It's Official

Actually, it's been official for a while now.

I Fucking Love This Obama Guy!

Was enjoying these pictures from UPI (??) of Obamz's first days in office. Those too eager to throw around accusations of contrarianism to pay attention to the nuances of my Obama position probably missed the part about my man crush that at this point trumps most of my hesitation about his centrism and appeasing (is there a better noun version of "appeasing"?). What a brilliant dude he is, wish I could find a video of the press conference in which he politely dismantled some objections to his appointments of Clinton-era folks. While it may be an overlapping skill set that drives both his ability to communicate complex position and his flair for motivational speaking, the latter always bored me, and I'm so glad we've arrived finally this week at the time when it will give way to the former. Former. Latter. maspuuuuto...

Also, how did I not know Mr. President is a southpaw?! FREAK!

Guest Post: Abandon All Hope by Marc Gold

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”


Let’s flash forward to morning of November 5.

Barack Obama takes the stage of a ballroom in a Chicago hotel. His young supporters cry on each other’s shoulders and wonder where they went wrong. A pile-driven economy, two endless wars, everything was on their side. How could something so certain, so logical slip away?

Upbeat despite the sleepless night, Obama tells the audience and those watching at home, not to give up hope. In his comforting baritone, he speaks of barriers shattered and the millions who voted for the first time. Change isn’t instantaneous, and we’ve taken the first step, a larger step than many imagined, he says. We must never give up the fight, especially not now, not when we came so close.

The liberal blogosphere echoes his calls to stand firm. Editorials encourage people not to let this loss get them down. With McCain in the White House, we must be as engaged as ever, they unanimously proclaim.

Let me preempt all this. If the Democrats lose, give up. It’s over. Cancel your subscription to Salon. Delete Dailykos or The Huffington Post from your bookmarks. It’s time to accept the facts.

You live in a country where the people want their government not only to tell you who you can marry but what you can do with your uterus. A country so firmly behind a bomb first, ask questions never foreign policy, that another impractical and immoral war is, no doubt, inevitable. A country where if you don’t have the cash for medical treatment, you’re left to die—unlike in other great world powers, such as Peru or Sri Lanka.

Already happy to have a government that listens to your phone calls and reads your emails, the people will likely put up little resistance when a warrant to search your body or your house is no longer required.

These are just the political realities of a McCain-Palin victory. Far worse, is how that victory reflects the ultimate triumph of ignorance over knowledge. Forget about the bridge to nowhere. The American electorate will have built a bridge out of the 21st Century, right over Ben Franklin’s house, pass the Renaissance, and directly into the heart of the Dark Ages. As far as I can tell, this was the last time in Western history knowledge was so distrusted, where expertise was so mocked, where faith reigned so totally over reason.

For the past eight years, we've kicked back and watched as Bush stuck his loafer on the truth's skinny throat. A bill which gave companies the right to pollute the air was called The Clean Skies Act and a bill which allowed the timber industry to decimate the remaining fraction of American forests, was called the Healthy Forest Initiative. Operation Iraqi Freedom was anything but that.

But with the election of McCain-Palin, the truth will receive the coup de grâce. We’ll have returned to an age that believes The Garden of Eden should be taught in schools as a likely alternative to The Origin of Species. To a backwards mindset that doesn’t accept global warming or believe in stem cell research. You don’t need to look much further than the continued promotion of abstinence only sex-ed to find the same sort of spit-in-the-face-of-all-evidence-and-logic that once demanded that the sun revolved around the Earth.

Yet in some ways with McCain-Palin, we’ll have entered a new phase in the utter debasement of reason. The man who was the staunchest supporter of an illegal and disastrous war, is chosen to be the most qualified to lead America abroad. An undergraduate degree from the University of Idaho is celebrated for its ordinariness while a law degree from Harvard is ridiculed. Once upon a time, being “elite” was considered a good thing. No longer. Now being mediocre is far more admirable.

This isn’t something you can fight. You can’t educate people who cheer ignorance. You can’t defeat irrationality with reason. Scream as loud as you want, but if someone has their fingers plugging their ears, they’re not listening. This is why it’s time to give up. I understand how counterintuitive this all sounds. Since we were kids, our parents, teachers, and Burgess Meredith have been telling us to never back down.

This is the type of thinking that keeps greyhounds running in eternal circles after a plastic bone.

There’s a time to quit. It’s not healthy to still think you’re going to play shortstop for the Yankees. If you’re 45 and shredding Allman Brothers songs in your parents’ garage, it’s time to forget about your record deal.

Sometimes it’s essential to let silly dreams die so you can move on to practical things. The election of McCain-Palin obviously wouldn’t equal the death of goodness. There’ll always be plenty of ways to help others on an individual level. But please, don’t waste any more time trying to convince someone in rural Ohio why it’d be better to raise taxes on rich people and lower them on poor people. Or why killing moderate Muslim civilians by the thousands might backfire one day. Forget it. You’ve passed through the gates of the Inferno. It’s no use pretending that you’ve gone someplace cool that has universal healthcare. You don’t live in Scandinavia. Accept it and stop thinking about a country that has stopped thinking about anything at all.

Busy......

Shit's hectic right now trying to wrap this office, so can't do much posting next couple days. I did find 10 minutes to photoshop this though.

Forthcoming -- once we've made the transition from blog to magazine style or whatever the fuck you call it -- will be my piece about how all this antiobamism is 1) not really about Obama who seems like a halfway decent guy and 2) not at all about skeletor mccain whose death would save many american lives. I will likely vote for Obama. This shit is mostly about so called progressives being snobs about their superiority to regular folks who are conservatives when progressives clearly fall for the same stupid tricks, like the ones that convinced them Obama was a liberal. Anyway it'll be one of those longer pieces, so look out for it and please comment and be mean to me and stuff. I can take it and the world needs it.

Obama in Red States

I'm very happy we're fighting for red states instead of simply focusing on battleground states. Gobama in red territory. I'd rather Obama didn't move right to court those voters, but it's refreshing to see him fighting over there.

ladies and gentlemen, Barack W. Obama

People have long accused me of wanting always to be right. In fairness, I used to use rhetoric the way, say, a lawyer might to muddy an argument and keep it moving in order to tire the other person involved. I have friends -- one in particular -- who still does this, so I'm pretty sensitive to it because it reminds me what I douche I can be. But these days when I hear this accusation about wanting above all to be right, I have to laugh it off or choke a motherfucker.

This came up a lot in the primary. Hillary was my girl in California but only because the other choice was Obama. Before them I liked Edwards sort of and really just missed Wes Clark and Al Gore. But people accused me of choosing Hillary to be a contrarian and being blind to anything else once I made that decision. Actually if I remember correctly I was calling out her campaign for being a piece of shit while praising Obama's. Ultimately though what matters to me is looking at all the facts and not working backwards from a choice of whom to support. I tried my ass off to have a discussion in which no party involved was secretly shilling for a candidate. A discussion in which we explored all there was to like and all there was to dislike about each candidate. But it seemed every criticism of Hill was met with "but Obama...." and vice versa. Mind you these are people above the age of 25 mostly and very well educated and funded. The upside is that I was contemplating getting involved in politics in more than a passing way, and I was involved in a moderate rich kid group that had the audacity to call themselves progressive. When confronted with the Obama vs. Edwards comparison one of the group leaders said, instead of engaging in anything resembling mature discourse "sorry. your guy lost." Ah, so it's not about progressive politics. It's about winning and losing. Ladies and gentlemen, the future (or lack thereof) of the progressive movement in America. On doit pratiquer la marseillaise!

Back to right and wrong. As lately Obama has proven himself to be the moderate I feared he was, I have been sharing this with those around me. In one IM I wrote "thanks for this" to a very liberal Obama supporter (I know its an oxymoron, but that's the point!) with a link to a piece about FISA, guns and faith-based garbage. The response was "how is this my fault?" (you only voted for the guy when there was far more evidence that he'd move right than left). Then there was some exchange about how I'm happy to be right about this. So... basically people are suggesting that to me the value of discovering my fears about Obama were right outweighs that of not having a jackass in the White House continuing to cater to DANGEROUS, intolerant terrorists in the faith-based everything community (not to mention the domestic spying and guns etc).

Wow. Honestly? That really hurts my feelings. I don't have anything clever to say. I can't be dismissive or condescending. It genuinely HURTS that someone would think I would behave like the whiny kids I know who play with the livelihoods of poor Americans so they can get some loose hippy pumpum at an Obama rally.

Remember, this whole Obama thing started as a faith-based movement. People had faith that he was a progressive. I didn't -based on overwhelming evidence, but faith ain't about evidence now is it? What scared me was that the type of thinking and the brilliant neocons ability to manipulate had worked so well and now the left was learning to use it. I was invited along for the ride by a couple lawyers, one of whom cited this scary speech that told me everything I needed to know about what would happen (and now has) when Obama secured the nom. Essentially they were saying "we've figured out how to use their strategy for our side. Come along...." Like them, Obama was trained (at Harvard no less) to decide what he wants to make a jury believe and work backwards filling in the evidence/rhetoric etc. as he goes so it seemed like the stage was set. The leader might change, but dangerous thinking would continue to rule the country. Dangerous in that there was no thought put into the thinking.

I don't think you need to pander to win. I think you need to look like a leader. Basically you need to man up, inject a little bit of the Kanye juice and i think you need to have the balls actually to be a progressive and convince people you're trying to help them no matter what the other side tries to do to cloud things up. The lesson to be taken from the Bush years is not "anything to win" but rather, if you state your positions confidently and stick by them despite the other sides attacks whether baseless like those against say slick Willy in the 90s or fair like those against Bush this century people will stick by your side. They want to be led and they want to be led by a leader, not a panderer. It's NOT about right and wrong for people. It's about who you want to follow in to battle. I think if Wes Clark were running he'd still say what he did about mccain and i think he'd still refuse to retract it AND MOST IMPORTANT HE'D HAVE THE RESUME TO BACK IT UP. Obama has no resume.

Obama may yet win in the fall but if he does and this was the way he did it, well it doesn't bode well for future election strategy. People are simple and they tend to think like "he won that way so that's the only way to win" when Obama likely could win in a number of ways including those that involve, say, getting health care for people who don't know better than to opt out of his current plan and keeping church and state separate. But he's chosen another path.

You are you. Do what you want. But I believe it is my responsibility not to encourage this type of politics. If Obama doesn't change his tune, I will write in someone who I think represents the best chances not simply for some approximation of my progressive goals to be achieved here in USA, but rather a path by which we can change our approach to politics in this country and bring about the change so many believed Obama would bring when he gave that convincing argument - I am about change because I say so.

Please comment! Give me shit! Start a dialogue! If you email directly in response, I will post your email (though I'll remove your name).

I love me some Wes Clark!

Why can't I vote for this guy in the fall? While handsome moderate Obama pats McCain and Petraeus on the back someone is at least taking a nuanced but firm position on John McCain who wants to send kids to die for the chance to get an education he's voted to spend less on.

Thanks Wes! Maybe I'll write you in.

I Say "Shit Is" You Say "Rad" - "Shit Is" "Rad" "Shit Is" "Rad"

I don't have time to write all I have to say about this piece, suffice to say it gives us a lot to think about, especially the last paragraph. Please share your thoughts and I'll try to cut out a chunk of time to give it the response it deserves.

You don't say....

Wait a minute, Obama's actually a centrist moving ever so steadily to the right? I never suspected that!

stealing a bit from bill maher...
new rule: if you wholly support obama and have from day one (and aren't like me just forced to vote for him because the other option is skeletor) you are not allowed to call yourself a progressive. he's not, neither are you. i'm not saying being a progressive is better than being a centrist. this isn't a question of whose politics are more right or better for the country, the world, etc. it's just that you are not allowed wildly to label him whatever makes you sleep better just because you liked the guy personally and physically more than all the real progressives who in the end couldn't compete with him.

Also hilarious is how I keep hearing "he's just doing this until the election." As if on November 5th he'll swing wildly left.... Don't forget kids, he's got to start his 2012 campaign that day. We know Obama's priority lies in campaigning and not legislating/leading etc -- he stopped going to work to campaign for 2008 after all.

By the way this is usually the moment when the obamabots would respond with "but hillary...." Too bad her Mark-Penn-hiring ass is gone so now you have come up with a response having to do with your guys politics. Please convince me not to be ashamed of voting for him come fall. Unlike most people I've come across who stick to their guns no matter what new information comes to light, I am quite open to being convinced my positions need re-examination.

Now do you believe me when I say I'm just campaigning for a bit of honesty and not a particular candidate?