US elections: the joker in the deck

David Seaton's News Links
At this moment the US presidential elections are centered around domestic political issues. health, taxes, immigration, etcetera. The two wars that America is fighting are on the back burner, simmering. The present conversation plays to the Democratic Party's strengths.

The only card the Republicans really have left to play these days is national security. Defense still seems the natural calling of mean, old, white men ... but things are so quiet.

In Iraq, the draw down from the surge has not begun and the insurgents are laying low in classic guerrilla fashion waiting till the coast is clear.

The mountain passes of Afghanistan are still filled with ice and snow and the Mujadeen in Pakistan only await the spring thaws to pour through them.

And then of course there is Osama.

Everybody seems to have forgotten him. I wonder what the old boy is up to?

Getting ready to decide who is to be President of the United States of America, I should imagine.

If you stop and think about it, Osama bin Laden owes the Republicans big. If Gore had won the election in 2000, (ok, I know he did win, but you know what I mean) then, when the Twin Towers went down, the United States, accompanied by all of NATO, would have gone through Afghanistan like a dose of fruit salts and bin Laden would have been brewed up in some hole in Tora Bora.

But Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld's ineptitude not only saved the sheik's life: by invading Iraq, by opening Guantanamo, by running Abu Ghraib and by supporting the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, they made Osama bin Laden's case for the entire Muslim world. Who's your daddy?

Does Osama bin Laden want the Republicans to win?

Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?

Now, even his worst enemies would have to admit that Osama bin Laden is a very focused, scheming, long headed fellow, so it is not difficult to imagine that he is not simply going to trust his fate to the wisdom of the American voters.

Maybe it's because I live in Madrid and have actually seen it happen that I expect a bomb to define the next US presidential election. In 2004, many observers thought that bin Laden's "October Surprise" video was enough to give Bush a second term. But after "four more years", it will take a bit more than a video to keep the Republicans in the White House.

As we move into Spring the Democratic candidacy will define itself, it will be either a woman whose major qualification is to be the wife of an ex-president or a young, untested African-American with no military experience. At that point first Afghanistan and then Iraq will begin to heat up. As the campaign hits October somebody in an explosive vest will blow him or herself up in an American shopping mall and with that mean, old, white, John McCain will be elected the 44th President.

In my opinion the only possible candidate that the Democrats had that could have survived this scenario and gone on to win is Al Gore, and short of a miracle in a brokered convention, he is not going to be the candidate. DS

Fidel retires

"This is the event that fifty years of U.S. policy was designed to stop." Sarah Stephens - Huffington Post

David Seaton's News Links

Compared to Switzerland, Castro’s Cuba is truly a vile tyranny. However, compared to neighboring Haiti, the favelas of Brazil or even post-Katrina New Orleans, for that matter, Cuba is Switzerland.

Cuba may be the only country in the world where African slavery once existed where today there are no children of color living in squalor, without preventive medical care or proper schooling. Could that have been achieved without such brutal repression? It is difficult to say, because it has never happened anyplace else.

I wrote this in a post last year about infant mortality in Mississippi:

On lifelong reading and observation I have come to the conclusion that African slavery and its aftermath form a pan-American nation and that Mississippi has more in common with the Dominican Republic than with Iowa and more in common with Haiti than Vermont. So I don't compare Cuba, for example, with Sweden, France, Lichtenstein or Canada. I compare it with Jamaica, Brazil and... Mississippi.

I 'll stand on that. DS

America, beautiful, but dumb

"The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse."
Susan Jacoby - Washington Post

David Seaton's News Links
America is literally like no other country in the world. To understand how original it is you only have to compare it to Australia and Canada. In fact one of the best ways of coming to grips with the American psyche is to begin by comparing these three, white settler, ex-British colonies.

America is extraordinarily original, therefore "exceptional", but not exactly like most Americans think. In fact "American Exceptionalism" is a doctrine which maintains that Americans, because of their innate "goodness", are destined to fulfill a special destiny.

Here is a sample of this mentality in a recent statement of Colin Powell's, which many see as an indirect endorsement of Barack Obama:

"I am going to be looking for the candidate that seems to me to be leading a party that is fully in sync with the candidate and a party that will also reflect America's goodness and America's vision."

Now there any number of positive adjectives that I could apply to "my fellow Americans": energetic, creative, hard working, ingenious, enthusiastic, etcetera, but "good"?

General Powell is talking about a people who enslaved his ancestors, ethnically cleansed the Native-Americans, dropped atomic bombs on the helpless civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and uselessly killed about a million Vietnamese in a historically short space of time. Good? Certainly, any lucid historian would have to say about America what the British used to say about certain ladies, "she's no better than she ought to be".

So, I am not "proud" to be an American, simply, I AM an American. I love America because I love myself, not vice versa. I accept and cherish her gifts to me and assume her karma reverently. America is my idiosyncrasy, my mother tongue and a sortilege of skandas to schlep though the samsara. Never, in my whole life, often surrounded by people who detest what the United States represents, have I ever said -- with that smile of a fox eating shit off a wire brush -- that I am a Canadian... In the words of a great American, "I yam what I yam". I just don't want to live there, f'ya knowwhaddahmean.

After I lived away from America some time, I began to have enough distance to "see oursels as ithers see us" and realize how unique, eccentric, idiosyncratic and even a bit sinister America really is. However, like Susan Jacoby, whose text I quote today, lately I have begun to notice that America has passed originality to become simply weird. A country that produced Emerson, William James, Walt Whitman, Henry Ford and Thomas Alva Edison has become a universal byword for stupidity.

'Twasn't always so. Jacoby writes:

People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged "Americans to spread out a map during his radio "fireside chat" so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, "they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin." This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today's public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made.

If we go farther back we can find masses of citizens, many frontiersmen, who way back in 1858 were able to follow the complex arguments of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. So obviously this isn't something genetic. Americans are being deliberately turned into idiots, because only idiots would act as America does today. What has happened? Who in America wants Americans to be so stupid? Why?

It is far beyond my modest abilities to forge a truly American, grand, paranoid, conspiracy theory of all of this. But I would humbly direct the attention of those sufficiently endowed in these matters to explore the confluence of interests between America's over bloated military spending, its suicidally self-defeating foreign policy and the enormous media conglomerates: news-sports-Hollywood, that create America's mental wallpaper, the texture of its stupidity. The answer is certainly there. DS

Susan Jacoby: The Dumbing Of America - Washington Post
Abstract: "The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations. This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office.(...) Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.(...) It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news. No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching." As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible -- and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be.(...) The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation. There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. READ IT ALL

The Real Face of Change

Uppagenzdawallmuddahfuggah!

"Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs and that have eluded solution for a generation. Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war" Charles Krauthammer

David Seaton's News Links
The quote above encapsulates the central political question of the United States and it is a question that will quite literally affect the entire world.

"Entitlement reform"... These two words are one of those American euphemisms like "collateral damage", which, in this case, is used to describe reducing pensions and health care for the aged.

The sad news is that there isn't enough money to pay for the empire and to pay the coming pensions of the "boomers". (full disclosure: I am not in the US pension system, I have been working in Spain and paying into its system. This is not about me). Chalmers Johnson describes the situation best:

"It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense's planned expenditures for fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations' military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defense budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The United States has become the largest single salesman of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out of account President Bush's two on-going wars, defense spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since World War II."

Something's got to give.

I doubt if it's going to be the old folks.

The codgers vote.

We have been hearing for years how selfish the boomers are. Get ready to see it in action. After all, we are talking about the "generation of '68".

One of the things that has irritated me most about Obama's "Children's Crusade" has been his supporters' criticism of the senior's lack of enthusiasm for his vaporous rhetoric, as if the elderly were holding back "progress".

As I read the tea leaves, the ones truly manning the ramparts in the battle against imperialism are America's elderly. The fight to pauperize America's elderly in order to pay for more missiles is the central political story of our time. DS

Krauthammer's opening move

"Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny them the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude."Charles Krauthammer - Washington Post

Erin go bragh?

David Seaton's News Links
I admit I am having some second thoughts on my theory's present validity on reading Krauthammer.

I detest Krauthammer, a poisonous neocon, but he is very smart. With him, "every movement has a meaning". Each word he writes is dripping with intention. He seems to have already written off Hillary Clinton and is unloading on Obama. His idea, put briefly, is that Barack Obama is some sort of George McGovern with a cool tan.

I joined in an intense debate on Barack Obama in the great politics junky's venue, TPMCafe, and I got some interesting questions that I thought I'd paste in here at News Links.

David, do you think there is more racism in our country over the past, say, 20 years, less, about the same, different? Are your thoughts on that part of your sense of hopelessness? Do you think it is impossible to over-estimate the racism of the American people?

I think every American is race conscious. I say this because in the United States anyone with even a drop of African blood is considered "black". This is not true of Latin Americans, where to be black means to be just that, "black". I have had Cubans that were as "black" as Colin Powell tell me that they were Basques or Galicians and nobody thought this was strange.

This leads to some strange attitudes. For example my maternal great grandmother was Irish from Dublin, the boxer, Mohammad Ali's maternal great grandfather was Irish from Dublin too. Ali is loquacious, poetic, pugnacious, brave and funny. Irish, no? No, of course not, he is "black". Ha, ha! But if I say that I am Irish nobody laughs, and I can't fight my way out of a paper bag... I would say that as long as nobody would think to say how "Irish" Mohammad Ali is, America is a racist country.

Is it "too soon" for a "black" man to be President of the United States?

Well, it is fair to say that it is much too soon for most white men or women to be president, so, not being a racist, I imagine black people wouldn't be any different.

Having said that, I think it is important to also say that Barack Obama is not the first "black" man to be considered for the job. Not too many years ago, General Colin Powell was being talked about very seriously for the presidency and certainly before Bush spoiled him, few would have argued that he was not qualified for it. If we look at the field this year, Powell might be considered overqualified. He surely has a thicker CV than any recent candidate and a record of proven judgment: certainly if the "Powell Doctrine" had been adhered to, the USA would have never invaded Iraq. I think that if he were a Democrat he would already have been president by now.

David, what are your specific concerns about Obama? What do you think would happen if he were President?

Here I am afraid that I agree with the detestable Mister Krauthammer, which is why I quoted him above. Here is the whole thing. DS

Charles Krauthammer: The Audacity of Selling Hope - Washington Post
There's no better path to success than getting people to buy a free commodity. Like the genius who figured out how to get people to pay for water: bottle it (Aquafina was revealed to be nothing more than reprocessed tap water) and charge more than they pay for gasoline. Or consider how Google found a way to sell dictionary nouns-- boat, shoe, clock -- by charging advertisers zillions to be listed whenever the word is searched.

And now, in the most amazing trick of all, a silver-tongued freshman senator has found a way to sell hope. To get it, you need only give him your vote. Barack Obama is getting millions.

This kind of sale is hardly new. Organized religion has been offering a similar commodity -- salvation -- for millennia. Which is why the Obama campaign has the feel of a religious revival with, as writer James Wolcott observed, a "salvational fervor" and "idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria."

"We are the hope of the future," sayeth Obama. We can "remake this world as it should be." Believe in me and I shall redeem not just you but your country -- nay, we can become "a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest."

And believe they do. After eight straight victories -- and two more (Hawaii and Wisconsin) almost certain to follow -- Obama is near to rendering moot all the post-Super Tuesday fretting about a deadlocked convention with unelected superdelegates deciding the nominee. Unless Hillary Clinton can somehow do in Ohio and Texas on March 4 what Rudy Giuliani proved is almost impossible to do -- maintain a big-state firewall after an unrelenting string of smaller defeats -- the superdelegates will flock to Obama. Hope will have carried the day.

Interestingly, Obama has been able to win these electoral victories and dazzle crowds in one new jurisdiction after another, even as his mesmeric power has begun to arouse skepticism and misgivings among the mainstream media.

ABC's Jake Tapper notes the "Helter-Skelter cult-ish qualities" of "Obama worshipers," what Joel Stein of the Los Angeles Times calls "the Cult of Obama." Obama's Super Tuesday victory speech was a classic of the genre. Its effect was electric, eliciting a rhythmic fervor in the audience -- to such rhetorical nonsense as "We are the ones we've been waiting for. (Cheers, applause.) We are the change that we seek."

That was too much for Time's Joe Klein. "There was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism," he wrote. "The message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is."

You might dismiss as hyperbole the complaint by the New York Times's Paul Krugman that "the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality." Until you hear Chris Matthews, who no longer has the excuse of youth, react to Obama's Potomac primary victory speech with "My, I felt this thrill going up my leg." When his MSNBC co-hosts tried to bail him out, he refused to recant. Not surprising for an acolyte who said that Obama "comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament."

I've seen only one similar national swoon. As a teenager growing up in Canada, I witnessed a charismatic law professor go from obscurity to justice minister to prime minister, carried on a wave of what was called Trudeaumania.

But even there the object of his countrymen's unrestrained affections was no blank slate. Pierre Trudeau was already a serious intellectual who had written and thought and lectured long about the nature and future of his country.

Obama has an astonishingly empty paper trail. He's going around issuing promissory notes on the future that he can't possibly redeem. Promises to heal the world with negotiations with the likes of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs and that have eluded solution for a generation. Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war -- with the hope, I suppose, that the (presumed) resulting increase in American prestige would compensate for the chaos to follow.

Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny them the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude.

What does, "inner Lenin" mean?

David Seaton's News Links
A reader asked me exactly what I meant by my "inner Lenin".

Wasn't he a terrible monster, she wrote.

I would answer the way Zhou Enlai did when asked his opinion of the French Revolution, "It's too early to tell."

Lenin created the Soviet Union and without him, Stalin who was surely a monster, would never have existed, but without the Soviet Union or Joseph Stalin, Hitler would have probably won the Second World War. Would Hitler have ever come to power if Germany's elites were not so afraid of a Communist revolution in Germany? History chases its tail like a puppy.

The Soviet Union no longer exists and Lenin is a wax puppet in Moscow. What could the word "Lenin" still mean?

In a sense "Lenin" means the same thing as Nike's "swoosh"... "Just do it!" or the Adidas slogan, "Impossible is Nothing". People are throwing the word "change" around a lot these days, "Lenin" really means change.

He was one of the most unsentimental readers of reality that has ever existed. His cold analysis of reality as a means to action and his fearlessness in executing his analysis are unequaled to this day.

He despised sentiment as "petite bourgeois", but he was not a cold man: my favorite Lenin quote comes from when he once walked out of a concert saying, "If I keep listening to Beethoven's Appassionata, I won't be able to finish the revolution." That is what I mean when I speak humorously of my "inner Lenin". As a mental exercise I try to imagine how America could be changed as radically as Lenin changed tsarist Russia, but I can't stop listening to "Beethoven's Appassionata".

There are contradictions boiling up in and around America and its society that could bring down the entire system if they are not correctly addressed. My inner Lenin views that with cool detachment, but my "inner Beethoven" cringes at the human cost. DS

Exactly who is Barack Obama?

David Seaton's News Links
The question is still, who is Barack Obama?

What do we really know about him from direct observation and not what he chooses to tell us? Or that we choose to imagine about him

Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain, warts and all, are people who have been in the public eye for a long time, they have had their successes and their failures in public. If we like them or dislike them it is because we actually know them. They are personalities that certainly do not encourage fantasizing.

We are moving into very dark and troubled waters and the rhythmic stroking of platitudes will not be enough to see the nation through them.

I think it says volumes about the present, desperate state of the American psyche that content-less speeches, well delivered by someone with such a tiny CV, could sweep all before them.

Most of what any politician anywhere says has a high bullshit content. It's not entirely their fault, there are many traps waiting for the plain and incautious public speaker ... However when they have been around a long time, it is possible to use our experience of how what they say relates to what they actually end up doing, to evaluate correctly the distance between their words and their actions.

Lets look at the recent case of Mitt Romney... There were a lot of actions as a governor and a lot of words as a candidate. Republicans were able to measure the distance between the two and make a decision based on observable facts.

Being President of the United States of America is the country's top job, it is the crowning achievement of a lifetime of service, eight years is as long as you can hold the job, after that you are supposed to fade into the wallpaper. Look at all the shit Bill Clinton is taking for not fading into the wallpaper. The only ex-president that has done anything interesting is Jimmy Carter. Being president is the end of a career, not the beginning of one... Unless you envision a lifetime of decades of after dinner speaking stretching out before you.

How does someone in his 40s with almost no CV have the nerve to present himself for such an important office? JFK was young you say?

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a war hero, who had been something like fourteen years in the Congress and the Senate and had won a Pulitzer Prize (not about his search for his "identity" BTW) before he put himself forward. And today he is not considered to have been a successful president, only a tragic and much loved one.

Look, the USA is broke, losing two wars, entering a recession that might even turn into a depression. I am really worried by Barack Obama's chutzpah, I see a boundless ego, untested by reality, standing before 300,000,000 people in a time of crisis and saying. "I am the best person among all of you to lead you!"

Getting starry eyed about Obama is like someone who has lost his job, taking his last savings and buying a lottery ticket... Hope. I don't know who is crazier, Obama or the people who cry at his speeches. DS

The Skinny, the Fudge and the Movement

Walking on water as she is really walked

David Seaton's News Links
In today's New York Times David Brooks lays out the cards face up:

"The new Democratic president would be faced with Bill Clinton’s Robert Rubin vs. Robert Reich choice: either scale back priorities for the sake of fiscal discipline or blow through all known deficit records for the sake of bigger programs. Choose the former, and the new president would further outrage the left. Choose the latter and lose the financial establishment and the political center. This is the debate that Democrats have been quietly rearguing during the entire Bush presidency. The left wing of the party is absolutely committed to winning it this time. It will likely demand the clean energy subsidies and the education spending, the expensive health care coverage and subsides to address middle-class anxiety. But no Democratic president can afford to offend independent voters with runaway spending. No president can easily ignore the think tank establishment, which is rightfully exercised about the nation’s long-term fiscal health. It would be another brutal choice."

A brutal choice indeed.

Brooks's bottom line is very simple,

"clean energy subsidies and the education spending, the expensive health care coverage and subsides to address middle-class anxiety"

must be sacrificed for military spending. Next will come Medicare, pensions and the "entitlements".

Spanish friends who travel regularly to the United States on business comment on the deterioration of America's infrastructure, roads, bridges, etcetera. There is no money for them either. Here is Chalmers Johnson precise description:

"There are three broad aspects to our debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on "defense" projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States. Simultaneously, we are keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segments of the American population at strikingly low levels.(...) in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources), we are failing to invest in our social infrastructure and other requirements for the long-term health of our country. These are what economists call "opportunity costs," things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world's number one polluter. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs -- an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than arms manufacturing.(...) Our excessive military expenditures did not occur over just a few short years or simply because of the Bush administration's policies. They have been going on for a very long time in accordance with a superficially plausible ideology and have now become entrenched in our democratic political system where they are starting to wreak havoc. This ideology I call "military Keynesianism" -- the determination to maintain a permanent war economy and to treat military output as an ordinary economic product, even though it makes no contribution to either production or consumption." Chalmers Johnson

When we talk about money for infrastructure and especially money for the education and for the health of children, we are talking about "seed corn". We are eating our seed corn. When it's gone, the real ride down the steep slope of decadence begins in earnest.

However Brooks in his inimitable, smarmy, sadistic, way is right. If elected, a Democratic president will be faced with all these choices. I have no doubt that be it Hillary or be it Obama, he or she will fudge... The "system", as Brooks points out, is the system. There has never been a system like it.

Both Hillary and Obama are dues paying, card carrying, members of that system.

The climb down would be less humiliating for Hillary as she could probably wheel and deal some kind of health care package in exchange for staying in Iraq and waltzing Kyoto... Hillary doesn't pretend to be a "movement". She is "Mrs. Possible".

However, at some point, Obama will be asked to prove his supernatural powers, to walk on water, to raise the dead and bring sight to the blind and when the fat, old thing just lies there looking at him, a lot of folks are going to be real disappointed.

And that, friends and neighbors, is when a real movement, one that actually moves, might get moving.

My human heart cringes, but my inner Lenin laughs and laughs. DS

David Brooks: When Reality Bites - New York Times
Abstract: When you think about it, the Democratic policy unity is a mirage. If the Democrats actually win the White House, the tensions would resurface with a vengeance. The first big rift would involve Iraq. Both Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have seductively hinted that they would withdraw almost all U.S. troops within 12 to 16 months. But if either of them actually did that, he or she would instantly make Iraq the consuming partisan fight of their presidency. There would be private but powerful opposition from Arab leaders, who would fear a return to 2006 chaos. There would be irate opposition from important sections of the military, who would feel that the U.S. was squandering the gains of the previous year. A Democratic president with few military credentials would confront outraged and highly photogenic colonels screaming betrayal. There would be important criticism from nonpartisan military experts. In his latest report, the much-cited Anthony Cordesman describes an improving Iraqi security situation that still requires “strategic patience” and another five years to become self-sustaining.(...) All dreams of changing the tone in Washington would be gone. All of Obama’s unity hopes would evaporate. And if the situation did deteriorate after a quick withdrawal, as the National Intelligence Estimate warns, the bloodshed would be on the new president’s head. Therefore, when a new Democratic administration considered all these possibilities, its members would part ways. A certain number of centrists would conclude that rapid withdrawal is a mistake. They would say that the situation had changed and would call for a strategic review. They’d recommend a long, slow conditions-based withdrawal — constant, small troop reductions, and a lot of regional diplomacy, while maintaining tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for the remainder of the term. The left wing of the party would go into immediate uproar. They’d scream: This was a central issue of the campaign! All the troops must get out now! The president would have to make a terrible decision. Which brings us to second looming Democratic divide: domestic spending. Both campaigns now promise fiscal discipline, as well as ambitious new programs. These kinds of have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too vows were merely laughable last year when the federal deficit was running at a manageable $163 billion a year. But the economic slowdown, the hangover from the Bush years and the growing bite of entitlements mean that the federal deficit will almost certainly top $400 billion by 2009. The accumulated national debt will be in shouting distance of the $10 trillion mark. With that much red ink, the primary-season spending plans are simply ridiculous. It’d be 1993 all over again. The new Democratic president would be faced with Bill Clinton’s Robert Rubin vs. Robert Reich choice: either scale back priorities for the sake of fiscal discipline or blow through all known deficit records for the sake of bigger programs. Choose the former, and the new president would further outrage the left. Choose the latter and lose the financial establishment and the political center. This is the debate that Democrats have been quietly rearguing during the entire Bush presidency. The left wing of the party is absolutely committed to winning it this time. It will likely demand the clean energy subsidies and the education spending, the expensive health care coverage and subsides to address middle-class anxiety. But no Democratic president can afford to offend independent voters with runaway spending. No president can easily ignore the think tank establishment, which is rightfully exercised about the nation’s long-term fiscal health. It would be another brutal choice. READ IT ALL

No Country for Old Common Sense

"Here and there one could see women crying and some men wiping away tears too.(...) When 16,000 people, without prompting, start shouting some of his keynote phrases as he delivers them, you know something special is going on. The atmosphere at his events is such that one wonders if Obama is about to walk out with a basket with some loaves and fishes to feed the thousands." Geoff Elliott - The Australian

"There was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messiahnism" Joe Klein - Time

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." H. L. Mencken

"It is one thing to preach and quite another to give people bread." Spanish saying

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Australians are famous for their plain spoken common sense, as Americans once were... a very long time ago. Geoff Elliott, The Australian's Washington correspondent asks some awkward questions about the prospective emperor's new wardrobe.

How does a cult figure, in the eyes of some something akin to a messiah, make the transition to a political frontrunner - president even - where disappointment will soon crush what seemed to be a journey to a promised land? (...) If he gets the Democratic Party's nomination another test begins anew: how to turn the narrative which is all about striving for what is possible, to one where people are suddenly asking how are you actually going to do it?

Certainly, it appears that many Americans are desperately clutching at straws, filled with powerful, inchoate, emotions as Barack Obama rhythmically strokes his platitudes. Students of American history will be reminded of "The Second Great Awakening", which of course was closely followed by "The Great Disappointment".

Many observers draw parallels between Obama and Jesus, but there are significant differences between the two. Obama, although visible has no clear program, whereas Jesus, although invisible, has a fairly clear program, briefly put: to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, harbor the harborless, visit the sick, ransom the captive, bury the dead, instruct the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, admonish sinners, bear wrongs patiently, forgive offenses willingly, comfort the afflicted and to pray for the living and the dead.

Although, as far as I know this program has never been put into effect anywhere at any time, many people still find it attractive and would willingly vote for it if they could. However, its superficial resemblance to Socialism might make it subject to controversy, if seriously put forward by a presidential candidate.

Changing the subject a bit, I find it curious that Hillary Clinton, who has some serious proposals about health care, child care and the like, only receives contributions from big donors, that is to say rich people; whereas Obama, who offers little or nothing that could be of any assistance to the poor or oppressed, has managed to perfect the Howard Dean techniques of small donations through the Internet. I think Hillary should take Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee lessons as soon as possible if she it to have any hope of surviving. DS

Geoff Elliott: Obama's first coming - The Australian
Abstract: It was early 1994 when Nelson Mandela gave a speech in a slum outside Cape Town and spoke in grand terms of a new beginning and how when he was elected president every household would have a washing machine. People took him literally. A few months later he became South Africa's first black president. That's when clerks in department stores in Cape Town had to turn people away demanding their free washer and dryer. Having spent some time as a reporter in South Africa watching the Mandela presidency I was reminded of that story this week when I travelled with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on the campaign trail.(...) How does a cult figure, in the eyes of some something akin to a messiah, make the transition to a political frontrunner - president even - where disappointment will soon crush what seemed to be a journey to a promised land? Looking into the faces of a more than 16,000-strong crowd in a basketball stadium in Hartford, Connecticut this week, the Mandela magic I'd seen before was there too. Black and white, and the youth; they appeared in a state close to rapture watching Obama speak. Here and there one could see women crying and some men wiping away tears too.(...) In this man they are projecting a new course - one that he says he will lead - where the US buries the culture wars, charts a new course in bipartisan politics and heralds a new dawn for America. After more than seven years of the Bush administration and when 70 per cent of the populace think America is on the wrong course, there's little wonder that the hunger for something new is real and fertile ground to till for a politician. But Obama is part politician, part cult. Supporters wearing T-shirts with an Andy Warhol like pop-art image of his face testify to that. But then they - him - were once easy to dismiss until people realised Obama's charisma was being matched by one of the most sophisticated ground operations ever seen. It is one that is outsmarting the Clinton machine. He's marrying inspiration and cult with old-fashioned political grunt. One would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by Obama on the stump. It's not so much by what he says but it's the way the crowds respond to his words. When 16,000 people, without prompting, start shouting some of his keynote phrases as he delivers them, you know something special is going on. The atmosphere at his events is such that one wonders if Obama is about to walk out with a basket with some loaves and fishes to feed the thousands. And therein lays the danger for Obama. The Obama shuttle has made it into orbit but at some point he's going to have to land this thing back on Earth.(...) Well known political journalist Joe Klein of Time magazine, who was travelling on the campaign plane this week with Obama, too, wrote of a nagging concern about this kind of rhetoric of inspiration over substance, noting "there was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messiahnism". In his Super Tuesday speech Obama said "we are the ones we've been waiting for", attempting to make the case the time was now to get some "change" in Washington: a post-partisan world where politicians reach across the aisle for the common good. "This time can be different because this campaign for the presidency of the United States of America is different," he said. "It's different not because of me. It's different because of you." As Klein notes, this is "not just maddeningly vague but also disingenuous: the campaign is entirely about Obama and his ability to inspire. "Rather than focusing on any specific issue or cause - other than an amorphous desire for change - the message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is."(...) I'd venture to call him a favourite in this race now. The next nine statewide contests through February are, given the demographics, likely to go Obama's way. He may well build an unstoppable momentum. And then the giddiness might evaporate and be replaced with something else. In marketing they call it post-purchase disappointment. If he gets the Democratic Party's nomination another test begins anew: how to turn the narrative which is all about striving for what is possible, to one where people are suddenly asking how are you actually going to do it? READ IT ALL

Leaving Iraq is like leaving "Sonny's Bar"

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Jim Hoagland has an insightful article in today's Washington Post. He makes these points:

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama share a problem as they move deeper into the primary season: They have both issued promises to withdraw from Iraq that are impossibly vague, unrealistic or worse. They must now rectify this -- for the good of their campaigns and the nation. The Democratic candidates repeat fundamental errors already made in Iraq by President Bush. They ignore the important role that Iraqis must play in deciding the fate of their nation if there is to be any stability during and after a U.S. withdrawal.(...) Like Bush, Obama and Clinton pretend they can implement neat solutions to that torn country's complex problems. That is, to borrow a phrase from this campaign, a fairy tale.(...) Obama's effort to impeach Clinton's credibility through a backward-looking debate on Iraq -- pitting her 2002 vote vs. his 2002 speech -- has not been decisive because he has yet to show that the difference will lead to an authentically different approach to getting U.S. combat troops out of Iraq. Yes, Obama has promised to withdraw all combat troops within 16 months. Clinton promises to begin withdrawals within 60 days of her inauguration. Most significant, each has promised a hedge: to keep unspecified numbers of soldiers behind to fight terrorists or train Iraqis and, in Clinton's case, to protect the Kurds and deter Iranian aggression. But neither has been pressed in debates or news conferences as to how these residual troops would be left behind. It strains credulity to think that the Iraqis would -- after being told that they are not worth protecting or working with -- allow U.S. troops to stay on and hunt al-Qaeda & Co. or protect the huge U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. What carrots do the two Democrats propose to keep this permanently dissed ally on board instead of making any U.S. retreat a hell on Earth? Kennedy and other Democrats pillory Bush administration officials for trying to negotiate a status-of-forces agreement with the Iraqi government to replace the expiring U.N. mandate that governs the presence of foreign troops. Bush's fault is that he has waited far too long to recognize that Iraqis want to exercise sovereign rights inside their own country. He is not rushing to tie a Democratic president's hands. He responds to long-standing pressures from the Iraqis and the United Nations that he has previously ignored. Bush's cavalier rejection of the provisional Iraqi government created immediately after the U.S.-led invasion -- in favor of installing proconsul L. Paul Bremer III and a long occupation -- pushed U.S. policy onto its slope of disasters. Surviving Republican candidates overshoot the runway in the other direction, attributing to recent U.S. gains a permanence that has still to be established. The Democrats clearly will not repeat that mistake. They must also reject Bush's habit of ignoring Iraqi realities and responsibilities and pretending that the United States alone has the power to impose its will as the end point of this conflict.

In fact, thanks to Bush's immeasurable incompetence, leaving Iraq has become like the famous scene in Robert De Niro's film, "A Bronx Story", (see above) where an improbable group of Hell's Angels invade a Mafia-owned bar in the Bronx and after being politely asked to leave, begin to spray beer and insult the patrons. Chazz Palminteri the local capo mafiosi locks the door and tells them, "Now yez can't leave", whereupon every Italian extra in Hollywood comes out the back room with baseball bats and beats the bikers to a pulp.

This is more or less the position the United States finds itself in today. I think that when the American people really wake up to the fact that, with Republicans or Democrats, by now Iraq is so screwed up that "yez can't leave", they will gladly extradite Bush to The Hague to have him tried as a war criminal. DS

Gore solution or gore solution

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I am beginning to think the battle between Hillary and Obama is going to get so rough and so ugly and end up in a tie running into a brokered convention, so foul and so sordid, that both candidates will be on life support by then as far as the general public is concerned.

At that time something will have to done to put that fight to an end and bury all the bodies, which will stink by August.

Probably the only solution would be a movement to draft Al Gore. In contrast to either Hillary or Obama I think he could defeat McCain handily. A Gore-Edwards ticket would certainly have my vote and I'm sure it would make America forget the Democratic primaries. DS

Why do Peggy Noonan, George Will and David Brooks favor Obama?

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Peggy Noonan, who wrote some of Reagan's best speeches, is the right wing's Maureen Dowd: Irish, beautiful, witty, subtle and dangerous. In today's Wall Street Journal, she joins such arch-conservative pundits as George Will and David Brooks in praising Barack Obama and favoring him for the Democratic nomination.

"(Obama) is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee -- an adult aiming to reform the real world rather than an adolescent fantasizing mock-heroic "fights" against fictitious villains in a left-wing cartoon version of this country." George Will

"The Kennedys and Obama hit the same contrasts again and again in their speeches: the high road versus the low road; inspiration versus calculation; future versus the past; and most of all, service versus selfishness." David Brooks

I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to smell a rat here.

To me it's perfectly obvious that the right wing is licking their chops in anticipation at facing Obama. Read this from Noonan's piece:

"He will be hard to get at, hard to address. There are many reasons, but a primary one is that the fact of his race will freeze them. No one, no candidate, no party, no heavy-breathing consultant, will want to cross any line--lines that have never been drawn, that are sure to be shifting and not always visible--in approaching the first major-party African-American nominee for president of the United States. He is the brilliant young black man as American dream. No consultant, no matter how opportunistic and hungry, will think it easy--or professionally desirable--to take him down in a low manner."

Now, obviously it would be absurd to apply this criteria to Karl Rove or any of his understudies and acolytes ... If you know how to read Noonan, she is calling in the hit. That is going to be the campaign. I think it would be childlike to believe that Karl Rove hasn't done his homework already.. They are drooling in anticipation.

Why do they "like" Obama so much?

Because they are terrified of Hillary Clinton, that's why.

Here is how Peggy Noonnan describes her:

"One part of the Clinton mystique maintains: Deep down journalists think she's a political Rasputin who will not be dispatched. Prince Yusupov served him cupcakes laced with cyanide, emptied a revolver, clubbed him, tied him up and threw him in a frozen river. When he floated to the surface they found he'd tried to claw his way from under the ice. That is how reporters see Hillary.And that is a grim and over-the-top analogy, which I must withdraw. What I really mean is they see her as the Glenn Close character in "Fatal Attraction": "I won't be ignored, Dan!"

It is this simple: in recent decades the Clintons are the only Democrats that win elections against Republicans... They don't want to ever face them again, no more complicated than that.

As soon as Barack Obama is declared the official candidate of the Democratic party the voters will be treated to something similar to the old TV show, "This is your Life"... Here is how Wikipedia describes the experience:

"The format of the show was simple: the host would surprise someone (usually a celebrity or public figure, occasionally an ordinary citizen) and, consulting his "red book," conduct a biography of the subject in a television studio. The subject would be presented with family members and old friends, reunited with old acquaintances, and often shed a tear when a personal tragedy was recounted."

Peggy may be right and Hillary will do Karl's work for him. This is a high stakes affair after all. DS

Farewell Mitt Romney

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I don't have anything visceral against Republicans in general (well, not very much) and even have family members in that party. I like both John McCain and Mike Huckabee as people although I don't agree with them on very much, but Romney, I confess, I loathe.

Something in his facial expression makes me angry. His positions are hard to nail down, but I have never gotten that far... the face is enough.

Anyway, after having been made a fool of by Mike Huckabee who spent one tenth of what he did, he is calling it quits. Thinking about that gives me a nice warm feeling inside. With time you learn to take pleasure when and where you can. DS

Not exactly an endorsement

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If I finally end up voting for Hillary Clinton she'll have John Edwards to thank. She has taken over his health plan, which according to Paul Krugman is the only workable one out there.

My inner Lenin tells me that it would be great if the whole health thing festered until the masses stormed the Winter Palace, but elementary compassion leads me to support any workable plan for universal health care that would alleviate the suffering of so many millions of fellow human beings.

Right now I think the Democratic nomination is down to two horrible phonies. One an experienced and capable phony and the other a phony of unmitigated chutzpah and cynicism and totally unqualified for the job. If backed into a corner, holding my nose and gagging and retching, I will vote for the candidate that has some chance to heal the sick, not the one that promises to walk upon the water. DS

Obama: America's Lady Di?

"Instead of a hyperactive debutante who had ricocheted around the scene with a series of ill-chosen but well-born or well-heeled boyfriends, alighting here on an astrologer, there on an aromatherapist and there again on a signature charity, we were presented with a Lady Bountiful or Fairy Godmother, without whose luminous presence the poor of the world were left unfriended, untended and alone." Christopher Hitchens, on the death of Diana - Salon

"Only Clinton derangement syndrome can explain the alliance of so many otherwise thoughtful people of both parties who speak well of the candidacy of a man with scant knowledge of the world who has never been tested and has never run anything larger than a senatorial office. The question that we need to ask is whether this man—who candidly admits, “I’m not a manager”—can manage the vast apparatus of the federal government. Will packaging be enough to deal with our problems?" Fred Siegel - City Journal

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After seven years of Bush, it is obvious that a significant portion of the American population is simply grasping at straws.

If anything were ever obvious it is that, although he is an intelligent, interesting person, Barack Obama is totally unqualified to be the President of the United States.

He is a junior senator with three years experience in Washington, he was a brilliant law student and did some community work in Chicago's South Side, then, as a state legislator in Illinois, he did little more than show up to vote "present". He has written a clever book and gives speeches with practically no content, but delivered in a momentous, ringing style.

The comparison with Princess Diana is wonderful. I think the Republicans are licking their chops, hoping that Obama will be the Democratic candidate in November. DS

Obama: The New Princess Diana? - James Kirchick - Commentary
Abstract: This was Christopher Hitchens’s question a year after the death of Princess Diana, which brought forth a “frightful binging and gorging of sentimentality” from the British populace, odd in a nation stoic by reputation. (...) As a 24 year-old male — just the sort of demographic he has solidly won over — I should probably hide while admitting this, but I feel the same away about the Barack Obama phenomenon as Hitchens did about the mourning of Princess Diana. And I’ll risk sounding a little self-satisfied by predicting that should Obama not be the one sworn into office come January 2009, the country will look back on this current presidential campaign feeling a similar sort of collective embarrassment that the British felt about their mourning of “The People’s Princess.” We may even be asking ourselves “What the hell was that all about?” should Obama actually win the presidency, a year or so into his tenure when his unpreparedness becomes manifest.(...) It’s long past time that we pause, take a deep breath, and evaluate the presidential candidates using concrete criteria as opposed to vague pronouncements that this or that candidate can “unite” the country or “transcend” this or that division, whether it be racial or political or what have you. It may be that Barack Obama is the best candidate at this moment in time; ultimately, of course, that’s a purely subjective question. But I fear about the emotional baggage that people have invested in his candidacy, and what his most fervent supporters will believe about American democracy should he lose. The country will, in short, become irredeemable. Given the unchecked passion already on display, it may already be too late to save this election from becoming marked, like the decade-old death of a blond divorcée, for its “bogus emotion and mass credulity.” READ IT ALL

"Jive": the forbidden word

"If Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, there is some chance — nobody knows how big — that we’ll get universal health care in the next administration. If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, it just won’t happen."
Paul Krugman, NYT

"A President Obama could no more magically transcend America's '60s-born divisions than McCarthy, Kennedy, Nixon or McGovern could, for the simple reason that our society is defined as much by its arguments as by its agreements. Over the meaning of "family," on sexual morality, on questions of race and gender and war and peace and order and disorder and North and South and a dozen other areas, we remain divided in ways that first arose after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963." Rick Perlstein, WP

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America owes much more to African-Americans than gratitude and shame for centuries of unpaid labor. Theirs is 90% of the magic of American identity, substance and style. Without Black America the United States would be some sort of Australia run amok. Among the infinity of cultural gifts that America has received from African-America is a richness of language that other English speakers do not possess and one of the most valuable words of this legacy is the word, "Jive", which Webster defines as, "glib, deceptive, or foolish talk".

I realize that for a white person to apply this marvelous word to any person of color breaks all the rules of political correctness, but as I believe that nurture is more important than nature and as Barack Obama was raised in a white home by white people in places, (Hawaii and Indonesia) where no African-American models existed, I consider that he is culturally as white as or whiter than I am and I have no compunction in admitting that I have never seen such a positively "jive-assed" politician in all my life.

Readers of this blog will know that I consider universal health care the single most important issue in US politics, the game changer. I would prefer that the Republicans keep the White House and that the pressure for something meaningful continue to build, than that a Democratic president pass something half baked that leaves millions of Americans without health care, but takes the pressure off. What I called in the last post, "throwing a fish".

As Paul Krugman points out, that is exactly the result we can expect if Obama is elected president.

I admit that I am becoming more than a little impatient with Barack Obama. The idea that the divisions and contradictions in America, which are real, serious and reality based, can be "healed" by the honeyed words of a few good speeches is an insult -- perhaps well deserved -- to American intelligence. DS

Rcik Perlstein - Getting Past the '60s? It's Not Going to Happen - Washington Post
Abstract: One of the most fascinating notions raised by the current presidential campaign is the idea that the United States can and must finally overcome the divisions of the 1960s. It's most often associated with the ascendancy of Sen. Barack Obama, who has been known to entertain it himself. Its most gauzy champion is pundit Andrew Sullivan, who argued in a cover article in the December Atlantic Monthly that, "If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today's actual problems, Obama may be your man." No offense to either Obama or Sullivan, but: No he isn't. No one is.(...) I realized it again when I saw the online ad produced by Sen. John McCain's campaign, arguing that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton didn't deserve the presidency because she earmarked one-millionth of the federal budget ($1 million) for a museum commemorating the rock festival Woodstock. I realized it, too, when Bill Clinton accused Obama of leaving the role of Lyndon B. Johnson out of the civil rights story, and when Sen. John Kerry announced his endorsement of Obama with a quotation from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. -- and both set off a strange bout of opinion-journalism shadowboxing over which camp, Clinton's or Obama's, better grasped the historical legacy of the civil rights movement. I realize it anew just about every day of this presidential campaign -- most recently when a bevy of Kennedys stood behind Obama last week and spoke of reviving the spirit of Camelot, and when the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks responded by making fine distinctions between "the idealism of the generation that marched in jacket and ties" -- the "early-60s," which he took Obama to represent -- and the "late-60s," defined "by drug use and self-indulgence," of which the Clintons are the supposed avatars. The fact is, the '60s are still with us, and will remain so for the imaginable future. We are all like Zhou Enlai, who, asked what he thought about the French Revolution, answered, "It is too early to tell." When and how will the cultural and political battle lines the baby boomers bequeathed us dissolve? It is, well and truly, still too early to tell. We can't yet "overcome" the '60s because we still don't even know what the '60s were -- not even close.(...) A President Obama could no more magically transcend America's '60s-born divisions than McCarthy, Kennedy, Nixon or McGovern could, for the simple reason that our society is defined as much by its arguments as by its agreements. Over the meaning of "family," on sexual morality, on questions of race and gender and war and peace and order and disorder and North and South and a dozen other areas, we remain divided in ways that first arose after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. What Andrew Sullivan dismisses as "the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation" do not separate us from our "actual problems"; they define us, as much as the Great War defined France in the 1920s, '30s, '40s and beyond. Pretending otherwise simply isn't healthy. It's repression -- the kind of thing that shrinks say causes neurosis. At least there's some comfort in knowing that our divisions aren't what they once were. Heck, in the 1860s, half the nation was devoted in body, mind and spirit to killing the other half; in the early 1930s, many sage observers presumed the nation to be poised on the verge of open, violent class warfare. We'll manage to muddle through again -- even burdened with mere flesh and blood human beings, not magical healing shamans, as our leaders. READ IT ALL

Health: a Spanish lesson

The picture that concentrated Franco's mind so wonderfully

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An American reader familiar with Spain asked me what possible relation there could be between the American situation and the Spanish one, where, as she pointed out, public health care predates Democracy. I thought it such an interesting question that I decided to answer her here.

Many years ago I worked on a project for a large American, family owned corporation with manufacturing facilities in Spain. They wanted to close a factory and they were amazed at the penalties they would have to pay to shut the thing down. They demanded a detailed history of Spanish social legislation, which I helped to research.

I speak from memory, but I seem to recall that we discovered that almost all the Spanish welfare state dated from when it became obvious that Hitler was going to lose the war. The idea of the victorious allies charging over the Pyrenees and Nuremberging him concentrated Franco’s mind wonderfully.

Franco, brutal victor in the recent civil war was always a practical and expedient fellow, so he threw the defeated working class a fish. Providing health care, protecting jobs and paying the summer and Christmas bonuses helped the police state keep control of the defeated working class during those black years before prosperity arrived, with the tourists, in the 1960s.

Basically then, Spain had some sort of health system under Franco because he was afraid of hanging by his feet in a gas station like Mussolini.

Until the Socialists reformed it in the 80s it was a very, very half hearted, half assed system indeed. And it was the fear of Spain going Communist after the death of Franco that allowed the reformist Socialist government of Felipe González which had been previously "restructured" under the guidance of Willy Brandt's SPD to finally take power and, once they agreed to stay in NATO, receive the blessings of the US as the lesser of many possible evils.

In a sense the entire European welfare system was put in place because the elites were afraid of the working class going with the Communists in the late 40s and early 50s. In the democracies the pressure was expressed in the ballot box, in Spain by police informers relaying the mood of the population. What is necessary today in America is to produce that same unease at the top of the American system. The civil rights struggle shows that this is as possible in the USA as in Europe.

If the Republican Party and the American conservatives in general were still more or less normal, like they were under Eisenhower or even Nixon, they would probably do like Franco and throw the fish. They showed that sort of pragmatism when confronted with the reality of "burn baby burn". But I think the Ayn Randies, the Norquististas, the Cato Instituters and assorted Reaganites, are a bunch of real Talibans and will fight this thing to the death and that will be the transformational struggle. Just like during the civil rights movement, there have to be people in the streets and a change or heightening of consciousness to bring about this transformation.

There would be two good things in this: one, the people would finally get health care and two, the struggle itself would change their consciousness. Thus, the unyielding resistance of the American Reaganite conservatives to any state health care system is fundamental to the final transformational effect. If any of them were half as intelligent as Franco was there would be no transformation.

As Democrats are not really people of the left they don’t seem to understand that politics like the rest of life is a constant, shifting, conflict of contradictory entities with contradicting interests and that these different interests struggle continuously among themselves and that this struggle produces what the Hindus call "Maya” or what the rest of us call “reality”: something of only apparent solidity, something which is constantly in flux.

To transform reality it is important first to understand the dynamics of these contradictions and to know when it best to push one place or to not push on another. This dialectical approach is very foreign to American politics. It would be easier for an American psychotherapist to understand the dynamics of transforming political reality and the value of the process of transformation than for the average American political commentator. A therapist easily understands that the process of becoming is as important as, or more important than the becoming itself, since in fact, everything only exists in the act of becoming and never really finally becomes, except, perhaps, when it dies.

Health care obviously wouldn’t be “transformational“ for Spanish politics because health care already exists in Spain. It was precisely Franco's readiness to concede it that kept it from becoming transformational. To create such a system in the USA would transform America because health care doesn’t exist and, given the rigid ideological stance of American conservatives, it probably would take a huge struggle to get it to exist. Since there are 40,000,000 people without coverage, this would constitute a formidable army in this battle. The struggle is just as important as the final result or to put it another way, the struggle is the result. DS

Vive la France! ...and forget about Billary-Bama

There are only two pictures of Jérôme (this is the other one)

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Just to tear ourselves away from the day's round of horrors in Iraq and Kenia and the boredom of Billary-'Bama, here is an article from the Wall Street Journal which describes how Jérôme Kerviel is turning into a national hero in France, the "Che Guevara of finance".

I love the French attitude to this whole business. This is how the women eat what they want and don't get fat: it's all in the mind! What the French still have to teach Americans is the idea of le petit bonheur, the happiness of small things. When the Americans catch on to it they will no longer have to "pursue" happiness, they will find it all around them.

Here is a prediction: there is going to be a film of this (of course) and the star who plays Jérôme Kerviel will be, Gad Elmaleh. (it will probably be Tom Cruise or Shia LaBeouf but it should be Gad Elmaleh).

Gad Elmaleh is a hilarious, enormously talented, Moroccan-Jewish comedian who works out of Paris. I recently saw him in a delicious comedy with Audrey Tatou called, "Hors de Prix", which sounds sort of racy, if you can't read French or spel so gud. DS

In a French Twist, Jérôme Kerviel Gets Hero Treatment - Wall Street Journal

Abstract: Société Générale says wayward trader Jérôme Kerviel lost the bank $7.2 billion. But that was last week. He's now on his way to cult celebrity -- and he still hasn't lost his job. Société Générale has stopped paying Mr. Kerviel and told him not to come to the office, but it hasn't managed to formally fire him. French law stipulates that to do that, the bank must first call him in for a sit-down meeting and explain its dissatisfaction. He has the right to bring along a trade-union official, a lawyer or anyone else he'd like. (...) Reviled by Société Générale as a malevolent fraudster and "mutating virus," Mr. Kerviel, 31 years old, is now being hailed by a growing band of fans as "Robin Hood," "the Che Guevara of Finance" and even a genius worthy of the Nobel Prize in economics. "Let's be honest: No one likes banks...and people like the rich to get cheated," says Christophe Rocancourt, a celebrated French con man who swindled wealthy Americans in the 1990s by masquerading as a French member of the Rockefeller family, a film producer and various other people. Edward Yardeni, an American economist who runs an investment-strategy consulting firm, credits Mr. Kerviel with helping save the U.S. from recession. "Merci beaucoup, Jérôme," says Mr. Yardeni, a former chief economist at Deutsche Bank. Société Générale's unwinding of Mr. Kerviel's bad bets, he says, accelerated a market slide that prodded the Fed to slash interest rates. Mr. Yardeni says French courts will have to decide whether Mr. Kerviel belongs in prison, but "we owe Jérôme quite a few thanks," and he "certainly deserves a footnote in American economic history."(...) When the news of Mr. Kerviel's disastrously bad bets first broke, he seemed destined for infamy and shame. Even trade unions, usually quick to rally to the defense of employees targeted for dismissal, showed little sympathy or solidarity. But the tide is now turning as questions mount about the bank management's own missteps and a change in Mr. Kerviel's public image from recklessly greedy master-of-the-universe to luckless little guy struggling to get ahead. Unlike Société Générale's executives, mostly upper-crust graduates of elite colleges, Mr. Kerviel grew up in a small provincial town in a family of modest means. Lacking the academic credentials and connections of the bank's highfliers, he struggled to get his feet on the lowest rung of the trading ladder. A Web site set up to chart the saga, jeromekerviel.com, has started polling visitors about whether the trader is to blame: According to one of the site's founders, 65% say no. Facebook, the social-networking site, now has dozens of pages devoted to various Jérôme Kerviel support groups, including one that wants to "fight for Jérôme Kerviel's reintegration in Société Générale." An American outfit is hawking "Jérôme Kerviel Is a Hero" T-shirts, and a British oddsmaker Ladbrokes has opened betting on who will play Jérôme Kerviel in a likely future film. Mr. Kerviel's biggest fan base is at home in France, which often has a soft spot for cheeky rogues, particularly when their victims are well-to-do. Mr. Rocancourt, the former Rockefeller impostor, has written three books about his exploits and says his own life story is being made into a movie. After doing jail time in the U.S. and Canada, he now lives in Paris with a former Miss France. Mr. Rocancourt urges Mr. Kerviel to take full advantage of his current notoriety. "People always like a Robin Hood, a guy who steals from the rich." READ IT ALL