Friday Malamute Blogging

The George Bush chew toy just bit the dust.

Obama Responds*

Dear friends on the left,

Hobgoblins, small minds and stupid consistency go together, as Emerson reminded us, so I suppose it shouldn't have come as a surprise that a cast of "progressive leaders" has again assembled locust-like at the waning stages of the electoral cycle to "urge me to listen to the voice of the people" and not "to retreat from the stands that have been the signature of (my) campaign."

You then proceed to itemize some of "the core commitments shared by many who have supported your campaign" and which you seem to believe -- despite virtually all evidence to the contrary -- are shared by me.

The left has never been much for realism -- though here the rose colored perceptions have a strikingly hallucinogenic character.

For example, I am claimed to have professed a commitment to "universal health care." May I remind you that even in the primary debates, where one might have expected some attention to the grassroots base of the party, I explicitly and boldly rejected universal health care. The latter was associated with my opponent Mrs. Clinton and while neither of us has any intention of addressing the root of the health care crisis, namely the for-profit health care insurance industry which has funded both of our campaigns lavishly, my "solution" as Paul Krugman noted at the time was well to the right of that of the DLC's initial choice of candidate.

It does not escape my notice, incidentally, that your communiqué fails to even mention the health care delivery system which you, and most Americans for that matter, support, namely single payer. I take this as a validation of what is perhaps the primary function of my campaign: to extract from the realm of the possible and consign to the realm of the unthinkable and the unutterable what is for most of the civilized world economic common sense and common moral decency. I am happy to report that your letter is a strong indication of my success in having achieved this transformation, one which, as Adolph Reed has written, amounts to nothing less than the functional eradication of the left.

Thus, to take another indication, while you have yet to notice it, so too into the Orwellian memory hole has gone the hope that our nation will "shed its warlike stance around the globe and focus on diplomacy" as a means of resolving conflicts. Allow me to direct you to my website where I call for 92,000 new troops, the redeployment of those soldiers removed from Iraq to an intensified conflict in Afghanistan-and possibly Pakistan. Also included in most of my recent foreign policy addresses are calls for unilateral action against governments suspected of support for terrorism not to mention my repeated threats against Iran and Venezuela.

Also consigned to the realm of far-left fantasy is "an environmental policy that transforms the economy by shifting billions of dollars from the consumption of fossil fuels to alternative energy sources". In his previous capacity as chief lobbyist for energy giant Exelon, my campaign manager David Axelrod has spoken eloquently of the need to ramp up the construction of nuclear power plants. That's what I mean by "alternative" and please rest assured that Mr. Axelrod will serve as a strong voice for this "alternative" in my administration. I will also invest in "alternative energy" through continuing subsidies to corn based ethanol insodoing securing payback to the farm behemoth Archer Daniels Midland for having bankrolled my campaign at the crucial initial stages. Another "alternative energy source" embraced by me is "clean coal" and the industry which helped me ascend to the first rungs of the political ladder in Illinois.

I suggest that you keep the just mentioned facts in mind in considering the likelihood of my "reform(ing) of the political process that reduces the influence of money and corporate lobbyists and amplifies the voices of ordinary people" as well as the likelihood of "an ongoing and constructive dialogue with (me) when (I am) elected President."

And then you wake up, as my wife likes to say.

And when you do wake up, you will realize that you are left with one option: "challenging" me. But please bear in mind that with the new surveillance capacities which I authorized as Senator and which will be available to me as President, challenging the executive branch is no longer the fun and games it was in the past. I have, of course, no intention of revealing sources and methods, but for the moment let's just say that I know what you had for breakfast this morning.

That said, you may rest assured it is quite unlikely that I will need to exercise these powers for any purposes beyond my own personal amusement.

For indeed I, and the corporate executives, white shoe law firms, big money lobbyists and their numerous apologists are in your debt for having led so many leftists into the abattoir which is my campaign. The movement which only a few years ago assembled millions in the streets of Manhattan, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and other cities is in shambles-unable to organize a gathering beyond a few old timers at a street corner, let alone the kind of action which might actually cause me and my base to take notice.

There is no need for a howitzer when the tiniest fly swatter will do quite nicely against the political force which you now represent.

And so in conclusion allow me to cite the deathless interrogatory of Clint Eastwood which applies not just to my campaign but which is routinely appealed to, consciously or not, by all politicians of any stripe:

"What are you going to do about it, Punk?"

Given that, for the past generation, you have repeatedly hoisted the white flag before the battle even began, the smart money is on your doing absolutely nothing.

Warmest Regards,

Barack

*John Halle, who teaches Music Theory at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, channels an honest response from Barack Obama to Change We Can Believe In: An Open Letter to Barack Obama published in the latest issue of The Nation.

And the Beat-Down Goes On . . .

That is, the public beat-down of the black poor goes on. Last week, against what we know was our better judgment red rabbit and I watched considerable chunks of Soledad O’Brien’s CNN special on being Black in America, and I have to say Sistah Soledad did not disappoint, delivering, in the poor disguise of an in-depth journalistic report, a finger-wagging, self-righteous lecture to downtrodden black folk about how to get their collective act together (and in case you were wondering, the solution has something to do with getting and staying married). Wherever the CNN cameras trained their focus, the message—often explicit, sometimes less so—was the same: Shape up, poor Negroes! Especially you triflin’ young men!

I’ll illustrate with one of the series’ less egregious examples. At one point the show teased a segment on HIV/AIDS with an image of a classroom of empty desks, which, I assumed, was going to be a metaphor for all of the deaths of young people caused by the disease. Boy, was I ever naïve. The empty classroom, it turned out was an AIDS awareness program that had no clients. One might have assumed the absence of any clients indicated a poorly designed program, but no—Sistah Soledad and the program administrator shook their heads and clicked their tongues at what seemed obvious to them: these poor, benighted people just don’t know what’s good for them.

And, as I said, this is one of the least blatant examples of the program’s victim blaming.

Watching the puerile commentary from the so-called experts trotted out by O’Brien I found myself repeating a question asked by Ralph Ellison 45 years ago, “Why is it so often that when critics confront the American as Negro they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confident superiority to quite primitive modes of analysis?”

Part of the answer, I believe, is that despite our alleged sophistication about “race,” so many people, black and white alike, persist in believing that black people are fundamentally different from white people. Soledad’s special produced in abundance public opinion poll after public opinion poll, and study after study displaying some version of the formulation that while, say, 65% of black people believed or did x, only 40% white people believed or did the same, every disparity providing an opening for some expert to come in to explain it all. The conclusion, time after time, was that something called “race” accounted for the disparity. No matter that every issue the program addressed and every study or poll it produced showed that large portions of both black and white Americans acted the same way or thought the same way. “Being black” made even the same things different.

So I suppose, in Sistah Soledad’s mind, it made all the difference in the world that the majority of the faces spewing the scurrilous crap against poor people were black and brown. After all, being black makes you an expert on being black—except of course if you’re black, poor, have a child, and are unmarried. In that case, since you don’t know shit, you’ll just have to take it from those who believe they do.

Monday Malamute Blogging

Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy...

Daddy-O (Part II), or B & O

(Brooks and Obama, that is)

Although as a self-deluded Republican Party hack, David Brooks would never actually vote for Obama (Brooks’ long-standing delusion is to think of himself as a disinterested social analyst rather than an inveterate apologist for the ruling class), his Tuesday Times column on the mortgage crisis exemplifies the Obamista social vision to which I refer in the previous post, a vision in which moralist and market-driven accounts of social justice meet seamlessly to cloak the rapacity of those who have seized power. According to Brooks the current crisis is the result of a combination of deteriorating norms:

America once had a culture of thrift. But over the past decades, that unspoken code has been silently eroded.

Some of the toxins were economic. Rising house prices gave people the impression that they could take on more risk. Some were cultural. We entered a period of mass luxury, in which people down the income scale expect to own designer goods. Some were moral. Schools and other institutions used to talk the language of sin and temptation to alert people to the seductions that could ruin their lives.

But more to the point, individuals share much of the blame for helping “degrade” these norms, because each decision by an individual to take on a high-risk loan, “reinforced a new definition of acceptable behavior for neighbors, family and friends. In a community, behavior sets off ripples. Every decision is a public contribution or a destructive act.” [Which, presumably, is also why, in a different context, one should treat an unwed mother like a social pariah—think of the damage to the social fabric if one doesn’t do so.]

In other words the real culprits in this meltdown are all the individual borrowers. And in Brooks’ view, the economic sector has already done what it can to fix the problem, which means that in rescuing the economy, the “important shifts will be private, as people and communities learn and adopt different social standards.”

This is the same ‘self-help” claptrap that Larry Bobo celebrates as the “next level of social justice” that will be inaugurated with Obama’s ascendancy to the Oval Office.

Debtors’ prisons and scarlet letters have never looked so good.

Daddy-O

It bears repeating that one clear effect of the Obama campaign has been to re-license victim-blaming as cutting edge social analysis and policy. Harvard’s Larry Bobo concludes a recent piece supporting Obama by writing:

The next stages of this struggle will call for new strategies, new ideas and almost certainly a larger dose of self-help and self-assertion from within black America itself. Obama's Father's Day remarks on absentee fathers and taking responsibility for children hit just the right note in this regard. I have rock-solid faith that having Barack Obama in the White House will take matters toward full realization of that next level of inclusion and social justice.

And the little bit of the “Reclaiming the Dream” panel discussion on CNN “moderated” by Soledad O’Brien that I could bring myself to watch became a virtual free-for-all when it came to taking swipes at black men and women for having children without benefit of clergy. It seems all would be well if only Baby Daddy would take Baby Mama in hand and, whether she wants to or not, walk her down the aisle before she drops another illegitimate child from her fertile loins.

Yes folk's it’s likely that next “level of inclusion and social justice” will be one in which those deemed worthy of support by the state (on a recent trip through the Mississippi Delta I saw a sign for an FHA Housing Project declaring it a community for “deserving families) will be those who best conform to statutes of moral behavior dictated by the faith-based organizations recently blessed by St. Obama, working in concert with the University of Chicago economists on his team, to figure out the appropriate moral and economic incentives to create the desired behaviors among “irresponsible” poor black people: let’s say, a poor single girl who gets pregnant at 16 will get less support than one who gets pregnant at 18, and both will get less than a poor young, but married, woman, who gets pregnant at 21, and so on.

The nation’s already atrophied capacity to recognize the structural causes of inequality will diminish to the point that our only explanation of persistent poverty will be either a new version of racialization in which it turns out that people are poor because their culture or their genes lead them to engage in behaviors that prevent them from taking advantage of the opportunities that have been made available for them, or that their poverty is the result of inappropriate government interference with market forces that would otherwise work like magic in creating general prosperity. Lord have mercy.

When all the KoolAid is gone...

... and the Obasms are but a memory...

You there, on the left...

You look like you could use a stiff shot of reality. Adolph Reed serves it up over at Black Agenda Report. And it isn't pretty.

The point is that we need to approach this presidential election stuff, and not just this time around, with no illusions about the trade-offs involved and recognize that it's not even as simple a matter as Obama being better than McCain in the here-and-now on a select menu of issues. I could understand the impulse to rally the troops to produce the outcome that's better on immediate tactical grounds, if we had some troops to rally. If we had such a base, it might even make sense to consider an organized boycott of the election, which may be the only way to keep from being treated like a 2 am booty-call for triangulating Dems.

Professor Reed's unvarnished examination of Obamaism and the state of party politics in the US should be mandatory reading for anyone "left." As usual, his analysis is relentless and dead on.

UPDATE:
Excellent points made by mozella in comments to this piece at Black Agenda Report:

Correct me if I'm wrong
written by mozella , July 16, 2008

It seems to me that the biggest problem we face today is the myth of the two-party system.
As long as we all pretend that there is any difference whatsoever between the major political parties in this country, we will continue to be vulnerable to manipulation by those global corporate entities who are really in charge.

A wet-behind-the-ears, newly elected junior senator does not have the wherewithall to mount a successful, dragon-slaying campaign without some powerful mojo from outside interests.
Nearly one hundred million dollars on hand before he was barely introduced to the millions of small donors who supposedly funded his campaign?

A manipulative, Rovian primary strategy that gamed the process in a style mastered in a ridiculously short political career, one spent almost entirely running for office and winning not on merit, but on technicality?

This is not the campaign of a committed politician, this is a carefully orchestrated puppet show.

The man behind the podium is a self-admitted blank screen, a chameleon, a shape-shifter.
To black Americans, he is redemption, validation, the culmination of the struggle, fulfillment of the dream.

For white Americans he is vindication, exoneration, absolution.

To young America he is hope, the promise of the future, the sign of the times, the prospect of things to come.

He's a liberal, he's a conservative, he's a hawk, he's anti-war, he's progressive, he's right-wing, he's black, he's white.
You name it, he is it.
What could be better?
Yet that is who he is only because that is who he is scripted to be.

In reality he is none of those things.

He's a two-bit political hack who can't seem to form a coherent sentence without a TelePrompter, let alone formulate or even explain a comprehensive, complex position on any government policy.

He simply looks the part for which he was cast.
In the minds of the string pullers he's the preferred winner, his opponent an equally scripted and cast, acceptable alternative.

What's so sad for black people is that to be so emotionally invested in what amounts to little more than an elaborately produced made-for-tv-movie is a sure-fire prescription for heartbreak.
The tragedy of buying the hype is there is no return policy, no money back guarantee, no recourse whatsoever.

What happens after the heartbreak is what worries many of us older folks, can our people endure such large-scale disillusionment?

Because the bottom line is whether he succeeds or fails those who look to him to be the reality of a common destiny realized are bound to be devastated when they realize it ain't about you.

And it never was.

Constitutional Rights are Non-negotiable

Signs and Portents of Obama's Housing Policy?

HT to Michael Kwiatkowski at Smirking Chimp.

Saturday Malamute Blogging

He needs a good brushing.

The Professor was cleaning up the backyard when he found Kodi’s stick collection (stashed behind the raised flower bed). Kodi barked indignantly from the dining room window while the prof. put the sticks in a trash bag.

Barbara Ehrenreich Recycles

The following is a blog post I was working up in May in response to a column Ehrenreich posted at Huffington Post. Well, lo and behold, the same column just arrived in this month's Progressive. Recycling is a good thing, right?

Barbara Ehrenreich says:

It's important -- even kind of exhilarating -- for women to embrace their inner bitch...

So Barbara does just that in a post over at HuffPo, entitled Hillary's Gift to Women.

...But by running a racially-tinged campaign, lying about her foreign policy experience, and repeatedly seeming to favor McCain over her Democratic opponent, Clinton didn't just break through the "glass floor," she set a new low for floors in general, and would, if she could have got within arm's reach, have rubbed the broken glass into Obama's face.

That Hillary Clinton set a new low in campaigning will come as a surprise to the Karl Roves and the Lee Atwaters, and pretty much any Republican working on any presidential campaign. C'mon, Barb, did Hillary really sink lower than the robo calls suggesting John McCain's adopted Bangladeshi daughter was his black love child?

Some understandable names come up like Margaret Thatcher and the warrior queen Boadicea, and even Condoleezza Rice, but then she throws in Lynndie England.

Whatever violent and evil things men can do, women can do too, and if the capacity for cruelty is a criterion for leadership, as Fukuyama suggested, then Lynndie England should consider following up her stint in the brig with a run for the Senate.

Lynndie England? Really? The first woman to get close to being POTUS brings to mind Abu Ghraib?

She even makes a PMS reference in this hit piece. I guess we should be thankful Medusa and menopause didn't rear their ugly heads.

¡Feliz Cumpleaños, Gregorio!

Saturday Malamute Blogging

...from the archives

It's All True

So it turns out the invasion of Iraq was about oil, after all.

Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.

...

There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.

Sensitive to the appearance that they were profiting from the war and already under pressure because of record high oil prices, senior officials of two of the companies, speaking only on the condition that they not be identified, said they were helping Iraq rebuild its decrepit oil industry.

And our lapdog journalists report it with little, if any, criticism. It's both old news and new news. Which has been pretty much how all the news about our corrupt government gets reported in the MSM. Forget about impeaching the bastards. It's off the table. Probably knocked to the floor by our "we might nuke Iran" policy.

Nimbeciles

Anybody else sick of the "Tim Russert was the best journalist ever" fantasia? It appears that Chris Matthews, grief-stricken and possibly drunk, divulged that Tim was just a big, fat, frightened patriot, really, who didn't do his job in regard to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. At least Tim claimed to believe the sky was falling in the form of a nuclear bomb in Saddam's twitchy little hands, and later blamed his lack of journalistic due diligence on government officials who didn't "pick up the phone" to tell him that Bushco was lying through their teeth.



Hell, I'm not the NBC News' Washington Bureau Chief, but I knew the build-up to the invasion of Iraq was one lie after another. Maybe I should apply for the job now that it's vacant since it appears you don't have to be a professional journalist to get paid to be a professional journalist. You don't even need a working bullshit detector, but I do have one of those.

MSNBC: I didn't mean to hit you, baby!

MSNBC really knows how to sweet talk the ladies:

'It was, like, you meet a guy and you fall in love with him, and he’s funny and he’s clever and he’s witty, and he’s all these great things,' Griffin said of the relationship between Olbermann and the Clinton supporters among his viewers. 'And then you commit yourself to him, and he turns out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal. And that is how the Hillary viewers see him. It’s true. But I do think they’re going to come back. There’s nowhere else to go.'"

I'm speechless.

Blogroll please...

Welcome to John Petty and progressive involvement, Anglachel's Journal, and Astarte's Circus. Welcome to our humble little blog.

Friday Malamute Blogging

Watching the game...

Makes me wanna holler

Well respected astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, has a very interesting Op-ed in the NYTimes today.

...If the general election were held today, Mr. Obama would win 252 electoral votes as the Democratic nominee, while Mrs. Clinton would win 295. In other words, Barack Obama is losing to John McCain, and Hillary Clinton is beating him.
...

Two questions arise in the face of this result. Whom should the Republican candidate prefer to run against to maximize his party’s chances of retaining the White House? And what does it say of the Democratic delegate selection system when its winner would lose the presidency if an election were held today, yet its loser would win it?

Is it stilly fuzzy math when "the recipient of nine honorary doctorates and the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal" uses it?