Obama Meets the Whinocracy

Obama’s showed at the Baltimore town hall encounter with the Republican House Caucus a week ago that he isn’t going to be easy to shove over despite the missteps of the first year. The direct confrontation with the assembled enablers of the teabagger fringe was delightful for the complete mastery Obama showed over these whiny conservatives and how easily he dismantled their bubble-world when given a platform from which to do so.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the meeting was hearing how convinced Republican politicians from Texas and West Virginia are that they’re being mistreated and sidelined by bad old Nancy Pelosi, forgetting, of course, that they (1) were repudiated in the last election and (2) did far worse when they had the chance and now fairly gloat that they will do so again as soon as they get the chance. To hear them tell it, Obama’s team are the ones refusing to seek bipartisan cooperation, not them.

What a wacko universe they inhabit—probably from watching Fox News all day long in their offices. The party that has made an explicit, public virtue out of total obstrucionism projects its bullying intransigence onto the other guy.

As many commentators—including Obama himself—have pointed out, there is a danger in pumping up blatant fantasies and falsehoods for short-term (electoral) gain because people start to believe the horror stories and act upon them. Republicans might think it’s cool that nearly half their loyalists think Obama’s not a U.S. citizen and another quarter are ‘not sure’ because these frightened bunnies are more likely to pour into the voting booths later this year and give them a few more seats.

But that’s playing with fire. Encouraging people to blast the system as illegitimate as soon as they lose undermines our democracy, which is a lot more fragile than most of us suppose. Obama struck a brilliant note by walking into the lion’s den and showing how flimsy the teabagger/Republican discourse really is, and he showed some teeth (at last) in not letting them getting away with their absurdities.

However, I’m not holding my breath to see a repeat. I can’t imagine anyone at the Republican National Committee supposing that they won points with this public display of their bratty attitudes and intellectual puniness. If only we could have Question Time and see both sides slug it out British-style, our political discourse would be elevated by several levels of magnitude. To which end, I enthusiastically signed onto this: and invite you to do the same.

A less efficient military isn't always a bad thing

The 1993 ban on gay and lesbian service in the military is one of the stupidest tales in a very stupid pair of decades given that butch homos and uniformed lesbies have been part of every military force in history and always will be. ‘Don’t ask/Don’t tell/Don’t Pursue/Don’t Harass’ harmed people’s lives and fanned homophobia, and it worsened the situation for people trying to keep a low profile because it was always based on a lie—that if you were discreet, you’d be left alone.

In fact, the Clinton collapse on non-discrimination led to immediate hounding, snooping and entrapment designed to weed out gays—exactly what that hypocrite promised would not happen. I’m always amazed by the gay advocacy groups’ ability to forget what a disaster good ol’ Bill was when he actually had the power to affect gay and lesbian lives—as opposed to issuing warm boilerplate and smiling benignly over what ‘should’ theoretically be done by other people.

After Clinton came up with his disastrous, phony compromise, gay men and lesbians in the service experienced increased harassment, assaults, witchhunts (especially at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey CA—gays are famously adept at learning foreign languages) while their commanding officers were completely AWOL on their alleged duties to address racial and sexual harassment. I wonder if the detectives who missed Nidal Hasan, the wacko psychiatrist/gunman at Fort Hood, were too busy tracking down who was singing Broadway musical numbers to himself in the shower instead.

On the other hand, I can’t help applauding one aspect of this hateful and reactionary policy, which is that it caused the armed forces to shoot itself in the collective foot and weaken illegitimate U.S. enterprises like the conquest of Iraq and the torture of defenseless detainees, especially in the Arab world. Every time I read about the firing of hundreds of interpreters and translators as part of the antigay crusade, I say to myself, Too bad for them, but good for the eventual victims of the criminal machinery of which they too often form a part.

Buju Bye Bye (Reprise)

Tonight’s Grammy Awards may result in an award to Buju Banton in the Best Reggae Album category, and the dismay over his homicidally anti-gay lyrics (noted two posts below) has been dismissed by the Recording Academy, which gives out the awards, as irrelevant to the act of ‘honoring musical achievement regardless of politics’.

Oh yes, that familiar message: Tut, tut, now people, please don’t be dull and mix politics with capital-A Art.

But what if we were to do a thought experiment and change the let’s-shoot-and-then-set-fire-to-homosexuals lyrics by substituting another class of people to be on the receiving end?

Like Jews, for example. Or blacks. How far would a singer get who pumped up his dancehall listeners with calls to shoot Jews or burn dark-skinned people? I suspect the reaction might be characterized in a lot of ways but never as mere ‘politics’.

Nor would many people rush to such a performer’s defense in name of artistic freedom, which merely demonstrates that hateful incitement to violence against gay men remains acceptable in polite society while anti-Semitism and racism are not.

[P.S.] One of Buju’s esteemed ‘longtime collaborators’ listed on the Irish and Chin website (which also carries furious attacks on Banton’s critics under ‘Dear Sodomite or Sodomite sympathizer’) is Wyclef Jean, the Haitian musician who is raking in mountains of money to his modestly-named Wyclef Jean Foundation. Problem is, according to The Smoking Gun, the WJF ‘has a lackluster history of accounting for its finances and . . . has paid the performer and his business partner at least $410,000 for rent [and] production services’.

Great bunch of guys. Let’s dance (non-politically)!

Tony Blair's millions

While we have been distracted with the state of our sorry union, the Brits have been entertaining themselves with their Chilcot Inquiry into the origins of the Iraq war and Britain’s part in it.

That would be the war that has caused, so far, an estimated 1 million dead, produced 3 million refugees and created 5 million orphans, according to one account based on government statistics.

But who’s counting?

Tony Blair made his cameo appearance Thursday, sneaking in a side door to avoid people eager to shout ‘War criminal!’ at him.

There have been some interesting revelations in the official inquiry, such as how dissidents were browbeaten into silence or acquiescence, including Lord Goldsmith, the British equivalent of our attorney-general, who for a while told Blair that invading Iraq to depose Saddam would be illegal for the obvious reason that Iraq did not pose a threat to Britain. But Goldsmith was bullied by the war party and buckled like most of his colleagues.

The commission also learned that:

-British intelligence knew Iraq had disassembled its chemical weapons, and

-Blair and Bush had a secret deal (‘signed in blood’, in the words of one) to remove Saddam a year before the invasion and then looked for ways to justify it.

None of which is surprising, and in fact the testimony from senior diplomats and officials had the smell of scapegoating by many of those involved, which is what you’d expect after a debacle on this scale—finger-pointing at the other guy. Britain’s former ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, claimed Blair’s bear-hug with Bush left officials scrabbling to find a ‘smoking gun’ to justify going to war, which Meyer himself promptly did.

Blair deftly parried all the revelations and kept out of the feeble panel members’ grasp throughout his six-hour appearance, an indication of how difficult it is for the political establishment to indict the architect of a failed policy with which it is deeply complicit.

Meanwhile, Blair, untroubled by regret for the destruction he has caused, used the platform to talk up another great idea—going to war with Iran next.

But despite his narrow escape, Blair is being steadily unmasked, revealed drip by drip as a conniving liar determined to do George Bush’s bidding despite massive domestic opposition, even while Britain got little in return.

It’s doubly tragic for Britons that the chauvinistic and brutal episode based on fear-mongering and lies was conducted under a Labour government, leaving decent-minded people nowhere to turn for an alternative. As one commentator put it, ‘We’re all conservatives now’.

"Buju Bye Bye!"

Buju Banton is a singer who’s achievements include a dancehall hit called ‘Boom Bye Bye’, which has lyrics like:

‘Boom bye bye
Inna batty boy head. . .

‘Guy come near we
Then his skin must peel
Burn him up bad like an old tire wheel’

In case you’re fuzzy on your Jamaican patois, Banton is saying that homosexuals should be shot in the head and set on fire.

I wonder what dances go with that.

But now Banton’s been arrested in Florida for trying to do a big cocaine deal. I can’t remember when I was more pleased over a piece of police work. Maybe a couple of decades in prison will give him a new perspective on the horrors of anal intercourse.

Needed: An Offense and a Defense

I don’t see any sign that Be Reasonable/Play Nice approach deployed by the president last night is going to turn the tide for more than a couple of news cycles. Obama’s ratings bump (among people who tuned in to hear him) was a relief and showed that people haven’t completely lost their minds to Fox and CNN. But the relentlessness of the war party shouldn’t be dampened by this modest setback, and they’re certainly not distracted by any silly old facts.

Masschusetts stimulated Obama’s faith in banking reform, and we heard another stern-daddy lecture on it in the State of the Union. If the legislation doesn’t ‘meet the test of real reform’, the president intoned, ‘I will send it back until we get it right’. [repeat] ‘We’ve got to get it right’.

Yes, that should happen, my cousin Jessica should lay off the vodka gimlets, and the lion should lie down with the lamb. But saying it twice doesn’t make it twice as likely to happen. Now that the Supreme Court has authorized the banks to use their unlimited cash [including ours] to buy up the last dozen remnant independent-minded fools wandering around Congress, how exactly is that worthy sentiment going to translate into anything?

For me, what’s missing in the Obama worldview is any sense that there are real differences of interest and intention among the opposing camps. He’s incapable of a Rooseveltian or Kennedyesque confrontation with the selfish, ruthless ruling elite that both of them knew so well because they were born into it.

Obama, by contrast, looks like a smart guy who’s convinced that the system is basically benign because it permitted him to come from nowhere and get where he is, and on his own merits, too. But within that alluring Weltanschauung is a dangerous trap.

The same system that made Obama president was staggering into a serious morass of its own making after the vast disaster of the Bush years and, I would argue, three largely uninterrupted decades of Reaganism. What better vehicle for a tactical retreat than someone who looks and sounds completely different—but perhaps really isn’t?

Obama’s bio reveals a guy who doesn’t show his cards but in the end is rather drawn to the conservative side of the fence. He stands for something more than Bill Clinton ever did, and he shouldn’t be counted out for flubbing Year One. But the forces out there trying to jam our society into a dangerously fanatical and narrow-minded mold are not to be underestimated either. That’s something we down on the ground can see and sense much better than the remote figures at the top.

WRONG

Why doesn’t Obama just publicly suck Joe Wilson’s dick and get it over with?

Obama’s imminent announcement of a freeze on non-defense, non-security spending emboldens the crazy teabagger narrative that we’re in trouble because the government takes care of people’s health and well-being, not because George Bush put us in hock so he could give away trillions to rich people. It’s exactly the narrative the Republicans want to push, and now they have the president of the opposition signing onto it—for which they will pillory him mercilessly as a Johnny-come-lately.

The last time our president-of-record addressed a joint session of Congress, South Carolina solon Joe Wilson of the unrepetent Confederacy famously broke protocol and called him a liar from the grandstands. If the current leaders in our increasingly polarized nation really believed their own rhetoric about respecting our country and its democratic systems, this would have been a watershed event.

Obama and his governing party could have saddled the Republican/teabagger crowd with the obvious fact that they’re bullies. We could still today be hearing about the difference between using violence and brute force to get one’s way and the Founding Fathers’ careful and ultimately successful strategy for making a revolution and not killing each other afterward.

We could have been hearing an alternative point of view since then, an indictment of the me-me-me party for its fanatical determination to permit nothing to occur that might remotely aid the populace and block the continued absorption of all national wealth by the plutocracy.

Instead, Obama shows every sign of determination to give away the store, the one we mobilized after eight nightmarish years of W-ism to deliver to him. We look to him for a distinct vision of the state, our current problems, the role of government, and what do we get? Recycled ideas from the people we threw out who are treated with deference while we’re chastized for making unreasonable demands.

Wilson should have been the poster boy for everything that’s wrong with the nasty, brutish opposition, and instead his shark attack was passed over as childish bad manners. So now there’s blood in the water—why not redouble the attack tonight?