Paul Street on BaRockstar's Gradual Political Sellout

[Casablanca]

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=11386

Obama’s descent into moral and spiritual Hell continues to accelerate in nearly precise accord with his national political ascent. The “work with war criminal Bush” comment is a typical gem, consistent with his growing record of collaboration with evil.

On Win Without Vision Night (last Tuesday), I caught a fleeting Obama sound bite on ABC. The smiling, suspiciously overnight superstar told the Disney-owned network that American voters were expressing a welcome and “pragmatic” repudiation of “ideology” and a desire for more “competence” and less “partisanship” and “anger” in government and politics. Here’s my long translation of that comment: “If you support majority U.S. (and indeed world) opinion and want to see U.S. troops out of Iraq now... and if you advocate the dismantlement of Empire and the diversion of public resources from militarism and corporate welfare to social justice and health at home and abroad, then you are a silly and unrealistic ‘ideologue.’ Let’s drop all our nasty partisan and ideological story lines and all just get along, with existing social, racial, and imperial hierarchies intact and, perhaps, with me in ostensible charge in about 26 months. Bush’s murderous oil invasion of Iraq (which has butchered 700,000 Iraqi civilians) and his related successful efforts to further the upward concentration of wealth (in what was already the industrialized world’s most unequal nation) aren’t criminal (only deranged and extremist “ideologues” say that). They’re just incompetent and show what happens when people act in accord with “ideology.”

Remember that the next time you see somebody robbing, murdering, and/or raping in your neighborhood: the perpetrators are being "incompetent" and are probably driven by “ideology.”

I have the distinct impression that Obama’s Harvard-certified “realistic,” “pragmatic,” and (according to David Brooks) “Hamiltonian” world view (more fully enunciated in his second book) marks the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. – a dedicated left opponent of the (for him) inseparably interrelated evils of militarism, racism, and economic exploitation (capitalism) – as a hopelessly dysfunctional “ideologue.”

A future edition of “The Empire and Inequality Report” will provide a more extensive critique of Obama’s second book, which carries the ironic title The Audacity of Hope (2006) and includes the following pearls of collaborationist wisdom:

*On poor folks’ responsibility to understand the rich and the benevolence of the rich:

“If we fail to help…people who are struggling in this society…we diminish ourselves. But that does not mean that those who are struggling – or those of us who claim to speak for those who are struggling – are thereby free from trying to understand the perspectives of those who are better off...…That’s what empathy does – it calls us to task, the conservative and the liberal, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressed and the oppressor...No one is exempt from the call to find common ground” (Obama, Audacity, p.68).

“Most rich people want the poor to succeed” (Obama, p. 51)

*On how well “our poor” are doing and on “our” capitalist “business culture” as the source of America’s greatness:

“We need to take a look at how our market system has evolved over time...Our constitution places the ownership of private property at the very heart of our system of liberty…Rather than vilify the rich, we hold them up as role models...As Ted Turner famously said, in America money is how we keep score. The result of this business culture has been a prosperity that’s unmatched in human history. It takes a trip overseas to fully appreciate just how good Americans have it; even our poor take for granted goods and services – electricity, clean water, indoor plumbing, telephones, televisions, and household appliances – that are still unattainable for most of the world. America may have been blessed with some of the planet’s best real estate, but clearly it’s not just our natural resources that account for our economic success. Our greatest asset has been our system of social organization, a system for generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative, and the efficient allocation of resources.” (Obama, pp. 149-150)

*On why no radical revolution in America (the most unequal and wealth-top-heavy nation in the industrialized world), where the top 1 percent owns half the wealth and a larger share of the politicians and policymakers (including Obama):

“ ..and if we have declined to heed Jefferson’s advice to engage in a revolution every two or three generations, it’s only because the Constitution itself provided a sufficient defense against tyranny” (Obama, p. 93)

*On the mind-blowing coolness and wisdom of the nation’s wealthy, slave-owning, and “rabble”-hating Founders:

“I’ve often wonder whether the Founders themselves recognized at the time the scope of their accomplishment. They didn’t simply design the Constitution in the wake of revolution; they wrote the Federalist Papers to support it, shepherded the document through ratification, and amended it with the Bill of Rights – all in the span of a few short years . As we read these documents, they seem so incredibly right that it’s easy to believe they are result of natural law if not divine inspiration” (p. 90)

No further commentary from me on B.O. at present; I’ll let his words speak for themselves for now and will return to all this and much more from "The Audacity of Hope" in a future issue.

[w13rd0]

1. By the third sentence...

...of vastly over-reaching and bombastic hyperbole, you'd lost me completely. "Win Without Vision Night"...ok, what the fuck ever...

[Casablanca]

2. By way of explanation, earlier in Street's article ...

BEATING SOMETHING AWFUL WTH NOTHING WONDERFUL

America’s superficially educated journalists are prone to bad historical analogies. Over the last few days I have seen and heard print and electronic reporters make repeated parallels between the Democrats triumph in Tuesday's mid-term congressional elections (I am writing on Thursday, November 9) and the Republican’s sweeping victory in the 1994 congressional mid-terms.

Beyond the obvious correspondence of one party taking power from another while the losing party holds the White House, the analogy breaks down in two critical ways. First, the Republicans rode to congressional power on the basis of a very distinct and specific agenda driven by a firm moral and ideological vision written up in noxious Newt Gingrich’s vicious “Contract With America.”

The congressional Democrats this week won while offering no clear agenda or vision. They’ve been content to ride the wave of popular discontent with the hideously corrupt and criminal war party in power, knowing that the Narrow Spectrum American Winner Take All System of Permanent Electoral Revolution Prevention means that voters had nowhere else to go. The Democrats just let the “other side” shoot itself in the foot and – as Chicago Tribune reporter Michael Tacket put it on Tuesday night – “essentially beat something with nothing” (M. Tacket, “Angry Electorarte Says ‘No’ to Bush,” Chicago Tribune, 8 November 2006, p.1).

The Democrats’ victorious platform this fall? That “we are not the corrupt, arrogant and blundering Republicans. We know you hate that smirking and incompetent tyrant Dubya so register your protest here by voting for us. We do not happen to have been the business party in power that invaded Iraq and flubbed Katrina.”

Tuesday’s elections showed that (in Tacket’s words) “Democrats didn’t need vision to win”

A second problem with the 1994/2006 analogy is that the proudly ideological Republicans of the mid-1990s came in determined to punish an ideologically and politically flexible president who was willing to accommodate and indeed incorporate key parts of their agenda. They were so full of partisan cojones and related constitutional chutzpah that they ended up impeaching their bete noir (whose principal sin was stealing key parts of their viciously regressive agenda) Clinton for lying about oral adultery. The Democrats of ’06 are coming into the congressional majority under a party leadership that proclaims its willingness to forgive a messianic president who has committed monumental (and frankly unforgivable) war crimes and has advanced a relentless series of high-state deceptions for which an extended period of incarceration would be appropriate.

Beyond its current “charm offensive” and its related sacrifice of War Criminal Rumsfeld, we should not expect the White House to listen all that seriously to the so-called (see below) opposition party. Certainly Bush has less to fear than he ought to with Pelosi and other top Democrats announcing in advance their lack of interest in acting on their elementary duty to impeach the president for high crimes and misdemeanors. For added good measure, the centrist Democratic presidential sensation BaRockstar Obama (see below) has been saying that the Democrats may be “punished in ‘08” if they “don’t show a willingness to work with the president” (Jeff Zeleny, “Democrats Fight to Say, ‘You’re Welcome,'” New York Times, 5 November 2006, sec.4, p. 4).

Now there’s an interesting and revealing take on what the outraged, Bush-loathing voters had to say Tuesday: yes, by all means, please do “work with this president.”

[sendero]

3. essentially beat something with nothing

I like your post but I have a comment on this comment. Characterizing our win as “essentially beating something with nothing” is pretty lame (I realize it these are not your words :)). Perhaps a more apt aphorism would be "beating abject failure with at least a possibility of success".

As for the "working with the president" and "new bipartisanship" talking points that the Repugs are floating now, I think Dems should act exactly as the Repugs have. As long as the Repugs agree with our basic position, we can work with them. Otherwise, they can pack sand. And anyone who really thinks that the Dems won Congress with the voters' hope of continuing the abject failures of the Bush administration is seriously misguided.

I listen to Ms. Pelosi and I kind of doubt that she is going to fall for the "charm offensive". We'll have to wait and see :)

[Warren Stupidity]

4. The real question now is did we just re-elect the War Party?

Until the progressive wing of the Democratic Party figures out that the battle doesn't stop at party lines, until we realize that the struggle to change course, really change course, has gotten much more serious now that it is actually possible, we are doomed to defeat.

[Le Taz Hot]

5. Outstanding article

It's nice to know others can translate the "let's all get along" doublespeak. Thanks for sharing this.