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How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Obama
by Michael Maiello 8/3/2012 - 3:16 pm
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What a four years it's been. Back in 2008, after two terms of George W. Bush, I felt overtaken by an impulse to want to upend the entire system and to undo the wrongs of the Aught decade. Hillary Clinton seemed to me to be the pugilist needed to egt the job done but when it became clear that she would not be selected, I learned to start liking Obama. Clinton apparently came to the same conclusion and she has been one of the most effective members of her administration.
Still, I went kicking and screaming. Obama and his campaign warned those of us on the left of mainstream not to expect too, too much. While it's easy to fool yourself into thinking of those warnings as just words, it's probably the reality that Obama's moderation is genuine.
Which, of course, makes it so frustrating to seem him smeared as some sort of American Che Guevara.
I know I've said this before, but it seems to me that Obama's take on America is that it needs to be repaired, not rebuilt from the ground up. If you're me, you kind of suspect that the car is totaled and that any cosmetic work you do to the bent frame is not going to last. He doesn't see it that way.
Reasonable people can disagree.
I do think that he's doing more good than harm. There are a few things I disagreed with him about that I still disagree with him about. They mostly have to do with health care and homeland security. On health care, I'll concede that my desires might have been impractical. On homeland security, I think a lighter touch is now in order, but I understand why no president will take the risk.
Now, here are some things I've decided I was wrong about over the course of Obama's first term:
I didn't support the auto bailouts because to me, an auto company CEO is no better than a Wall Street CEO. But, looking back I realize that Obama's administration designed the auto bailouts while the Wall Street bailouts were initiated by Bush. Had Obama's auto solution been applied to Wall Street, fewer bank executives would have kept their cushy jobs. Though I still think it's a travesty that GM's former CEO got his golden parachute on the way out, the auto bailouts did preserve jobs, as promised and the executives were not so unjustly enriched as I feared (most of them were booted).
Libya. Never thought I'd say that, but my Iraq/Afghanistan war aversion got the best of me. Obama built a coalition and executed very well. In the end, it served justice. I'll be more humble in my critiques of his decisions in Syria, for sure.
Joe Biden. I didn't like him at first. He's won me over.
Drone operations. I'd put this as "in progress." I am coming around to the idea that they beat the alternatives for a lot of obvious reasons.
Those are all pretty big things. And, of course, there's a lot that I think that Obama has done right (killing bin Laden, cutting the payroll tax, making a go of green energy research...)
He's a smart guy, but he's going to have to compromise with some hard headed people on the other side if he gets his second term. I notice that he has so far resisted calls from centrist commentators to make something like Simpson-Bowles the centerpiece of his re-election campaign. I take that as a positive sign. No matter who wins the election I suspect it will be on all of us to immediately raise awareness about the long-term flaws of that plan and why it must be stopped.
Maybe Obama will even have our backs on that.
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In the News
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Somali Militants Live-Tweet Their Deadly Attack on U.N....
By Colum Lynch, Turtle Bay @ ForeignPolicy.com, June 19, 2013
The Somali militant movement al-Shabab today launched a deadly strike against a U.N. humanitarian compound in Mogadishu that killed one international staffer, three contractors, four Somali security guards, and an unknown number of Somali civilians.
Then the group gloated about it in a creepy series of Twitter posts.
The tweets seemed calculated to taunt the new U.N. representative, Nicholas Kay, who opened a political office in Mogadishu this month. "So Nicholas Kay, are you still planning to settle down in Mogadishu by the end of the month?" read...
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FBI admits to using surveillance drones over US soil
By Dan Roberts in Washington, guardian.co.uk, 16 June, 2013
[....] Speaking in a hearing mainly about telephone data collection, the bureau's director, Robert Mueller, said it used drones to aid its investigations in a "very, very minimal way, very seldom".
However, the potential for growing drone use either in the US, or involving US citizens abroad, is an increasingly charged issue in Congress, and the FBI acknowleged there may need to be legal restrictions placed on their use to protect privacy.
"It is still in nascent stages but it is worthy of debate and legislation down the road," said Mueller, in response to questions from Hawaii senator Mazie Hirono.
Hirono said: "I think this is a...
Read the article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/19/fbi-drones-domestic-surveillance -
We are losing the art of writing and of conversation
OK, admittedly this is not "news", but I couldn't resist posting this. I didn't feel that I had anything to add to it, so I've added it to "In the News". I apologize if that crosses a line…
Read the article at http://xkcd.com/1227/ -
Egypt tourism minister protests over Islamist governor
Reuters, June 19, 2013
CAIRO - Egypt's tourism minister tendered his resignation on Tuesday over President Mohamed Mursi's decision to appoint as governor of Luxor a member of a hardline Islamist group blamed for slaughtering 58 tourists there in 1997.
Prime Minister Hisham Kandil did not accept the resignation of Tourism Minister Hisham Zaazou, who remains in the post for now. However, the move pointed to a split in government over an appointment that one critic called "the last nail in the coffin" of the tourism industry.
Mursi appointed Adel Mohamed al-Khayat, a member of al-Gamaa al-Islamiya, as Luxor governor this week, a move seen as a sign of a deepening political alliance between the once-armed group and the...
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I've always thought that a second term President Obama, while keeping basic traits and standards in place, will present a much more progressive and 'forceful' persona.
He's had the up close and personal experiences of the trials endured in attempting to forge a bi-partisan, 'can't we all just get along' arena, as well as living the reality of being the POTUS with all the bells and whistles. Thus, in his second term, IMO, without another election looming - while we may be in for a bumpy ride, his command will no doubt be somewhat different, but no doubt stronger and more confidant than his 'maiden journey'.
Here's hoping! Though I think you're right to assume that lessons were learned and that four years in that occupation does change a person.
I respect your objection and stipulate that I've been hitting the Hitchens pretty hard lately.
Well, he managed the Libyan war well, but the first Bush managed Desert Storm well. They were both immoral wars.
I liked him before he slashed assistance to the poor, signed the bill authorizing detention without trial, went to war in Libya, and failed to see that it was time to get out of Afghanistan. I think the only reason I'll be voting for him is to avoid an invasion of Iran.
Before he slashed assistance for the poor... Like when he got the Tea Party caucus to agree to extend unemployment benefits in the Bush tax cut deal in late 2010, or passed health care reform that put many millions of poor people otherwise lacking coverage into our health care system?
And while I didn't support the first Iraq War at the time, I was wrong. It was Iraq's invasion of Kuwait that was immoral or illegal, not expelling Iraq. Ironically in light of your condemnation of the Libya intervention, the only two nations in the Arab League to oppose the UN resolution calling for the withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait? Iraq itself, and Libya.
For details on Obama's screwing of the poor, see
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/sep2011/obam-s20.shtml
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/15/obamas_37_trillion_budget_calls_for
I'm sorry that you changed your mind about Desert Storm. I would think the deaths of some 600,000 Iraqis, mainly children, from disease and starvation in 1991-2002 would have strengthened your opposition to it. One of the consequences of H.W. Bush's war is W. Bush's later war in Iraq.
In talking about throwing Iraq out of Kuwait, I was not speaking to the entirety of the permanent sanctions campaign. I do not think throwing Iraq out of its indefensible (you aren't defending it yet) invasion entails advocating for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.
And no, the first Iraq War did not "cause" the latter in any meaningful sense. That one is solely a choice of W. and Cheney. The major justifications (all false) had to do with WMD and 9/11. That's like saying the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s caused the second Iraq War.
Blaming H.W. Bush for the 10 years after his presidency is like blaming Clinton for W's changes to welfare reform or the final mortgage meltdown.
At the same time, that containment - 10 years of benign overflights vs. 10 years of unproductive occupation - was a great success. We contained Yugoslavia without any meaningful military attack, and eventually Milosevic was thrown out - a detail W. downplayed even though it happened under him, because it undercut his rush to war.
Even though the "incubator babies" was made up, Hussein did invade Kuwait without resolving any historical land claims, and it was all about grabbing oil to pay for Iran-Iraq losses (which caused Gulf War I, which caused Gulf War II, right?)
And I've always been skeptical about these statistics of 600,000 deaths or whatever, and they always seem to ignore the part that Hussein - the guy who rather obviously lost the war - played in not cooperating or sneaking money out of oil-for-food.
Re: the cuts to social programs, Obama is a deficit scold and has played into Republican hands on many occasions. Sad to watch.
Articleman, the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths were a direct consequence of the war. I don't think a policy which killed so many children should be called "a great success." Bush is to blame because he destroyed the country and developed the policy which his successor continued. 600,000 is a conservative estimate. Saddam is to blame for stealing money from the oil for food program, but that doesn't absolve the United States of its responsibility.
I myself doubt we would have invaded Iraq if we hadn't already fought a war there, but I guess I can't prove there would not have been an Iraqi Freedom without a Desert Storm.
H.W. Bush could have gone into Baghdad instead of ending the war with overflights and sanctions - how many would that have killed? What were his actual options?
The sanctions were to keep Hussein from reconstituting WMDs. The 2003 inspectors didn't actually acquit Hussein of ambitions - they pointed out that sanctions worked.
And Hussein didn't seem to lack money for new palaces even as children were supposedly dying.
Anyway, here's an article on the bullshit of statistics in the hands of the wrong people, and the politics of dying children. No, "600,000" is not a conservative estimate. It's a largely made up figure, one that Hussein was happy to pump up for international support. UNICEF comes up with 420,000 and bases that on halted improvements in child mortality, but blames part of that reverse solely on Hussein's anti-Kurd policies in the north, and part on the switch from healthier breast feeding to bottle feeding. While post-1997 all of this extra mortality should have been fixed with $18 billion per year of oil-for-food program money. How should H.W. Bush have predicted all of this?
http://reason.com/archives/2002/03/01/the-politics-of-dead-children
Okay, maybe the Americans didn't kill 600,000, but UNICEF says there would have been half a million fewer child deaths if the pre-war decline had continued, and they attribute part of the toll to the war and the sanctions.
http://www.unicef.org/newsline/99pr29.htm
They also say that mortality of children under five was more than twice as high in 1998 than in 1990.
http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1999/08/cmrirq.html
If Garfield's lower figures are right( he isn't more authoritative than UNICEF) than under the best case scenario the Americans are directly responsible for anywhere between tens of thousands to a couple hundred thousand child deaths. I hope he's right, but I'd still call it a crime. Saddam is also to blame for stealing from the oil for food program, but the Americans and the Security Council remain answerable for the bombing and the sanctions.
One of Bush's options was to not fight the war, thereby saving many, many lives. (Bush shot down every attempt at a diplomatic solution).Another option was to fight the war without bombing Iraq's water pumping and purification systems and electric power grid. As Michael Walzer said, this was an attack on civilian society in which it was the military effects that were "collateral".
I myself don't think it was worth killing all those kids to keep Saddam from reconstituting WMDs. This business of killing kids to prevent possible killing(which might have claimed fewer lives even if it happened) is dubious.
It was a careless comment she much regretted making.
Uh, the point of worrying abut a WMD released over say Tel Aviv or Istanbul is it could wipe out a million people.
Scud missiles hitting Israel in Gulf War I could have been biochemically weaponized with devastating effects if a powerful agent had been available.
We can discuss what are proper targets in war, no problem - it's a difficult quandary - many wars are won by discomfiting the population, not the leadership. Some are won via military targets only, but there aren't that many pure wars despite our druthers. 5 million people died in the war in Congo, and the rape atrocities and brutality to children continues, but that's not on our weather map - the war in Iraq still is.
No, your response is bullshit.
Hussein had a WMD program in Gulf War I, and he had Scud missiles that reached Israel that he used. No "could" there.
He did launch major wars against 2 neighbors, Iran and Iraq - no "could" there.
He did use chemical weapons on his own people (Kurds) before GWI, and used various military measures to put down Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south afterwards. No "could" there.
Since we didn't have an occupying force after GWI, we had to work with indications and inspections where allowed to make sure the weapons program wasn't reconstituted, and Hussein did throw out inspectors, as he refused to work with an oil-for-food program for several years.
The nuclear development was always overstated. He did maintain interest in developing biochemical weapons, but those efforts were largely thwarted, as inspectors later showed.
luv ya too - how about go stuff your head in a sewer pipe while I'm looking up Wiki? Seems like a fair trade - you deal in shit, I deal in knowledge.
He would have needed nuclear weapons to wipe out a million Israelis or Turks.
We're still in the area of possible deaths of children vs. actual deaths of children. I'm more concerned about the actual deaths. Anyway, deterrence probably would have prevented him from nuking Tel Aviv or Istanbul.
There are very few modern wars in which innocents don't die , which is a big reason to be antiwar.
When a country invades another, we're past "possible deaths". So now we're balancing, but sometimes self-defense doesn't calculate the enemy's losses first - in other words "tough shit for Iraq, should have invested in a different dictator". Yes, innocents suffer - c'est la vie
I keep coming across this callousness whenever I argue with supporters of a war--children die, but tough shit. If you want to make a moral case for a war, you need to show that the alternative is worse, and I don't think you've done that. Deaths in a nuking of Tel Aviv or Istanbul are in the "possible deaths" column. The "actual deaths" in the occupation of Kuwait numbered between one thousand and two thousand. Desert Storm and its aftermath killed hundreds of thousands, even if we don't count the second war. It wasn't self defense; it was a war of choice.
5 million people died in Congo, but few in the west noticed, because Sudan had better marketing, even the atrocities were smaller. Rape gangs still persist there. But Libya, then Syria are our focus (Ivory Coast went on at same time as Libya, but surprise, without oil we couldn't muster action)
Yes, some kids died in Iraq. The numbers are highly politicized - Hussein exaggerated for UN leverage, Democrats exaggerate to bash Bush, and Bush was oblivious. As I noted, the numbers were much smaller than the "conservative" values often parroted.
But yes, when Afghanistan harbors bin Laden and the US retaliates, innocent people get hurt. Civilians died in Germany in much higher numbers, and so on - we try to clean up our rules of engagement, but it takes time.
I'm willing to let Peracles comments stand, but will say that the toll of death and suffering in Iraq(and Kuwait, remember the expulsion of the Palestinians from there) is more than I think a humane person can accept, especially when a diplomatic solution may have been possible.
There wasn't an attempt at diplomacy before Desert Storm. Bush said Iraqi withdrawal had to be completely unconditional. Serious proposals were floated by Iraq, Iran, and King Hussein, and Bush ignored them all.
General Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war?
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: No, I don't think I do, sir, no.
General Jack D. Ripper: He said war was too important to be left to the generals
MEIN Fuhrer
I CAN WALK !!!
*hugs*
I don't think the economy is improving. There's a good chance this stagnation will sink into a repression or even a depression. So stop worrying? I think not.
It's not Obama's fault. He didn't cause the harm. Some of that harm might even come from outside this country, a collapse of the European Union. I do agree that he's doing more good than harm. But that's not what I see as the important question. We're in a situation where we need more than a president that just does more good than harm. The question is, is he doing enough good to stop the harm from increasing? I think not.
Obama is just what I thought he would be. It seems he defines compromise as: Cease to resist an opponent or an unwelcome demand; surrender. Synonyms:surrender - give in - yield - submit - succumb
He's caused some of it. The situation was salvageable, but No Drama Obama lacks the fortitude to lead or act outside the parameters of what is conventional and expected by the people who run our society.
While I agree with you that he didn't seem to understand what was happening and what was necessary to fix it, it's perhaps worth pointing out that this disease has afflicted much of the developed world at this point. We all had the opportunity to learn from the Japanese experience, but the US, UK and EU are all stubbing their toes on the same obvious rock.
Yes, we're living through a Chamberlain-like generation of mediocrity and passive corruption. The West is dormant and decadent, and is gradually handing its democracies over to unaccountable corporate power, with the connivance of its bought and compromised political leaders. Obama is an intellectual casualty of the post-Cold War interregnum, an era of small dreams, fat bellies, flickering democratic commitment, and weak spirit. But my guess is that history is going to start getting exciting again.
Here Here ! Well said old man.
That some still believe it was immoral for the US, France, Britain, NATO, with approval of the UN Security Council, to assist the people of Libya in the overthrow of the unquestionably despotic, insane Colonel Moammar Qaddafi, accomplished in a matter of months and with no foreign occupation, makes one wonder if they would ever believe the UN, NATO and the US can act to assist a people in gaining freedom.
It seems hypocritical that those on the left and the right who would've let the Libyans twist in the wind, who criticized the action in freeing Libya of it's oppressive regime, who objected that Obama didn't wait after UN approval and with Qaddafi shelling Benghazi, for the do-nothing GOP Congress to develop a resolution and vote under the War Powers Act, or that Obama hasn't 'got out' of Afghanistan fast enough, are often the same ones who complain loudest about protection of their own freedoms. Such as detention without trial issues, gun rights, privacy rights or asserting Americans roaming the deserts of Yemen have some special immunity from being dealt with like other members of their terrorist organization.
"I deplore the disingenuous position that if our soldiers don't receive fire, it ain't an episode requiring. compliance with the War Powers Act. "
Republicans, and far too many Americans, also don't seem to care 'if our soldiers....receive fire' ,with or without action by Congress, they also don't care about the body count of US war dead, or the number of wounded US troops. As long as they aren't one of them. Obama has shown he does care. So do I.
I would suspect the 'citizens of Benghazi' care more about their freedom than you do, as many died fighting for it.
No argument on your assertion 'Qaddafi wasn't insane', I will grant you your personal conviction in the soundness of his mental health.
Obama has convinced me that American mainstream politics is a fairly hopeless affair in this era. I honestly can't think of a single American politician right now that that I respect or that I think has a clue. I'll probably vote, but I'm not going to waste a great deal of time debating the inanities and calculated emptiness of this campaign.
I don't think the insane corruption and amazing bipartisan conservatism of these end-of-history doldrums can last forever. Eventually we're going to get a genuine movement for revolutionary change and dynamic national revival. Obama and Romney are just zombies in the wasteland.
I really sympathize with you, Dan. Both of use share the belief that the current system cannot hold. Obama is part of that system. He spent his life joining it and has been rewarded. He doesn't want to upend it, Romney sure doesn't want to upend it and I can't imagine that anybody who has achieved the status and benefits of national office would ever risk major reforms in pursuit of something better for the broader population. Heck, the only system that would be an improvement would flat out distribute power, prestige and wealth away from the elites and towards everyone else. And we're asking the elites to do that?
What I think is that Obama will steer the sorry ship over fewer innocent victims that Romney will. And he might spruce it up a bit, while Romney will make the worst parts worse.
Maybe destor. But with our civilization crumbling around us, I'm in no mood to tick through a check list to measure which of the overlords is least egregious. Based on one's values, that judgment is an easy call. It's not worth a lot of talk.
I can't imagine that anybody who has achieved the status and benefits of national office would ever risk major reforms in pursuit of something better for the broader population.
I think Roosevelt did. But even if you are right, that just shows that the real theater of social change and progress is not the arena of mainstream party politics. If the national parties and power structures are institutionally incapable of addressing the most important challenges, then it is time to focus our limited energies elsewhere.
Art.
Not kidding.
Finally! I've got a voodoo doll in the form of the boa wearing destor23 in the ObamabotMat I created and I've been performing voodoo heebie jeebies, in order to finally balance your chi, thus convincing you to come to the side of light. This can also work when playing pool. Damn, thanks for telling me it finally worked.
Really though, nice.