Say whuh?

posted by Armadillo Joe

More hopey, changey-ness --

Obama Appoints Loyal Bushie Dana Perino To Broadcasting Board Of Governors

...and so it goes...

Hopey, Changey

posted by Armadillo Joe

TEAM OBAMA READY TO SURRENDER PUBLIC OPTION?

That such a headline could even be conceived is sufficient for me to say "I told you so."

Democrats suck. I want a new party.

Hopey, Changey

posted by Armadillo Joe

Detainee Photos: Obama Seeks To Block Release

Not what I voted for.

Obama Kung-Fu

by Armadillo Joe

I'm tired of reading fellow bloggers trying to defend this crap as yet another brilliant move in Obama's elaborate chess match with entrenched interests and call it what it is: hopey, changey (from Glenn Greenwald) -- bold face mine.

In the last week alone, the Obama DOJ (a) attempted to shield Bush's illegal spying programs from judicial review by (yet again) invoking the very "state secrets" argument that Democrats spent years condemning and by inventing a brand new "sovereign immunity" claim that not even the Bush administration espoused, and (b) argued that individuals abducted outside of Afghanistan by the U.S. and then "rendered" to and imprisoned in Bagram have no rights of any kind -- not even to have a hearing to contest the accusations against them -- even if they are not Afghans and were captured far away from any "battlefield." These were merely the latest -- and among the most disturbing -- in a string of episodes in which the Obama administration has explicitly claimed to possess the very presidential powers that Bush critics spent years condemning as radical, lawless and authoritarian.

Hopey, Changey

A couple of days ago, I wrote a post expressing disillusionment at the actions taken by the Obama Administration -- and, more specifically, not taken -- that seem to indicate that we may have been fooled again. That "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" gut-feeling, for which I have been criticized in the past, has been gnawing at the edges of my rational mind ever since our guy took the election and started to make personnel selections that were praised by self-interested Villagers as grown-up and statesmen-like, but which seemed to this bitter partisan to be more of the same, maybe not Chimpy McMean-Drunk level of sameness, but at least Clinton-esque, Third Way-ish, accomodationist same.

In the comments for my Disillusionment post, Matt asks me to give Obama more of a chance before condemning him as another LBJ. Um, sure. OK, I am going to give him a chance -- unless I act to overthrow his administration, what choice do I have? -- but just because I voted for him, I'm not going to be automatically pleased with every step he takes. Frankly, he has done very little to justify my previous faith in him and a great deal to make worry, from the Rick Warren slap-in-the-face to the bailout mess to state secrets.

So, really, what we're talking about here is misgivings. I have them. A lot of them.

Chris Bowers at OpenLeft outlines many of the same reasons and I find it heartening that someone who isn't a reflexive Reich-wing tea-bagger also feels the same way, though recent political history frames his reasons, which seem otherwise principally focused on the economic crisis and how it relates to assorted political dispositions. My fear for this administration and the man who leads it is that the economic crisis is but one facet of myriad other issues relating to empire, wealth, power, hegemony and class struggle.

Yet, because Chris Bowers is so much smarter than me, he is also able to articulate the reasons for those misgivings far better than this author. His take on the situation also gives more specific historical context with regards to Mr. Obama himself, his actions and the choices he's made that make a pretty solid case for progressive mistrust of the president.

His list breaks down into six keys reasons for his Case for Distrust (mostly with regards to the banking crisis):

1. Because it isn't just the Obama administration we are dealing with
2. Because there are too many dirty hands
3. Because they keep telling us to tone down the pressure on CEO's and Blue Dogs
4. Because I don't trust anti-partisan and anti-ideological rhetoric
5. Because I don't trust the Obama administration more than I trust other Democrats
6. Because President Obama flip-flopped on FISA

Of course, under each heading he presents a detailed account, though they should all be pretty clear just from their titles. However, I do have some choice quotes. The best one (and I had forgotten about this until reading Chris' post) was Obama's FISA vote. I was very upset and angry with him at the time. Here's Chris take on it -- quoted in full:

I don't trust President Obama himself because he flip-flopped on FISA due to right-wing pressure in the campaign. During the primaries, he vowed to fight telecom immunity tooth and nail, but once the primaries were over, he just flat-out flipped his position. This was a straightforward case where President Obama changed a position as a result of shifting political pressure. The conclusion I drew from that event is that it is possible to change Obama's public positions if there was enough political pressure for him to change, and that such pressure was necessary because he was willing to cave into right-wing demands if they applied enough pressure.

In short, FISA was the "distrust and pressure" object lesson for me. From that point on, there could be no benefit of the doubt. If you wanted Obama to side with you, simply trusting him and supporting him would not suffice. Distrust and pressure became requirements.

But the better section comes when he discusses the post-partisan language the Obama campaign and now administration uses in all its public presentations. Like me, Chris Bowers is wary of anyone from the left end of the spectrum who speaks of all of us just getting along. Like me, he cannot but think of such a person as either a dupe or a con-man. Decades of being repeatedly kicked to the curb whenever no longer needed to advance some upstart's career will do that to we trusting souls here in DFH-land.

When I hear "let's get beyond ideology and partisanship," it doesn't mean "reach out, sit down, and have a good faith discussion." Instead, it means "let's cave to Republicans on economic issues, foreign policy issues, and gay rights." I just don't trust Democrats who use language like that. Twenty times burned, thirty times shy, I suppose.

Again, I will say that apart from reigning in the most violent, high-profile and egregious authoritarian excesses of the Bush years, what has anyone in the Obama Administration done to justify the faith we seem to be putting in them (and please note the plural, that I haven't singled out Mr. Obama this time around, but refer to collectively to the administration that bears his name)? The misgivings, again, derive from the way the Obama Administration is expending energy. It isn't even what they are failing to do, the problems they haven't tackled, but the engagements they are actively seeking that are the cause of my disheartenment.

What engagements are those? Well, this one flew in on Friday afternoon under the radar amid all the "state's secrets" brouhaha this past week (h/t Glenn Greenwald):

The Obama administration said Friday that it would appeal a district court ruling that granted some military prisoners in Afghanistan the right to file lawsuits seeking their release. The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight. . .

Tina Foster, the executive director of the International Justice Network, which is representing the detainees, condemned the decision in a statement.

“Though he has made many promises regarding the need for our country to rejoin the world community of nations, by filing this appeal, President Obama has taken on the defense of one of the Bush administration’s unlawful policies founded on nothing more than the idea that might makes right,” she said.

Pre-emptive responses: I don't think any defense of this behavior is possible. I don't want to hear about statecraft or Realpolitik or sausage-making or Obama Kung-Fu. Barack Obama became the Democratic candidate by creating an aura that he represented something different, that he was a Constitutional scholar who understood the stakes, that we could hope he would and could change things for the better.

Why in the world would we gullible, lefty moon-bat DFH dreamers have come to think such things about Obama? I dunno, maybe it was this speech on the Senate floor in September of 2006, when he said this (again, h/t Greenwald):

...restricting somebody's right to challenge their imprisonment indefinitely is not going to make us safer. In fact, recent evidence shows it is probably making us less safe.

[...]

We don't need to imprison innocent people to win this war. For people who are guilty, we have the procedures in place to lock them up. That is who we are as a people. We do things right, and we do things fair.

How are we Dirty Fucking Hippies supposed to reconcile that man, and the administration working in his name?

Disillusionment

by Armadillo Joe

Atrios is a master of the infectious catch-phrase which, in just a few choice words, can circumscribe a whole larger issue and create a useful shorthand for people who are tuned-in to the discussion over the long haul, basically an internal slang or jargon. My latest favorite is, as many of you know, SUPERTRAINS!, but he has others that also become more humorous by repetition. "Document the Atrocities" as a heading for his weekly run-down of the lineups of each Sunday morning's bobblehead shoutfests is funny by (slight) overstatement and "Deep Thought" -- while obviously lifted from the old 90's era SNL skit -- is still funny in that what he posts under it is almost never very deep at first glance, but is always revealing of a darker reality in that snarky way that makes one reconsider their own underlying assumptions and also sneer at the foolish who made the mistake of adopting such assumptions in the first place. Which is what good political (and polemical) humor should do.

The most recent phrase of his that is catching on with all the wannabe Kewl Kidz -- or with me, at least, and soon with others I have no doubt -- is "Hopey, Changey", a riff on Colbert's "Truthiness" and a direct attack on the image of Obama that we all voted for versus the grim reality becoming clearer with every centrist, capitulating, accomodationist move he makes. Whether the banks, the Pentagon or the recent Justice Department decision, just to name a few, he has not yet taken any of the really bold steps we progressives hoped he would when we came to support him, but he has certainly made some very clear moves to make us question who's side he's really on. Some of his defenders will chalk up his concessions to The Reich-Wing as yet another stealthy move in an orante clash of political gamesmanship, a chess-match, his Kung-Fu being unorthodox, but effective. They will argue that he is a victim of Bismark's old saw about politics being the art of the possible, and that he is doing the best he can under extremely difficult circumstances with mighty forces of epic greed and entrenched power ranged against him and that at the end of the day he is just one man and one man can only do so much.

I cannot abide such excuses, though. So far, this is not what I voted for.

However, I cannot align myself with the Washington chattering classes who seem so quick to condemn his presidency as already having failed because he hasn't cured cancer, solved the riddle of the sphinx and brought about world peace forever and ever within his first 100 Days, amen. Those clucking tongues on the Sunday morning talk shows are little more than historical blips, mere gossips hardly consequential to present day much less humankind or The Ages, and history will soon forget them as completely as it forgets the poison tongues of the scolds in the king's court at Versailles, who -- when they are remembered at all -- are recalled only as the height of daft frivolity.

No, despite their carping, I think Obama still has promise simply because, well, I have to. The crystal ball is cloudy, though, and I do think Obama guilty of willfully allowing a mis-perception of his commitment to our lefty vision of America to aid his rise to prominence. I have had a gnawing fear from the time he became the anti-war candidate of choice that he was playing us, "us" being the dyed-in-the-wool lefties and assorted DFH's who hated George W. Bush with the searing passion of a thousand suns because Dubya symbolized everything we hated about our country: the gleeful and willful ignorance, the faux-cowboy "common-man" swagger disguising a true East Coast blue-blood's contempt for "The People", the frat-boy bravado marketed as "charm", the mean-spirited jingoistic stupidity passed off as the One True God of Patriotism, the haughty assumption of American exceptionalism used to sell to the rubes the idea of a protected status for a Ruling Class accustomed to inherited wealth and privilege and the abuses of power that flourish in that rancid culture, the inbred and self-absorbed obtuseness of that privileged class, the brittle Christopathic sanctimony parading as moral superiority...

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Barack Hussein Obama was supposed to be the opposite of all that, the antidote to all that ugliness in the American soul, a one-man redemption tale for a vast and powerful nation both sacred and profane from her humble, violent origins to her highest, most sublime ambitions. He was walking, talking proof to the world -- non-white, urbane, educated and eloquent proof -- that we are not all those people (and you know what I mean) that we are not all those gun-toting, Bible-thumping, inbred, hairy-knuckled, toothless, Dixie flag-waving NASCAR goobers stupid enough to vote for an alcoholic chimpanzee who thinks he talks to god and his Evil Uncle Dick(head)...

...on purpose.

TWICE.

...and yet...

...and yet...

And yet, it is hard not to have that gnawing fear bubble up to the surface of having been suckered by a charming chameleon, the sense that all that Hope and Change stuff was really more Hopey and Changey because he looked so different and sounded so different (straight out of Liberal Central Casting), that maybe, just maybe (I can't believe I'm even typing this) over here on the left side of the dial, our popular image of Barack Obama is as much a projection of our own bleeding heart dreams, our own collective moon-bat aspirations for the country we live in, as unrooted in the reality of the man as were the drooling jebus-freaks' collective washing of the sins of George W. Bush.

If Barack Obama were white and named Barney Oswalt from Illinois and running for office twenty years ago, espousing the exact same positions he does now, he would have been a nameless, vaguely right-of-center Republican with a smattering of liberal positions to assuage his urban constituency and otherwise mired in the anonymous middle of the Reagan coalition.

His casting as a Left Wing Matinee Idol reveals both just how far to the right our nation has devolved since the dark days of Saint Ronnie's Reign of Terror and just how obsessed we have been and remain to this very day with pigmentation vis a vis ancestry. He's black with a funny name, therefore -- in our popularly defined bounds of public discourse -- any pronounced position by Mr. Obama to the left of Attila the Hun makes him a DFH, or sympathetic to the DFH's, which is worse because it means he's willing to turn Jesus' America over to the queers and the uppity wimmin-folk and the nigras and the mooz-luhms and all those scary hippies. Which is why anybody in the GOP with skin slightly darker than week-old milk has to take social and political positions that make Marie Antoinette look like a bleeding-heart.

This DFH can't truck with all of that, though. I like Barack Obama, sometimes I truly love him in a teary-eyed, almost worshipful way -- for instance this past week as he and Michelle represented my country, MY country on the global stage -- because he is the image I want to project to the world; he is a living, breathing symbol of that miscengenating, multi-culti, caramel-colored America I believe in, that American ideal I believe we should and could achieve, or I wouldn't be a liberal. Except that I also see that Obama is frail and human and as much as I hope we are witnessing Obama Kung-Fu with his bank bailout end-runs on behalf of the banksters, his expansion of the Pentagon budget (not the reduction that got sold to the press) and -- worst of all -- his reluctance (and, frankly, I predict his eventual failure) to not only not pursue the Bush Administration for its crimes, but his Justice Department's continuation of the crimes themselves makes me realize that we have in him not only an eloquent, handsome and charming symbol of the promise of America, but of her essential corruption, too.

I'll get over it, I'm sure. Today, however, I am sad.