alternative hippopotamus

It can be dangerous to take a commenter from a blog post, and use that response to condemn the group as a whole. In this case, I saw a comment on a PUMA thread, which was predictably, a sorry smear on Obama. The commenter in question, Mawm, is the mother of the author, so I guess it’s fitting that I’m responding to a guilt by association post by focusing on an associate of the poster.

Here goes: (link)

If one good thing has come out of this primary for me, it is that I have completely let go of any liberal guilt I had. To me, affirmative action is wrong. Affirmative action is one of the reasons we are in the situation we are today. Continually highlighting and dissecting everything by race, and then creating a perceived debt that is owed a community has been harmful I believe.

When will the victimhood end? Michelle Obama had it a lot better than I did growing up, but in this society, I must have had it better, not because of my parents income(dirt poor), but because I was born white, and I get all the entitlements that go along with that. What entitlements? Will someone tell me? I know what they say, but I just don’t see it in real life.

One of the complaints of the PUMA community, or if you prefer, cabal, is that Obama has thrown people under the bus, and that Hillary Clinton was the authentic liberal. OK. If that’s the case, I wonder how aware folks on this thread are that affirmative action is a bread and butter progressive issue, and that the folks most sympathetic with the commenter are named Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts.

Continued mostly dark tonight turning to widely scattered light in the morning. So said a funny man once, something like 30 years ago. While, it’s a great line for any occasion, it captures the mood of the present progressive landscape succinctly. It does indeed seem dark currently, but we’re hoping for some scattered lightness any day now.

When the Democratic nominee comes out in support of a FISA bill that rewrites the history of illegality, legalizing activity today that was illegal yesterday, you sort of wonder what his next trick is going to be: retroactively pardoning the Watergate burglars?

My basic objection is this: a democratic society can’t recognize a separate and special class of people for which the gravity of laws are bent. It’s even more fundamental than ripping up our constitution. That would nullify one manifestation of western civilization. Creating a legally privileged class nullifies a fundamental concept of justice over the last several hundred years. That with respect to laws: all men are indeed created equal.

So, this FISA thing really has me pissed.

From Jewschool, on an anti-Obama bumper sticker encouraging jews to immigrate to Israel if Obama is elected:

Funny, I would have thought “Yerida…because he might win” would have been more appropriate. No one is concerned about what Obama will do to Jews in the US. It’s what he will do to Israel’s safety/security that people are debating.

Yeah, if I understand the email forwards correctly, I thought the problem was that Obama, if elected, was going to appoint his former pastor Mahmoud HUSSEIN Ahmadinejad as Secretary of State, and would then nuke Israel and establish a fundamentalist Islamic state on the charred wreckage. It seems that the Obama-smearers need to be more on-message.

I laughed. ODS satire is funny.

Speaking of ODS. The Chairman Meowists are getting restless:

And now we have a presumptuous nominee who we can’t quite pin down when it comes to policy on much of anything. But we know who is championing him: libertarian Democrats, former moderate Republicans, young college aged students from affluent backgrounds and a bunch of academic liberals wo don’t like to get their hands dirty. The part of the party that is being purged consists of working class, elderly, latino, women, GLBT. Just the kind of people who benefit from New Deal programs and the Great Society.

Did you guys know about the party purge? Sounds like everybody but “libertarian Democrats, former moderate Republicans, young college aged students from affluent backgrounds and a bunch of academic liberals who don’t like to get their hands dirty” has got to go.

I’ll talk to KCinDC about doing a Party Purge night at DCDL. Should be fun.

A few days ago I saw this Robert Samuelson op-ed in the Washington Post-it-note. Allegedly, Samuelson is non-partisan. This wikipedia article, for instance, mentions that he’s so concerned about the possibility of becoming partisan that he doesn’t vote. Looking at the details of his op-ed, I have to believe that it would be okay if he went ahead and voted right-wing hack.

For instance, take these paragraphs:

Start with Barack Obama. Even those who disagree with him ought to feel pride in his impending nomination because it continues America’s racial reconciliation and atonement for slavery. But symbolism can’t substitute for policy, and any feel-good fallout from electing Obama would soon fade. He’d have to earn popular support, and this would be made harder by a problem of his own making: He’d have to disavow much of his campaign rhetoric. The reason is that his campaign is itself a contradiction.

On the one hand, he projects himself as the great conciliator. He uses the metaphor of his race to argue that he is uniquely suited to bridge differences between liberals and conservatives, young and old, rich and poor — to craft a new centrist politics. On the other hand, his actual agenda is highly partisan and undermines many of his stated goals. He wants to stimulate economic growth, but his hostility toward trade agreements threatens export-led growth (which is now beginning). He advocates greater energy independence but pretends this can occur without more domestic drilling for oil and natural gas.

This plays into a narrative initiated by the Clinton campaign, and no doubt will be used by McCain: Obama is a phony, an empty suit. Samuelson argues this by saying that Obama is such a phony that he promises to govern from neither right or left, while a little digging shows that he’s such a hippy that he intends to undo all the peace and prosperity that Bush’s trade and energy policies have created.

For instance, Samuelson says he is hostile to trade agreements. Economists for Obama has a different take:

Obama will fight for a trade policy that opens up foreign markets to support good American jobs. He will use trade agreements to spread good labor and environmental standards around the world and stand firm against agreements like the Central American Free Trade Agreement that fail to live up to those important benchmarks. Obama will also pressure the World Trade Organization to enforce trade agreements and stop countries from continuing unfair government subsidies to foreign exporters and nontariff barriers on U.S. exports.

If by hostility to trade agreements, Samuelson means that Obama is hostile to trade agreements that screw over the US labor force, then yes, Obama is guilty as charged.

Regarding energy independence, Samuelson says that Obama is pretending that we can get there without increased US drilling. After reviewing this speech by Obama, I’d say that Samuelson is confusing the word ” pretends” with “has facts that show that”:

The President’s energy proposal would reduce our oil imports by 4.5 million barrels per day by 2025. Not only can we do better than that, we must do better than that if we hope to make a real dent in our oil dependency. With technology we have on the shelves right now and fuels we can grow right here in America, by 2025 we can reduce our oil imports by over 7.5. million barrels per day - an amount greater than all the oil we are expected to import from the entire Middle East.

We can do this by focusing on two things: the cars we drive and the fuels we use.

The unfortunate truth is that any kind of meaningful energy conservation has been put on hold since at least 1995, the last time CAFE standards increased, and in many cases since the Carter administration.

Please go read this article from NPR on Kurt Vonnegut, written by his son Mark. You can take any paragraph from the article and spend the rest of the afternoon pondering the truth contained therein.

At random, I’ll take this one:

He was like an extrovert who wanted to be an introvert, a very social guy who wanted to be a loner, a lucky person who would have preferred to be unlucky. An optimist posing as a pessimist, hoping people will take heed. It wasn’t until the Iraq War and the end of his life that he became sincerely gloomy.

Me, too, Kurt. Me, too. The Iraq War has sincerely depressed me for a variety of reasons. It’s impossible for me to reflect on Iraq without thinking about how many people are no longer with us. People that no doubt loved being alive just as much as I do, no longer walk the face of this strange and beautiful planet. That is very hard to accept. When you add to this that there was every reason to believe that the Iraq War wouldn’t accomplish anything, you have every right to be sincerely gloomy.

As I say, this is just one paragraph excerpted from Mark Vonnegut’s new book, Armageddon.

Well don’t ya go carryin’ pictures of Chairman Meow.

Shorter Confluence:

1. Write manifesto calling for the overthrow of the Democratic Party to install your preferred candidate:
   

   The problem with Obama and the new Democratic party is that it doesn’t stand for real Democrats. It is yet another strange amalgamation of voters whose self interest was pandered to. In many ways, it is no different than the Republican party of gilded capitalists, religious crazies and neocons. This new Democratic party is made up of young people, libertarians and pretentious status conscious liberals. There is a nasty streak of cynicism in it as well, as if it’s just so outre to consider helping the poor or abiding by any core Democratic principles. The new Democratic party is just too cool for that. They can write some lengthy, detached policy paper about it and pay some lip service but really, the American demographic has evolved and those people on the brink of insolvency, well, they are the Neanderthals that didn’t make the cut. Moving on.
   

2. ?
3. Profit.

Seriously, if I thought these folks had some kind of a point I’d politely argue that the grassroots/netroots movement here in Our Fair City is primarily made up of Obama supporters, or, as the PUMA’s prefer, young pretentious status conscious liberals. (At least I get young.)

I’d write something with a little more sympatico, but something tells me that you don’t want to be friends. Maybe could be the manifesto. C’est la vie. Moving on.

One of the things that I look forward to is being able to focus on the right-wing freak show rather than the rhetorical fallacies of fellow progressives. But today and tomorrow we’ll probably see a few token shots at the “Obamabots.” For example, BTD takes this statement by Roger Simon out of context to inflame Clinton supporters:

It has been a hard-fought and sometimes bitter campaign, but Obama is not, one of his senior advisers assured me Tuesday night, going to spend a lot of time in the next few months wooing Clinton supporters whose feelings may be hurting.

Sounds like Roger Simon is saying that the Obama campaign told him that Clinton supporters would be thrown under the bus doesn’t it? But, the following paragraph makes clear that the Obama campaign staffer is saying that now the campaign pivots to focus on former Clinton supporters, independents, and Republicans: ( Politico )

“I think there are always immediate feelings of disappointment and anger,” Anita Dunn said. “But in the months ahead, he must appeal not just to the constituency groups who favored her in the primaries, but those he wants in the general election, and that includes independents and Republicans.”

Why would BTD quote the introductory remark without the context of the following paragraph? Interesting question. Here’s my theory. BTD understands that anger sells. He is providing what former supporters of Clinton are looking for: justification for their anger at Obama. Is the anger actually justified? Not from that quote it isn’t.

Any other theories?

Like most bloggers, I’m trying to understand what HRC’s actions mean wrt not conceding while acknowledging that BO is about to clinch the nomination. It’s kind of like a modern version of Aesop’s the Tortoise and the Hare. In this case the hare appears to insist that the tortoise didn’t win the race, as the hare has not yet conceded that the tortoise has won the race.

As Talk Left puts it:

Until and unless Hillary Clinton publicly suspends or ends her campaign and concedes that Obama is the nominee, there is no nominee. There is only a statement that if current delegate positions at this moment were frozen in time until August he would be the nominee.

The way that I’m hearing this is that HRC’s supporters believe that she holds the power of concession over Obama. With which she will get some kind of agreement out of him. I don’t believe that, but maybe there’s a political truth in this that I’m missing.

I see TPM is also trying to understand where this is coming from. It sounds like Greg Sargent believes that HRC senses the historical nature of the moment:

Here’s my stab at trying to answer the question of why this controversial and in some ways enigmatic figure has refused to quit the race. One key reason she has stayed in, I believe, is that it strengthens the inspirational power of Hillary’s political narrative and persona, and, ultimately, strengthens her emotional grip on her supporters.

It’s no accident that Hillary has compared herself to Rocky on occasion. Just as Rocky emerged as an iconic figure for blue collar whites disoriented and displaced by the wrenching demographic changes of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hillary has presented herself as a kind of feminist Rocky, a heroine who refuses to lay down on behalf of millions and millions of women who have felt defeated or voiceless, or who have felt as if they quit too early, or who have felt that the odds have always been stacked against them.

It may be that it’s impossible to really get what’s driving her. Unless, of course, you too have been married to the President, and have lead the most successful campaign for a woman to be US president.