Do elections mean choice?

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Tomorrow there are general elections in Spain. I don't like to write about internal Spanish politics in this blog, but suffice to say that Spanish voters will have some really clear choices tomorrow.

They will be permitted to choose between a party that has legalized homosexual marriage, was the first to legalize divorce and abortion, and a party that still is directly connected to the Franco dictatorship. What could be clearer than that?

What sort of choice are Americans being offered?

McCain-Clinton-Obama?

The underlying problem the Democrats have is that they masquerade as a party of the left... and they are no such thing. Gore Vidal defined it perfectly: "There is only one political party in America, the Party of Property, which has two right wings, the Democratic wing and the Republican wing."

The Republicans are simply more authentic. They are what they seem to be, while the Democrats aren't, the Democrats are like closet gays, living a lie and people are giggling behind their backs, especially the out in the open, real gays... for "gay", read authentic people of the left.

Clinton understood how this worked very well and offered a conservative package in progressive wrapping. Barack Obama understands it even better than Clinton did and offers nothing but wrapping. Emotional sensations of "change" for the sort of people that think that using a certain aftershave is a "statement".

People are not as dumb, you say?

Probably the most pro-American country in the world is Australia. They actually like Americans. So after you've watched this video, try to imagine what it would have looked like made by anybody else.

What I find depressing about this video is that my grandparents and my father were educated in little red schoolhouses in the rural Middle West and they could locate any country on the globe and knew the name of all the capitals. So it isn't genetic. Americans have been deliberately made stupid. DS

The world doesn't deserve this

For now, it’s all up to Pennsylvania in April, until it’s all up to Indiana and North Carolina in May. (This Saturday is the Wyoming caucus, but it’s not all up to Wyoming.) Finally on June 7, it will all be up to Puerto Rico, until it’s over and we discover that we’re right back where we are now.
Gail Collins - New York Times

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The American elections are draining all the life blood from the news cycle. The entire world, with its tragedies and emergencies is being put on hold while this absurd ritual continues.

We are talking about a country of 300,000,000 people with the world's highest percentage of University graduates and it can't do any better than this? Should it be so hard to sort out the mediocrities that have pushed their way to front of this disaster. The idea that at bottom America is not a serious country is percolating in the world's consciousness, as mankind awakes to smell the coffee. This is like discovering that the paterfamilias is a drunk or has gambled all the family's savings away at bingo. A trauma. DS

Obama couldn't close the sale

David Seaton's News Links
Barack Obama needed to finish off Hillary Clinton with solid victories in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday, but he couldn’t.

Hillary Clinton, like Javier Bardem’s character in “No Country for Old Men,” is not that easy to stop.

Obama'll probably regret it for the rest of his days.

By winning in Texas and Ohio, important states in any possible Democratic victory in November, Hillary Clinton proved that reports of her political death were much exaggerated.

Why did she win?

Hillary won in Texas and Ohio because there are a lot of lunch bucket, working class people, white and Mexican-American, in those states who trust that the Clintons will make things better for them in practical ways... because they have done it before. In fact, if Obama's skin were of a different color, he probably wouldn't have gotten a single African-American vote running against a Clinton. The case is not really the candidates "experience", but the voters experiences of the candidates.

These are working people who are really worried about making ends meet in what looks like becoming very hard times, and as such they are not all that concerned about America having a "cool" image in the world, and neither do they wish very much to be "transformed" and "healed" as does the latte crowd.

This is a return of "It's the economy stupid!"

The Clintons have a proven record of delivering prosperity. That simple. This is certainly not rocket science. DS

The world of Charlie-Foxtrot

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There is something nightmarish about the meteoric ascension of Barack Obama, a perfection of the same surrealist stupidity, of national foot shooting, that gave the world George W. Bush; as if the United States was imitating ancient Rome, where the Emperor Caligula made a consul of his horse. Caligula only did it once.

"Strange" is a good word, but there is a better one.

What do you call it when many problems, all with many intersecting vectors, each with its own conflicting internal contradictions, all of them in mutual contradiction with each other, all of which then line up like planets in a malignant horoscope? A series of thesis and antithesis with a dialectical result that can only produce a sinister synthesis?

The US military calls this construction a "clusterfuck"; sometimes known by the NATO, phonetic-alphabet acronym, "Charlie-Foxtrot".

The United States finds itself at this moment immersed in full-spectrum, multilayered, universal, clusterfuck of historic proportions.

Just for starters, while the Israelis continue to do what they do to the Palestinians, atomic bomb brewing, Holocaust denying, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was just warmly received in Baghdad. So much for Iraq.

Turning to atomic Pakistan and that failed state, opium farm, Afghanistan, Arnaud de Borchgrave has this to say:

Replacing U.S. influence topside in Pakistan — or still competing for it — is Saudi Arabia and its protege Nawaz Sharif, the man deposed by Mr. Musharraf in 1999 and exiled to the Saudi kingdom for 10 years. He flew home last fall after Mrs. Bhutto's return, this time generously bankrolled by his Saudi friends. Saudi Arabia was one of only three countries (with Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates) to recognize the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The new triumvirate gradually superseding President Bush's "most trusted non-NATO ally" is made up of ISI, Saudi Arabia and Nawaz Sharif. This does not bode well for the future of NATO in Afghanistan. President Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul controls only a third of the country while a resurgent Taliban is now solidly entrenched in 10 percent of the narco-state, according to National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell. And tribal leaders call the shots in the rest of a barren, medieval country whose opium poppy production generates more than two-thirds of its gross domestic product (and funds Taliban's insurgency). The most optimistic estimate calls for the United States and NATO to remain engaged, with increased military and economic assets, for another three to five years. Ten years would be more realistic. Speaking not for attribution, a Darwi-speaking U.S. official, back from a wide-ranging inspection trip to Afghanistan, said: "The corruption defies imagination. It has to rank as the worst in the world." Mr. Karzai, he said, used to be called the mayor of Kabul. No more, said my informant. Now Mr. Karzai doesn't even control the capital. Most of his ministers have U.S. visas up to date — just in case. More important, NATO could fracture and founder over the Afghan commitment. Violence and terrorism could then quickly escalate across the world. READ IT ALL

And then of course, there is the economy. James Howard Kunstler is the "Sultan of Clusterfuck", America's most entertaining prophet of doom. Here is what he has to say about the economy:

When you introduce perversities into an economic system, they invariably end up expressing themselves as distortions. The economy that evolved the past two decades, driven by the perverse securitization of wishes and frauds, will now express itself in a stark cratering of American living standards. Incomes and jobs will vanish, massive quantities of stuff will collect dust on the WalMart shelves, the fragile infrastructures of daily life will go to shit, and there will be political hell to pay. Every attempt to avoid a straight-up workout of our massive losses, will represent another layer of perversity and more consequent destructive distortions. I feel sorry for the next president. Even as he takes his oath of office, the nation will be flying apart like a seized-up engine. READ IT ALL

Into this world sails the USS Barack Obama, brilliant law student who has practiced little law, community activist, state legislator, three years in the US Senate... the man of the hour.

Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, with his wife, Valerie Plame, were a couple at the center of the fight against the rush to war in Iraq: Wilson's is the most damning dismantling of Barack Obama that I have read so far.

Joseph C. Wilson: Obama's Hollow "Judgment" and Empty Record - Huffington Post
I was involved in that debate in every step of the effort to prevent this senseless war and I profoundly resent Obama's distortion of George Bush's folly into Hillary Clinton's responsibility. I was in the middle of the debate in Washington. Obama wasn't there. I remember what was said and done. In fact, the administration lied in order to secure support for its war of choice, including cooking the intelligence and misleading Congress about the intent of the authorization. Senator Clinton's position, stated in her floor speech, was in favor of allowing the United Nations weapons inspectors to complete their mission and to build a broad international coalition. Bush rejected her path. It was his war of choice.There is no credible reason to conclude that Obama would have acted any differently in voting for the authorization had he been in the Senate at that time. Indeed, he has said as much.(...) Obama's gyrations on Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran are not the actions of one imbued with superior intuitive judgment, but rather the machinations of a political opportunist looking to avoid having his fingerprints on any issue that might be controversial, and require real judgment, while preserving his freedom to bludgeon his adversary for actually taking positions as elected office demands. It is hard to discern whether Senator Obama is a man of principle, but it is clear that he is not a man of substance. And that judgment, based on his hollow record, is inescapable. READ IT ALL

Well, as soldiers often say when in the midst of a clusterfuck, "shit happens". DS

Washington: a White House is not a home

Storyville, New Orleans - Bellocq

Let the poets pipe of love
in their childish ways
I know every type of love
better far than they.
If you want the thrill of love
I have been through the mill of love
old love
new love
every love but true love

"Love for Sale" - Cole Porter

David Seaton's News Links
A long time reader of mine asked me why I slam Obama so hard... and so often. Good question.

The answer lies, I think, in his barefaced use of purposefully vague language that links emotion to spirit for personal gain. He uses words like "hope" and "change" and "we" too freely, he is using these words intentionally to manipulate the emotions of people, especially young people, he does it to further his ambition. In the end his supporters will be left with the words and if things continue as they have till now, Obama will be left with the power.

Washington is a place where a lot of money changes hands, where decisions are taken that get people killed, where anyone looking for a friend is advised to buy a dog. Washington is a huge brothel like the legendary houses of New Orleans' Storyville. A word, like "hope" in this context is used in exactly the same way as prostitutes use the word "love"... The words are sweet, but the eyes are cold and hard.

This is not to say that these establishments do not serve noble purposes on occasion. One of America's greatest contributors to universal culture, Louis Armstrong, after whom New Orleans International Airport is named, earned his bread and cheese as a homeless waif delivering coal to these ladies. By patronizing genius, the Medicis earned immortality in similar fashion, but "love", "hope"?

Certainly it was not impossible to experience truth and beauty in the houses of such as “Countess” Willie Piazza. You could of course... if the piano player was good enough. But anyone entering the premise in search of "love", would certainly wake up with empty pockets, and an aching head.

And let he that is without sin cast the first stone. An old Spanish Communist once told me, "David, if all the sons of prostitutes that there are on this planet had wings and could fly, they would so cover the heavens that the rays of the sun would never touch the earth again and all life would be extinguished." DS

Krugman: Deliverance or Diversion? - New York Times
Abstract: Some progressives are appalled by the direction their party seems to have taken: they wanted another F.D.R., yet feel that they’re getting an oratorically upgraded version of Michael Bloomberg instead. Others, however, insist that Mr. Obama’s message of hope and his personal charisma will yield an overwhelming electoral victory, and that he will implement a dramatically progressive agenda. The trouble is that faith in Mr. Obama’s transformational ability rests on surprisingly little evidence. Mr. Obama’s ability to attract wildly enthusiastic crowds to rallies is a good omen for the general election; so is his ability to raise large sums. But neither necessarily points to a landslide victory. Polling numbers aren’t much help: for now, at least, you can find polls telling you anything you want to hear, from the CBS News/New York Times poll giving Mr. Obama a 12-point national advantage over John McCain to the Mason-Dixon poll showing Mr. McCain winning Florida by 10 points. What we do know is that Mr. Obama has never faced a serious Republican opponent — and that he has not yet faced the hostile media treatment doled out to every Democratic presidential candidate since 1988.(...) If Mr. Obama does make it to the White House, will he actually deliver the transformational politics he promises? Like the faith that he can win an overwhelming electoral victory, the faith that he can overcome bitter conservative opposition to progressive legislation rests on very little evidence — one productive year in the Illinois State Senate, after the Democrats swept the state, and not much else.(...) All in all, the Democrats are in a place few expected a year ago. The 2008 campaign, it seems, will be waged on the basis of personality, not political philosophy. If the magic works, all will be forgiven. But if it doesn’t, the recriminations could tear the party apart. READ IT ALL

America fiddles while the world burns

Israel's deputy defence minister yesterday warned his country was close to launching a huge military operation in Gaza and said Palestinians would bring on themselves a "bigger shoah," using the Hebrew word usually reserved for the Holocaust. News Item - Guardian

David Seaton's News Links
"Relativizing" the Holocaust, comparing it to any other event, diminishing its uniqueness, is considered by Jews and many others as a grave insult to Hitler's Jewish victims and a proof of antisemitism. In what light are we supposed to read the Israeli defense minister statement threatening the Palestinians of Gaza with a Holocaust? Does he mean that since he already has the Palestinians in a concentration camp, that he is now preparing to exterminate them? Is he relativizing the Holocaust?

However that may be, his language is perfectly outrageous.

If I say that, am I "relativizing the holocaust"?

Meanwhile the candidates to the US presidency are lining up to swear eternal loyalty to Israel.

I think that there will be no meaningful debate on Israel, or much of anything else, till after the presidential elections. The elections drain all the vitality from the news cycle. Strangely enough, they put all serious political discussion into the deep freeze. The candidates and their handlers craft positions and try to avoid being shot down. The world burns, but the US elections come first. DS

To have your namoura and eat it too

David Seaton's News Links

There are scurrilous and totally unfounded attacks circulating in the Internet accusing Barack Obama of being a crypto-Muslim and an enemy of Israel. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I think that is stupid for anyone to say or to suggest that Barack Obama is not a friend of Israel, a Christian, or that he in any way supports the Palestinians. Everything he says or has said, does or has done, his every vote in the Senate, bears this out. I repeat, that this line of attack is both ignorant and stupid.

What I do find strange is that at the same time some of Obama's most enthusiastic supporters think that, in spite of his support for Israel and his conspicuous Christianity, that simply because of his color or because he is famously named "Barack Hussein" that this is going to simultaneously have some enormous "healing" or soothing effect on America' relations with the Islamic world.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

As I have had it explained to me, if your father and grandfather were Muslims and if you have a Muslim name, but profess another religion publicly and support the enemies of Islam (Israel) that makes you an apostate. Here is a quote from the Wikipedia article on the subject of apostasy.

The four major Sunni and the one major Shia Madh'hab (schools of Islamic jurisprudence) agree that a sane adult male apostate must be executed

If you look up the subject in Google you will find some 1,160,000 entries referring to the subject. Laws to this effect are on the books of several Muslim countries at this very moment.

So really, we cannot have it both ways*. It seems to me obvious that for the United States of America to elect a president named "Barack Hussein", who is a practicing Christian and a supporter of Israel would be seen by Muslims as the ultimate provocation and the fulfillment of the most paranoiac fantasies of the most extreme Salafists.

They would say that this is what America does to Muslims: not only does it persecute Muslims, it takes the son and grandson of Muslims and turns him into the chief killer and persecutor of Muslims. A Muslim version of Damien.

The bottom line is that you can't have it both ways. It is one thing if somebody named "John" or "Hillary" bombs Pakistan or Iran and supplies the Israelis with weapons and quite another if someone with "Hussein" anywhere in his name does it... It's adding insult to injury.

I think that Obama's supporters should make right wing voters and people like Daniel Pipes see what a unique occasion the presidency of Barack Obama would give them to take yet another opportunity to mortally offend Islam. DS

*For the curious here is a link to Namoura

Our finest hour

David Seaton's News Links
"Bullshit" is a word found neither in Shakespeare nor the King James Bible and yet it is perhaps America's greatest contribution to the common heritage of the English speaking peoples.

It holds a wealth of meaning and whatever its humble etymology, it gives a name to something that is the greatest danger to America, its republic, its institutions, its people and through them the health and sanity of the entire world.

In truth, you you don't have to be an assiduous reader of Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal or Thomas Frank to get a grip on the throbbing thickness of American Bullshit, to a clear eye it is ubiquitous and so penetrating that perhaps only a starveling yogin trained down fine in some Himalayan cave would be immune to it.

The daily labor of cleansing its Augean mess from the heart and mind is a duty paid to sanity and the bride price of a limpid heart. DS

Cor blimey, that's better out than in!

Here is some homework for News Linkers. DS

Obama victory will prolong US racial divide - Times
One of Britain’s most influential black figures today accused Barack Obama of cynically exploiting America’s racial divide and gave warning that he could prolong, rather than heal the rift.

Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, claimed that the Democratic front-runner would ultimately disappoint the African-American community and dismissed the notion that he would be "the harbinger of a post-racial America" if he becomes the country’s first black President.

Writing in Prospect, the monthly current affairs magazine, Mr Phillips suggested that guilt over transatlantic slavery was behind Mr Obama’s support from middle class whites.

"If Obama can succeed, then maybe they can imagine that [Martin Luther] King's post-racial nirvana has arrived. A vote for Obama is a pain-free negation of their own racism. So long as they don't have to live next door to him; Obama has yet to win convincingly in white districts adjacent to black communities," he wrote.

Mr Phillips compared Mr Obama to Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey, prominent black “bargainers” – those who strike a deal with white America not to make an issue of historical racism if their own race is not used against them.

But, in a warning to the Democratic candidate, he added that Cosby now cut a “sad and lonely figure” because he had abandoned the moral weapon used by figures such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and Jesse Jackson in insisting that “in the end, salvation for blacks won’t depend on the actions of whites.”

"In truth, Obama may be helping to postpone the arrival of a post-racial America and I think he knows it," Mr Phillips wrote. "If he wins, the cynicism may be worth it to him and his party. In the end he is a politician and a very good one: his job is to win elections."

He added: "If he fulfils the hopes of whites, he must disappoint blacks – and vice versa."

Reading Obama with Thomas Frank's glasses

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For me, the most sinister thing about America is how it tames, absorbs, trivializes and somehow manages to package and market absolutely everything in true, Milo Minderbinder fashion. "Big Brother meets the cash nexus".

Every insight into the workings of the human mind that science stumbles onto is used to "optimize" the population, mold its thoughts and especially its choices, and most especially its spending "decisions". We and our minds are here to be processed as efficiently and as thoroughly as if we were battery chickens... Ever feather, every bone.

That is what I fled from, but it promises to follow me to the ends of the earth.

I think before we go on, you should read an excerpt from Thomas Frank's must-read classic, "Conquest of Cool". After reading this, I think you'll understand me and my Obamamania-phobia, and perhaps even understand your own self, a little better:

Regardless of the tastes of Republican leaders, rebel youth culture remains the cultural mode of the corporate moment, used to promote not only specific products but the general idea of life in the cyber-revolution. Commercial fantasies of rebellion, liberation, and outright "revolution" against the stultifying demands of mass society are commonplace almost to the point of invisibility in advertising, movies, and television programming. For some, Ken Kesey's parti-colored bus may be a hideous reminder of national unraveling, but for Coca-Cola it seemed a perfect promotional instrument for its "Fruitopia" line, and the company has proceeded to send replicas of the bus around the country to generate interest in the counterculturally themed beverage. Nike shoes are sold to the accompaniment of words delivered by William S. Burroughs and songs by The Beatles, Iggy Pop, and Gil Scott Heron ("the revolution will not be televised"); peace symbols decorate a line of cigarettes manufactured by R. J. Reynolds and the walls and windows of Starbucks coffee shops nationwide; the products of Apple, IBM, and Microsoft are touted as devices of liberation; and advertising across the product category sprectrum calls upon consumers to break rules and find themselves. The music industry continues to rejuvenate itself with the periodic discovery of new and evermore subversive youth movements and our televisual marketplace is a 24-hour carnival, a showplace of transgression and inversion of values, of humiliated patriarchs and shocked puritans, of screaming guitars and concupiscent youth, of fashions that are uniformly defiant, of cars that violate convention and shoes that let us be us.

What I am pointing out here, is that what was a historically unrepeatable, "before and after", period, one that truly brought "change" both good and bad, a period that was genuinely subversive, painful, destructive-creative, revolutionary, fresh, startling and real has been repackaged and recycled until now it is tame, stale and manageable.

Most of this has been done by my own generation (now 60+) who took over decades ago from bemused, older marketing executives who didn't understand "our" new culture. They don't want the same thing to happen to them so they have decided to freeze time and sterilize young people's minds by continually rewinding and replaying their own youth. We are living in a classic-decadent period.

So by now, decades later, what passes for America's perception of reality has been manipulated and packaged by elderly former hippies or wannabes and their apprentices. Sophisticated (hip) and cynical to the point of nihilism, they have been pimping their youth (and mine) ever since. Barack Obama is the first, chemically pure, slickly packaged, political expression of Thomas Frank's observations.

To compare Obama with Martin Luther King, the talk of "change" and "yes we can", is no deeper than Nike's slogan, "just do it!" I am saddened by how Obama's emptiness is taken for value. As if the voters were confusing Starbucks with Vienna's Café Sperl... But then, they already do that almost every day of their lives. DS

Linking Obama to King and RFK

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The New York Times has an article that, with a totally straight face compares Barack Obama to Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, who were assassinated within a few weeks of each other in 1968. Here is a sample:

There is a hushed worry on the minds of many supporters of Senator Barack Obama, echoing in conversations from state to state, rally to rally: Will he be safe? In Colorado, two sisters say they pray daily for his safety. In New Mexico, a daughter says she persuaded her mother to still vote for Mr. Obama, even though the mother feared that winning would put him in danger. And at a rally here, a woman expressed worries that a message of hope and change, in addition to his race, made him more vulnerable to violence. “I’ve got the best protection in the world,” Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said in an interview, reprising a line he tells supporters who raise the issue with him. “So stop worrying.” Yet worry they do, with the spring of 1968 seared into their memories, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated in a span of two months.

In my opinion this should be accompanied by a disclaimer, "I'm Barack Obama and I approve of this message", because it is straightforward propaganda and a gross manipulation if ever I saw one. The message being that the "change" that Obama propose is in some way comparable to the kind of change that King and RFK were pushing for, or that the climate today in anyway resembles that of 1968.

I have an almost total recall of that period. The European student rebellion, in which I had a small, walk on, part was in full swing and the entire western world was in ferment. Everything was changing at breakneck speed, politics, sex, music and dope were all taking new forms daily. The effect was dizzying. King and Kennedy were symbols of what was the sudden and deeply traumatic destruction of the familiar. There was deep rage and fear lurking everywhere. To be a symbol of what was, in fact, a revolution was to have a target hung around the neck. Another icon of the period, John Lennon, ended up finally paying the same toll.

How can anyone compare our post-post-post, period to that one, or Obama's stream of vacuous platitudes to what RFK and King represented?

This is what gets me incensed, how ersatz this Obamamania all is... It's like comparing poor little Amy Winehouse to Stax/Atlantic. DS

But seriously folks.. Kosovo

David Seaton's News Links
Instead of ranting about Obama, today I'd like to comment briefly on something serious: Kosovo. It's something I've been avoiding, because it's a touchy subject here in Spain: Spaniards are outraged at the United States violating Serbia's sovereignty as it might set a bad example for the separatist movements in Catalonia and the Spanish Basque country.

Personally, I don't think the Spaniards really have that much to worry about, as I cannot imagine the Catalans resigning themselves to never seeing Barça and Real Madrid play against each other again, except maybe, by chance, once or twice a decade, in the Champion's League.

Athletic Club Bilbao, never gets to Champions and so they would never ever play Madrid again. I just can't imagine that happening. However, as it makes my Spanish friends very nervous, I have avoided the subject.

The people who are really nervous, and with reason are the Israelis. The Kosovo precedent is directly applicable to the "Occupied Territories"... even more so as, in contrast to Serbia in Kosovo, Israel's sovereignty over the West Bank has never been officially recognized by anyone.

Right wing Israeli commentator Caroline Glick who is solidly aligned with the American neocons had this to say in the Jerusalem Post:

The emergence of a potentially destabilizing state in Kosovo is clearly an instance of political interests trumping law. Under international law, Kosovo has no right to be considered a sovereign state. Even UN Security Council Resolution 1244 from 1999, which the KLA claims provides the legal basis for Kosovar sovereignty, explicitly recognizes Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo. For Israel, Kosovo's US-backed declaration of independence should be a source of alarm great enough to require a rethinking of foreign policy. Unfortunately, rather than understand and implement the lessons of Kosovo, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government is working actively to ensure that they are reenacted in the international community's treatment of Israel and the Palestinians. Today, Israel is enabling the Palestinians to set the political and legal conditions for the establishment of an internationally recognized state of Palestine that will be at war with Israel.

And in the English edition of the semi-official Egyptian news paper Al-Ahram John Whitbeck wrote:

American and EU impatience to sever a portion of a UN member state (universally recognised, even by them, to constitute a portion of that state's sovereign territory), ostensibly because 90 per cent of those living in that portion support separation, contrasts starkly with the unlimited patience of the US and the EU when it comes to ending the 40-year-long belligerent Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (no portion of which any country recognises as Israel's sovereign territory and as to which Israel has only asserted sovereignty over a tiny portion, occupied East Jerusalem). Virtually every legal resident of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip seeks freedom, and has for over 40 years. For doing so, they are punished, sanctioned, besieged, humiliated and, day after endless day, killed by those who claim to stand on the moral high ground.(...) Of course, to prevent the US and the EU from treating such an initiative as a joke, there would have to be a significant and explicit consequence if they were to do so. The consequence would be the end of the "two-state" illusion. The Palestinian leadership would make clear that if the US and the EU, having just recognised a second Albanian state on the sovereign territory of a UN member state, will not now recognise a Palestinian state on a tiny portion of the occupied Palestinian homeland, it will dissolve the Palestinian Authority (which, legally, should have ceased to exist in 1999, at the end of the five-year "interim period" under the Oslo Accords) and the Palestinian people will thereafter seek justice and freedom through democracy, through the persistent, non-violent pursuit of full rights of citizenship in a single state in all of Israel/Palestine, free of any discrimination based on race and religion and with equal rights for all who reside there.

And not only the Israeli ultra-ultras are in a panic. Here is Bradley Burston in Haaretz:

The Palestinians have kept their ultimate doomsday weapon under tight wraps for 40 years. Israel knew about it. Israelis senior commanders could only pray that the Palestinians would never take it out and put it to actual use. Every Israeli soldier who served in Gaza knew about it, and also knew the hollowness in the declarations of IDF brass that "The army will now how to deal with it, should it happen." In all of Israel's vast arsenal of defense hardware and technology, there is nothing that can effectively counter it. That is what makes it a weapon so powerful we dare not speak its name: non-violence.(...) At the back of the minds of Israeli statesmen, diplomats, police officials, and defense planners, was an awareness that the true power of the Palestinians had nothing to do with stone-throwing, Molotov cocktails, grenade attacks, knifings, suicide bombings, assault rifle drive-by's, or Qassam rocket barrages. They knew that the true power of the Palestinians to damage Israel also had nothing to do with incitement, institutional anti-Semitism in schools, or declarations of revolution until victory and the ultimate replacement of the Jewish state by an independent Palestine. The true power of the Palestinians, the bottom-line dread of the Israelis, was embodied in only four words: Get up and walk. The theory - expounded by Palestinian moderates for year after year, supported by Israeli leftists - was that a determinedly peaceful demonstration in which thousands and thousands and still more thousands of Gazans headed for the Israeli border, would do more for the cause of Palestinian independence and freedom that all the gratuitous violence of the last 40 years of armed struggle combined.

Why the United States would choose to do something with such potentially perilous effects on Israel at this precise moment is an interesting question. I cannot answer it. Is anyone else asking it? DS

Ok, so now what?

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I'm getting tired of playing Jeremiah and I'm sure my readers got there first. In the "Book of Lamentations", God told Jeremiah, "You will go to them; but for their part, they will not listen to you".

It sure does look like Senator Barack Obama is going to take the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

The media certainly think so. Matt Drudge - a sign of our times if ever there was one -- gloats daily over Hillary's decline after flirting with her outrageously in the opening weeks.

However, Hillary might pull it off yet, the Clintons are like the guy with the funny haircut in "No Country for Old Men".... you don't want to turn your back. And of course, as Al Gore said, "It isn't over till the fat lady sings", (the fat lady sang for him, but it didn't get him anything but a Nobel Prize).

But, ok, ok, let's assume for argument's sake that Obama has got it in the bag. What's next? It's kind of tricky in my opinion.

The first thing Obama will have to do on nailing down the nomination is to stop massaging his movement and veer toward the center. This is going to disappoint some of those who applaud when he blows his nose, but if he doesn't move to the right and convince people who give this fainting and speaking in tongues the fish eye, he won't have a chance.

When searching for the center he will run into his greatest weak point, his nil military credibility. He has never even served in the armed forces. Bill Clinton and Dubya hadn't either, you say? At the time both of them came to office, there were no serious military threats to the USA. That has all changed.

The United States is presently fighting two wars and has a good chance of losing them both. At this moment both Iraq and Afghanistan are relatively quiet and there has not been a terrorist attack on the US "homeland" since 9-11. All of that could change in a moment. When the snow melts in Afghanistan this spring the fighting will get very hot and will last well into the fall.

As to terrorism: Osama bin Laden has done very well with the Republicans and I imagine he would do his little bit to keep them in the White House. A major terrorist attack in the USA would win the election for McCain outright. And we haven't mentioned the Balkans, that could all go blooey at any moment.... and with no troops to spare.

Then there is Iraq. Some think that Iraq is "winnable", but they are talking in terms of something like nearly twenty years. Military überpundit, Anthony H. Cordesman writes in the Washington Post:

What the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan have in common is that it will take a major and consistent U.S. effort throughout the next administration at least to win either war. Any American political debate that ignores or denies the fact that these are long wars is dishonest and will ensure defeat. There are good reasons that the briefing slides in U.S. military and aid presentations for both battlefields don't end in 2008 or with some aid compact that expires in 2009. They go well beyond 2012 and often to 2020.

This means that talk of a quick withdrawal from Iraq will meet with stiff, well documented, establishment resistance and not just from the neocons and AIPAC.

That means trouble for Obama. I can't really see any vice presidential candidate that would give him any credibility here except Wesley Clark. Have I missed somebody? The Democrats hold very strong cards on economic issues, but when it comes to war fighting... All it took was an "October surprise" video of Osama bin Laden's to sink John Kerry, and he was a war hero!

If I were John McCain, I would play this card very strongly. In fact if I were McCain I would choose as my running mate no other than Colin Powell. It is a fact that if the "Powell Doctrine" had been applied, either the invasion of Iraq wouldn't have taken place or enough troops would have been sent to stop the anarchy that followed. McCain, the hero of Vietnam, running with an African-American general on the ticket, would be hard to beat... in less, of course, there were breadlines by November.

Whoever gets to be President had better not have made too many promises about "restoring America's position" in the world. It isn't doable. Nobody seems to want to break the bad news to the American people, but the party is over. Bush is merely the face on the decline, not the decline itself. Tony Karon has a wonderful post on this called "Honey I shrank the superpower". I quote:

The gangster movie Miller’s Crossing offered a profound mediation on the nature of power in one petty thug’s warning to his boss: “You only run this town because people think you run this town.” Bush’s catastrophic mistakes have inadvertently revealed the limits of U.S. power, making it abundantly clear to both friend and foe that Washington is no longer in charge.(...)The fading of Pax Americana in the wider Middle East is partly a product of Bush’s over-reach and over-reliance on force and the threat of force. But it is also a symptom of epic, economically-driven shifts — the rise of China and India, Russia’s resurgence and Europe’s steady expansion, to name a few — that have redefined the global power equation.

The key word is Bush's has revealed the limits of American power. Bill Clinton was like the magician, David Copperfield, much smoke and mirrors, and Bush is like a kid's birthday party magician who puts his hand in the hat and pulls out nothing but rabbit poop.

The limits are real and everybody, everywhere is in on the gag by now, except, it seems, a lot of American voters. DS

Obama: bait and switch

David Seaton's News Links
What I am worried about it the emptying of real political energy for change into the self promotion of who knows who or what, to be filled in later.

A cynic would say that modern America is built on that continuous process of emptying and transference.

The Bush years are not "lost" years.

Surely the last thing Bush meant when he referred to himself as a "transformational president" was the awakening, practically the re-creation of the American left, but that is what has been happening.

After eight years of Bush the United States is still standing, but something very good has happened in that time. Many people have awakened and begun to ask serious questions. A small but visible crack has opened in the system and some light is pouring through it. This we owe to Bush. Obama is here to plaster up that crack.

A reader over at TPM commented on my previous post:

Just gets me riled up to worry about a Democratic candidate that might just blow the GOP out of DC for a while, when we have had Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Ashcroft, Rove, Addington, Yoo, Negroponte, Bolton, Bolten, Alito, Roberts, Boykin, Delay, Lott, Boehner, Hastert, and endless other idiots in charge.

This is a list of names that have caused millions of Americans to actually stop and think seriously about politics. Something that Americans are loathe to do. They have built consciousness and consciousness is what changes the world. Bull Conner and Orval Faubus -- after Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King -- probably did more than anyone else to advance the cause of African-Americans.

To me, Americans waking up is the key to real, permanent change in America and, to the extent of America's influence, changing the rest of the world. That is the real center of the question, certainly not about producing another, Democratic, "business as usual" version of "Good Morning America".

What is truly important and essential is the awakening and the energy conjured by Bush and all he represents and what I see in the Obama "movement" is the system's endless siphoning off of that energy and its singing a lullaby for the newly awakened.

Obama's "movement" is just another part of the endless manipulation that all Americans suffer from the day they are plunked down wearing diapers in front of TV set. DS

Obama or "Elvis joins the army"

David Seaton's News Links

Lately I have found myself ranting about Barack Obama and his "movement" on an almost daily basis. Experience has taught me that when that happens it is as wise to examine myself as to examine the cause of the irritation.

Reading over my old posts I find myself clamoring repeatedly for a citizens "movement" and commending Howard Dean for instigating Internet micro-financing to offset the big check writers. Why, then, am I so turned off by Obama?

This quote from Howard Zinn, the author of "A People's History of America", gets a corner of it:

We who protest the war are not politicians. We are citizens. Whatever politicians may do, let them first feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not for what is winnable, in a shamefully timorous Congress. Howard Zinn (emphasis mine)

What is needed to "change" America is a "citizens" movement, patiently built brick by brick from the ground up on the lines of Martin Luther King's civil rights movement that would put as much or more pressure on the politicians as the different lobbies and PACs do. And Doctor King was not alone, his movement spawned dozens of leaders, some of whom are still prominent and influential today. Few of them are office holders. By its very nature a "movement" cannot be in the hands of politicians, who as part of their function must make concessions and compromises every day of their lives. You cannot be both a sheepdog and a wolf, you have to choose.

Then my irritation became much clearer to me. What we are seeing with Obama's "movement" is the most classic maneuver of the American system's playbook: neutralizing and homogenizing any energy it fears. We have seen this happen over and over again.

For want of a better name I call the maneuver, "Elvis joins the army".

I call it that because of something John Lennon said when Presley died. Asked for comment the ex-Beatle said, "Elvis died when he joined the army". it was a brilliant remark, because before being drafted Elvis had been a national symbol of rebellion and untamed sexuality. Along with James Dean and the young Marlon Brando, he was a symbol of a new and dangerous way of being young. When they drafted him and cut off his hair, they turned him into a pasteurized version of himself. The fat, drugged, hambone, kitch, rhinestone, "living dead," Elvis was born in the US Army.

That is why, a generation later, Muhammed Ali's, rebellion was so important, he didn't let himself be pasteurized by the system, he made no concessions... He was absolutely true to himself and to those who looked up to him. Authenticity personified. He suffered and was vindicated. You cannot be both a sheepdog and a wolf, you have to choose.

When I hear Obama and see the reaction of the crowds, I feel my inner Holden Caulfield rise from some dusty 1950's closest. "No, not again." DS

Change... you mean spare change?

David Seaton's News Links
The USA has gone broke.

From personal experience, I know that one of the hardest realizations that people who have always had quite a lot of money can have, is to discover that they are flat broke.

I don't say "wake up" to discover, because waking up is instantaneous and the discovery that one's world no longer exists is a slow one. Sometimes it never fully sinks in.

Denial is a wide river that floods the valleys of the nouveau pauvre.

Martin Wolf, the chief economist of the Financial Times outlines the situation:

"The risks are indeed high and the ability of the authorities to deal with them more limited than most people hope. This is not to suggest that there are no ways out. Unfortunately, they are poisonous ones. In the last resort, governments resolve financial crises. This is an iron law. Rescues can occur via overt government assumption of bad debt, inflation, or both. Japan chose the first, much to the distaste of its ministry of finance. But Japan is a creditor country whose savers have complete confidence in the solvency of their government. The US, however, is a debtor. It must keep the trust of foreigners. Should it fail to do so, the inflationary solution becomes probable. This is quite enough to explain why gold costs $920 an ounce."

David Ignatius elaborates in the Washington Post

"The public, fortunately, doesn't understand how bad the situation is. If it did, we might have a real panic on our hands.(...) Do you want to know who is bailing out America's biggest banks and financial institutions from the consequences of their folly -- by acting as the lender of last resort and controller of the system? Why, it's the sovereign wealth funds, owned by such nations as China and the Persian Gulf oil producers. The new titans are coming to the rescue, if that's the right word for their mortgage on America's future."

I disagree with David Ignatius when he says, "The public, fortunately, doesn't understand how bad the situation is." I think that deep down, the public does understand only too well and a great many of them are in denial.

I believe this explains the Barack Obama phenomenon, where a hysterical, nationwide personality cult has grown up mushroom style around a person who has never really done anything: Jerzy Kosinski's fantasy made flesh, a blank sheet, who creates rhythmic ecstasy in his followers with words like "hope" and "change".

Nobody has much of an idea what he might stand for. When Obama supporter Susan Sarandon was asked about this she replied, “I can’t wait to see”.

We are speaking of denial: lets review the steps of the classic, Kübler-Ross "grief cycle".

1. Shock stage: Initial paralysis at hearing the bad news.
2. Denial stage: Trying to avoid the inevitable.
3. Anger stage: Frustrated outpouring of bottled-up emotion.
4. Bargaining stage: Seeking in vain for a way out.
5. Depression stage: Final realization of the inevitable.
6. Testing stage: Seeking realistic solutions.
7. Acceptance stage: Finally finding the way forward.

I think it is obvious that the eight long years of the Bush Restoration have been pure Kübler-Ross. Different parts of the American electorate are at different places on the cycle.

Some of us went directly from "shock" to "anger". Others, the Obamites, are stuck at step two with maybe a foot in four; those disposed to vote for either Hillary or McCain are either at step five or are dabbling in six or seven.

I think these months are going to go down in history as one of the most bizarre chapters of our amazing and original national experiment. DS

When backing Barack feels like joining a cult - Boston Herald
Abstract: I’m nervous because too many Obama-philes sound like Moonies, or Hare Krishnas, or the Hale-Bopp-Is-Coming-To-Get-Me nuts. These true believers “Obama-ize” everything. They speak Obama-ese. Knit for Obama. Run for Obama. Gamble - Hold ’Em Barack! - for Obama. They make Obama cakes, underwear, jewelry. They send Valentine cards reading, “I want to Barack your world!” At campaign rallies people scream, cry, even faint as Obama calmly calls for the EMTs. When supporters pant en masse, “I love you!” (like The Beatles, circa 1964), Barack says, “I love you back” with that deliciously charming, almost cocky smile. Oh - I’m nervous because it’s all gone to his head and he hasn’t even won yet. I’m nervous because it’s gone to a lot of other people’s heads as well. Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings introduced Obama last week in Baltimore and said, “This is not a campaign for president of the United States, this is a movement to change the world.” “He walks into a room and you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere,” says George Clooney. “I’ll do whatever he says to do,” says actress Halle Berry. “I’ll collect paper cups off the ground to make his pathway clear.” I’m nervous because nobody’s quite sure what Obama stands for, even his supporters. (“I can’t wait to see,” said actress/activist Susan Sarandon, declaring full support nonetheless). I’m nervous because even his biggest fans can’t name Obama’s accomplishments, including Texas state Sen. Kirk Watson, an Obama-man who humiliated himself when MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked him about five times to name something, anything, Obama’s done. Watson hemmed. Watson hawed. Watson gave up. I’m nervous because John McCain says Obama’s is “an eloquent but empty call for change” and in the wee, wee hours, a nagging voice whispers, suppose McCain’s right, too? Then what? READ IT ALL

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.