No Exaggeration
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Atrios may be reading secret e-mails from Fox News containing Protocols of the Elders of Obama that I haven’t seen — oops, I shouldn’t have made a joking reference to that noxious forgery, because by so doing I have played into the hands of anti-Semites — but I haven’t come across any right-wing hits on Obama that feature an American flag burning in the White House fireplace and a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the wall. ~Gary Kamiya
That’s true. You’d have to rely on Larry Johnson to come up with something like that. But the flag in the fireplace isn’t much of an exaggeration at all of various false charges that Obama has no respect for the flag or the Pledge of Allegiance or what-have-you. The hubbub over Obama’s “endorsement” by Hamas as some kind of “proof” that he was friendly to Hamas or bad for Israel and the basic assumption shared by many Republicans that leaving Iraq is “surrender” to Al Qaeda (or something like that) aren’t exaggerated very much by the picture of Bin Laden. Considering how much trouble that Hamas “endorsement” caused Obama, I was amazed to see Christopher Beam finish his piece in Slate with these words:
And, no, Obama’s fist bump was not a secret show of solidarity to Hezbollah. It’s really a secret show of solidarity to Hamas. Just kidding!
Yes, laugh all the way to McCain’s inauguration!
Of course, it will take some enterprising chain e-mailer about five seconds to remove that last sentence and cite it as more “proof” of Obama’s abiding love of Hamas. Anyone who has any familiarity with these chain e-mails knows that they are ripping Obama’s own words from The Audacity of Hope out of context to ”prove” that he has some higher loyalty to Muslims, and this is being credulously circulated around all the time. Sometimes critics will include the context and then ignore the significance of what it means when he wrote, “I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.” Of course, he was writing here about American citizens who are Muslims, and he is talking about standing with them in the event that there are attempts to curtail their civil liberties. Would that this supposedly ardent civil libertarian Obama had been voting to support a filibuster of the FISA legislation!
It amazes me that we have just come out of an era in which roughly half the population was at one time certain that Saddam Hussein not only had operational ties to Al Qaeda (false) but was responsible for 9/11 (some embarrassingly large number of people still believe this), and yet we still get these harangues from Kamiya and The Los Angeles Times about how harmless and unimportant misinformation is. ”People aren’t that stupid!” they declare. They’re not stupid, but they can be ignorant, and that ignorance can be exploited, just as the Bush administration did in its arguments concerning Iraq. When national polls are finding that nearly 40% of the public believes Obama went to a religious madrassa (madrassa itself ultimately just means “school”) and about one out of eight people think he is a Muslim, you have to be strangely optimistic that this kind of misinformation won’t spread any more than it already has.
I intend for this to be my last post commenting on this cover image matter, because one of the most damaging things that the image and controversy about it have done is to distract almost entirely from recent things related to The New Yorker that aren’t phenomenally stupid. These would be the enormously important reports derived from Jane Mayer’s book on the torture and detention regime and, less importantly, also overshadowed Ryan Lizza’s interesting investigation into Obama’s Chicago political past. The former is obviously of great importance to debates on national security, treatment of detainees and most of all to understanding what crimes were committed by members of the government. The other has some notable points, the most important of which was this concluding one:
Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them.
While I have tended to put it more harshly than this, this is what I have been arguing for some time now. Obama is not interested in challening the status quo in any fundamental ways, and he has no interest in confronting powerful interests and lobbies. This is why the people who are most critical of him because of his alleged “weakness” on Israel, antiterrorism or national security have been entirely wrong about him, while those who keep hoping that his hawkish gestures are only temporary are being taken for a ride. The closer he gets to being elected, the more he will accommodate the Bush era status quo in all these areas. Those who are basically satisfied with the foreign and national security policies of the last eight years can feel very comfortable knowing that they have two candidates who will reliably line up with them on almost everything.
Filed under: politics
I wouldn’t much argue with the notion that Obama doesn’t want to rock any boats. It’s not exactly a secret, though, is it? That’s his whole message in a nutshell – he’s a centrist who doesn’t want to “fight” for some radical new order, but wants to bring an end to fighting. He’s sick of all the fighting, and he wants people to get along, within existing institutions, and change them gradually and intelligently. Of course, that’s precisely why people think he’s a secret muslim – they assume that his plan is to get inside the machine, and then work to destroy it according to some unvoiced agenda known only by those who know the secret handshake. That’s the cartoon in nutshell – Obama and his wife secretly celebrating their “con” of the public in the oval office. What I guess I don’t understand is why you seem to think that Obama’s “change” message is supposed to mean some kind of radical agenda, and then finding out that it doesn’t, thinking he’s betrayed his promises. Those aren’t the promises he’s made, explicit or implied.
What I guess I don’t understand is why you seem to think that Obama’s “change†message is supposed to mean some kind of radical agenda, and then finding out that it doesn’t, thinking he’s betrayed his promises.
It should be obvious that Mr. Larison doesn’t think in this way.
Thanks, Ted. Indeed, I don’t think any such thing. I think he has betrayed explicit promises that *he* made to his supporters over the months, particular re: the FISA bill, but you’ve already made clear that you couldn’t care less about that. I just find it amusing that the “change” candidate is basically a candidate who generally embraces the status quo. That confirms my longest-held assumption that the “change” rhetoric was a lot of nonsense. It need not be a radical agenda, but it could at least represent some meaningful break with the way things are. It isn’t. If you find that appealing, be my guest.
Is Obama waffling? Or is he simply compromising ahead of time? It’s not usually in a candidate’s best interests to compromise, since the majority of high-likelihood voters usually have firm directions in which they’d like to see the country taken. But no less a liberal than Gail Collins noted last week in the New York Times that Obama’s been talking about bipartisanship, compromise, a new way of doing business for over a year now… the problem with the left, I think, is that THEY (not necessarily the right, as Conrad suggests) are the ones who think he is playing the American people: talk of compromise, change, etc., but once he gets in office he’ll be a reliable ultra-liberal in fitting with the pointless National Journal ranking. (I wrote about it here.)
Ultimately, he IS a politician… ever wonder why the Gingrich-era right ultimately failed to make meaningful change in the way Washington works? I’d suggest it’s because, at their core, they had their eyes set on Washington all along. If, however, a true anti-establishmentarian like Ron Paul were elected, you might see some seismic change. Which is precisely why he was seen (and is still seen) by GOP functionaries as so dangerous.
“I just find it amusing that the “change†candidate is basically a candidate who generally embraces the status quo. That confirms my longest-held assumption that the “change†rhetoric was a lot of nonsense. It need not be a radical agenda, but it could at least represent some meaningful break with the way things are. It isn’t. If you find that appealing, be my guest.”
This simply makes no sense, given that the country has already gone through a radical change over the last eight years at the hands of a radical incompetent who has wrecked havoc throughout both our country and the world. “Change” in this context means a rejection of Bush’s radicalism and incompetance, and the re-establishment of sane, prudent, sensible and non-radical modes of political discourse and policy. Bush rejected the idea of coming to a sensible compromise on anything, always pursuing instead a radical agenda of power-grabbing and war-mongering. Obama rejects that, and wishes to govern by a sane and sensible approach that tries to find a middle path that balances the conflicting needs and policies of the country, rejecting radicalism but embracing compromise. WHile Bush rejects reality and tries to impose his own vision onto everything around him, Obama accepts reality and tries to deal with it the best he can. In the current circumstance, that did indeed mean accepting that FISA was the best compromise he, as a sitting senator among 100, could get. It’s certainly not the best compromise he, as a sitting President, would be able to get.
The problem with your analysis of Obama is that it shows the same inflexibility that has plagued so many on the right of late, including Bush. You assume that whatever compromise Obama accepts now shows what he will specifically do as President. You ignore that he does what he thinks is the best he can do under any given circumstance, which means what he actually does will itself change, as his circumstance change. Being President is different than being a senator running for President. What you should notice about your own views is that they are actually nostaligc for a dictator of the type Bush has aspired to be, in that you seem to want an inflexible leader who will try to impose his will on the country. You have a different agenda you want imposed, but the method is the same as Bush’s – a leader who will adopt a radical position of change from the status quo, and who will impose this change by force of will, personality, and uncompromising purity of purpose. That’s Bush with paleocon wings, or Ron Paul with balls. What it is not is conservative, taking into account the reality of the way things are, which you reject with a sneer as “the status quo”. So it makes sense that you reject Obama, who wants to respect the realities of the way things are, and change the specifics of policy sanely and sensibly, to the degree that it can be done at all.
I can understand your love of Ron Paul. I sympathize with some of his views also, but his path has not a prayer of succeeding in the slightest. Obama’s does. Ron Paul is the stary-eyed idealist who thinks the perfect world can be dreamed up in one’s head, and then re-created on earth by osmosis. Politics simply doesn’t work that way. Obama understands politics in a way the Ron Paul never will, and that exceeds even our own grasp of things. He has a genius for organization, it would appear, and seems to be doing pretty well. So yes, he does represent a change from the Bush way of doing things. Bush would never accept a compromise on FISA, but Obama will. Which means he will continue to accept the best deal he can get. Which means the deal itself will change as he can change the circumstances. Which I guess is very frustrating to someone who thinks the way you do. Radical conservatism is so self-contradictory, however, that it will always fail, whether it is Bush’s version or Ron Paul’s or Daniel Larisons. What the conservative movement really needs is its own Obama. Which I suspect is what really peeves you the most about him. You wish that Obama was a policy conservative, or that there was a policy conservative like Obama, and this makes you despise him out of sheer envy. Or maybe that in terms of process, he’s actually way more conservative than you, which really gets your goat. That’s what the Obamacons seem to base their support for him on, that at least he represents a conservative sensibility of accepting reality and working with it, rather than accepting ideals and working from them to change reality into the world they see in their heads.
[...] Technically, Peter may be right, since there is no serious mainstream belief along these lines, but claims that are not far from these do seem to circulate with some considerable frequency. As I said last week: But the flag in the fireplace isn’t much of an exaggeration at all of various false charges that Obama has no respect for the flag or the Pledge of Allegiance or what-have-you. The hubbub over Obama’s “endorsement†by Hamas as some kind of “proof†that he was friendly to Hamas or bad for Israel and the basic assumption shared by many Republicans that leaving Iraq is “surrender†to Al Qaeda (or something like that) aren’t exaggerated very much by the picture of Bin Laden. [...]