Re: [Marxism] Obama's team of zombies

[Jon Flanders <jonflanders@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2009-02-07 at 18:58 -0500, Louis Proyect wrote:
> (A breach is definitely opening to the left among liberal supporters of 
> Obama. This could have been written by Ralph Nader.)
> 
> http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/02/07/sirota/print.html

Yet more evidence of this trend.

Jon Flanders


All the Comforts of Home: Republicans Destroy, Democrats Serve Cookies

by David Michael Green

I got a bad feeling that if we liked the Clinton years, we're gonna love
the Obama ones.

Remember those fun 1990s? Actually, they really weren't, of course. If
they look good at all in retrospect, it is purely because the
intervening monster mash gave us a point of reference so that we might
know what ugly really looks like.

Apart from that, however, the political story of that decade had a
depressingly simple narrative arc to it. Republican bottom-feeders
demonstrated at every opportunity how scummy politics can be, and
Democrats responded over and over again with the political equivalent of
"Thank you, sir, may I have another?" And wasn't that fun to watch?

What the last months seem to be screaming out for all to hear is the
lesson that some people just can't change. Or won't.

Could the little project launched a few centuries back, and
affectionately referred to as âAmerica', possibly be in a more
precipitous free-fall than it is right now?

No. And yet...

...And yet, while Wall Street firms are desperately trying to out-30s
the 1930s themselves with their 2008 exercise in earnings annihilation,
management gladly rewarded itself with nearly $20 billion dollars in
bonuses, many funded by the United States taxpayers. This caused the
people's president to nearly raise his voice in remonstration, he was so
upset.

...And yet, with the Republican Party tanking so badly that its best
likely outcome in the years ahead (and you should see the second best)
is to wind up as the undisputed vote-getting champ of Mississippi and
large parts of Georgia, still they reiterate their most aggressive and
abysmal of behavior.

...And yet, with the Democratic Party holding more or less all the
political cards imaginable, still they go desperately looking for any
and all possible ways to share their political power with the GOP. And
when the latter folks reward such generosity with an immediate slap to
the face, still the Dems come back begging for more.

We're two weeks into the Obama decade, and already I'd be bored if I
wasn't so pissed. Even with every imaginable self-made predator circling
the camp, still we go on with the same set of juvenile antics that
substitute for a meaningful politics in America. Even with every
conceivable disaster hungrily lapping at our shores, some of us would
rather get rich than live to retirement age, some of us would rather win
elections than save the country, and some of us would rather hold hands
than be the guy who walks away from the knife fight alive.

Yep, it's the Clinton years again. Minus the booming economy and
probably the sexual shenanigans. But the politics sure look the same.

Wall Street greed that exists absolutely without bound, to start with.
And a government that finds increasingly creative ways to liquidate the
commonwealth of its common wealth and turn it instead into private
playgrounds, corporate jets, MBA bacchanals, and really big rings on the
fingers of really big trophy wives. What, you've got a problem with a
$35,000 toilet for a company accepting taxpayer bailout money?

Don't worry. Barrack Obama called it shameful. Since that appears to be
just about all he plans to do about it, and since I had already made
that particular analytical leap on my own horsepower, I must confess to
being seriously unimpressed. Yeah, limiting salaries of the execs
running companies receiving bailout funds is not a bad idea, but mostly
another terribly trembling tactic from timid town. Since I am now an
owner of these firms, would it be too much to ask for new management?
Call me strange if you must, but I don't want corporate chiefs who have
proven their ability to wreck companies running mine. It's just this odd
quirk I've always had.

But the finger-wagger-in-chief's little dressing down was actually the
high point of the week. Somewhat less amusing was the GOP's reaction to
the president's fiscal stimulus plan. Even though Obama went out of his
way to include within it tax cuts that seem to be the only two words the
lips of Republicans are able to form in discussions of economics or
public policy - tax cuts that are widely understood not to have serious
stimulus capacity at this point - still not a single member of the House
- not one - voted for the bill. Instead, they went parading around the
media complaining about how the legislation would favor illegal
immigrants, or would spend a few bucks on family planning services.
Can't have that. Brown women in America? Not barefoot and not pregnant?
Not okay.

Did I mention that this looks a lot like the 1990s? Zero was precisely
the number of Republicans who voted for Bill Clinton's economic rescue
package in 1993. Taxes, sex, war, taxes. Taxes, sex, war, taxes. This
guys are like a jazz singer who can only hit four notes, two of which
are the same. And about as useful.

Of course, people gotta have principles. Texas Senator John Cornyn - who
is absolutely everything you'd expect a Texas senator to be - said this
week "I read the bill in vain for any real stimulus in the economy. What
I do see mainly is an opportunity being exploited to spend a lot of
money without much scrutiny." Now see, dang it, that's not okay. For
example, let's just say you had this Treasury secretary - we'll just
call him John Doe Paulson, to pick a name at random - and he spent $350
billion by giving banks rescue money that they used instead for bonuses
and really cool toilets, literal and figurative. Now that there, my
friends, is an example of money being spent without scrutiny. Or certain
contractors (oh, you know, like Haliburton maybe) and their no-bid
contracts in certain wars (let's say Iraq, for instance). Or a
prescription drug bill that actually forbids the government from using
its buying power to obtain volume discounts. Now those are some nasty
cases of unscrutinized federal spending, and we can all be thankful that
Cornyn and other Republicans have been on the job this last decade,
making sure none of that transpired.

The party, meanwhile, was busy last week choosing for themselves a new
chairman. And guess what? He's a real conservative fellow. Now there's a
shocker. And he's a black man. And he argues that Republicans have
gotten a totally bum rap when it comes to perceptions of their racist
politics these last decades. You know, that whole Reagan states' rights
campaign kick-off speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi - a town famous
for only one thing, murdering civil rights workers - for example. Or
that whole Nixonian Southern Strategy to appeal to racist white voters
in the South. Or the Willie Horton ad. Or the small matter of mass black
voter disenfranchisement campaign in Florida in 2000. Or Ohio in 2004.
Yeah, man. You gotta feel bad for the GOP and this unfair reputation.
They really need to hire some new marketing people!

Oh, and did I mention the guy who didn't get the chairmenship? He sent
around a CD to party leaders that included the snappy little tune,
"Barack, the Magic Negro"! Some people in the party thought that was
pretty tacky. But others didn't, and so a serious and major debate
ensued within the party leadership as to whether this was an appropriate
thing to do, and whether it was a good idea to put such a person at the
top of the party. Hmmm, tough question. No wonder they had such a
struggle over it.

Of course, the good news for the GOP is that with a black man as their
chairman now, they'll no doubt be drawing tons of black votes from this
point forward. And the even better news is that the GOP thinks that with
a black man as their chairman now, they'll no doubt be drawing tons of
black votes from this point forward. You know, just like Sarah Palin
knocked down those barriers preventing women from gaining equality (the
same ones that Republicans had spent lifetimes erecting) and thus
energized the female vote for the GOP ticket. Oh yeah.

Let's be honest. The chances that the GOP would change its ugly ways
only rose to the high-water mark of about three out of a thousand
because of the trouncing they took in two elections back-to-back. Anyone
who thought these folks were about to give up either their abysmal
politics or their disgusting tactics hasn't been paying attention since
the 1950s. And, besides, what would be the point? We already have a
party that stands for just about nothing, and does so with unsurpassed
strategic blunder, and a passionate devotion to the avoidance of both
passion and devotion. Who needs another?

Speaking of which, I'm starting to feel kinda dumb for having said
lately that a certain fellow by the name of Obama is a real smart guy.
The more I see him in operation, the more I get the sense that the prime
directive of his operating system is to always seek the making of
happy-happy with his adversaries. He actually had some nice Republican
members of Congress over to his new house the other day and personally
walked around the room carrying a plate of oatmeal raisin cookies to
serve them. You think I'm making this up, don't you? You wish. I wish.
If this keeps up, pretty soon he's gonna make Chamberlain at Munich look
as tough as the siege of Stalingrad by comparison.

He gave the Republicans a couple of hundred million bucks worth of
worthless tax cuts as a means of compromise, even though that
substantially diminishes his chances for succeeding in bringing
recovery, and therefore also in succeeding at playing president. He says
nice things about Ronald Reagan and throws a big shindig for the guy who
just got through spending half a year calling him a socialist terrorist.
He's now put three Republicans in his cabinet, which by my count totals
to a contingent therein approximately three hundred percent bigger than
the liberal cohort (of, maybe, one person). Not only that, instead of
trading the last Republican added for the 60th Democratic senator and
thus a filibuster-proof majority that would guarantee getting his
legislation through Congress, Obama agrees to a deal wherein the
Democratic governor of New Hampshire backfills Judd Gregg's seat with a
Republican appointee.

And what do they do, in return? Trash his bill in public, say that they
hope he fails, and vote - with nary a single exception - against the
signature legislative initiative of his presidency. During an economic
crisis, no less, with a public already massively angry at them.

If anyone knows this guy's Blackberry address, pass it along, wouldya?
I'd like to remind him that Republicans don't get that whole
âpost-partisan' thing. Precambrian, yes. Post-partisan, no. They will
thrash the country (again) if they think it will wreck this presidency
and bring them back to power. I'm not sure how Rush Limbaugh could
possibly have been quite any more explicit about that. Yo, Barry. They
are going to resist you any and every way they can. If you succeed,
they'll take credit for it, maybe saying that the Bush tax cuts finally
kicked in. If you fail, I'm pretty sure they won't be acknowledging the
role of their political sabotage during a national economic crisis.

Lose the hand-holding impulse, dude. You've got cred, you've got crises,
you've got control of the government. If you throw them a bone and they
slap your face in return, the thing not to do here is increase the size
of the bone. No more oatmeal cookies, man. Pull their useless stuff out
of the bill, redraft it exactly the way you want it, and ram it down
their throats. If they use their 41-seat minority in the Senate to block
a relief bill that the people desperately want, the House has passed,
and the president is waiting to sign, make them pay for it politically
by endlessly reminding the public just who's standing in the way of the
Red Cross trucks, and just who's driving them.

I mean, is it really too much to ask for a Democratic Party actually
does something? Without asking the GOP for permission first?

Once before, American had a crumbling economy, a bumbling foreign
policy, an angry electorate, and a decisive election. Ronald Reagan won
in 1980, and Democrats cowered for the next three decades. They're still
cowering.

This time the conditions are almost identical, except for three things.
First, people are hurting a lot worse now than in 1980. Second, it's the
Democrats who have won this time. And, third, it wasn't an election. It
was two.

But, of course, one thing hasn't changed.

It's still the Democrats doing the cowering.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra
University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to
his articles (mailto:dmg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx), but regrets that time
constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be
found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

 



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