After the Future

Quote of the Day: American Conservative on FISA

In real reality as opposed to Beltway media reality, opposing telecom immunity is not an issue of the left.  It's an issue for anybody with principles:

One of the most disturbing things about “mainstream” reaction to Obama’s reversals, particularly the reversal regarding the FISA legislation, is the idea that defending the Fourth Amendment against egregious, systematic violation by the government is some far-out extremist position that must be watered down or abandoned in order to appeal to “the middle.”  If I were in the political “middle,” I would be deeply offended by the idea that supporting the gutting of core civil liberties is required to win my vote.  If it is true that voters in “the middle” will reward assaulting constitutional protections for the illusion of security, some constitutional liberties won’t have much of a chance of surviving another administration like this one.  To be clear, this is not just a question of granting telecom immunity, undesirable as that is, but it is a question of resisting warrantless–and therefore illegal–wiretapping. . . .

I would add that the reflex of some Obama supporters to justify his reversal on the FISA legislation in terms of prudence and/or the political need to “move to the center” reinforces the unhealthy and dangerous pattern of identifying policies that subvert civil liberties and expand the power of government in the name of national security as “centrist.” This makes dissent from such terrible policies to be extremist by definition, which works to marginalise the genuinely more moderate, prudent and (in my view) properly conservative arguments against increasing the power of the security state.  If an able rhetorician could make the argument with conviction that constitutional liberties are fundamental and non-negotiable and that we have an obligation to preserve the legacy that has been handed down to us, he might be able to reframe the entire debate.  Or he could yield to the Washington consensus that says that civil liberties are the concern of the fringe and can be trampled on as and when necessary.

Read more.

Who's Getting Swiftboated? (Updated)

Not John McCain, that's for sure. You might make the case that Wes Clark is.  Watch this clip put together by TPM.  It's rather amazing how viral idiocy can be:

Give the Republicans credit; they know how to defend themselves. Push them even a little and they'll hit back hard. They know McCain cannot afford to have his foreign policy/national security cred challenged, so they will do what it takes to make sure the Dems don't probe this sore spot again. Pretty soon they'll have things set up, if the Dems and media let him, so that any legitimate criticism of McCain will be an outrage.

The shame is no one is out there defending Clark. Americans admire loyalty, and he's not getting it from the Obama campaign. Apart from the way it makes Obama look weak and reactive, Clark deserves better treatment from Obama than to be left hanging the way he has been.  

I hope we don't look back to this period in the campaign as the time when it all started to go south for Obama.  I think it's too early and not enough people are paying attention yet for these kinds of mistakes to matter much, but I hope at some point soon he stops dancing around, plants his feet, and shows what he's made of.

WEDNESDAY UPDATE:  dday @ Hullaballoo:

I actually think that Wes Clark completely threw McCain off with this. The Villagers are having their little hissy fit, but this has exposed that McCain believes in his own divine right to the Presidency based entirely on his suffering and his wounds (which he's ever so "reluctant" to talk about, he mentioned in the same interview. Yeah, right.) Clark touched a nerve here by questioning the assumption that McCain's biography can stand in for his judgment or policy prescriptions. He deflated McCain's entire rationale for his candidacy. And McCain can't take it so he's acting like a WATB.

The Sixties (revised)

Obama is taking some flak for distancing himself from the MoveOn mentality and toward the faith-based mentality, and I thought I'd make an attempt to explain why I think it's probably a good idea. It is insofar as it  is part of a longer term strategy to explode the left/right/center media narrative that has developed since the sixties and that I wrote about the other day. The real issues before us are not defined by left vs. right, but by those who want to preserve democracy and the rule of law vs. those who are promoting or are ok with or don't care about the nation's drift toward a national security surveillance state. Nothing matters more than arresting this drift because of the threat it poses to the idea of America.

That idea isn't dead yet, but it's moribund.  Obama's campaign revived my hopes that it the idea might survive and move toward a greater realization of itself because he was right on the issues and because he understood to effect a re-alignment around those issues.  That means creating an atmosphere within the Democratic Party that is more hospitable to Main Street than many Main Streeters feel is currently the case.  And a part of creating that atmosphere requires moving away from the style of liberal politics that endoresed or  became associated with the New Left in the sixties.

You could make the case that the movement toward a national police state began in earnest during the fifties and sixties. Reading Rick Perlstein's Nixonland will educate those of you who didn't live through it and remind those of us who did why the new lefties of the sixties provoked the backlash that justified such a movement in the minds of many Americans. It's not that the Left was wrong about the war and race; it wasn't even that the the anger and frustration by many who opposed the war was unjustified--it was. Then as now bi-partisanship meant a shared commitment to idiocy, and that idiocy defined our national policy. It was infuriating. But the anger and frustration about the war combined with Black anger and frustration created a continuous media spectacle of riots and violent confrontations with the police that scared the hell out of most Americans, and they wanted the police to put an end to it.

Perlstein's narrative makes clear that the new lefties, no matter that they were right on the issues, developed a style of protest that was easy for Main Street to hate. They were deliberately provocative and divisive, and their tactics, rather than quicken the conscience of Middle America, provoked instead its disgust and in doing so delegitimated their cause. The New Left driven protests assumed the illegitimacy of the Johnson and Nixon governments, but neglected to persuade the rest of the country.

A precondition for the success of any political protest requires that the majority of non-protesters sympathize with the protesters. That's what distinguished the Civil Rights protests before the riots and protests like Solidarity in Poland.  The New Left tactics were more about expressing rage than effecting change, and despite their being right on the issues, their tactics delegitimated their positions.  People would rather be wrong than be associated with that rabble. Given the choice between the legitimacy of the state and its police powers and the legitimacy of the protesters who challenged that legitimacy, Americans chose the state.

Perlstein is very interesting in the way he describes the media coverage of the police brutality during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The media was outraged at the police because the police was indeed over-the-top brutal.  But it soon became clear that the police were surrogates for what a majority of Americans would have liked to have done themselves--beat the living bejesus out of these ungrateful, morally degenerate, unpatriotic punks:

The media had left Chicago united in the conviction they were heroes, prophets, martyrs. "The truth was, these were our children in the streets, and the Chicago police beat them up," the New York Times's Tom Wicker wrote. "In Chicago," Stewart Alsop wrote, "for the first time in my life it began to seem to me possible that some form of American fascism may really happen here." Top executives at all the networks, New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Washington Post and Newsweek publisher Katharine Graham, Time Inc. editor in chief Hedley Donovan, and Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler posted an unprecedented telegram to Mayor Daley excoriating the way newsmen "were repeatedly singled out by policemen and deliberately beaten . . . to discourage or prevent reporting of an important confrontation between police and demonstrators which the American public as a whole has a right to know about about.

Then they learned the American public thought differently. . . .

Governing from the Center II

Obama's the move to the center continues with  his disavowal of Wes Clark's sensible comment that getting shot down and spending years as a POW does not make you a foreign policy expert.

I think that the Obama campaign is very aware of the sixties/seventies baggage that the Democrats carry, and it is trying as hard as it can to throw it off the train. I think that's something that the Democrats have to do if they are going to win back the confidence of the center, but again you have to question the tactics. I think there is a reactive and proactive way to do this, and the tactics used in the last couple of weeks indicate that they are taking the reactive approach, which may not lose them the election, but I think it makes them look passive and weak. Show some toughness, for crying out loud.  Show you can throw a punch so long as it's a fair punch.

Clark was doing exactly what needs to be done--to go on the offensive, keep the McCain campaign on its heels, and take away McCain's only strength--the aura of being the wise old man on national security issues because of his war record.  To challenge that image is not swiftboating; it's not taking anything away from McCain's honorable service.  It's just making a perfectly obvious point: being a POW doesn't affect policy judgment one way or the other. McCain's positions on the Iraq War,  his "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" remarks, his confusion and ignorance about the real situation in the Middle East are far more relevant indicators of his policy expertise and judgment.  And if the media isn't bright enough to understand that, great--keep it explaining it.  The longer it stays in the news, the better it is in undermining this so-called McCain strength. I'm so sick of Dems backing down from a legitimate fight.

The Obama campaign now seems to want to play it safe.  It is playing not to lose rather than playing to win. It's dancing around and ducking punches rather than throwing its own. I think this is a dangerous strategy precisely because it surrenders the initiative to the opponent, and makes the opponent look stronger and more admirable that he is, which is precisely what the Dems can't afford to do. I had thought from the way the campaign handled the primaries that finally we were going to have a Dem candidate that understood how this worked.  Maybe not.

A more proactive approach would involve a general strategy of going on offense, sticking to prinicple, ridiculing the silly-season attacks of the Right, and showing initiative. The patriotism speech he gave yesterday was good, but even so, it's main function was prophylactic--to blunt the attacks he knows are going to come concerning his and his wife's patriotism. They're still going to come.

Bottom line: The country is sick of the Republicans and they want the Dem candidate to stand up and show some backbone and leadership, not just play it safe. Playing it safe is not playing it smart.

Governing from the Center (Updated)

I don't have a problem with Obama's moving to the center  as an overall strategy in the general election. His job once elected will be to govern from the center, and he has to obtain the confidence of those who live there if he will have any effectiveness once elected. But I think it's legitimate to criticize his specific tactics in trying to win the center. And I think we have to define more clearly what it means to govern from the center.

I don't look at myself as a member of the progressive community or the netroots community. I have concerns that overlap with their concerns, but more fundamentally I'm looking for someone for whom the concept the "common good" means something, and who has good judgment and a flexible problem solving approach. Pols who fit that criteria are more likely to be found in the Democratic party, but not all Democrats fit that criteria. 

So I look at myself rather as normal American who has been paying attention to how the Republicans and their collaborators in the Democratic Party have flagrantly and irresponsibly used bad judgment, inflexible thinking, and a K-Street-driven disregard for the common good to run this this country off the tracks. I just want somebody with the public spiritedness, good sense, and competency to get things back on track. And "back on track" means a sensible, subsidiarist New Deal style social democracy.

And so from where I stand seeing clearly what's in front of one's nose is not a matter of left/right/center perception.  It's just a question of looking at this train wreck and calling it a train wreck. Conservatives with good sense see it as clearly as liberals with good sense. And so it starts there: calling it what it is--and then we can argue about how to go about the cleanup.  But no sane, responsible  person could possibly vote to keep in office those who are responsible for creating this mess, and the people who are responsible are the Hard Right which has dominated Republican Party since Reagan.

It's not partisan to say so; it would be obvious to any sane clear-sighted observer, liberal or conservative, who had some time to study the situation. That's why so many principled conservatives are supporting Obama despite his liberal voting record. The problems we confront transcend the liberal/conservative divide, and anybody with a shred of common sense understands that. And because that's true, governing from the center has to be redefined in terms of the competency and public spiritedness required to clean up the mess and get things back on track.

Always Good Reasons for Doing the Wrong Thing

The real danger is that those who defend Obama the Candidate no matter what he does are likely to defend Obama the President no matter what he does, too. If we learn in 2009 that Obama has invoked his claimed Article II powers to spy on Americans outside of even the new FISA law, are we going to hear from certain factions that he was justified in doing so to protect us; how it's a good, shrewd move to show he's a centrist and keep his approval ratings high so he can do all the Good things he wants to do for us; how it's different when Obama does it because we can trust him? It certainly looks that way. Those who spent the last five years mauling Bush for "shredding the Constitution" and approving of lawbreaking -- only to then praise Obama for supporting a bill that endorses and protects all of that -- are displaying exactly the type of blind reverence that is more dangerous than any one political leader could ever be. Read more.

This whole FISA thing is being framed as moderate vs. insane, strong vs. weak, shrewd vs. politically obtuse, flexible vs. rigid; realistic vs. naively idealistic and from where I stand it's exactly the kind of thinking that gets us into trouble time and time again. This calculation by the Obama camp is led by the kind of thinking that led Clinton and so many other Dems to vote to support the war--but in many ways worse: Lots of things are negotiable in the political arena; constitutional principles are not among them. 

There are always good reasons for doing the wrong thing.  There would be no such thing as a tough moral or political choice if that were not the case.  Obama is doing the wrong thing and any argument to justify it by Obama supporters is either cynical or a naive ex post facto rationalization. I don't expect a pure candidate.  I expect a candidate to know where you draw the line, and Obama has raised very serious doubts about whether he knows where that line is.

Dodd's Speech

This is probably the speech of his career.  Best lines: "The compromise between liberty and security remains a difficult one. But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security. And that ought to be the epitaph of this Administration: “sacrificing liberty for no apparent enhancement of security.” Worse than selling our soul—giving it away for free!"

It's long so here are some highlights:

This bill does not say, “Trust the American people;  Trust the courts and judges and juries to come to just decisions.” Retroactive immunity sends a message that is crystal clear:

“Trust me.”

And that message comes straight from the mouth of this President.  “Trust me.”

What is the basis for that trust?  Classified documents, we are told, that prove the case for retroactive immunity beyond a shadow of a doubt.

But we’re not allowed to see them! I’ve served in this body for 27 years, and I’m not allowed to see them! Neither are a majority of my colleagues. We are all left in the dark.

I cannot speak for my colleagues—but I would never take “trust me” for an answer, not even in the best of times.  Not even from a President on Mount Rushmore.

I can’t put it better than this:

“Trust me” government is government that asks that we concentrate our hopes and dreams on one man; that we trust him to do what’s best for us. My view of government places trust not in one person or one party, but in those values that transcend persons and parties.

Those words were not spoken by someone who took our nation’s security lightly, Mr. President.  They were spoken by Ronald Reagan -- in 1980. They are every bit as true today, even if times of threat and fear blur our concept of transcendent values.  Even if those who would exploit those times urge us to save our skins at any cost.

Then he addresses the motives behind the bill:

So I will ask the Senate candidly, and candidly it already knows the answer:

Is this about security—or is it about power?

Why are some fighting so hard for retroactive immunity? The answer, I believe, is that immunity means secrecy, and secrecy means power.

It’s no coincidence that the man who proclaimed “if the president does it, it’s not illegal”—Richard Nixon—was the same man who raised executive secrecy to an art form.

The senators of the Church Committee expressed succinctly the deep flaw in the Nixonian executive: “Abuse thrives on secrecy.” And, in the exhaustive catalogue of their report, they proved it.

In this push for immunity, secrecy is at the center. We find proof in immunity’s original version: a proposal to protect not just the telecoms, but everyone involved in the wiretapping program.

In their original proposal, that is, they wanted to immunize themselves.

Think about that. It speaks to their fear and, perhaps, their guilt: their guilt that they had broken the law, and their fear that in the years to come, they would be found liable or convicted.

They knew better than anyone else what they had done—they must have had good reason to be afraid.

Thankfully, immunity for the executive is not part of the bill before us. But the original proposal tells us something very important: This is, and always has been, a self-preservation bill. . . .

As Justice Robert Jackson said in his opening statement at Nuremberg: “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”

Mr. President, what is the tribute that Power owes to Reason?

That America stands for a transcendent idea.

The idea that laws should rule, not men.

The idea that the Constitution does not get suspended for vengeance.

The idea that this nation should never tailor its eternal principles to the conflict of the moment, because if we did, we would be walking in the footsteps of the enemies we despised.

The tribute that Power owes to Reason is due today. I know that we can find the strength to pay it. And if we can’t? We will all have to answer for it.

This is the kind of speech I was hoping for from Obama.  If he gave it, people would have heard it.  I doubt many will have heard this one.  I hope at the very least he will be persuaded by it and by the arguments of others to support the filibuster and if that fails to vote against.  But I fear he has painted himself into a corner. The political logic of his supporting the bill in the first place--that he distance himself from the left extremists in the party--requires that he not do anything that looks like he is caving it their pressure.  His staff will tell him can't afford to be a flip flopper, even though his support for the bill now is a flip flop from hie earlier opposition to it. (And how ironic if the triangulator Clinton winds up voting against and he for it.)

This is a  huge blunder on Obama's part--an unforced error that seriously tarnishes his credibility no matter how politically smart some think it is. At the very least all he had to do was lay low and just vote no as he has done in the past when it came to a vote.  Arguments about how "smart" this tack to the center strategy is for Obama are unpersuasive for reasons I've explained elsewhere--the right is on its heels, and it should be kept on them.  Voting for this law accepts that the right's framing of the issue still has potency when in fact it only has a much as the Dems are willing to give it. It's politically stupid to allow the  discredited right to continue to define what is left, right, or center.

And I do not accept that the center is behind laws like this. People in the center just don't understand its implications and need to be educated by reasonable, clear statements like the one Dodd made. This was not politically shrewed. If anything it was a missed opportunity for Obama to stand up and show he has the spine Americans in the center want to see from a leader. 

Second, this isn't an issue like healthcare on which reasonable people can disagree.  This issue cuts to the very heart of what America means. You don't play politics with it. The fourth amendment is not up for negotiation any more than suspending free speech (or habeas corpus). You just don't permit legislation like this to pass. It's unconscionable. Anybody who votes for it deserves to share in the condemnation that history will heap by the bucket load on this administration and its collaboraters in congress .

 

Winning at Any Cost (Updates 1 &2)

MJ Rosenberg makes the case at TPM Cafe:

No election in my time has been as remotely significant as this. I don't have to explain why to any liberal or progressive except to say that Obama's election is, literally, a matter of life and death for many Americans, not to mention God knows how many people worldwide.

Accordingly, it is silly to get bent out of shape when he says something he may or may not believe in order to win, or not yo be successfully swift-boated or race-baited. That is precisely what I want him to do, just as I wanted him to opt out of public financing.

I'm not saying we can't criticize. But we need to maintain perspective.

That means always remembering who and what the alternative to Obama is (this would have applied to a Democratic ticket led by any of our primary season candidates). Let Obama say what he wants to right through the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. I assume he has his fingers crossed behind his back anyway. You know, just like FDR when he promised to balance the budget or Lincoln when he said that he did not oppose slavery itself, just its extension.

In 2008, Vince Lombardi's mantra is more apt than ever. "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." That and getting America off its suicidal course.

I understand the argument, but I don't buy it with regard to the FISA/Telecom immunity. There are some issues that transcend tactical compromise. The precedent that this sets is far too dangerous, and it's amazing to me that Rosenberg or anyone who understands what is ailing us can be so dismissive of its toxic effects. This isn't just about catching the bad guys; it's about stopping and reversing what the bad guys have put in motion. To stop bills like this is precisely the reason we don't want the Republicans in office anymore, and what's the point off having Democrats in office when the Dem leadership is actively capitulating to the administration on an issue as central to the health of the republic as this one? 

Are Obama's fingers crossed? It's one thing to play coy with one's position on an issue; it's another to actively support and vote for something you don't believe in. My fingers are crossed that he still might find a way to change his mind. He's the one who's supposed to be about changing the Beltway mindset, not succumbing to it. 

Rosenberg is right about the need to get America off its suicidal course, but passing this bill is an unnecessary self-inflicted wound that increaes the bleeding and hastens us along that course. And the fact that Dem leadership is behind it is what is so deeply disturbing. Rosenberg seems to think that all will be well as soon as we have a Dem in the Oval Office again.  But if the Dems are not going to do anything now to staunch the bleeding, why should we expect them to do it next year? And that Obama is collaborating with this is not something we should just shrug off and say, "Wait 'til January."  No it's all about putting pressure on these guys now to counter the pressure they feel from the other side.

Obama knows what's at stake here, and he's playing it safe. He's playing 'prevent defense', and as I've written here before, that's a losing strategy. You have to keep the other side on its heels. I thought Obama understood that. I am convinced that most Americans will applaud the candidate that fights for what he believes in--it is starved for such a candidate.  Americans are sick of these calculating, triangulating robo pols, and it's precisely in Obama's representation of himself as an alternative to that that makes him so appealling. It's as if he's stopped believing in what has got him this far.

The Pelosi/Bush deal here is so wrong for so many reasons--but mainly for the way it shreds the fourth amendment.  If constitutional lawyer Obama misses this important opportunity to show what he's made of, he will have badly blundered--it will be as big a blunder as Kerry's or Clinton's vote to approve the war--probably worse.  He needs to stay aggressive and keep the other guys on defense.

UPDATE: P.M. Carpenter takes a similar line to Rosenberg:

In short, progressives should get off Obama's back. He is, as Polman correctly noted, "simply doing what it takes to win." Progressives should follow suit and swallow their vocal idealism -- precisely as they did on public financing -- until the prize is won. Then they can hammer him leftward -- although he's already there and is only trying to strategically hide it as best he can.

My point is that (1) this is bad strategy because it's old prevent-defense thinking, and (2) that you don't play politics with constitutional fundamentals. His decision about public financing and his decision about this Bush/Pelosi deal are in two different realms of importance.  The fundamental mistake here is to see them both through a purely political tactical lens.

And it's fundamentally wrong to frame this as a left/right issue.  Any principled conservative is as upset about this as Glenn Greenwald is.  Watch this interview with Reagan conservative Bruce Fein. This YouTube is from October, but the essential of his critique then are as relevant now.

UPDATE 2: Greenwald on New Republic Syndrome:

The reason these posts are worth noting is because they so perfectly capture the mindset that needs to be undermined more than any other. It's this mentality that has destroyed the concept of checks and limits in our political system; it's why we have no real opposition party; and it's why the history of the Democrats over the last seven years has been to ignore and then endorse one extremist Bush policy after the next. It's because even as The New Republic Syndrome has been proven to be false and destructive over and over -- even its practitioners have been forced to recognize that -- it continues to be the guiding operating principle of the party's leadership.

The defining beliefs of this Syndrome are depressingly familiar, and incomparably destructive: Anything other than tiny, marginal opposition to the Right's agenda is un-Serious and radical. Objections to the demolition of core constitutional protections is shrill and hysterical. Protests against lawbreaking by our high government officials and corporations are disrespectful and disruptive. Challenging the Right's national security premises is too scary and politically costly. Those campaigning against Democratic politicians who endorse and enable the worst aspects of Bush extremism are "nuts," "need to have their heads examined," and are "exactly the sorts of fanatics who tore the party apart in the late 1960s and early 1970s." Those who oppose totally unprovoked and illegal wars are guilty of "abject pacifism."

It's exactly that mentality that has brought us to where we are as a country and a political system today. It's not at all surprising -- and wouldn't have surprised the Founders in the least -- that a radical and corrupt political faction (the Bush-led Right) has been able to take over parts of the Government and sought to consolidate political power. The expectation was that this would happen, and the solution was to devise a litany of checks -- the Congress, the media, opposition parties -- that would stand up to and vigorously oppose that faction and prevent it from running rampant.

New Republic Syndrome is another way of describing the strategies developed by insiders who have been already defeated in spirit.  Again it's about changing the mindset.  I'll vote for Obama no matter what because the alternative is grotesquely awful.  But he will cease to intererst me as a politician and a man  if he succumbs to the Beltway mindset he said he aims to change.

Boilerplate Reporting (Updated)

I got a good laugh last night when I read this Time piece explaining the reasoning behind Nancy Pelosi's support for the FISA "compromise."  It's as if there's a boilerplate form for the writing of such articles--like a mad libs.  The story is already written--just plug in the word or phrase that fits for today's story. Since Time always tells the company story, it has to go with the idea of "compromise."  And compromise means finding a middle ground between the two extremes of left and right.  So first sentence:

A compromise deal to extend the federal government's domestic spying powers, passed by the House on Friday and expected to sail through the Senate next week, has drawn attacks from both sides of the political spectrum. The right is unhappy at concessions made to protect civil liberties; the left is furious that the Democrats allowed the domestic spying powers to be extended in any form.

That's why only one Republican--Johnson from Illinois--voted against it. The Republicans were horrified at how much they were giving away to those awful leftists who want to tie the president up with rolls of red tape. I'm not even going to contest this one--that the GOP looks at this as a win for the president is well documented.

The article goes on to praise the stalwart "liberal" Pelosi for her standing up against the wrath of the leftist base and to point out how politically shrewd she is:

What motivated Pelosi and the Democrats to incur the wrath of their liberal base and allow one of the Administration's most controversial anti-terror policies to be extended? A mix of politics, pragmatism and some significant concessions.

First of all, Pelosi wanted the issue off the table for the political campaign this fall. Despite anti-GOP sentiment in the country and record low popularity for President George W. Bush, Democrats still trail on national security and that could hurt them in Congress. Stonewalling the Administration and letting the surveillance powers expire could have cost the Democrats swing seats they won in 2006 as well as new ones they have a chance to steal from Republicans this November. "For any Republican-leaning district this would have been a huge issue," says a top Pelosi aide, who estimates that as many as 10 competitive races could have been affected by it.

Pelosi realized that conservative freshman Democrats like Nancy Boyda of Kansas and centrist Southern representatives were willing to squeeze the Administration for a compromise as long as she got one in the end. That made it possible for her to let the Protect America Act — which passed last August and granted full approval to the Adminstration's expansive surveillance powers — expire in February, and set up her negotiating position through the spring.

This is Beltway system groupthink. It's how the world lives when your daily reality is a hall of mirrors. What good is a Democratic congress if they can't stop a travesty like this.  It's 100% political calculation whose only concern is playing the game to get more power.  That's the only thing that enters into the mind of someone defeated by the Beltway system.

If you want a more thorough critique of this Time piece of propaganda see Greenwald this morning on this.

UPDATE: The basic question goes unanswered, though:  Why is Pelosi, Hoyer, Rockefeller, and Reid so strong on supporting this bill. I don't buy the contested congressional seats reason quoted in the Time article is robust enough to be a primary mover for the Dem leaders. I think that Jonathan Turley's hypothesis, as stated on Olbermann (youtube found at update 2 to this post) is the Dem leadership is as implicated in the illegal wiretapping as Bush and his people are. I don't know if that's true, but it's certainly plausible and would go a long way to explain what otherwise seems an unnecessary cave in to a president who has no real power or credibility anymore.  If it is true, we'll probably never find out if this bill is approved, which is the point of the bill--to make sure nobody ever finds out.  No lawsuits, no discovery. 

If true, and Obama knows about it, does it make his support more understandable? I don't think so. Rather it makes him a collaborator in their cover-up. What if in exchange for his support he has demanded that if he is elected they then must step down from their leadership positions? I don't know; Im just thinking out loud.  I'm still looking for a plausible reason to explain Obama's passivity on this.  He knows what the bill means. Just to go along because it would be embarrassing for Dem leaders to be outed is not even close to being a good reason to support this bill. There better be something else going on behind closed doors that justifies this.

Integrity and Compromise

I'm not a politician. I have neither the temperament or the kind of drive that is a prerequisite for success as one.  But if I was one, I would recognize that I had to pick my fights carefully. I would recognize that sometimes I would  have to make choices dictated by political reality that I would not make if I was unconstrained by them. I would understand that in order to be strong on X issue, I have to be weak on Y issue. 

Politics is not a place where idealists thrive, and that's the way it always will be. It's a place where you need sharp elbows and to throw them while maintaining a smile plastered on your face. It's a reality where there are no real friendships, just alliances of interest ("If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog," Harry Truman famously said.), where the  "public statement" the preeminent tool to blow smoke  to hide from the public what is really going on.  It's a place where consistently speaking the plain truth is a ticket to electoral failure.

So is it any wonder that the people who rise to positions of leadership in such a world are those who don't see there's much of a problem with that? Is it any wonder that those who thrive are the ones who are most skilled at gaming the system, at lying and manipulating?  Is it any wonder that the majority of those who are attracted to politics are really driven by their own careerist objectives rather than the common good?

Am I saying that this is a black and white reality and that there are no gradations? No, but I think there are people who have been mostly defeated by the system and those who mostly haven't been.  But I think most of us can agree that guya like Russ Feingold and Jim Webb (regardless whether we agree with them on the issues) define the brighter principled end of the spectrum while Cheney, Rove, Delay define the greed and power-driven darker end. People like Lieberman, Clinton, Pelosi, Reid are somewhere in the middle.  Obama?  Let's be realistic.  It's too early to tell. He has proven nothing. He is mostly potential that may or may not realize itself.

Obama Supports FISA "Compromise" (Updates 1, 2, & 3)

Pretty disappointing.  I haven't had time to read a lot on this, but in what substantive sense is this a compromise? Does anybody know of  an analysis of what Obama's thinking is on supporting this travesty? Or is it just the normal fear of being seen too left on the issue when he's trying to move to the center?  It's not a matter of left or right; it's a matter of right and wrong, and there are only bad reasons for supporting this bill that I can see. I mean even the Cato Institute is against this thing.

So this is a big deal; it's not just a pick your battles kind of choice when other battles are more important.  This one is very, very important.  And I would say the equivalent of voting yea or nay on the war. He wasn't in the Senate when he opposed the war and so was not didn't feel the pressure he's feeling today--makes you wonder if he would have voted against the war if he had been in the senate at that time. We need somebody with a high profile to stand up against the cronyism that is driving this legislation.  This is all about the continuing agenda of the right to lay the infrastructure for the future, and the Dems are collaborating for no more lofty reason that to cover their butts. It's nauseating.

Look I know Obama has got tough choices in often no-win situations, and I know that he is going to disappoint us time and time again. And I know that he says he wants to work to remove the immunity part of the bill.  But he has not said he will not vote for it if immunity is in the final bill, and the immunity part isn't the only disturbing aspect of the bill--the warrantless wiretaps part of it is, and if there is a compromise here, it's in the details not in the substance from everything I've read about it.

I, of course, continue to think that his candidacy offers so much more potential than any one else's out there, but this is still a big, big disappointment. I see it as a missed opporttunity.  We need him to get out in front of this issue and give a speech about what's at stake rather than hiding in the crowd as he's doing now. He's a constitutional lawyer fergawdsakes--he knows what's at stake, and he's hiding.

Don't have time to say anymore on this, but what is there to say.  Interested to hear from anybody if there's an angle I'm missing.

UPDATE: From Obama's statement:

"Under this compromise legislation, an important tool in the fight against terrorism will continue, but the President's illegal program of warrantless surveillance will be over. It restores FISA and existing criminal wiretap statutes as the exclusive means to conduct surveillance - making it clear that the President cannot circumvent the law and disregard the civil liberties of the American people. It also firmly re-establishes basic judicial oversight over all domestic surveillance in the future. It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses. But this compromise guarantees a thorough review by the Inspectors General of our national security agencies to determine what took place in the past, and ensures that there will be accountability going forward. By demanding oversight and accountability, a grassroots movement of Americans has helped yield a bill that is far better than the Protect America Act.

"It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives - and the liberty - of the American people.

Greenwald says to the contrary:

This whole controversy began because George Bush, in December of 2005, got caught breaking our spying laws for years. He did so because he embraced a radical and un-American theory that asserted he has the power to break all of our laws provided such lawbreaking is, in his view, related to "defense of the nation." That lawbreaking theory is at the heart of virtually every major controversy of the last seven years, and it remains entirely in tact and preserved:

At the meeting [with the DOJ], Bruce Fein, a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration, along with other critics of the legislation, pressed Justice Department officials repeatedly for an assurance that the administration considered itself bound by the restrictions imposed by Congress. The Justice Department, led by Ken Wainstein, the assistant attorney general for national security, refused to do so, according to three participants in the meeting. That stance angered Mr. Fein and others. It sent the message, Mr. Fein said in an interview, that the new legislation, though it is already broadly worded, "is just advisory. The president can still do whatever he wants to do. They have not changed their position that the president's Article II powers trump any ability by Congress to regulate the collection of foreign intelligence. [NYT August 19, 2007]

This scandal began by revelations that the President broke the law -- committed felonies -- when spying on our calls and emails without warrants, because he believes he has the power to break the law. The scandal all but concluded yesterday, with the Democratic Congress (a) protecting the President, (b) permanently blocking the lawsuits which would have revealed what he did and would have ruled that he broke the law, and (c) legalizing the very illegal spying regime that he secretly ordered in 2001. Only in the twisted world of Washington can that be described as a "compromise."

Here's the precedent that's being set: Whenever the president orders someone to do something, it's legal no matter how illegal in fact it is. Think for a moment the kinds of abuses that will flow from this.

Reid, Pelosi, Rockefeller really want this for their own reasons, so Obama's doesn't want to rock the boat.  End of story.

UPDATE 2: Here's Hurley on Olbermann's show last night:

UPDATE 3: Balkin's pretty cynical take:

Barrack Obama plans to be the next President of the United States. Once he becomes President, he will be in the same position as George W. Bush: he wants all the power he needs to protect the country. Moreover, he will be the beneficiary of a Democratic-controlled Congress, and he wants to get some important legislation passed in his first two years in office.

Given these facts, why in the world would Obama oppose the current FISA compromise bill? If it's done on Bush's watch, he doesn't have to worry about wasting political capital on it in the next year. Perhaps it gives a bit too much power to the executive. But he plans to be the executive, and he can institute internal checks within the Executive Branch that can keep it from violating civil liberties as he understands them. And not to put too fine a point on it, once he becomes president, he will likely see civil liberties issues from a different perspective anyway.  Read more.

I doubt there is any evidence to support this. I assume it's Balkin's basic take on lhuman nature that any executive when offered  more power and less hassles to maneuver in any way he can will not turn down that power.  Obama, for instance, isn't turning down all that extra money he'll be getting by opting out of  public financing.  So if Balkin is right, it's pretty disturbing: "Just give me the power.  I'll use it well. . . honest."  Even if BO does, what about the next guy?  It's all about laying the infrastructure.

I'll be interested to see how hard he works next week to remove the immunity sections of this bill.

Authoritarian Watch: Title VIII

Title VIII of the so-called "Protect America Act" is called "Protection of Persons Assisting the Government." Greenwald's interpretation:

So all the Attorney General has to do is recite those magic words -- the President requested this eavesdropping and did it in order to save us from the Terrorists -- and the minute he utters those words, the courts are required to dismiss the lawsuits against the telecoms, no matter how illegal their behavior was.

That's the "compromise" Steny Hoyer negotiated and which he is now -- according to very credible reports -- pressuring every member of the Democratic caucus to support. It's full-scale, unconditional amnesty with no inquiry into whether anyone broke the law. In the U.S. now, thanks to the Democratic Congress, we'll have a new law based on the premise that the President has the power to order private actors to break the law, and when he issues such an order, the private actors will be protected from liability of any kind on the ground that the Leader told them to do it -- the very theory that the Nuremberg Trial rejected.

It's amazing how many legislators can support a measure like this.  Either they don't understand the implications or they support the kind of unchecked power that it gives the president.  The same is true for those who passed the Military Commissions Act.  I assume people like Sherrod Brown who voted for it just didn't understand what they were doing.  I think that happens a lot more than we want to think.  Maybe these legislators have a staffer read it who makes a political calculation based on polling, and that's as far as the thought process goes.  That's probably at the root of McCain's calling the Guantanamo ruling last week the worst in Supreme Court history.

Could it be possible that  they honestly don't understand what kind of precedent they are setting?  Do they really believe that their insistence to refuse of habeas rights to non-citizens, a dubious proposition to begin with, will be limited only to non-citizens?  Don't they realize that any American citizen can be imprisoned indefinitely without recourse  if the president or his agents simply assert that such a citizen aided terrorists. Why shouldn't a power like that be used to target political enemies?  What check is there on such a power being abused?  And it will be abused if already these rightists flout existing laws and restraints.

The kinds of things that Kristol, Graham, and McCain have been saying about the Guantanamo or Boumediene ruling tryng to frame habeas corpus as a proedural issue rather than a human rights issue are just astonishing--and their comments disqualify them from ever being taken seriously again on anything. (There was a time when I was opne to listen to those guys--no longer)  There is no possibility that I can extend even a little respect to a man like McCain.  He is either stupid, which I'm beginning to think might partially explain his statements and behavior--he  graduated 894 out of 899 at the bottom of hiis class at Annapolis--or he is an egregiously unprincipled panderer, or is he a proto authoritarian. Is there another possibility I'm not seeing here?

At some point start talking about how much slack we're willing to cut Obama when it comes to his own political calculation.  The reality anyone faces in dealing with a Democratic congress that is willing to approve a law like this is depressing to say the least, and his best interests lie in ridding the congress of Blue Dog Bush enablers like John Barrow.  I realize that there is a certain amount of having to play the game that goes on if you are going to get into politics as it plays out on the ground rather than in our  dreams. And I realize that he has to bring conservatives into the conversation, but not hacks like Barrow. I'd like to hear his justification for that one.

Profile of an Obamacan: Andrew Bacevich

From his article "The Right Choice?The conservative case for Barack Obama" in The American Conservative:

Barack Obama is no conservative. Yet if he wins the Democratic nomination, come November principled conservatives may well find themselves voting for the senator from Illinois. Given the alternatives—and the state of the conservative movement—they could do worse.

Granted, when it comes to defining exactly what authentic conservatism entails, considerable disagreement exists even (or especially) among conservatives themselves. My own definition emphasizes the following

• a commitment to individual liberty, tempered by the conviction that genuine freedom entails more than simply an absence of restraint;

• a belief in limited government, fiscal responsibility, and the rule of law;

• veneration for our cultural inheritance combined with a sense of stewardship for Creation;

• a reluctance to discard or tamper with traditional social arrangements;

• respect for the market as the generator of wealth combined with a wariness of the market’s corrosive impact on humane values;

• a deep suspicion of utopian promises, rooted in an appreciation of the sinfulness of man and the recalcitrance of history

Accept that definition and it quickly becomes apparent that the Republican Party does not represent conservative principles. The conservative ascendancy that began with the election of Ronald Reagan has been largely an illusion. During the period since 1980, certain faux conservatives—especially those in the service of Big Business and Big Empire—have prospered. But conservatism as such has not.  Read more.

Authoritarian Watch: Democrats Still Craven

Greenwald this morning about the telecom amnesty bill that looks like it will pass soon with Democratic support:

Democrats are about to institutionalize a proposition that has been rejected since the Nuremberg Trials -- namely, that individuals (or, more accurately, lobbyist-protected corporations) are free to break the law as long as they can claim afterwards that they were told by the Leader to do so. That's the principle which the Democratic Party -- following their standard pattern of having enough of their members join a virtually unanimous GOP while the Democratic leadership enables it all -- is about to write into our laws.

The excuse Congressional Democrats are using for this behavior -- that passing a FISA/telecom bill is necessary to avoid political harm -- is as false as it is cowardly. As I noted the other day, there are all sorts of easy ways to avoid political controversy if that goal were really what was driving them, including simply extending the existing PAA orders by 6-9 months so that they don't expire in August.

But the broader and more important point is the one illustrated by the bold and principled acts being undertaken by British politicians in several parties there, the same principle illustrated by numerous acts of Russ Feingold over the past seven years: defending basic liberties, the core principles of our political system, and the rule of law is of such overriding importance that any worthwhile politician, by definition, will do so even if it entails some political cost. As British members of Parliament resign their seats and defend members of other parties in defense of their liberties, our own Democratic Party this week will -- yet again -- endorse and legalize the most extremist and illegal aspects of the Bush agenda in pursuit of the craven, illusory and increasingly irrelevant goal of protecting its own political interests.

Do you get the feeling sometimes that the calculus used by these legislators to judge yea or nay has little or nothing to do with what is best for the country and everything to do with what is best for them? Does what is good for the country ever really come into view for them?  Is it that they don't care or that they are just clueless? Do they assume that if it is good for them, it is good for the country? Do they talk themselves into some rationale that they are doing no harm or that someone can fix it later? With sociopaths like Cheney or Bush I can understand their indifference to immolate so many lives on the altar of their ego and personal interests.  But it would seem that they have risen to the positions that they hold because they are prodigies of callous indifference--they are the leaders of a craven pack which, regardless what it says in public about them, admires them and seeks to sits at their feet.

Greenwald:

When the history of the post 9/11-era in America is written, it will record that our country was ruled by an administration as radical as it was contemptuous of our laws and basic liberties, but was also aided and abetted every step of the way by a putative "opposition party" too craven and/or supportive even to attempt to impede any of it, let alone succeed in doing so. The very few times when certain of its members tried to take principled stances of the type Britain is now witnessing -- such as Feingold's vigorous opposition to Bush's illegal spying program, the Military Commissions Act, and excesses of the Patriot Act -- the Democratic Party leadership itself intervened to quash them and ensure they failed.

Maybe there are some discussions I'm unaware of, but except for Olbermann's special comments and his discussions with Jonathan Turley and John Dean, you'd never know from other sources in the MSM how vicious has been the attack on basic constitutional principles.  If I'm wrong, tell me where.

Guantanamo Ruling

Relieved, but still 5-4?  And that it should even come to this?

And Roberts is one of the four dissenters.  I had no hope for Alito, but I wanted to believe that Roberts was a principled conservative, but he is clearly a rightist. As we see in England, principled conservatives oppose security state-driven thinking that justifies the abridgment of fundamental rights.

I'm not going to go on one of my anti-authoritarian rants here because I am feeling more optimistic lately. But honestly, can you see how frightening close we are here?  And can you see how important it is that we keep Republicans away from making any more court appointments for some time to come. So long as McCain, now in thrall the the right-wing base of his party, has the possibility of being eleced, we are in jeopardy.

How Liberalism Got Its Bad Name

I've been reading Rick Perlstein's gripping account of the sixties, Nixonland, and it's a little disconcerting, since I lived through it, how much I need to be reminded about what was going on then, particularly about the controversies surrounding school desegregation and open housing in 1965-66, both years of unprecedentedly violent summer rioting. As I am reading, I  remember what it felt like to live through those times as a teenager growing up in a Main Street New York suburb. The situation for people my age was ambiguous because our high school teachers were mostly liberal and our parents mostly conservative.

My wife grew up in the Bronx in a working class, mostly Irish and Italian neighborhood. There was no ambiguity there because her neighborhood was on the front line. Blacks were the enemy who were destroying everything white ethnics had striven for, and the liberals weren't doing enough to protect them and their interests.  Although they were life-long Democrats, Liberalism became for these people a dirty name.

But Liberals and moderates were in a politically impossible predicament in the mid to late sixties. They were caught in the middle between, on the one hand, a had-it-up-to-here black community which sought to force change, and on the other hand, ordinary white Americans who were scared to death they were seeing the beginning of a new race-driven Civil War in which their neighborhoods were the battleground. Their concerns were dismissed by too many Liberal elites as racist, but those Liberals were not forced to pay the price the way these urban white ethnics were. These Liberals were not living on the "race war's" front lines.  Much more should have been done to compensate working class urban whites for the price they paid for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Instead they were looked at as Archie Bunkers--more a part of the problem than victims of historical happenstance. From their resentful ranks Nixon and later Reagan found the electoral pickens easy.

Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, and the Watts riots began August 11. How was the juxtaposition of these two events interpreted at the time? From Johnson's and the liberal perspective: "This is how "they" thank us?"  From the African American perspective: "What do you expect?  It's all too little, too late."  From the southern white perspective: "We told you this was going to happen. You Liberals don't know what you're doing."

But what could a decent, intelligent president, governor, or mayor, liberal or otherwise, with common sense have done once the rioting began? Read the history to see how haplessly they flailed, but really there was nothing more for them to do except contain the chaos, limit the damage, and wait it out. As we see now in retrospect, the violence did eventually dissipate and we survived.  But from the perspective of 1965, it looked like things would only get worse--and in the short run they did get worse. And so those who advocated using force to put the demon back in the box won the day, and the foundation for the conservative backlash was laid. Reading Perlstein has convinced me that the racial politics of the sixties was the biggest reason for the de-legitimation of Liberalism on Main Street, while also convincing me it was Liberalism's finest hour.

Last Word on Hillary

I hope.  Rebecca Traister in Salon, who voted for Hillary, sees her pretty much the way I do:

The truth is, whether you have a life-size poster of her on the wall or the Hillary nutcracker sitting on your bedside table, you cannot help admitting: Clinton and her ever-lovin' husband are figures too delicious to resist, their story a must-read. They are our great American characters: Shakespearean in their marriage, Fitzgeraldian in their striving, Chandler-esque in their noirish cronyism. They can't stop writing their own compelling narratives; they just can't help themselves.

You could say something similar about Nixon as an American political prodigy--there's something kind of awe-inspiring about such people; they really are different from the rest of us more-or-less normal saps. But let's hope there's no Hillary and Bill sequel. However intriguing they might be as characters in a political melodrama, the country is better off with both of them off stage. Traister's whole piece is worth a read.

Fathers & Sons

Interesting piece in he local paper by Johann Hari about Obama's and McCain's relationship with their fathers:

The Hillary-dam has finally burst, so now oceans of newsprint are being spilled over the long-delayed Republican vs. Democrat showdown. But as we simplistically blather about the candidates' race and age we seem to be ignoring the best guide we have to John McCain and Barack Obama's hearts.

Both men have written strange, searching books about their fathers. It is in their pages that we can find the clearest clues to their potential presidencies. At first glance, these slabs of non-fiction -- "Dreams From My Father" by Obama and "Faith of My Fathers" by McCain -- are strikingly similar. They both tell the autobiographical story of an insecure young man who flails around for an identity, and finds it by chasing the ghost of his absent father to a dangerous place far beyond the United States. Yet Obama ended up writing a complex story of colonized people -- while McCain wrote a simple celebration of the colonizer. (jh/t MP)  Read more.

George Will's Conservative Faith

George Will has been and promoting his latest book collection of his columns. I can't say I'm a regular reader of his columns, but I found a couple of things he said on Colbert and Charlie Rose earlier this week interesting as indicative of a kind of conservatism that I find respectable (as opposed to the right wingism of the GOP) but which must be vigorously debated and refuted by people like me who are neither liberals or conservatives as will would define them. I think I and others like me represent a way out of the liberal/conservative impasse, and Obama is the public figure that comes closest to embodying in the political sphere what I believe is the way out of that impasse.

Watch the Colbert clip, in which I thought Will was very good good in explaining the difference between conservatism and liberalism.  He says in response to Colbert's request to define the difference between conservatism and liberalism:

The competing values are freedom and equality at all times. Conservatives tend to favor freedom and are willing to accept inequalities of outcome from a free market. Liberals tend to favor equality of outcome and are willing to sacrifice and circumscribe freedom in order to get it. . . . What conservatives say is that we will protect you against idealism; we will protect you against the liberal faith that they can make something straight from the crooked timber of humanity. We understand that the government's job is to deliver the mail, defend the shore, and get out of the way.

That's a pretty cogent, concise definition of libertarian conservatism. (I am somewhat surprised, though, that  he thinks it's the government's job to deliver the mail.) I would even go so far s to say that this critique of liberalism long ago made it clear to me that I could not be a Liberal, and that's why I call myself a progressive--they are not the same. My progressive faith differs from liberalism in that I think we humans do evolve in the cultural sphere, which is the sphere of spirit, and that our politics evolve to reflect what happens in the cultural sphere. That's different from the liberal faith that progress can be engineered top-down. I see activity in the cultural sphere as yang and activity in the political sphere as yin.

Two Speeches

For the record, Obama's acceptance Speech:

And for a laugh, a review of McCain's edited over at TPM:

Harold Ford, by the way, another DLC Dem.

Goodbye to the Clintons

I just read Digby's apologia for Hillary, and I have to say I have a hard time understanding why anybody who thinks of him or herself as a progressive Democrat can defend the Clintons.  I know Digby voted for Obama in the California primary, but when push comes to shove she's a Dem loyalist more than she is a clear-thinking, probing analyst.

Digby is smart enough to know that Hillary is not a progressive Democrat.  She's closer to Lieberman on foreign policy than she is to Obama, and that alone is reason to disqualify her from consideration by anybody who thinks of herself as a progressive.  She is a DLC Democrat, and that faction of the party along with the Blue Dog Democrats are in their different way more Republican than they are progressives.  The DLC Dems are more in line with Republican ideas about free trade and the militarization of foreign policy and are comfortable with the basic way in which the military industrial complex defines Beltway reality. The Blue Dogs are a continuation of the the socially conservative southern coalition of Dems and also line up with the Republicans on issues of national security and corporate welfare.

For purposes of holding a majority, it's important that DLC and Blue Dog Dems call themselves Dems, but they too often behave and vote like Republicans, and they have been profoundly complicit in the the Bush Administration's folly. They think of themselves virtuous for being more open to bi-partisanship at a time when that meant time and again caving to Bush administration's tyranny agenda. I'm all for bi-partisanship when we're dealing with issues about which principled and reasonable people can disagree, but no reasonable, principled, well-informed person who cares about preserving the rule of law and a republican form of government can compromise with the policies of this administration. It demanded time and time again the kind of resistance we finally saw from Chris Dodd some weeks back when the the Telecom Amnesty bill was coming to a vote. We need to recognize that the only real patriots in our national legislature are the ones who spoke out forcefully and voted consistently in resistance to Bush policy.  There is no compromise with tyranny, especailly when it's the subtle, undercover kind created behind a fog of propaganda and confusion that is the GOP m.o.

John McCain and Hillary Clinton have not been nor are they now among these resisters. With McCain, despite whatever claim he might have to be a maverick to the contrary, it's obvious how he is a Bush enabler.  But Hillary, because she has accepted to play the game by the GOP rules, is almost as complicit. I have more respect for principled conservatives like Chuck Hagel, Pat Buchanan, and George Will than I do for Hillary Clinton, Lieberman and McCain. I may disagree with the first three, but I don't think they are sanctimonious fools as I think of Lieberman, nor are they say-anything, do-anything panderers like Clinton and McCain. I could sit down and discuss issues with the first three, but with the others "reason" is simply a tool to be used expediently to justify his or her will to power.

So Digby's defense of the idea that Hillary should have stayed in as long as she did and should be respected as a tenacious fighter only makes sense if your goal is to say something to make Clinton supporters feel good in order to heal the wounds. Maybe that's her purpose, and there's a place for that. But it's not my purpose, nor is this blog the place for it.  Anybody who is a Hillary supporter probably stopped reading this blog a long time ago, and while I'll admit it's a shortcoming, with so much at stake I don't have the temperament to suffer what I perceive to be foolishness gladly or any other way. Given the outrages we have witnessed in the political sphere I am not in a mood to make nice.

For progressive who at this late date has more positive things to say about Hillary than negative ones is either a fool or trying to placate one. She is a paint-by-numbers robo pol who did everything according to obsolete formulas, and she would have done the same as President.  She was as prepared for this campaign as the French Generals were prepared for the German blitzkrieg. For all her intelligence she has proven time and again that she is politically inept. She was outmaneuvered, outsmarted, outfundraised, and just plain whipped by Obama. It was obvious to everybody weeks ago, except her and the people who still fanatically supported her. As the French generals are the very definition of political foolishness, so are Clinton and her dead-enders.  That being said, if I find it impossible to make nice, I will try to shut up. I will make an effort from here on to restrain the disdain I have come to feel for the mindset that characterizes Clinton and her band, and let those of you who are kinder, more generous, and understanding than I do the placating. Luckily Obama seems to be that kind of person.

Now It Begins

Despite the media focus on Clinton and the ungraciousness of her speech last night--Did we expect anything else?--Obama should feel no pressure to give in to her demands--at least in the short run. The Clintons want to prove to Obama that politics isn't just about words, it's about dealing with self-absorbed jerks like them. So that's certainly something that he has to handle well if he's to move on to the next stage.  I think he'll handle them fine.

It remains to be seen what proportion of the nearly half of Dems who voted for Hillary were voting against Obama.  My gut tells me that these are relatively few.  But I don't know that. I think most women and most blue collars will get over their disappointment.  The Appalachian types won't.  If I'm wrong about that, then maybe he has to do more than simply be nice to Hillary.  Let's hope it doesn't come to that. 

But the real issue now is McCain, and I have every confidence that Obama will take it to him forcefully.  He will take on McCain in a way that Bush should have been taken on.  He is a terribly flawed candidate, and while McCain has a friendly media cohort, he does not not project well on television.  His speech last night was so stilted it verged on the comical.  Maybe he'll get better.  But the bottom line is that he's a fraud, and he knows it. And it shows.

This is an historic moment on so many levels.  But it doesn't feel that way for lots of reasons, but mainly because nothing really matters until next November and January.  I feel confident that the historical currents are shifting, and I'll keep riding my pet theories until they are proven wrong, but bottom line is anything is possible.. 

Postmodernism's Bad Name

Just read this comment by Koszmik at TPM Book Club:

Postmodernism, the serious intellectual movement, emerged in a post WWII Europe fatigued by war, having gladly moved beyond feudal and imperial classicisim, but was still struggling with modern ideologies most personified by Cold War propaganda promising two mutually exclusive modern utopias. Postmodernism is essentially an attempt to deconstruct the nature of ideology, both classical and modern. But it's still constructive deconstruction, understanding not destruction. Any appearance of a paradox, or nihilism, is simply a misunderstanding.

Which gets to a problem with "Post Modernism(TM)" the popular identity brand, and any perceived differences between hippies and hipsters.

It's embrace of "devolution" as somehow ironic and tragically hip, the embrace of paradox and perpetual irony, is just a cognitive dissonance, incredibly pretentious, and has become cliched and even orthodox.

It's always in style and never in style, because it's always ahead of itself and too cool for itself. It's always ironic, even when it's not, ironically. It's not pretentious, fraudulent, or clinched, because everything is pretentious, fraudulent, and clinched. The shallower something is, the more profound it is. Everybody trying their hardest to be apathetic. Obsessive trendiness masquerading as compulsive disaffection.

It's not postmodernism so much as a complete failure to understand postmodernism. Sophistic, pretentious, hollow. A classical and postmodern example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.

Postmodernism is one of those terms that means a lot of things to different people. Mostly it connotes a kind of pretentious intellectuality. The term, I'm pretty sure, was first coined in the architectural world, but it has meanings in literature, philosophy, and history. I have used the term on this blog mainly to convey what I see as a cultural historical transition as in premodern, modern, postmodern.  The premodern in the West was medieval. The modern was the cultural impulse in the west for which the Renaissance and Reformation are usually thought of as its beginning, the Enlightenment it's high point, and World War I its endpoint. The postmodern doesn't really have a name yet.  The zeitgeist of the postmodern to date is fragmentation and decadence.

So I would disagree with Kozmik's characterization to the extent that his first paragraph depicts the real postmodernism and his description of "Postmodernism (TM)" depicts the fake version. I think they are both valid responses to the collapse of modernity. There are three possible responses to the collapse of modernity: the first is to live as if it hadn't collapsed (the majority), the second, to embrace the decadence and absurdity of a world where there is no longer a robust set of collective meanings and values (PostmodernismTM), or, third, to embrace the decayed forms that have followed from the collapse of modernity as the soil out of which something new shall emerge. 

My critique of liberalism lies in that it is in the first category listed above.  Its assumptions are for the most part Enlightenment modern and proceed as if that cultural impulse was still a vital force. So I am sympathetic to the postmodern inclination to give such a prominent place to understanding power relationships--there simply is not enough discussion and so a general lack of sophistication about how power works, particularly among liberals who want so much to believe in the system without really countenancing the fundamental way in which the system is rigged. Liberals are radicals whose naivete about power has not yet been deconstructed. They still believe in the system and either cynically accept the way it is rigged as "reality" or are in denial about how power really works rigged. The former, like Clinton are decadent liberals; conservatives like Reagan are neo-liberals. Neo-Liberals understand power in Social Darwinist terms--they use that knowledge to run rings around liberals (like Warren Christopher in "Recount") who believe the system still works.

I could be wrong about this, but I see Obama as a postmodern in the third category. He understands the nature of the collapse, but refuses cynicism, and recognizes that he must use the vocabulary of liberalism because that's the language understood by the majority whose habits of mind are still modern. If he is who I think he is, then he will refuse naive liberalism while at the same time work to retrieve the essential from the liberal tradition while retrieving what is essential from the faith traditions of the West. This is both a radical and conservative project--radical in that it rejects as profoundly flawed the current wealth and power arrangements; conservative in the Burkean sense that rejects Jacobin top-down solutions and looks to retrieve from the past that which is necessary to evolve into the future. That's the nature of the project in the poltical and cultural spheres as I see it. We'll see if I'm just projecting too much on Obama.  I could be.

I don't know Kozmik's metaphysics, but I would agree with him that there is nothing definitionally nihilistic about postmodernism's deconstruction project, and to the degree that he sees himself in the third category above, we are allies.  But after the deconstruction, what is left?  That's the really interesting question for me. For many, the honest answer is nothing, so they revert to the entertainment that is Postmodernism(TM).  For others maybe there is some assertion of a positive value in the "human" or in "equality" or "freedom" as if they were values that had value simply by our willfully asserting that they are valuable. For me both those responses, while understandable, are inadequate insofar as they fail to embrace the fundamentally spiritual character of the human project.

My longstanding argument here has been that in a period of decadence, such as the one in which we're currently living, the vitality has left the collective meaning framework that gave the pre-decadent society its confidence and vibrancy.  That epoch in the West gave us science and Bach, Beethoven and Rembrandt.  It gave us Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, Coleridge and Wordsworth.  It gave us Hegel, Marx, and Kierkegaard. If the modern period officially died during World War I, here's a question the answer to which I think proves my point about decadence:  What person born in the West after WWI has the same greatness of soul as any those (and many, many others) named above? I can't think of a one, and I've thought a lot about it.

The reason: there's nothing, no zeitgeist, no spirit of the times, for talented or genius level personalities to work with. The zeitgeist of the Postmodern period to date has been fragmentation and decadence. There is nothing in our collective lives that gives us a sense of robust future possibility. There is nothing that works on the collective level to energize our imaginations and which inspires great works. So in the artistic and creative sphere, what you get is Postmodernism(TM).  If there is a positive imagination of the future human it is of some kind of cyborgism.  It's as if since the collapse of the modern we have become or want to become some different species from the people listed above.

But the the way forward requires a dismantling or deconstruction of our old mental habits while at the same time retrieving and assembling in a new constellation the shards from the past.  That is the formula for Renaissance, and renaissance is in a very real sense first and foremost a gift and then secondarily a response to that gift.  Renaissance is our near-term future, even if not in my lifetime or yours, but without it there really is little hope that we will remain recognizably human. We are gradually shrivelling into something else.