Individual Liberty—Progress—Humanity—Ethics—Rule of Law
"...if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties—if that is what they mean by a "liberal," then I am proud to be a liberal."
Just recently William Greider wrote in The Nation an interesting piece about "Obama and the Big Dogs," the canines who typically inhabit the top floor two-corner offices on "Wall Street." I wouldn't have known about the article at all except CommonDreams aggregated it into their daily "must read" dozen under a grab-you title "Testicular Politics." The way "CommonDreams" presented it, you would have thought Greider was framing the trouble President Obama has bitten off as somehow linked to Barack's manhood. In fact, Greider does play the Alpha Dog routine for all it is worth in his brief essay, so the combined effect of the publisher and the aggregator is to frame the state of the Presidency today pretty much as a mano a mano combat situation, with just a tinge of pejorative sexual/racial overtones to lend contrast, just a suggestion of wimp, without having to take too much responsibility for the slur.
Shailagh Murray and Paul Kane are Staff Writers for the Washington Post. Murray has been featured here at ALP quite a few times over the years. Today these two have a major article in the Post ostensibly about the Obama administration setting the tone in Washington. You should read this piece and see if you know anything more having done so.
Frankly, I am appalled. Murray and Kane set this up as if we are to suspect that all the old soldiers are going to try to fight their old battles along familiar lines. Then they report that Rahm Emanuel thinks this is a new time with new issues and new bipartisanship. Is any of this news?
What it looks like to me is a bag of miscellany scooped and packed into an article to fill the place where serious reporting of the "new tone" could have been. Why can't the Post writers ask intelligent questions about how Congress is going to get past the old bitter partisanship? Why do these writers accept as gospel that the global warming initiatives are DOA? Isn't this a bit "previous" and doesn't it mask deals in the background that the writers should be reporting on?
If this is what we are going to be getting from the Post in the future, we need to find a different paper!
Mark Morford keens in today on the slightly disoriented feeling we have, the sense that we have done what we must, but America cannot change soon enough, but maybe it will be too much. Like most real things we see verities collapsing around us and yet the psychology of the week is supposed to be Thanksgiving. It is the union of opposites, something Zen or Hegelian or just what we are not sure.
There is no map for what has happened to us over the past eight years or the past eight weeks. We have elected the most Liberal man in the U.S. Senate to be our president, but he is hiring on a crew of centrists. How will this work, we ask? How can we get our votes to count for something intelligent in this country? How can we rid ourselves of the mindlessness of sullen, racist, anger or of the cowardice and corruption within our own ranks?
"How" has been explained to you by your President-Elect. This will be a bottom-up society from now on. You are a community person from now on. Your job is to get off your Thanksgiving ass and do something for the community. That's it! Do something for someone besides your fat self. You will become addicted to the feeling and the world will change, and you will like it. Believe me!
Bill Moyers Journal this week has an interview with James K. Gailbraith on his paradigm shifting book The Predator State, which was reviewed this week in the New York Review of Books (but is not online ... otherwise I would have linked to it several days ago), and which will probably not provide the new nomenclature for the next epoch, but will, however, provide exactly the right insight necessary to avoid rampant Cheneyism (American jingoist corporatism). Bill provides his own essay about voting, weird candidates, and a miscellany of important news that gets lost in the madness of elections. Bill interview Mark Johnson on the transformative effects of music. (This is not to be missed!) (I wish, also, that we could find a reprise of Leonard Bernstein's Harvard Lectures from thirty years ago.)
I am putting Bill Moyers Journal at the top (nearly) of the list of "Liberal Links: The Electronic Press" on the right sidebar today. You should watch these gems of journalism every week, but I have been fearing that as Saturday postings they get lost in the flood of opinion we feature here at ALP. When something super important, like James K. Gailbraith comes up, I will draw your attention to it. Otherwise, you are now on your own to continue your Bill Moyers habit.
I don't think we have ever featured Gail Collin's NYT columns here at ALP. So, today I am breaking precedent and using her apt remarks to futher a notion I have been fiddling with for several weeks. Collins's essay today is about jitters primarily, the kind that cost the Boston Red Sox the pennant innumerable times, the kind that hope that a major sports figure on the other team gets the cover of SI. If God does not like the Democratic Party, then clearly the Democrats themselves must have something of a death wish and perversity of electoral nature to bring about God's vengeance for Democratic cheek and strolling across the finish line. Our point, Collins's and mine, is that the campaign is not over until some wee hour on November 4th, and Democrats would be well-advised to notice that a history-making election is not going to make itself!
By now everyone has heard of the Bradley Effect and it has been discussed to death. The Reverse Bradley Effect has been described here and elsewhere and the cousin Effects that work for and against John McCain, too. The fact remains that a society plagued with race prejudice is unlikely to vote "normally" when one of the candidates is of highly visible mixed race.
Obama supporters need to understand that pundits are excited about an Obama Administration and will write about the election as if it has already happened. Conservatives who have given up write about the Obama Administration knowing that their words fall like a gentle anesthetic on the body politic, creating lethargy and irresponsible behaviors among the electorate ... mostly among Republicans (who read their stuff), but also among Democrats who hear about it 2nd and 3rd hand. Some scurrilous folk are speaking of the Obama Administration deliberately to suppress Obama votes.
As for the polls, the conventional wisdom is that Obama needs a 10 point margin right now and all the way through November 4th to assure himself of a win. The only people that can assure him are the voters who get off their couches and vote!
Bill Moyers Journal this week consists of segment with Linda Chavez and Roberto Lovato on the election two weeks out, Michael Zweig on the economic turndown, and Mark Crispin Miller on voter fraud and the election.
Maureen Dowd in today's NYT is a delightfully competitive columnist wondering what she can do to keep her stall in the Times stable, now that Paul Krugman has won a Nobel Prize, for crying out loud!
She then moves on to the havoc that Sarah Palin is causing and as the eggheads retreat from the Party, Bill Kristol advises her that Sarah Palin is the real thing. Not surprisingly, I am not convinced, but I will warrant that talk-radio America is a whole nuther universe and has been since Arthur Godfrey gentled folks into a cup of coffee every morning and chatted about Lipton's lack of chicken in their chicken noodle soup.
One thing that emerges from the Presidential campaigns this time is the fact that the American people are a mixed bag, some completely ready to entertain ideas that will guide our country during the next four years or more, but other people pretty much a train wreck of dashed illusions, fear, slightly below average intelligence, fear, clinging to stale dogmas and Fox Noise bombast for dear life. Many of both groups will fail to vote, but many who really have no business voting because they have no earthly idea what it is all about will vote. That's democracy in the 21st century and the 18th.
The problem is education and honing a skill at something like "critical thinking." The corporate media are not at all interested in providing the whetstone. They are interested in market share and profits. They know that most Americans only weakly grasp the import of the passing events of the day, but they choose not to elaborate or to educate. Education is so politicized, they say, that they are better staying away from it.
A few short moments ago (in my time zone) Rachel Maddow on MSNBC had one David Frum, of the National Review Online, on her show. He wasted no time in criticizing Rachel and then had the temerity and effrontery to quote from "Ghandi,... or someone" that the way toward civility is to be civil. He was not. She was. She handed the slimy bastard his jock in front of the world! Having just shown the defectors from the McCain candidacy, among them George Will and Krauthammer, she pretty well demonstrated by bringing Frum onto the show that conservatives are bereft of intellectuals these days and fully into the death spiral of their "movement." Alas!
Bill Moyers Journal this week has an interview with George Soros and with Kathleen Hall Jamieson on the week in the campaigns. The campaigns took a couple more turns for the worse today as people who are angry at the market for evaporating their life savings responded to the hate and racism message of Cindy McCain, John McCain, and Sarah Palin. McCain has begun to try to put an end to his campaign's kindling of the hatred and racism, but everyone is holding their breath to see if he really means it. If not, you will soon see brown shirts in the crowds and major trouble across the land.
The Soros interview dovetails with my posting yesterday that linked to the book review of Soros's new book. If you did not get all the way through it, you owe yourself the 20 minute interview, for it is no less chilling and authoritative. We are, indeed, at the end of an era.
Frank Rich in the Sunday NYT steps up with a thesis that I have heard several times from the hard Christian Right, Palin's the strength of the ticket and they (pardon the passive construction here) don't care about John McCain's health record. They are putting up with him, but will not be catering to his every whim, if by some miracle he gets elected. If Rich is right then we have gone beyond issues decisively into the territory of character, in which case Johnny McCain, womanizer, foul-mouth, spoiled brat who should have been tossed out of the Naval Academy his second year there, but wasn't, the liar, about-face and step on his own shoe-laces mind changer, member of the Keating Five (not a rock band, you know) comes up decisively short.
Rich is only partly serious though. His column is mostly tongue in cheek, exploratory, looking around for something to chew on and finding only the slightly embossed imprint of his own teeth, clearly the result of a prolonged grimace. Funny thing, though, R.J. Eskow in Smirking Chimp thinks she is setting up for 2012, which amounts to the same thing. Out with the old tired maverick and in with the cute new one, eh!
Bill Moyers Journal this week features an interview on the media with Brooke Gladstone and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. The second segment is about the bailout/rescue and the story behind the headlines, featuring Emma Coleman Jordan.
This is probably the first Vice Presidential Debate that has attracted major attention. They all are interesting, and our lack of paying attention to Dick Cheney, for instance, proved to be a serious flaw in our political process. Tonight though, we have Joe Biden, an acknowledged expert in international relations and a long-time member of the U.S. Senate with the delicate task of dealing with a neophyte politician, Sarah Palin, from the state adjacent to the Bering Strait. She is a "babe" and like most of that genre wears her feminity as a coax and a claw. You have to be careful talking to "C" student cheerleaders. Michael Tomasky has a few thoughts about how it should go.
Welcome to you-know-where! It is a cold day here and so, appropriately, we have David Brooks as a featured columnist. Brooks is an autodictat-ish sort of modest intellectual, conservative without a cause. His transmogrification from strident hawkish enfant terrible to a moderate Republican with ties of his own making to the nether regions of rightwing conservatism took place during the past eight years. To his everlasting credit our Mr. Brooks understood that the Republican train had left its tracks and gone off into a swirl of imperialist pipedreams.
Today Brooks nails the coffin shut on Sarah Palin. He says she does not have nearly enough experience to be Vice President. He also takes a couple whacks at Liberals, knowing though that those Liberals are no longer Marxist levelers, but merely bleeding hearts destined to worry about the poor and afflicted forever. Brooks does himself proud today and we thought you'ld like to see it for yourself.
It might not seem to be the truth to you, but there are people out there who really do not care what you think about what they think. They are settled in to their habits of mind and comfortable understandings about the "ways things are." They exist on all sides of the political spectrum, but they seem to congregate more where there are other systems to support their self-satisfaction with their world-view. So far I am describing really angry people who feel left out of the process ... or people who believe that the process has been running amok for a while. Strangely, there are people on both sides of the current political contest who are like this.
On the liberal and progressive side there are knee-jerk, bleeding hearts, and special interests who will never believe there is any good in anybody on the other side. I find myself among these people often, but the ones on the other side are more frightening, to tell the truth. They have a violent streak in them that the Left does not seem to have. In fact, they prize this quick-draw streak as sure evidence that they are not going to get caught in any "revolutions" from the Left. They are, in actual fact, ready to defend their way of thinking by force of arms ... rather than sitting down and examining any evidence or any chains of logic.
Bob Herbert's column in the NYT today is a well-written impeachment of the RNC and its Bottom Gun headliner. McCain is a failed warrior, a man who got shot down, a man who argued beyond his rank and billet to bomb civilian areas in Hanoi and Haiphong, a chip-on-his-shoulder firecracker personality likely to go off at anyone, anytime, anywhere: his wife, fellow Senators, campaign staff (all attested), during caucuses in the Senate (completely attested), and on the campaign trail (yes, attested). He is not a populist; he is the son of an admiral whose progress on this planet was planned for him, coaxed, nurtured, and made to come true, and yet ... McCain was shot down and for failing his mission he thinks he can make it up to his father and grandfather by getting himself elected President and Commander-in-Chief. He is a dangerous and unreliable man in a mass transit bus. In the White House he would be an absolute disaster ... and the majority of the voters know it.
Bill Moyers Journal Friday featured a conversation with Kathleen Hall Jamieson on the effects of the RNC and a vignette of the relationship of National Guard troop deployments and the security of the states from which they are taken.
Bob Herbert in the New York Times has hit the very center of the Palin issue this morning. This election is not about Palin, and raucus cat-calling in her direction will prove to be counter-productive. She is a diversion ... whether she knows it or not ... and her candidacy is, of course, ill-advised. The Republicans cannot be allowed to skate out from under the manifest incompetence of their party to govern!
Frank Rich is the wiseman among the stable of columnists at the New York Times. Sometimes his articles are less demonstrative or less ornamental than those of the others. Buried in today's absolutely excellent column is this astounding statement ...
Indeed, the disconnect between the reality of this campaign and how it is perceived and presented by the mainstream media is now a major part of the year's story. The press dysfunction is itself a window into the unstable dynamics of Election 2008.
Remember, this is coming from a member of the journalistic establishment and it applies as much to himself, Dowd, Nagourney, all the rest at the NYT and, of course and especially, the bombastadiers at Fox, CNN, ABC, CBS, and even NBC/MSNBC!
Rich has as much admitted as simply stated that the large corporate media have—whether collaboratively or not!—fallen into a method of journalism that deliberately distorts events for their potential to titilate and provoke uncertainty ... the better to lure the hapless back for another dose of titilation and fear. Frankly (no pun intended), I believe that management is doing this for partisan political reasons because they and their owners are afraid the Democrats will roll back the ownership rules on media, leaving them with one outlet per medium per town and a maximum of three or five outlets total. I do not blame them for cheating, but I expect them to answer for it with their freedom!
Just recently William Greider wrote in The Nation an interesting 