2012

I suppose I could be talked into voting for a Clinton/Obama ticket.

Disqualified to be president

As has been pointed out on other blogs, many of us voted for Barack Obama largely because (as a senator) he was totally right about the Iraq war. If that qualified him to be president, then it occurs to me that, being totally wrong about presidential authority to assassinate, he is disqualified to be president after 2012.

FWIW

Useful info:

How to Record the Cops

A guide to the technology for keeping government accountable

...and why you might someday need it.

Food riots / J Edgar's back!

And the news gets crazier:

• UN Warned of Major New Food Crisis at Emergency Meeting in Rome
• FBI Raids Homes of Several Twin Cities War Protesters

(Not) Unbelievable!

• Tick-Tocking the Clusterf ...

The Dems are suicidal

And another link or few:

• TPM: House Dems unlikely to act on tax cuts
• HuffPost: Dems likely to punt on tax issue
• The Bush Billionaire Tax Cut Dance
• Criminal Stupid
• Why Did the DCCC Lie to Their Members About Health Care?

I give up. Is there a "tea party" for disaffected progressives? The "pot party"? Where can I sign up?

One more

Oh, and one more link:

• President Obama Needs to Fire David Petraeus

Shallow thought

Basically, I've given up.

• To Obama Admin’s Reported Surprise, Private Insurers Skirt New Health Care Law
• Obama Plots New Disappointments for Progressives

I'll go to the polls and I'll vote for the Democrats...but only because I couldn't live with myself if I didn't at least go through the motions.

The Republicans say Obama's the worst president in American history. I still say George Bush holds the first place title.

2012

Uh, speak for yourself:

As angry as it might be, the professional left isn't ready to back a primary challenger to President Obama just yet.

Two high-profile liberals on Thursday said they are not interested in running against the president in 2012, and liberal bloggers say any challenge to Obama would be fraught with difficulty.

"I haven't heard of a credible name that has been floated that would challenge President Obama," said David Sirota, a prominent liberal blogger. "I haven't heard of that. I think it would be very difficult to do."

Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, who is also a columnist for The Hill, said he didn't think Obama would get a 2012 primary challenge "in a million years." In an e-mail, Moulitsas also said Obama shouldn't be challenged.

Bomb, bomb, bomb-bomb Iran

How propagandists function: Exhibit A -- and how the Israel lobby drives our foreign policy. Glenn Greenwald takes down Jeffrey Goldberg's big cover story in The Atlantic: It's bullshit.

Update: Greenwald follows up.

Partners with the Devil

If this happens, we absolutely totally need a new president in 2012.

...just kidding, of course. If he sells out the Gulf, it would royally piss me off, but it would fall a ways down his lengthening list of progressive sellouts. It wouldn't be a major surprise.

Hell hath no fury...

The left, professional and otherwise, is in a serious tizzy this morning about the remarks of Robert Gibbs. Understandably so. But let's be fair to Mr. Gibbs. He was only repeating what President Emanuel told him to say to all us fucking retarded liberals.

Peter Beinart

I'd like to recommend a couple of articles by armchair journalist and ex-warmonger Peter Beinart. He has apparently graduated from fighting terrorism and is now ready to take on a much tougher foe: Zionism.

The first, Hateful Ground Zero Hypocrisy:

The Anti-Defamation League's opposition to building a mosque at the site of the 9/11 attacks betrays its own founding principles. Peter Beinart on the Jewish group's Muslim double standard:

The other day, when the Anti-Defamation League came out against building a mosque near Ground Zero, I think I heard a sound—the sound of chickens coming home to roost.

[...]

The second is a much longer piece from New York Review of Books two months ago called, The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment. It deals specifically with hard-core, conservative Zionism and how it has fallen out of favor with a younger generation of American Jews. Here's how it starts:

In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.

The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn’t. “Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,” he reported. “Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word ‘they‘ rather than ‘us‘ to describe the situation.”

And here's how it closes:

But the message of the American Jewish establishment and its allies in the Netanyahu government is exactly the opposite: since Jews are history’s permanent victims, always on the knife-edge of extinction, moral responsibility is a luxury Israel does not have. Its only responsibility is to survive. As former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg writes in his remarkable 2008 book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes, “Victimhood sets you free.”

This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s. Yes, Israel faces threats from Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, Israelis understandably worry about a nuclear Iran. But the dilemmas you face when you possess dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto. The year 2010 is not, as Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed, 1938. The drama of Jewish victimhood—a drama that feels natural to many Jews who lived through 1938, 1948, or even 1967—strikes most of today’s young American Jews as farce.

But there is a different Zionist calling, which has never been more desperately relevant. It has its roots in Israel’s Independence Proclamation, which promised that the Jewish state “will be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew prophets,” and in the December 1948 letter from Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and others to The New York Times, protesting right-wing Zionist leader Menachem Begin’s visit to the United States after his party’s militias massacred Arab civilians in the village of Deir Yassin. It is a call to recognize that in a world in which Jewish fortunes have radically changed, the best way to memorialize the history of Jewish suffering is through the ethical use of Jewish power.

For several months now, a group of Israeli students has been traveling every Friday to the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where a Palestinian family named the Ghawis lives on the street outside their home of fifty-three years, from which they were evicted to make room for Jewish settlers. Although repeatedly arrested for protesting without a permit, and called traitors and self-haters by the Israeli right, the students keep coming, their numbers now swelling into the thousands. What if American Jewish organizations brought these young people to speak at Hillel? What if this was the face of Zionism shown to America’s Jewish young? What if the students in Luntz’s focus group had been told that their generation faces a challenge as momentous as any in Jewish history: to save liberal democracy in the only Jewish state on earth?

“Too many years I lived in the warm embrace of institutionalized elusiveness and was a part of it,” writes Avraham Burg. “I was very comfortable there.” I know; I was comfortable there too. But comfortable Zionism has become a moral abdication. Let’s hope that Luntz’s students, in solidarity with their counterparts at Sheikh Jarrah, can foster an uncomfortable Zionism, a Zionism angry at what Israel risks becoming, and in love with what it still could be. Let’s hope they care enough to try.

Heady stuff. Go read the middle part. Beinart says he is turning this article into a book.

Krugman

He says (condensed version):

Why does the Obama administration keep looking for love in all the wrong places? Why does it go out of its way to alienate its friends, while wooing people who will never waver in their hatred?

[...]

What explains Mr. Obama’s consistent snubbing of those [progressives] who made him what he is? Does he fear that his enemies would use any support for progressive people or ideas as an excuse to denounce him as a left-wing extremist? Well, as you may have noticed, they don’t need such excuses: He’s been portrayed as a socialist because he enacted Mitt Romney’s health-care plan, as a virulent foe of business because he’s been known to mention that corporations sometimes behave badly.

The point is that Mr. Obama’s attempts to avoid confrontation have been counterproductive. His opponents remain filled with a passionate intensity, while his supporters, having received no respect, lack all conviction. And in a midterm election, where turnout is crucial, the “enthusiasm gap” between Republicans and Democrats could spell catastrophe for the Obama agenda.

[...]

O.K., I don’t really know what’s going on. But I worry that Mr. Obama is still wrapped up in his dream of transcending partisanship, while his aides dislike the idea of having to deal with strong, independent voices. And the end result of this game-playing is an administration that seems determined to alienate its friends.

Just to be clear, progressives would be foolish to sit out this election: Mr. Obama may not be the politician of their dreams, but his enemies are definitely the stuff of their nightmares. But Mr. Obama has a responsibility, too. He can’t expect strong support from people his administration keeps ignoring and insulting.

Notable comment

From an online discussion with Robert Scheer:

11:27 Comment From erniesfo
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:27:39 GMT
Comment: Bob [Scheer]: I may not put this right, but Garry Wills recently wrote an article about “what he told Obama” at a secret meeting with prominent historians in NYRB. Turns out they all told Obama not to go in on Af-Pak, to get out. He was warned about his economic advisers—Summers, Geithner, Goolsby, et at, that they were retreads who had never made a correct economic assessment in their careers. Yet here we are. Could it be that Obama is such an ideologue, and, it must be said, such an elitist (fawning over folks from Ivy League schools, etc.) that this degrades any native intelligence that he might possess?

1:33 Robert Scheer
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:33:14 GMT
Comment: (To erniesfo) I don’t think I could put it better myself. I do think, sadly, because I still find the guy quite appealing, but sadly I think you nailed it. The elitism, the unwarranted respect for someone like Summers, even screwed up being head of Harvard, has a terrible track record, is responsible for the deregulation, why would he have such a high position in the White House, it’s mind boggling. [Rest of Scheer's response deals with the folly of Afghanistan.]

I don't think "ideologue" is the word erniefo really meant to use, because Obama is anything but an idealogue in my book. That is someone who is rigidly, even blindly wedded to a particular set of principles and assumptions, often unable to compromise or to be pragmatic. If Obama subscribes to any principles, I'm sure I no longer know what they are. He's compromised away most of the principles I voted for.

But "fawning...elitist" I'll go with.

11:40 Comment From erniesfo
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:40:04 GMT
Comment: Bob [Scheer]: That’s what I was afraid of—that we need an FDR and get a Hoover instead. Summers is so galling. The guy trashes women, pisses off the faculty and the students, then hoses Harvard’s endowment and ...Obama promotes him. It hurts thinking about it.

With all due respect

What Krugman said.

#ObamaFAIL

Sitting here, literally in tears, watching the full Shirley Sherrod speech on CNN.

Barack Obama should hang his head in public shame for this. He should apologize personally and profusely -- but I don't know how any apology could ever compensate this woman for what the administration did to her. Not intentionally with mean intentions, of course. But stupidly, and in cowardice.

We know what Andy Breitbart is. We know what Fox News is. This kind of thing is what they do. They cannot help themselves. You cannot expect anything better from them.

But we can, and should, expect better from this president and this administration. If we can't, then there really is no hope for us.

Update1: Jane Hamsher:

Now that the full video is out there and Sherrod’s version of events is vindicated, Obama looks foolish, impulsive and reactive. And he has only empowered Breitbart, who will continue to employ the same tactics until someone stands up to him. You would hope the President of the United States could manage that.

Update2: Sherrod Asks President Obama the Right Question: Do You Believe in My Principles?

Update3:

Ford

OK, he is pretty goofy. But you gotta hand it to him for those zingers in his closing remarks. Talk about framing! Lakoff would be proud.

Modern liberalism

Charles Davis writes:

Some would argue (ahem) that there can be no "balance" when it comes to protecting civilians; you don't kill them, and if you do, you should be considered a murderer and punished accordingly. It's an obvious crime only compounded by the fact the Afghan war is not in the least bit necessary to protect the national security of the United fucking States.

But then that's the difference between modern liberalism and radicalism: the former will rationalize murder if it's backed by the leading technocratic intellectuals of the day and carried out by the State under the auspices of some modern day White Man's Burden, while the latter, valuing human life equally regardless of nationality and not making moral distinctions based on a murderer's uniform, will condemn -- not condone -- violence whether it's perpetrated by governments or non-State actors. You can probably see why they're not part of the panel discussions.

Please don't count me in that description of Modern Liberalism. I guess that makes me a radical.

Busy beaver

Busy, busy, busy! Could it be that Mark Luttrell is too busy running for Mayor to do his day job? He seems to lose a lot of inmates.