago, people were galvanized by this bright, personable, and up-and-coming young Black person. He spoke their language everyone thought, especially over the background of the grimacing Dick Cheney bent on world domination and privatizing everything in sight, especially if a profit could be squeezed out of it, which is inevitable when the U.S. government privatizes its essential functions.

Obama set himself up as a great relief from the Bush/Cheney cynical exploitation of government for private profit, but his words did not turn into deeds, or even worse, his campaign words did not turn into Presidential addresses excoriating the corruption and false ideas of the past. He moved into the White House, surrounded himself with able men and women. Academic pedigrees counted. And Obama insulated himself from the very people who elected him with their own audacious hope that he could do something ... almost anything ... to fix the perennial mess in Washington.

Disappointment is a weak emotion. It is nothing like rage or fear or love or forgiveness. It is pallid and it will have like consequences in November this year, when voters who are "disappointed" will not bother to vote. The GOP is counting on this, of course, because to redefine themselves away from the cynicism of the Cheney/Bush years, the GOP has had to distance itself from the old leaders, and in so doing became virtually leaderless. Into this vacuum moved Rush Limbaugh and that Glen Beck fellow from Fox, the parent company of which gave $200 million dollars to the GOP this summer. The GOP needed a way of coordinating without a leader, so they developed a mantra that everyone could understand without actually having to say the words. The words are: "do nothing to help this administration succeed, absolutely nothing!"

Meanwhile, Obama and his staff, headed by the ever vulgar martinet Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff, had a mantra of their own, a fairy-tale in political circles, a decisively stupid policy of trying to achieve consensus, called "bipartisanship," in Washington without enough chips to carry it out. The policy of the GOP was, as we have all seen, to have absolutely none of this, but Obama and his staff were too enchanted with the idea to drop it. So, where you might have expected the President to be "presidential" and to tower above the GOP and declare their ideas inappropriate, ill-considered, or even outrageously stupid, Obama was having none of that. This is where a lot of "disappointment" comes from. Obama seems to be captive of his own prejudices about government. He is not pragmatic, when his campaign was all about pragmatism.

So, young people, the prescription for your disappointment is: remember that disappointment means fewer voters in November. This means that you all have to ... HAVE TO ... join a campaign staff locally this coming week and work your tails off to make sure that people understand that their disappointment is NOTHING compared to what the GOP will do to our country if they get power in November.

Second, you have to remember that President Obama has actually accomplished quite a bit in two years: health care won against a trenchant and utterly corrupted enemy, is one. Foreign affairs is another. You did notice that the Iraq "war" is finally over, I hope. Now it is the Iraq "advisory and training mission," which is better than what we had, and must be carried out vigorously and honestly to straighten out as best we can the mess we have made over there.

Third, you will be asked by friends whether Obama should run in 2012 or not. The answer is easy: it is way too soon to know the answer. He has a lot of irons in the fire and if just half of them come out right, if he forges a good peace process in Palestine, if he finds a way to correct immigration policy and actually does it, if he begins to use the presidency to teach, to exhort, and to be creative, then probably he should run and win. In the mean time, though, with your disappointment lingering in the back of your conscience, with your hopes deflated, with your prospects for a good job languishing, you should become involved in local politics so you can listen carefully to what others are saying about other possible candidates. This is your time to be in on the ground floor, so be smart about it.

JB

3/22/10

As children we used to exult in the arrival spring, for cabin fever is an oppressive condition for young kids. Winter is more so now, what with global warming squeezing more moisture into the atmosphere to be let go in torrents and blizzards. My home region of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area saw snows the likes of which I vaguely remember from the snow belt in up-state New York. But, thankfully, spring is here and James Carroll has a fitting ode for this occasion.

We have not yet entered the light and dawn of a new era. The darkness still pervades the political landscape as drear old men fight off the coming of new perspectives with angry fear. Still "Springtime, The Chance to Leave Darkness Behind" is a good essay. Refreshing and codifying.

JB

2/17/10

My colleague in NYC sends me articles from the Times and occasionally from the Post that he wants to be sure that I have read, maybe to comment on them publically (as today) and almost always privately between us. Like myself, he is retired, but unlike me he spent a lifetime in and around politics and public health programs. He says he got through one page of this article before throwing up his hands in despair. Jobs, education, and serious mental health care, he wrote. And, I cannot disagree with him. The "Tea Party" people are a tragedy in the making.

First thing that always comes to mind about the "revolution" that these people think they want is that they will be the first and bloodiest victims of any revolution. In fact they already are: they are the urban and suburban and exurban/rural blue collar middle class, and their station in life is evaporating before their very eyes. The squeeze on the middle class, especially the less well educated (but highly skilled, mind you) middle class strata has been intense. The economic squeeze has been relentless with "sticker shock" on everything reducing aspiring people to wondering how they can possibly maintain a semblance of the lifestyle their parents struggled for and finally seemed to achieve. But the psychological squeeze is the vise into which their lives have slipped and the inexorable pressure on their self-esteem goes back a generation or more.

The first moments of the Tea Party were the racist-populist politics of George Corley Wallace. With Wallace we first heard the expression of anger at the lifting up of American Blacks at the palpable expense (jobs lost were the worst of it, but welfare queens the most iconic) of the white blue collar middle strata. The racism was not the racism of hatred, but of fear, fear that Black people would ... with the boost given them by the Great Society programs ... rise higher than any of the whites could hope to achieve, given that they were deficient in book learning and especially critical thinking skills.

No one knows how deficient their critical thinking skills really are. They assume that what befalls them in life is chance, luck, kismet, and a variety of other exogenously stimulated factors, not their own "fault." The pseudo-Christian ethos of the United States quickly hones in on good v. evil and the consequent states of guilt and being at fault. The overburden of this psychology drives multitudes either into the arms of evangelistas (whose message is that "believe THIS and I can assure you that all of this is NOT your fault") or out of religion and into a wasteland of consumerist, popcorn and beer bargain basement hedonism.

Critical thinking is the antidote to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. But, critical thinking is in short supply and squeezed out of a society where economic pressures and white collar greed put a boot in the face of those struggling without a full toolbox of thinking skills. I have watched students in my classes struggle with concepts that are alien to them and their families and some—a precious few—break through, but most hold on with stubborn resistance to a schema that provides a "guarantee" of security of personality because it is familiar, if not exactly incisive and enabling. Americans in general do not know how to think very logically and intelligently, and so how can we expect them to have thoughts that make sense. The answer: Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh give them a vocabulary that through endless repetitions seems to become a coherent "philosophy" of life, politics, and society. But, it is not, it is emotional propaganda, full of anger and truly mindless seething rage at what befalls those who stumble at the threshold of life, formal schooling, and never quite get their balance again.

But, all this said, the Tea Party folks have a point, and that point is: "I am not sure what is wrong or why, but something is drastically wrong, and I am not going to put up with it any more."

Yes, indeedy, there is something wrong. Politics has been corrupted from top to bottom by money. Of course property interests should be heard in the din of human interests, but they should not have bought the system and should not be using it against the society in general. But they do. Corporations own Washington and everyone in that fetid place. And, education in America sucks. The reason is that the quanitity of students is the major concern, their huge numbers, their scores on measurement tests. The quality of education is dependent upon parents and teachers, but too few of either understand how critical their roles are ... and we pay them either nothing or very little to educate our successor generations. Well now, we have a successor generation and a large part of it believes that revolution will solve their problems. It will not.

The only cure for todays problems is for common citizens to beseige their elected representatives on a 24/7 basis, physically, and to tell them that "devil take the hindmost" they will be thrown out of office if they do not end the corruption, starting with the corruption within politics and our Constitutional organizations, principally the Congress. The first place to start is to publically fund all elections and to put limits on the amount that can be spent. Free air time on our public media. That's where to start.

JB

2/13/10

Charles M. Blow is one of the newer columnists at the New York Times. He is astute, and in this case—today's column—he absolutely nails an essential feature of the ineptitude and paralysis that President Obama cannot blame ... or we cannot blame ... on anyone else but Barack Hussein Obama, himself.

Read the article and know that Obama brings a lot of "community organizing" baggage into the White House, luggage the efficacy of which is problematic at best and toxic, as we have seen. You just do not set up shop in the White House like it was a glib store-front operation designed to boost the self-confidence of neighborhood people. Yes, of course, if you treat semi-rational people as if they had the capability of understanding and emulating, they will respond. Some of them, even, will turn a corner, but many will not. In Washington the semi-rational are different from the ghettos of Chicago. Ideology is their main problem and no amount of kissy coddling will change that.

The year is moving along rapidly. The Olympics will drain attention to the fetes and feats and soon it will be March and then April Tax Time. By then Obama should have understood that, like Mr. Blow says, he must change to accomplish Change. I will give him until the Ides of March to get a new methodology out into view, and I will give him until the federal tax deadline to have accomplished something. No accomplishments and I go to Dr. Howard Dean with a public open letter and ask him to stand up and be counted. There are many like me.

JB

1/21/10

About a week ago I got one of several calls I will get this year from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). I detest that organization, but I understand the party-political need for recruitment of good candidates, especially those (like Gavin Newsome of San Francisco) who without help from seasoned coaches and a fast course in how to take it on the chin and survive, ... would (like Gavin Newsome) not survive. But, the DSCC and its counterpart (equally corrupt) in the House have become "incumbency rackets" rather than recruitment organizations or miniature bootcamps for aspiring pols. I told the nice lady that I disagree almost all the time with what DSCC does, and lo! she admitted to me that they have made quite a few mistakes recently. The name Joe Lieberman came up. I told her I would never again contribute to the DSCC ... crossing my fingers ... and hoping that someone of the 65 Democrats begins to understand what the real purpose is. It is not prolonging incumbency!

So with that rolling around in mid-term memory in an exchange of emails with my colleague in Massachusetts I am told that the Coakley campaign was not Obama's fault. The Boston Globe says as much with quite a bit of detail, including Ms. Coakley's unfortunately timed Caribbean holiday.

I read the piece and noticed that there was a subtext. The White House is trying to get the burden of failure off Obama's back ... as you might easily suspect. And, there is the drift of the article to the conclusion that Coakley just was not ready for prime time, which the voters quickly understood, and so they acted accordingly. So much for running naked through the streets of Boston and the rest of a locked-down, stalwart Democratic state. Well, so much bullcrap!

The DSCC dropped the ball by not telling Coakley that she must win the election and that she should not take anything ... ANYTHING ... for granted. DSCC should have forwarded a copy of that message to DNC so that they could remind Coakley about the New Jersey and Virginia losses ... and that the public is angry ... very angry! They apparently did not, or if they made the effort they made very little impact. DNC needs help and quickly. Do not even think about Rahm as the leader of DNC!

The White House, being tacked toward the political center by Rahm, should have made it plain to DNC that Obama's agenda very much depends on the Senate being filibuster-proof. When the Massachusetts campaign began Rahm should have made double sure that DNC and DSCC were in cammies and conducting bootcamp for Coakley. Apparently, Mr. Emanuel did not see the underlying and obvious urgency. Mr. Emanuel is not the brightest guy in the White House, by the way. It is a shame that President Obama cannot see that everything that goes through Rahm's office becomes less. Obama knows that Emanuel is more conservative than himself, but with a good Chief of Staff, the message of the leader, not the stiff in the Chief of Staff's office, would be the message we hear. Apparently ... all too apparently ... this is not the case.

This is not to let Axelrod off the hook, either. He is a politically savvy guy and should have a reflexive interest in anything that threatens or threatens to threaten the power structure in Washington vis-à-vis his charge as chief political advisor. Apparently he does not see it that way or cannot get his voice heard.

The up-shot of the Massachusetts debacle is not that Coakley was arrogantly and publically advertising that she thought herself to be a "shoe in." The real conclusion is that the top leadership of the Democratic Party——beginning at the very top ... in the White House——is failing, flailing, and inept. President Obama should make changes to his staff, not his ... and our ... agenda!

JB

1/20/10

It is impossible not to write something about the loss of a U.S. Senate seat to a Republican in ... of all places ... Massachusetts. Everyone is writing something and most of it makes sense, except that all the reasons posed seem to contradict one another in the end. Coakley ran a lazy and "I've been chosen" campaign, and Brown—another pinhead from the teaparty branch—ran an aggressive, if sophomoronic, campaign. The White House assumed wrongly that Coakley could not lose. The DSCC continues its path of wandering in the desert. Etc. Etc. The truth is that the voters are fed up with Washington and particularly the failure of the Democrats to be Democrats ... and believe me Massachusetts understands what a Democrat is supposed to be and do.

My thesis is that voters absolutely hate Congress ... both sides of the aisle. They are faced with the paralyzing prospect of a binary choice among candidates who become immediately sold out to special interests ... most recently the heath care and pharmaceutical industries, both of which are fabulously wealthy and without conscience when it comes to purchasing a few key legislators. The paralysis is relieved by shoving it up the butt of bi-partisan demagogues. Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama, please take notice. You're next.

There is a strong sense abroad in the land these days that the federal government is beyond redemption. The parade of assinine pontificating during endless months of Health Care Reform legislating, the ugly display of whorish Senators cavorting with their sugar-daddy lobbyists, the lies and the lame excuses, they all add up to a revulsion that the Massachusetts voters displayed. They (and we, I maintain) are sick to death of this crap, and if it takes a complete transformation of the House and Senate ... a complete up-ending ... a term-by-term kicking of legislative asses both sides of the aisle, then that's what we are going to do.

The Senate has rules of procedure that are anti-democratic and they must change. The House is a little better, but jackasses like Murtha are much too burdensome to defend anymore. The White House has Rahm Emanuel and a clique of financier-ass-kissers, and they must all go too. Obama really needs to understand that the first Black American president is very likely to be the last for a good long time, if he doesn't get is own butt straightened out and f*****g remember who elected him—a coaltion of progressives and independents.

Yeah, I am mad. Let the morons in the Democratic Party understand this: January 19th, 2010 the Progressive movement becomes the Progressive Party ... and devil take the corrupt and feckless and heave them into the dustbin of history!

JB

1/19/10

At OpEdNews Rob Kall, the proprietor there, posted an article from CNN's "Politics Ticker" about Progressives digging in to unseat Rahm Emanuel from his job as Chief of Staff in the Obama White House. This is the best news I have heard in months! How long does it take Democrats to understand that the Obama we see is the result of heavy-handed manipulations by a person whose qualities of character are so negligible as to call into question the character of those who associate with him. Rahm Emanuel is bad for Obama, bad for Democrats, bad for America because he is an arrogant, slithering, cockroach of a politician, one whose chief claim to fame is that he can brow beat members of Congress both sides of the aisle.

Rahm works through fear. He is supposedly a centrist in an era where the center is where the media says it is, but not where the hearts and minds of the public are. The center is functionally sterile. This suits Rahm because he actually has no program or values other than himself.

Rahm demands obedience from everyone, cabinet secretaries included, and one wonders how he gets away with this. So, wonder. When you are finished wondering, you have to understand that Obama lets him.

Obama did not have control of his own government on day one. He still doesn't. He has a mighty rival in the military industrial apparatus, much of which is represented directly in Congress in both parties. He has Bush-era appointees still in office sprinkled "liberally" throughout the departments and agencies. He has appointments stalled in the U.S. Senate by Republicans whose game is simply to resist anything whatsoever that Obama might do. He has a press corps that cannot be trusted by him or public. And so, Obama, fully aware that his administration would be one of the most nitpicked in the history of human government, chose Emanuel to be his "whip." It was an awful decision, and it will surely spell the end of Obama politically if he does not do something about it and soon.

The issue is not actually or only a "progressive" one. It is an issue of attempting to come close to the Obama of the campaign, a persona that evaporated the moment Emanuel took office. There is no reason for this to have happened, except that Emanuel is totally unscrupulous and, in addition to being a foul-mouth of the first order, is a martinet. My personal feeling is that Obama is slightly afraid of Emanuel and has been "blackmailed" by references to "losing control" from Rahm. He is as one commenter on the CNN article said of his crooked character, '... should not be within 100 miles of Washington.'

We have all been trying to understand why President Obama is so different from Candidate Obama. Rahm Emanuel is the reason. He is the bottleneck and filter for everything that happens in the WestWing. He likes it that way, but Democrats inside and outside of Washington need to say otherwise. We do not like it that way!

What, I ask you people inside the beltway, do you know about Emanuel and why are you so afraid to speak up? Do you not understand that not only the fate of the Democratic Party, but clearly the fate of the nation hangs on you telling the truth about your fear of Emanuel?

It is time, waaay past time, to remove this cockroach from the White House. Speak up, join the chorus, understand that Rahm Emanuel is a cancer on this administration and must be removed.

JB

1/14/10

Among progressives there is a fair amount of angst these days. Rahm Emanuel has convinced Barack Obama that the left progressive wing of the Democratic Party can be essentially ignored ... mostly because they have no place to go. Rahm is wrong ... again ... of course. Obama announced this before the inauguration, by saying that he would "govern from the center."

We all understand that governing a diverse nation should take into account the dispositions of the many, but it is pure hogwash to believe that the center is any one place, especially in routine politics in Washington, and moreover, with Republicans taking a trenchant and often mindless approach to the Obama administration that results in 100% non-cooperation on any detail whatsoever, politically "center" is meaningless. Obama still does not think so, so we have a problem Houston!

Here is the essential agenda for 2010 for progressives and classical liberals, you know, the educated elite from universities and the left media and literary circles and so forth. The agenda is to quietly pick a successor to Obama and being to place this person (say, Howard Dean, for instance) into conversations where Dean looks and sounds like he knows what is going on by comparison to the current White House. I say that this must be done quietly and deftly so as not to tip off the far right, which will begin to hurl insults, lies, crap of all descriptions at the successor. We don't want that, of course. Campaigns are long enough as it is without shifting the successor's moves toward a campaign in second, third, or high too soon.

But it can ... and must ... be done. We need to be able in November if the news is really bad to tell Obama straight out that he must fire Rahm and Summers and Geithner immediately or else. Believe me, it will be "or else" because Rahm has Obama captive and Obama wouldn't believe it if you rubbed his arrogant face in it. Meanwhile as we are selecting several and then one standard-bearer who is a realistic candidate for 2012, we are waiting and listening intently to the White House for signs of their magical cure for plummeting popularity polls. Democrats in the House and Senate are going to demand that ... and Rahm knows it.

What Rahm's idea of a magic potion to save the election and come close to satisfying progressives and liberals will, probably, not be enough. He is a moderate along the lines of a foul-mouth, Capone-era lawyer with some Evan Bayh in there for the ladies. Obama will fail to turn the election the way of the Democrats and, I believe, only a disaster of some sort that galvanizes the imagination of voters in the fall ... that is well-handled by the White House ... will do the trick. I think they will not handle it any better than they handled the Christmas terror incident, i.e., there will be off-hand things said and done that the rightpress will blow out of proportion and, yet, dominate the coverage.

This is a very disturbing situation. Rahm is the root of it and the proof is that Obama was considerable a different personality and presence before Rahm became his chief of staff. The "before" and "after" pictures are starkly different. Yes, of course, he became President, too, but you don't see this kind of change very often. It is the image of a powerful and malign personality at work.

Our agenda is flexible and based on evidence and keen observation. It is a workable plan to keep the GOP out of the Executive as long as possible. There are some keys to observation that I will detail in coming essays.

JB

12/20/09

Two op-ed columns on Sunday morning struck home the idea that President Obama has lost perhaps irrecoverable ground with his "base" in just one short year. The first one I read was by Neal Gabbler in the Boston Globe decrying the lack of passion in Obama (as compared to candidate Obama) and his staff. It is, as Gabbler sees it, not listless, but rather seemingly afraid to rock the boat too much, to be seen as an angry Black, to unnecessarily jostle some vote in the gray middle of political opportunists. Gabbler's is not quite an indictment. But if you are looking for causes for these effects, you really need go no further than the Chief of Staff, whose martinet style and gushing profanity has effectively subdued his boss and the rest of the staff. It sounds preposterous, but every organization run by a martinet soon learns to avoid the pain and becomes insensitive to the pain of others.

The second and perhaps more profound of the columns is by our favorite columnist in the New York Times, Frank Rich. I had to pause and go about my morning business before I realized that Rich's use of Tiger Woods as stalking horse for a fundamental problem in American culture is, in fact, a long-awaited statement of a problem we as a culture and as individuals have with the news and information media: we trust it too much, too broadly and too deeply. We allow ourselves to be deceived and it is frankly having more consequences than we are able to deal with.

There is no question that Americans are not well-educated when it comes to discerning pepper from fly-specks. We tend to take things on hopeful face value and sort the world into categories that are comfortable for us. We have categories for crime and faithlessness, but these are bound categories with sharper edges than really exist in real life. We are hood-winked, as Rich says, all too often, and we accept spin as having a strength of truth in it, despite much evidence to the contrary. We don't like disagreement and the feeling of being talked into or being talked down to. In defense of what self-conscious awareness we have of our limitations, we prefer to accept a web of deceit than to challenge the messenger and risk being defeated in argument.

Frank Rich ends his essay with what I think is a memorable sentence, memorable because of its utterance as much as its content. It represents a departure that the White House had better begin to understand soon.

... Though the American left and right don’t agree on much, they are both now coalescing around the suspicion that Obama’s brilliant presidential campaign was as hollow as Tiger’s public image — a marketing scam designed to camouflage either his covert anti-American radicalism (as the right sees it) or spineless timidity (as the left sees it)....

JB

11/13/09

The following essay/diatribe, complete with foul language (which I have "bleeped,") appeared the other day in Salon. It is the sort of thing that echoes around in certain precincts, but contains, in my opinion, the seeds of a nasty surprise for Liberals and Progressives, especially those who think that Marty has recovered his senses and will be a companion in the coming struggles. Not so much, I think. But, it is good to see the radical right buckling and imploding. JB

Hi, I'm Marty, and I'm a recovering Republican

I was a feminazi-hating, liberal-bashing loudmouth who tried to befriend Bill O'Reilly. Man, I was such a (bleep)

By Marty Beckerman

Every day I wake up with the same thought: "I used to be such a (bleeping) idiot."

I am a former Republican. And I wasn't merely the libertarian, live-and-let-live, fun-at-parties kind of conservative whose primary concern is balancing the budget; I was a spiteful, narrow-minded, fire-breathing paranoid lunatic who questioned the patriotism and morality of my liberal fellow citizens. Recognizing the error of my ways has done wonders for my mental health but left me with constant, unremitting remorse; I really want to go back in time and kick my own (bleep).

Surely I am not alone: Earlier this year independents sympathized with Democrats two-to-one over Republicans, whereas they were evenly split five years ago; a slim majority of young voters voted for Sen. John Kerry in 2004, but nearly 70 percent chose Barack Obama in 2008, the widest margin in electoral history. Traditionally people shift rightward as their bank accounts expand and their flesh wrinkles, but my generation is seemingly the first to move leftward with age.

Actually, I was a passionate liberal when I entered college in September 2001, and I initially resisted the GOP's post-9/11 fury and propaganda. I decried the suspension of habeas corpus and the 2003 Iraq invasion and feared for our country when dissent was equated with treason in the popular imagination. And then a few things happened:

• A handful of my friends joined the College Republicans. As our drunken nights accumulated -- with Fox News always in the background and a stack of vitriolic books cracked open -- I found myself questioning my assumptions. Craving the acceptance of my peers like any other insecure college kid, I gradually accepted their self-reinforcing groupthink, slowly but surely inching toward the Dark Side.

• A handful of my fellow campus left-wingers appeared to excessively sympathize with right-wing Islamists, rationalizing the violence of suicide bombers, for example, but refusing to criticize (on multicultural grounds) heinous civil rights abuses across the globe. The starry-eyed George W. Bush acolytes who called for the expansion-by-explosion of worldwide freedom -- despite opposing countless domestic liberties -- seemed righteous in comparison.

• A handful of my professors injected their utopian and hypersensitive politics into the classroom, calling for a "socialist revolution" and grading me poorly for using "heteronormative" language. Rebelling against their authority, as they had rebelled against conservative professorial authority in their student days, felt as natural as doing a keg stand at a fraternity party.

• A super liberal girlfriend dumped me, sparking my testosterone-fueled bitterness toward everything that reminded me of her, such as left-wing politics and basically all human females.

Very few people in their late teens and early twenties seek justice in moderation. The hormone-soaked college years are a time of extremes, our changing identities often defined by dissent-quashing affiliations, leaving us to later cringe at our frenzied "Goldfish Liberation phase," "Castrate the Phallusocracy phase," "Noam Chomsky phase" or "Ayn Rand phase." (Yes, I spent a summer vacation trying to finish reading "Atlas Shrugged," ultimately throwing in the towel around page 75,000.)

Much like our previous chief executive, I should have seen the danger of sealing myself in an echo chamber to prevent contamination from outside viewpoints; I began only hanging out with conservative true believers, only reading conservative books, only getting my news from conservative media outlets. In order to avoid journalistic "left-wing bias," I embraced right-wing bias, foolishly confusing sensationalist entertainment with debate and truth-telling. Outrage became my drug of choice.

There was no single moment when I transformed into an unhinged, raving authoritarian; propaganda works in repetition -- in accumulation -- and worldviews rarely change overnight. However, as your skepticism weakens, a new understanding of history develops. Whereas Liberal Me viewed America improving over time with the progression of civil rights and sexual liberation, Conservative Me viewed history as an unfolding catastrophe: In my mind, "socialist" handouts threatened our laissez-faire way of life, as if public roads/schools/libraries were no different than Stalin's gulags, and hedonistic decadence -- facilitated and encouraged by scheming left-wing nihilists -- threatened individual self-control. I mistakenly came to believe that America had not progressed toward justice but fallen from grace.

I railed in conversation and on my website against "freedom-hating hippies," "activist judges who overturn the will of the people," "pro-abortion feminazis," "Marxist Democrats," "elitist, so-called intellectuals," "greedy welfare queens," "environmental whack jobs" and other perceived bogeymen. I lost sight of grayscale and instead saw the world in black and white; I labeled Terri Schiavo's husband a money-hungry murderer for pulling the plug on his comatose wife, lumped all Palestinians together with the few terrorists among their population, uttered racial/sexual/ethnic slurs with a little too much enthusiasm for simple prurience and approvingly repeated Michael Savage's book title "Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder." I even argued that women belong in the home, not the workplace! (Now a self-employed author, I cook dinner for my girlfriend nightly and perform household chores -- groceries, laundry, dishes -- when she heads to the office. Truly I am a domestic goddess.)

My sudden transformation mystified my friends and family, many of whom tried to talk sense into me when they didn't outright disown me. Even my conservative father said I was going overboard. For example: wondering if my 90-year-old grandmother was a Commie for cashing her Social Security checks. In order to heed your inner Joe McCarthy, you must first squelch your inner conscience.

Strangest of all, I developed a finger-wagging puritan bent, which made absolutely no sense for a 20-year-old guy who was getting laid and intoxicated on a steady basis. I blamed "the anti-family Left" for encouraging couples to divorce and youngsters to fornicate, as if liberals were all conspiring together to destroy the traditional family, as if liberal states do not have lower rates of divorce and teen pregnancy than their conservative counterparts. My hypocrisy is mystifying in retrospect -- why would I bash sexual liberation while having sloppy drunken unmarried sex whenever possible? -- but perhaps conservative politicians such as John Ensign, Mark Sanford, David Vitter, Larry Craig and Newt Gingrich can explain.

You might imagine my moralizing stemmed from our cultural anxiety about sexuality, but it actually came from a longstanding need to position myself as superior to others; I got off on presenting my fellow millennials as pleasure-seeking, unthinking/unfeeling animals while my life had Truth and Meaning. It was incredibly self-righteous and self-congratulatory, and it was only about 50 percent accurate.

None of this would haunt me so deeply if I did not have a national platform to air my histrionic, uninformed opinions. However, I was uncommonly lucky for my age. In 2004 MTV/Pocket Books published my book "Generation S.L.U.T.," which described the anonymous hook-up culture among contemporary American youth and unleashed a storm of publicity. Although I am proud of the book's emotional nakedness (apart from its amateurish didacticism), the book's promotion is another story: In Salon, the New York Times, and countless other interviews (newspaper, radio, TV, blogs) I blamed the psychological turbulence of modern teenagers -- from wrist-cutting to school shootings -- on the 1960s feminist revolution. I sounded like a bitter middle-aged man; I even flattered the ultimate bitter middle-aged man, Bill O'Reilly, whom I asked to "be my friend" during a Fox News Channel appearance. (O'Reilly appeared confused by the request. For the record: I am friends with every Irish person, minus the nondrinkers, who do not exist.)

I completely understand why conservatives-turned-liberals such as Arianna Huffington and David Brock and liberals-turned-conservatives such as P.J. O'Rourke and David Horowitz spend decades walking back their youthful ramblings. When millions upon millions of people remember you for something that you no longer represent -- if you think they remember you anyway, which they probably do not -- the shame is unbearable, the desire for a time machine pathological. The temptation is to become an extremist in the opposite direction -- LOOK how much I've changed, everybody! -- which is hardly an act of maturity. The dilemma remains: You have evolved, yet the perception of you remains stuck in a misguided past. (At a recent literary event someone asked me, "Aren't you the guy who thinks women shouldn't have sex?" I'm misanthropic, yes, but willing to concede that humanity should probably reproduce.)

However, I might have never recovered from my right-wing fever if not for the controversy I caused. Readers sent me hate mail following a Salon interview with Rebecca Traister, in which I bashed feminism and articulated such thoughts as: "Men don't see women as clean and pure but as a means to an end, a nice little (bleep)-hole." One Salon reader even threatened my physical safety.

But middle-aged liberal psychologist Steve Edgell took another approach: calmly and gently talking me back to earth. Over the course of many e-mails and phone conversations, Dr. Edgell -- who had been an Ayn Rand junkie at my age -- explained the reasons for his own political evolution and guided me through the myriad inconsistencies of my rabid philosophy. Just as I was beginning to understand how unbalanced I had become, Edgell died of a heart attack. He did not live to see me completely return to planet Earth but must have known he had planted the seeds of doubt. I never met the man, and I don't necessarily agree with everything he believed, but I owe him my sanity. (He was an atheist, but I hope he is looking down from the cosmic void with amused satisfaction.)

Just as morphing into an extremist took a couple years, un-becoming an extremist happened over time. One by one I saw the flaws in conservative orthodoxy: attempting to fight terrorism with torture, which only aided our enemies' propaganda efforts and thus created more terrorists; seeking to liberalize the Muslim world while curtailing rights for gay people at home; criticizing public schools for lackluster results and therefore cutting funds further; disdaining the weak while never analyzing why they are weak; always seeing the effect but never the cause, which on a mass scale perpetuates the effect.

The 2008 financial crash further proved to me the necessity of an economic safety net within the market system; tying health insurance to employment suddenly made no sense, for example, when millions of people lost their jobs due to conditions beyond their control. Capitalism with a few safety pads -- or a condom, I suppose, since the recession has fucked us all -- is a far cry from a Marxian worker's paradise.

I am not an extreme leftist by any means -- I still dream of swimming in a vault of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck, I would die to protect the First Amendment from censorial progressive overreach (the same goes for theocratic conservative overreach), and I would consider voting for moderate Republicans if any still existed -- but I've learned to see the big picture. It doesn't matter whether you are liberal or conservative, but it's dangerous to always think with exclamation points instead of question marks. Your stance on any particular issue is far less important than whether your worldview is a product of inquiry or incuriosity, whether you feel more comfortable questioning the crowd or blindly marching with it. No ideology has a monopoly on reality -- including my rediscovered left-wing politics.

No longer drunk on jingoism and bloodlust, I feel like a German in 1946, wondering what the hell happened to me, what the hell I supported when I harbored no doubt that we should "nuke 'em all" and measured people by standards other than their character. The years pass, but I cannot reconcile my former and present selves; in my early 20s I made the worst mistake of my life --injecting poison into a world that desperately needed the antidote -- and while it's impossible to undo that error, perhaps my penance is remembering and therefore not repeating it. Just as Dr. Edgell steered me back to the shores of lucidity, I can encourage mellowness in others -- no matter their cause -- and discourage the inevitable craziness that resentment and overgeneralization breed.

Paul of Tarsus, the most famous convert in history, commented long ago: "Even though I was once … a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief." I don't know if anyone, deity or human, will show mercy on me, but I will try to have mercy on myself, and -- even if I continue to fail -- maybe that's enough.

8/6/09

I was going to entitle this essay "The Wrong Guy at the Right Time," but reconsidered. Bromwich quickly provides alternative titles and at one point says,

... Obama's two opposing traits, the caution and the presumption, have joined with results that are deeply unhappy. He arrogates. He does not indicate. And when the argument is well underway, he starts his major explanation as an afterthought.

Obama cherishes the ideal of a frictionless transformation of society. It is a wish for aesthetic harmony, which he mistakes for a political goal. Its attainment would be a beautiful thing. But no matter how much he appeals for comity, Obama is certain to give offense to some. Better to choose your times and targets than allow others to force that choice.

In plainer language this means that Barack Obama is failing at being President ... because he is, apparently, constitutionally unprepared to go into the fray and break a few knee caps if necessary. He continues to believe his fantasy about bipartisan solutions. As Bromwich puts it Pragmatic justifications have been offered to explain his aversion to any contest that implies a clash of opposing interests. Thus Rahm Emanuel said of the disastrously time-wasting courtship of Republican support for the stimulus package: "The public wants bipartisanship. We just have to try. We don't have to succeed." But try every time and you will waste your life. And when did the public say it wanted bipartisanship? The last fair measure was the election of 2008; and the public then gave a convincing majority to one party. (emphasis added)

Barack Obama wants to please everyone. That's his fantasy, but it is our cross. As my colleague in New York City put it the other day when we were discussing the Bromwich essay, particularly the part regarding Obama's fixation with bipartisan solutions ...

One additional point that Obama does not understand is that there is no functioning Republican Party to have bipartisanship with. There are no statesmen in the shell that passes for a political party. There are no intellectual thinkers with any ideas in the empty shell party. But most of all, there are no American patriots in the party. Their patriotism is only to their excessive wealth while using the vast numbers of uninformed voters like the "birthers," gun-nuts, and varieties of sociopaths to demonstrate for them.

I might not have been as kind to the Republicans as Tony, but his points are well taken. Republicans are in a tail-spin of psychological and political withdrawal from the horrendous lies and bullying of the Bush/Cheney administration, still believing that racism is a reasonable core position for a 21st century political party, and rudderless and virtually hopeless and clueless. The yelling and screaming of their minions at public meetings show the Party reduced to a frothing tantrum ... AND YET Barack Obama is helpless to take advantage of it ... or even extricate our country from the pollution from it suffered for the past ten years and now on into his own administration.

Bromwich ends with the hope that Barack Obama can reverse himself and wise up. He says that if he does not this Presidency will be a failure and all semblance of his leadership foreclosed. We can survive that domestically, with pain, but with a world-wide recession still in progress, with Putin's shirt off on horseback in Siberia and his submarines eerily patrolling our coasts, with Israel hovering over its own little red button, with fanatics in Muslim countries afraid to bring their own cultures into the 21st century, continuation of Obama's failure could be fatal. In any case it will be ugly!

JB