While disappointed, marijuana activists have no one but themselves to blame if they invested too much in a president. For as I keep saying, presidents don’t make the laws — especially presidents who understand constitutional law. Obama clarified his administration’s medical marijuana policy to Rolling Stone this week:

What I specifically said (during the campaign) was that we were not going to prioritize prosecutions of persons who are using medical marijuana. I never made a commitment that somehow we were going to give carte blanche to large-scale producers and operators of marijuana – and the reason is, because it’s against federal law. I can’t nullify congressional law. I can’t ask the Justice Department to say, “Ignore completely a federal law that’s on the books.” What I can say is, “Use your prosecutorial discretion and properly prioritize your resources to go after things that are really doing folks damage.” As a consequence, there haven’t been prosecutions of users of marijuana for medical purposes. (Emphasis mine)

Demurring on marriage equality with the portentous phrase “I’m not going to make news in this publication,” the president instead talked about the process of reversing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell:

I’ve made clear that the issue of fairness and justice and equality for the LGBT community is very important to me. And I haven’t just talked about it, I’ve acted on it. You’ll recall that the last time you and I had an interview, we were getting beat up about “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the LGBT community. There was skepticism: “Why’s it taking so long? Why doesn’t he just do it through executive order?” I described very specifically the process we were going to go through to make sure that there was a buy-in from the military, up and down the chain of command, so that it would be executed in an effective way. And lo and behold, here we are, and it got done. (Emphasis mine)

On Wall Street corruption prior to his administration, and the absence of criminal prosecutions during his administration:

First of all, we’re a nation of laws. So in some cases, really irresponsible practices that hurt a lot of people might not have been technically against the law. They might have been the wrong thing to do, but prosecutors are required to actually build cases based on what the law is. That’s part of the reason we’ve passed Wall Street reform: to make much clearer what is prohibited and what is not, to set up rules and regulations that say, “You can’t do this, and if you do do it, there are going to be consequences.” (Emphasis mine)

Of course, if Overton Windows worked according to “theory of change” then all of this would make Obama exactly the opposite of teapublican caricature. Right wing signage and rhetoric dresses him up as a dictator, while left wing caricatures have him too weak and conciliatory — not enough of a dictator. The firebagger’s disappointment is the mirror of the teabagger’s rage, with both proceeding from false precepts.

Repeating myself for what feels like the ten thousandth time: no president can usher in a progressive agenda on their own, and certainly not the full range of issues progressives might care about. That’s not how it works, or has ever worked. Congress writes the laws, which is why midterm teapublican organizing was first and foremost about taking power in that branch.

There is no mirror to that activity on the left today. If you want new federal drug laws or to do away with old ones, change Congress. If you’re upset about indefinite detention provisions snuck into must-pass legislation in secret Senate committee sessions, then change Congress. If you want laws that curb the excesses of Wall Street, change Congress. If you want marriage equality, change Congress.

It’s not hard to understand, it’s just hard to do — whereas complaining that you didn’t get your cookie is easy.

Not content with the fact that the newly redistricted Congressional district in Ohio chose Democratic Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur as their candidate to run against Joe the Plumber, Dennis Kucinich has traipsed cross-country back to what he perceives to be the Pacific Northwest ueber-Liberal haven of Washington State, complete with a survey for potential registered Democratic voters.

The survey has one question:-

Should Dennis Kucinich run for Congress from Washington State?

Apparently, Washington has pretty lax residency laws for anyone wanting to run for public office. All you have to do is find a place to rent and register before May 18th to be able to declare yourself a candidate for public office.

It may have escaped Dennis’s attention, amidst all the anger, bitterness and general angst at being refused by people literally right from his backyard (not that he ever really lived in Toledo for many years – at least not in the 16 years he represented Ohio’s 10th Congressional District). His recently-acquired trophy wife (thirty years younger) hails from the sophisticated part of the Southeast of England (that’s London or its leafy suburbs), and somehow, I don’t see her settling nicely in a place like Toledo (too much like the deprived part of Bolton, Lancashire — not that she’s ever seen that) — but until January 2013, Dennis actually has a job to do: representing the people of the 10th for as long as it’s extant.

So he got rejected. It happens to the best of us, but now he wants to relocate, abandon the people who actually did elect him in Ohio, to try to court up the people of Washington State, just because they’re supposedly as ueber-liberal as he is?

Something smells here … oh, wait … I know … it’s positively parliamentary! You see, in the UK, we have what’s known as “safe seats” in Parliament. They’re seats that have always been Labour or Conservative since Jesus walked this “green and pleasant land.” (Cough, cough). If the devil, himself, stood for Parliament as a Conservative from a safe conservative seat, he’d win. A lot of these safe seats serve as springboards for aspiring young politicians. And you don’t have to be from the area you represent.

I live in the Southeast of England, closer to France than London. Until 2010, the Member of Parliament representing the constituency in which I live was from Wales. He lived in London, and had a weekend home in our area. But he’d never lived here full-time, never raised his children here, never shopped here, never had a business here. The house was bought for “residency purposes” and used whenever he’d come back for the odd weekend and photo opportunity. The latest MP comes from closer to home – just North of London. Again, no home here, apart from the ubiquitous one for weekend jaunts.

The MP for Vauxhall district in London is from Northern Ireland. Tony Blair was nominally Scottish and represented a Northeastern constituency which, had he had to live there, he’d probably have died rather than do so.

This is par for the course in Britain, because most people who serve in Parliament are professional politicians – educated to do nothing else but campaign and play politics from the time they enter university. In the US, we call them “carpetbaggers.”

Remember Hillary Clinton being called that when she decided to run for the Senate from New York? Dubya Bush was equally one – don’t be fooled by the phony Southern accent. In 2009, the voters of Virginia decided they didn’t want Terry McAuliffe to be the Democratic gubernatorial candidate because he had a whiff of the Carpetbagger about him. So they elected Bob McDonnell as Governor … who happened to be from Pennsylvania and, yes, a Carpetbagger.

Go figure.

Maybe Dennis has taken his wife’s advice in this. I mean, Washington shopping and lifestyle has to be hard to give up, and Washington state is probably a lot cooler, sociologically and otherwise, than Toledo; but in this last-ditch effort of practically begging to be sent back to Congress from anyplace (as long as it’s hip and liberal) is embarrassingly desperate and makes Dennis seem more of a common-and-garden political hack rather than a crusading Progressive.

Even Stank Cenk Uygur thinks as much, because he was certainly taken aback by Dennis’s concession speech, when he lost the Democratic nod to Marcy Kaptur. Check it out, and check out Stank’s Cenk’s rare moment of political acuity.

You know, this is probably why Dennis lost this battle. I mean, here’s the man who not only sued the cafeteria in the US Congress after breaking a tooth biting into an olive pit, he also made mincemeat of the media calling for the President’s impeachment for his role in aiding Libyan liberty.

Or maybe the reason Dennis lost was because last year, when the world was beginning to turn away in revulsion of the bloody clampdown by the Syrian President on the anti-government protestors, Dennis and wife breezed into Damascus and spent a few days kissing Assad’s assad.

After all, it was Dennis who asserted that President Assad was “highly loved and esteemed by the Syrians.”

But that’s not enough. Last year, it seems that documents found in deposed dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s compound show that Dennis was in correspondence with the regime, asking for titbits of information regarding possible corruption in the Transitional Council and evidence of any of the rebels’ involvement with Al-Qaeda – probably to show how inept, irresponsible and reckless the President from his own party was in Dennis’s attempt to impeach him.

Who would want a Democrat like that?

It seems, not many in Washington, according to Seattle Times Op-ed columnist Joni Balter, who succingtly writes in a recent editorial:

“Should Dennis Run in Washington State?” He should know already that we have plenty of our own politicians, Democrats and Republicans, who can capably fill open seats in the 1st, 6th and 10th congressional districts.

Those who have announced intentions to run know the issues. They know their neighbors, because they have spent more than 10 minutes in their districts. They even know how to pronounce Willapa and Washtucna.

Few among us are clamoring for a politician with five toes in Ohio to come, rent a place to “live,” establish residency and pretend that somehow, lickety-split, he is the best person to interpret and translate the needs of Northwesterners.

The Democratic leadership certainly has no use for him.

“I think this is thoroughly offensive to the people of Washington state and thoroughly offensive to his (Ohio) district,” said Dwight Pelz, chairman of the Washington State Democratic Party. “He is obviously the ultimate definition of a carpetbagger, a person who moves into a district moments before the deadline, rents an apartment and, instantly, he is a resident of Washington state and a candidate for Congress.”

Few Washingtonians can get upset about people moving here and working in the public or private sectors. Many of our top politicians hail from somewhere else: former Seattle Mayor Norm Rice and former U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton, to name two.

The good ones came and spent the time learning about the place before running for office. Kucinich pretends he can straddle big parts of the continent, representing Ohio while flying in to speechify and participate in marches.

Are we supposed to buy the idea that Kucinich is a good fit because he had a seminal experience years ago when he supposedly saw a UFO while hanging out with Hollywood actress Shirley MacLaine near Graham, Pierce County?

(Oh, Lord … there’s a Virginia connection … my bad).

(snip)

The law says Kucinich can come here and file for residency before May 18. All he has to do is rent or buy a place to live. Nothing in Washington law says he has to stop representing Ohio. But that doesn’t make it the wise thing to do or make him the best fit for any of our districts.

If you think about it, Kucinich would just be repotting the plant, so to speak, trying to match his own liberal politics to fresh soil in Washington.

Another part of the equation: He is just enough of an annoyance for Democrats who worry he will detract from homegrown office seekers in districts with open seats. All of which prompted state Republican Party Chairman Kirby Wilbur to quip that he will pay Kucinich’s airfare to the state anytime and every time the congressman from Ohio wishes.

Aye, there’s the rub. In trying to be the voice of the most fickle part of the Democratic party, the Progressive Left, Dennis has, inadvertantly, become the most useful idiot the Republicans have at their disposal.

If he truly wanted to do some good, he’d go back to Ohio, maybe get a job at Ohio State, lecturing in political science, start a PAC and start to raise some money. It’s not long until 2014, when Ohio Governor John Kasich will be up for re-election. In opposing him, Kucinich would be doing the utmost in promoting Democratic interests and could regain a new political life.

But, at the end of the day, for Dennis, it’s all been about one thing: Dennis.

One of the more hilarious right wing memes out there is the idea that every progressive is a Saul Alinsky acolyte. Alinsky titled his book Rules For Radicals because all too often, radical action stirs no real change. Today’s example comes from activist and radio host Rose Aguilar responding at TruthOut to Van Jones’ recent appearance on This Week:

In response to a question about disenchantment with President Obama on the April 1 broadcast, Van Jones said, “We sat back and we let the Tea Party crowd dominate the protest world in the streets. For the first time, we had the biggest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. And there was not one left wing protest. The right wing was marching. The left wing was munching popcorn, hoping that Obama would do it.”

What he fails to mention is that the Tea Party was bankrolled by the billionaire Koch Brothers. Would we even be talking about the Tea Party if it weren’t for the Kochs and Dick Armey’s Freedom Works, the other major sponsor? When the Tea Party took to the streets, every media outlet was there; when labor groups or anti-war activists took to the streets, the media were missing in action.

Yes, tea parties were bankrolled by billionaires. So what about it?

Look, I chronicled the truth about tea parties from early on, but it made no difference to the amount of attention they were able to grab. Astroturf organizing is still organizing. Noise is still noise. The left was disorganized in 2009, and the examples Aguilar provides to debunk Van Jones actually prove the point:

I wonder if he’s familiar with the incredible organizing happening within the disability rights movement. They didn’t munch popcorn after President Obama was elected. On April 27, 2009, disability rights activists from across the country marched on Washington, many in wheelchairs, to speak out against the administration’s failure to include long-term care in the healthcare bill that would allow them to live independently rather than in a nursing home. Ninety-one activists were arrested for chaining and handcuffing themselves to the White House fence. They chanted, “I’d rather go to jail than die in a nursing home.”

[...]

A number of single payer rallies and arrests also took place that year. I remember attending a single payer rally in October in Washington DC. Not one media outlet bothered to send a reporter. In that same month, 61 activists were arrested for protesting the occupation of Afghanistan, and thousands of immigrants marched on Capitol Hill calling for comprehensive immigration reform. Many more actions took place at the state and local levels.

That is not a coherent mass movement, it is the scattershot action of independent groups. Only after the August 2009 health care town hall “silly season” was well advanced did anyone seem to understand they were being out-hustled, and by then it was too late.

I lost count of how many single-payer Facebook groups I was invited to join that year. None of them seemed to be part of any larger umbrella; each had its own plan for success with question marks at the critical bullet point. I’ve had that same experience on email lists: everyone has a plan, so there are always a million competing plans.

Few of them have a realistic approach to get from noise to power in their “theory of change.” Single-payer is a good example, because these were ad hoc organizations demanding “a seat at the table” where plenty of well-established groups were already sitting. Some of them (AARP, Families USA, etc) had been working on their issues for years, and their efforts are written in the ACA now. Single-payer advocates didn’t have a lobbying organization then, and still haven’t formed one.

Indeed, the most unusual thing about Occupy is that a broad coalition of interest groups and affiliates actually gathered in one large crowd. That is just about impossible to do with progressives. I’ve heard organizers mutter that we’re like a herd of butterflies: at meeting time, altogether too many activists reject Robert’s Rules of Order as “authoritarian” and then wonder why it takes so long to get anything done while they concentrate on getting everyone to agree today’s lunch should be vegan.

It was not until far too late in the game (October of 2010, to be exact) that One Nation brought together civil rights, unions, and assorted organizations for a rally on the National Mall. This was after tea parties had been organized for simultaneous April 15th events around the country two years in a row, after the Tea Party Convention, after the Tea Party Express tours, and after two large tea party rallies on the National Mall.

One Nation spent much of that time agonizing over what their name should be and fighting about who got credit for the idea. They were followed by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who managed to bring 250,000 people to the National Mall on the last weekend before the election — the time when those folks should have been calling and knocking on doors to turn out the vote.

So denounce the Kochs all you like, but they were organized: FreedomWorks started out with a name already decided, got straight to making noise, and it worked. As much as I’ve highlighted dissonance and incoherence at tea parties, they were clearly about something. All too often, progressives are only interested in their own pet issues, and while their signs are spelled right their overall message is garbled.

Look at Occupy. Even as the encampments received criticism and critique for having no list of specific goals, Occupy at least had a tagline: “WE ARE THE 99 PERCENT.” It has stuck; Occupy could easily rebrand itself “the 99 percent movement” if they wanted — and no one would skip a beat.

Van Jones was accused of being a radical, which led to his resignation from the Obama administration. Ironically, nowadays he’s not radical enough, even though his organization is helping Occupy expand civil disobedience action across the country. That points to just how hard it is to get the progressive movement moving together. On this, too, the right has it easy, but that’s no excuse.

Hard to believe that it was only one year ago, come April, that the President announced he was running for re-election, and this announcement brought Progressive political commentator Joan Walsh crawling from the woodwork to reveal herself as something of a racist. The entire reveal began with Walsh’s insensitive and totally disingenuous remark in a particularly snarky blog, timed to coincide with the President’s announcement that he was seeking re-election. (To Walsh, a diehard Clintonista, this must have been like the proverbial tolling of the bells).

I deeply resent people who insist that white progressives who criticize Obama are deluding themselves that they’re his “base,” when his “base” is actually not white progressives, but people of color. Ishmael Reed laid out this pernicious line in December, in the New York Times, after many progressives, of every race, criticized Obama’s tax cut compromise. Reed compared “white progressives” who wanted more from Obama to spoiled children, compared with black and Latino voters “who are not used to getting it all.” I’ve been getting a similar message from some of my correspondents, and it’s depressingly divisive.

So coupled with a rather tactless remark, which appeared to express resentment that African Americans should even hope to make up a part of whatever the President’s base happens to be, she also completely and totally misquoted Ishmael Reed’s assessment of white progressives as well.

You can read the Ishmael Reed article in its entirety here, just to see how far off base Walsh was and who, exactly, was really “pernicious”; and you can read a brilliant summary, with links to the actual argument, of the Twitter war that erupted between Joan Walsh and several brilliant African American bloggers here.

Joan revealed, in herself, what I’d always suspected of a certain strata of Progressive, especially the “Left Coast” variety who sneer down their noses at the rest of America – the rural Midwest, which they jokingly call “Flyover Country” and the South, which in their minds is populated yet with hoardes of Jubilation T Cornpone-type shitkickers and assorted sad Southern belles, cross-pollinated from the corpses of Blanch DuBois and Scarlett O’Hara. Oh, and we’re all neo-Confederates with DeliveranceLand morals.

Such enlightened Left Coast Progressives are merely closet racists, whose racism is wrapped in the fetid blanket of subtle condescension, nowhere more prevalent than amongst the talking head icons of the Professional Left, of which Joan Walsh is a charter member. Their racism is masked as disillusionment and disappointment in the fact that the President didn’t jump at their first finger-snap and deliver, on demand, a suitably Progressive agenda, irrespective of the fact that Congress was a necessary adjunct in every matter legislative.

In fact, Professor Melissa Harris-Perry actually identified the sloughing off of white Progressive support of the President as “a triumph of a more subtle form of racism”, which offended Joan and caused her to label Professor Harris-Perry as her black friend, in an effort to prove that “friend” totally wrong.

Such pandering condescension brought the professor’s hammer down firmly on Walsh’s assertion of friendship. In an article responding to Joan’s effort to “school” Professor Harris-Perry, the academic remarked:-

I was taken aback that Walsh emphasized the extent of our friendship. Walsh and I have been professionally friendly. We’ve eaten a few meals. I invited her to speak at Princeton and I introduced her to my literary agent. We are not friends.

Since that exchange of articles, Harris-Perry has now acquired a show in her own right on MSNBC, which airs every weekend, and Joan Walsh is the newly-appointed political analyst for the same cable network, replacing a man whom she’s fought bitterly, Pat Buchanan.

I am not a fan of Pat Buchanan; neither do I like Joan Walsh. Pat Buchanan’s views on race are particularly distasteful, but he doesn’t hide those views, as Walsh does hers, behind a curtain of concern trolling. Since the infamous Twitter battle, Joan’s tried endlessly to tie her Irish Catholic heritage, as downtrodden and beleagured, to the heritage of slavery in the United States.

Believe me, there is no comparison.

But recently, Joan’s ventured into another realm of ugly reality, inadvertantly revealing herself to be a religious bigot as well. Last night, on Twitter, as the returns came in from the Michigan Primary, Joan made a particularly bigoted Mormon joke, tried to explain it, walked it back and eventually, reluctantly, apologised.

The joke was contained in the first Tweet:-

Romney’s saving the soul of America – so he doesn’t have to baptize us after we’re dead.

Then later:-

Also, Romney was the one who said he wanted to save our souls, just another apocalyptic, hysterical attack on the president.

And finally:-

However, I believe in keeping religion out of politics and I don’t want to be responsible for everything my Church preaches, so I apologize

Admittedly, Walsh got slammed, and virulently so, by the usual Rightwing Breitbartian contingent. I’m no fan of theirs either. Neither am I a believer in any religion, but I have a particular discomfort with the penchant the Left Coast Progressives seem to have in deriding people of faith. Considering the amount of time and blogspace Joan’s dedicated to outlining all the slings and arrows of outrageous prejudice thrown the Catholics’ way over the year, it seems now that she’s joined in the late-night comedians’ bracket of making Mormon jokes.

I know very little about the Mormon religion, but I’ve no doubt that Mormons are Christian. A cousin of mine converted and married a Mormon. They are Christians and also very liberal Democrats. Like Harry Reid, only more liberal. I know that Mormons hold beliefs different from other Christian denominations. So do Catholics. So do Southern Baptists. So do Primitive Baptists and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I was raised to keep religion out of politics — kinda like the First Amendment — and therefore, a politician’s religion holds no brief with me. A person’s faith is intensely personal and should no more be criticized or joked about than a person’s personal appearance. Not bright.

Joan finds the fact that Mormons baptize dead people weird. I grew up with kids who thought that Catholics prayed to saints and viewed Communion as the actual body of Christ disturbing. We don’t joke about either.

And I object to the sanctimonious, faux concern-troll tone Joan adopted in the ubiquitous blog, backtracking and sullenly apologising for her remarks:-

I live-tweeted the primary results, and in the course of my dozens of tweets I made a Mormon joke. After Romney pompously talked about “saving the soul of America” – typical of the histrionic rhetoric the GOP contenders use about defeating President Obama – I said, “Romney’s saving the soul of America – so he doesn’t have to baptize us after we’re dead.” Of course, the Mormon church is under fire for baptizing dead non-Mormons, including Anne Frank and hundreds of thousands of Holocaust victims, and more recently, Daniel Pearl.

(And the Catholic Church is under bigger fire for its complicity in hiding years of child sexual abuse by its priests).

I was honestly torn about how to reply. On the one hand, Elie Wiesel has asked Romney to ask his church to stop baptizing Jews. Daniel Pearl’s family was disturbed, especially since the journalist professed his Jewish identity before he died (and likely died for it). Romney himself took part in baptizing dead non-Mormons, he admitted in a 2007 interview with Newsweek, telling the magazine awkwardly when asked about the practice, “I have in my life, but I haven’t recently.” I think his views on his church baptizing the dead of other faiths, when leaders of those faiths and even the families of the dead object, is a legitimate topic for political inquiry.

(I don’t. It’s a personal matter. As long as such practices don’t interfere with any sort of governmental function, I don’t see such a practice – unfamiliar as it may be to non-Mormons – as a problem. Perhaps Joan would like a political inquiry for Harry Reid?)

Given that I believe religion and politics should be kept as separate as possible, and given that Romney isn’t endorsing baptizing dead non-Mormons out on the campaign trail, my joke was a cheap shot. I apologized on Twitter, and I apologize here.

(Please. And trying to be a bit more gracious in your apology might be mete; because it’s this attitude amongst Progressives, particularly the Left Coast variety, which totally alienates people of faith who may, just may, have socially liberal consciences and open to political persuasion. Because of this attitude, our battle is lost before it’s begun. And you’re right … religion and politics, as everyone so rightly castigated Rick Santorum, should most definitely be as separate as possible.)

Joan’s blocked me from following her, but I know she reads my blog, and that’s as sneakily hypocritical as anything she’s done above; so I’ll stop now, before she acuses me of being a Republican and a Romney supporter. She’s already accused me of being a misogynist … and I’m a woman.

Cross-posted from Emilia Wahoo ]]> http://www.osborneink.com/2012/03/the-bigger-bigot.html/feed 3 http://www.osborneink.com/2012/02/my-valentine-from-joan-walsh.html http://www.osborneink.com/2012/02/my-valentine-from-joan-walsh.html#comments Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:40:30 +0000 Matt Osborne http://www.osborneink.com/?p=19008 Continue reading →]]>

The Salon editor doesn’t like one of my co-bloggers, and felt it necessary to say so Sunday night in a direct message on Twitter. I’m not sure she ever actually followed me, or saved herself the trouble of un-following me to prevent me from interrogating the message at all. Yes, she sent it with some expectation of privacy, but that is the point: this was a drive-by burn from a paid MSNBC personality (she announced her hiring recently on Twitter). There is something not right about it.

I was saddened, but not for the reasons you might expect. Yes, I admire Ms. Walsh for her erudite writing. Yes, I disagree with her but have been proud to share a book cover with her. We had developed some working rapport on Twitter and that might have borne fruit later somehow, though possibly not. I actually like her. I didn’t think of her as an enemy, but I was unafraid to make enemies when I invited Emilia1956 to cross-post here.

As anyone who has read her posts will know, Emilia1956 lives in the UK but was born, raised, and educated in Virginia. We share a Southern perspective and remember the great Southern liberal lions of the Democratic Party. She has a drill sergeant’s impatience for nonsense, and understands the urgency of now. So of course I asked her to cross-post. Frankly, with firebaggery hitting a crescendo last year I lacked the time and attention necessary to categorize all the hoopla, and she was a help. She has also been gracious enough to accede to my editorial requests. Her shorter posts have been an especial boon, as is her coverage of things European.

I say “she” repeatedly to point out something: calling a woman a misogynist is exactly like calling liberal Jews “self-loathing.” The language of politics is already loaded enough with such phrases. Someone else actually called her a “bigot” in another forum, and when I pressed for definitions they replied that she came across as bigoted against the people she writes about. Emilia writes about all kinds of people, including Joan Walsh, and is a completely fearless Amazon warrior about it. But as controversy raises the hit counter, no wonder her posts are so popular!

Let me repeat that: Emilia1956 writes popular posts. I barely have to push them at all. Half the daily top posts for January were her posts. She also cross-posts at Addicting Info and has cross-posted at Politics Anonymous, which I suppose makes them dishonorable websites too. But as long as we’re on the subject of bigotry, let’s talk about putting “-lover” behind someone’s name. That’s a sure-fire way to convince perhaps a million people that you’re clueless, and also bigoted against them. The problem isn’t racist memes towards presidents, but elitist snobbery towards the president’s supporters.

Like “emoprog,” a term I don’t use, there are lots of names out there and very few proper categories. I sympathize with Ms. Walsh: the internet is full of people who take offense quickly, and never let go. Indeed, Emilia1956 (real name Marion Watts) can be a bit terrier-like in her tenacity. But I had not known until the moment I read the above message that Ms. Walsh had a problem with Emilia1956, nor am I in the habit of checking with the internet before giving someone cross-posting privileges.

Emilia1956 has also been accused of brooking no compromise. I can think of someone else who doesn’t brook compromise: he writes for Joan Walsh and his name rhymes with “spleenwald.” I get what he’s doing, and it’s free speech, but I disagree and say so — which is also free speech. I haven’t made any judgments about his sense of honor. Emilia1956 is also exercising her free speech, she speaks for a supermajority of expats on many issues, and she’s not questioning anyone’s honor.

It’s much worse than that, I’m afraid.

One of the reasons I let Emilia1956 on board this blog was because she is married to a union man, and she understands the value of a union. Joan Walsh knows all about unions and their history in the progressive movement. I absolutely support unions, and if this website enjoyed a fraction of Joan Walsh’s new income it would instantly become a union shop with members in three countries. Despite my middle class background and education, or perhaps because of them, I am proletarian to the core.

During the backlash against the ACA, I first began to see a problem developing in the liberal-progressive ‘sphere that reminded me of the Democratic coalition’s breakup. The same privileged intellectual class was still pooh-poohing the necessity of including the South in any strategy. As Emilia1956 and I have tried to demonstrate, this is a huge mistake. We want our 50-state strategy back, damn it, because we are Americans and not some other nationality.

As before, hucksters were out peddling solipsistic tripe and confusing theory of change with the workings of the empirical universe. Some people thought they were moving an Overton Window, but in fact what most of them were doing was chasing hits. Outrage wins the internets. That’s how a for-profit website works. And in time, Obama’s name became a negative thing because it attracted attention for all the wrong reasons, and both sides were doing it.

According to the logic behind “theory of change” progressivism, this ought to have awarded Obama a place squarely in the middle. The great centrist should have been called that by the mainstream media. Yet this is not what happened. The president became less popular than a notional opponent and people in the middle heard only bad things about Obama from everyone. What else were they to think, except that the president was awful, horrible, no-good and very bad at his job?

So they said so. In fact, people were generally dissatisfied and had a right to be. I’m pretty sure the president is dissatisfied. But as provisions of the ACA come on line to the direct benefit of regular Americans, it becomes more popular, and this is exactly what I said would happen when I chronicled the health care debate. (I certainly wasn’t alone — Karoli did it much better.) At the time, I said that the progressives with the fancy websites did not know what the proletariat wants or will like, and should stop trying to reinforce FOX News talking points about it. I still say that.

During “Kill the Bill,” I also wondered why it was so difficult to engage the creative, activist, nutty, wonderful street left in the process of reform. It seemed so easy for the astroturfers to whip up a crowd and make some noise, and by doing that the billionaires moved the Overton Window with greater effect than all the blog hits in blogistan.

During 2010 and 2011 I observed the rise of a new green activism, the rebirth of union activism, and the rumblings of discontent with hope for a new movement to take over the spotlight. Boy, did I ever get one. And now that an actual, real, not-electronic movement is in place the Overton Window has suddenly shifted like magic. It’s a lesson a couple of Ms. Walsh’s stable of bloggers might learn: there is more value in showing up than shouting.

I’m starting to feel old. Emilia1956 is young yet, but older than me. So I’m an old soldier, and she comes from the land of General Lee, and you’ll forgive our impatience with a movement that has to organize to have a meeting to consider all points of view on whether to hold a vote on the question of whether to order lunch, and then to follow through the whole process again to decide what to have for lunch. The movement that put Barack Obama in office took a two-and-a-half year lunch break arguing about its lunch while its lunch was getting eaten.

That coalition continues to break up over whether or not he is the most centrist Democrat in the whole history of forever. God forbid he should be two ticks of a completely-artificial scale to the right of Bill Clinton. Obviously that is worth letting things all go to hell so that we can start over in 2016 with no America left to save. In some circles, it’s quite fashionable to say such nonsense — and there are cliques that will come as thick and fast as the “obots” ever did if you defy the fashion.

There’s too much personality involved. The reason rabbits dominate my templates is that I refuse to be the kind of celebutard commentator who blocks and denounces people over personal drama and butthurt they cannot properly name. For the most part, I look at the blogosphere and see a big, enormous failboat, much of it on this score. My Twitter DMs include many alerts that someone has said some thing bad about me; I expect to find badness spoken of me somewhere on these ‘tubes, and that’s fine. Let them. It’s free speech. I can tune it out or I can engage — my choice.

I’m still hopeful that January 2013 can be a movement’s reunion to remember. So here’s a valentine for Joan Walsh, who may or may not ever wish to engage again. I’ll still behave exactly the same way I did before, as though I never got her message, and we’ll see if she honors that.

Most recently, Ron Paul played the part of the smiling, shucksy, old-fashioned country doctor for expatriot Brit and former newspaper editor, Piers Morgan. Here’s the interview:-

Morgan raises some good questions about Paul’s policies and beliefs, but the interview is pure softball in nature, and Paul’s unchallenged responses ranged from the downhom-ish in their nature to the totally bizarre.

Paul’s foreign policy is simple: Don’t get involved. He just about approves of our involvement in World War II, but not World War I; and everything after 1945 is just illegal. He waffled rather incoherently about pre-emptively acting against another country whom you knew to be planning a military strike against the United States.

His exasperated response to Morgan’s persistent hypothetical questioning about Iran’s threats against Israel was to bully back a sullen demand to know why the British didn’t intervene in Israel’s problems – let some British boys give their lives, or something to that extent.

The healthcare question was another waffle. Of course, we all know what Paul’s views on healthcare are – if you can’t afford private health insurance, find a kind neighbour or depend on the charity of churches. In other words, die. And the final discussion about Paul’s anti-abortion views eventually disclosed that, yes, Paul believes that life begins at conception.

This week, on Real Time with Bill Maher’s Overtime segment, the question of Ron Paul arose again. You can watch the discussion here:-

As part of his damage limitation exercise, in which he’s trying to undo all the undermining of the President he’s fronted for the past four years, Bill Maher is now one of a number of so-called Progressives and members of the Professional Left, who are trying to convince us that – hey, all those racist comments, all that talk about Obama having no spine, folks, they were just jokes – nudge nudge wink wink – hey, funny, huh?

Not.

So, even though a week doesn’t go by when Bill doesn’t get a mention in about Ron Paul, he’s now trying to say (as are a lot of others), that, although Ron Paul has a lot of ideas with which Progressives can agree (like legalised pot, dismantling the Federal Reserve and bringing the troops home), there are just a few with which they don’t agree – the bad ones, like … oh, you know, healthcare and the gold standard.

This is like whistling and looking the other way. Specifically, it’s like whistling anything but Dixie and looking away. Because no one, no one in the media, and especially not the Professional Left, are raising the one thing that should mightily offend them about Ron Paul, so much so that it should totally negate any other so-called “good” idea he might have with which the Left, under normal circumstances, could concur:

Ron Paul is a racist.

If you seriously still do not believe that, you can read about it here, here, and here.

In point of fact, before he thought World War I was illegal, he thought that the Civil War was a big mistake too, and that Abraham Lincoln totally disrespected the Constitution when it came to States’ Rights and property rights – right on down to Lyndon Johnson disrespecting the Constitution some more when he signed the Civil Rights Act, which Ron Paul opposes.

Everyone in the media avoids questioning Paul about this. Everyone. And now, his former admirers, who are distancing themselves, are not mentioning the one thing that should offend them to the hilt of their Progressivism: they simply do not say that Ron Paul’s history of racism and his ability to attract the flotsam and jetsam from the white supremacist tranche of lowlifery offend the core of their beliefs.

And that’s the worst sort of hypocrisy. It denies them the right, in my opinion, not only to regard themselves as Progressives, but also to speak for the vast majority of Progressives who find Ron Paul and his candidacy offensive in every aspect.

Bill Humphrey, in his blog entitled “Memo to White Liberals Who Support Ron Paul” actually has a very astute message for those misguided and misbegotten souls who count themselves both Paulbots and Progressives:-

Pretty much sums it up. Until these self-appointed spokespersons in the public eye openly acknowldege why they really do reject Ron Paul’s candidacy, they have no right to bill themselves as members of the Professional Left.

Cross-posted from Emilia Wahoo ]]> http://www.osborneink.com/2012/02/not-quite-getting-there-about-ron-paul.html/feed 0 http://www.osborneink.com/2012/02/football-is-progressive.html http://www.osborneink.com/2012/02/football-is-progressive.html#comments Sun, 05 Feb 2012 18:00:13 +0000 Matt Osborne http://www.osborneink.com/?p=18677 Continue reading →]]> I have to hand it to Bill Maher on this one: football is the most progressive sport ever, and the perfect rejoinder to anyone who tells you that socialism is un-American, or that it doesn’t work. It also proves that “progressive” and “pacifist” are not precisely the same thing.

Industrialized warfare began with trenches and no-man’s-lands; football has lines of scrimmage and a neutral zone. The terminology of a Superbowl is infected with martial language: bomb, formation, attack, etc. If you’ve attended both two-a-days and basic training it hits home how similar they are. The physical side of coaching is different in effect, but there is a similar mental training: players have to be aggressive to tackle and soldiers have to be aggressive to shoot.

So not only does the sport embody the economic and social ethos of the progressive era in which it was born, it consciously imitates the dominant historical experiences of the liberal age. American football is THE representative sport of our nation’s 20th Century, which was characterized (until the 1980s, anyway) by mass conscription armies and the social leveling they provided.

The Civil Rights Era began with African American veterans demanding a social status equal to their sacrifice. This coincided with, and was strengthened by, the integration of the armed forces. In a similar way, Paul Bear Bryant’s 1971 refusal to continue coaching an all-white team killed official segregation across the South. Within a year, the entire Southeastern Conference was integrated — and in ten years, George Wallace would win the governor’s mansion with 90% of the black vote.

George Will, who hates football, agrees on this topic, calling the game “a mistake” that combines the two worst aspects of our previous century: violence and committee meetings. But the white and black and brown kids holding hands in the huddle with seconds on the clock on a Friday night are the best argument that we should keep the game forever, and to me the Superbowl is merely a national celebration of this.

By Emilia1956

Our biggest problem – the Left’s – is that we’re stupid. Or rather, we’re naive. So naive, we never learn from our mistakes.

And we listen too much to the Professional Left.

No sooner had Barack Obama won the 2008 Election, than we were lapping up every liquid word Chris Matthews or Bill Maher or Uncle Tom Cobbley told us about the Republicans being dead in the water – how they’d never come back from this, how they’d be the party in the wilderness for a long time.

Then, the Tea Party arose, and the Democrats lost the House in the 2010 Midterms.

OMIGOD! HOW DID THAT HAPPEN? I KNOW … IT’S OBAMA’S FAULT.

Well, that was the refrain of the Professional Left, as well. After all, it was the Professional Left who told us not to vote, just so we could show Obama. Show him what, I’ve still to ascertain. How stupidly sheeple-like certain tranches of the Left are!

Anyway, the Professional Left have a new message: After three Republican Primaries in three states with three winners, the Party is splintering. Gingrich is attacking Romney, Romney’s being cagey, Ron Paul sounds increasingly weirder (although Rick Santorum’s approaching those depths, himself). They’re all fighting with each other. They’re destroying themselves from within.

Of course, there’s a method to this meme on behalf of the Professional Left. Most would like to lull their sheeple into a daze where the prospective voter thinks the Republicans are so damned batshit that there’s no way the President could lose … so they won’t need to vote, will they? That way, they could continue with their Obama-criticism well into his second term and feel even more purist in their critique because, after all, they didn’t vote for him.

But unlike the Left, who have made snatching defeat from the jaws of victory an art form, the Right always seem to find a second wind; and if you really look at and listen to what the GOP candidates are saying, you’ll find most of their policies mirror each other’s, even Ron Paul’s.

Mary Cate Cary explains in the most recent U S News and World Report:

A cursory review of the GOP candidates’ positions on the issues is surprisingly repetitive, especially on the issues of most importance to voters, namely, the economy and the budget deficit. All of the Republican candidates are fiscal conservatives, all want lower federal income taxes, and when it comes to lowering corporate taxes, it’s simply a question of who wants to cut by how much. Most support a balanced budget and raising the retirement age. All want to reform Social Security and Medicare. Most favor repealing Dodd-Frank’s restrictions on the financial industry, and all want to reduce federal regulations on businesses.

All are pro-life, and all want tougher border security. All are opposed to Obama­care, with most calling for an outright repeal. All except Ron Paul support a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. The biggest areas of disagreement seem to be defense and foreign policy, with stances ranging from cutting the defense budget (Paul) to no reductions in the Pentagon budget except for waste (Newt Gingrich) to keeping all U.S. bases open (Rick Santorum) and increasing overseas troop levels and warships (Romney). They have a variety of positions on how to handle Libya, and while the field is split on whether waterboarding is torture, most support keeping the Guantánamo Bay prison open.

Overall, that doesn’t sound like “deep ideological divisions” to me. On domestic issues, Republicans are surprisingly unified. Republicans agree on most economic issues, as well as on the other issues most important to voters: the federal deficit and healthcare.

There are a growing number of disaffected Progressives about, who plan on voting for a third party, knowing that this would give the election to the Republicans, in hopes that in four years a real Progressive revolution would take hold and, just like the Tea Party, prevail within four years.

Don’t bank on that, and above all, don’t give them the ammunition to achieve it.

Cross-posted from Emilia Wahoo

The White House has also been far too free with cuts to energy assistance programs for low-income households. Because I have an intimate understanding of American poverty, I’ve actively opposed this trend for two years in a row. These cuts erode economic recovery by reducing an important stabilizer for the working poor at wintertime. That shouldn’t happen.

The president also came into office promising to do something about the college bowl system; Josh Levin even called him obsessed with the subject. Yet President Obama has made zero progress on the issue, even with our season of intense public attention to the dark downside of college football programs.

Now look through those three ‘graffs and tell me which part is the obotomapology.

I have never seen my “job” at this blog to be about apologizing for, or rationalizing away, presidential decisions. There are lots of policy areas where I don’t agree with Obama, and I’m not enamored of every decision he’s made even in policy areas where I generally agree. That’s more or less how I expected things to stand when I supported him all the way back in 2007.

For no matter how receptive and helpful a president is, any broad agenda (and what could be broader than the progressive agenda?) will find itself stymied at some points by even the friendliest of presidents. No president can be 100% of what any American or group of Americans want; that is not how politics in America have ever worked.

Moreover, it isn’t just one individual politician: both presidency and parties have barriers to complete participation in an agenda. Remember, Bush did not fully satisfy abortion opponents with his stem cell policy, either. All the teapublicanism, you’ll recall, was about putting “real conservatives” in office.

One example of a progressive policy area that suffers under the Obama administration is marijuana legalization efforts, medicinal and otherwise. The way through the War on Drugs (as opposed to simply ending that war) is to divide and conquer rather than continue pretending marijuana and heroin are the same.

Democrats generally don’t push these issues, however, as no one in the party can speak about them coherently. (That’s a problem with Democrats on many issues — there is no common set of talking points.) Issues like marijuana legislation are perceived as coming from the “dirty hippy” wing, of course, and that makes it hard for Democratic officeholders to participate. But that may change.

Marijuana has a large, highly-engaged following that enjoys crossover political support from libertarians and some conservatives. Marijuana is an example of a highly-engaged demographic, then, but not a broad constituency. That is, few voters care enough to turn out for the issue, but those who do care will turn out in droves, even for Ron Paul. They can’t get him nominated, however, because the issue isn’t a winner in the broader electorate.

Obama has nixed any hope of sane marijuana policy on his watch, and it’s not hard to understand why. What president wants to be “soft on crime”? You can see that in Obama’s pardon policy: the White House has issued very few pardons, and only to a rigorously-selected tranche of applicants. (Note the anger at Haley Barbour in Mississippi over the issue.)

Obama did sign the Fair Sentencing Act with bipartisan support, however, and that is what drives the hyperengaged to distraction: where there is no consensus, there is no forward progress. That’s not just a problem for this particular president, either.

With no consensus for single-payer, you get an inefficient form of single-payer by enforced market participation and Medicaid enlargement. With no consensus for the American Jobs Act, it doesn’t matter that the White House writes the legislation the way it didn’t with health care, or that the president’s advisers talk it up on TV, or that the president uses his bully pulpit with a speech to Congress and a tour of decaying bridges.

No consensus of Congress, no law. That’s how the American system works; no one can make it work against its will. If marijuana policy voters put Ron Paul in the Oval Office, he still wouldn’t be able to legalize it with this Congress. In fact, the great failure of progressive movement politics is that issue hawks invested far too much expectation in a president. The laws are written by Congress and legislatures. That isn’t apologetics, it’s basic civics.

Progressives must avoid fixating on any one office or branch of government; they are all integral to problems and solutions. The government is larger than one man, and so a progressive agenda must always seek a broader base of progress than one man. My objection to firebagging is not about defending the administration, then, but defending the cause.

“We” are the change we have waited for. “He” isn’t — and can’t be. That’s not how things work, and I don’t say so because I like him or want someone’s approval. Moreover, I have no problem recognizing his imperfections. Many of them are common to Democrats and the progressive movement. As I keep saying, look where he comes from.

In a related issue, Punk Patriot — a genuine netroots phenom and a swell guy — feels restless about the president because he’s a bit of a pacifist, whereas the president has made very effective use of his executive warmaking authority. The Punk Patriot speaks for a youth cohort that is very engaged on the issue, and as I actually like his larger point here, I’m going to let him talk and put my thoughts below the fold:

A few points. First, the president doesn’t want to keep Camp X-Ray, the Guantanamo detention facility, open. The sad story of why it’s still open belongs to Congress, where powerful Senators on the Armed Services Committee have been attacking executive power over indefinite detainees. This started early in Obama’s administration, it has not let up, and it is why I find public focus on the president over NDAA completely misplaced: those notorious provisions on indefinite detention are just the latest manifestation of this congressional power-grab. Remember, the Constitution makes the president commander-in-chief — he’s supposed to have the powers of, and over, indefinite detention.

I share Punk Patriot’s desire to put detainees on trial in civilian courts, close Camp X-Ray, and put the worst of the worst in supermax prisons if necessary — but we don’t have a vote in Congress. In fact, our point of view barely gets a voice there at all.

Second, most of the American public wanted progress in the war against al-Qaeda and approves of the progress Obama has made since his inauguration. It has always been normal presidential business to kill America’s enemies (see: Constitution, “common defense”). He promised a laserlike focus on al-Qaeda when he ran for president, and I don’t think anyone can seriously say he hasn’t fulfilled that promise. The Bushies, on the other hand, seemed in no special hurry to win the war on al-Qaeda. So don’t tell me they’re the same, because they’re just not.

Third, I do not agree with the common framing on drone strikes. If Obama sent Marines to shoot everyone and urinate on them instead of firing missiles from drones, would it actually make anyone feel better? I doubt it. Marines who fail at military discipline and violate the laws of war can get caught and punished. But it’s still war, and the punishment is for pissing, not killing.

Furthermore, the only “Overton Window” you can look for in the current presidential field is Ron Paul, who would issue letters of marque and reprisal to the company formerly known as Blackwater. Good luck getting any accountability for whatever horrors Erik Prince can come up with in Waziristan.

War is not fair. The art of war is the creation of unfairness. The enemy cannot be granted a sporting chance; he will likely kill you as thanks for the opportunity. He’s not playing games, and neither should you. That’s why people who wage war — by blowing up families in Kabul, or Marines on convoy in Afghanistan, or planes full of passengers — don’t deserve sanctuary or special protection across the artificial political boundary of a “lawless tribal zone.” Moreover, the drone strikes have worked: the Taliban are now talking, which is the first step to getting out of Afghanistan.

The president’s mission in Afghanistan is to get out of Afghanistan. His mission in Pakistan is to stay out of Pakistan. His mission in Libya has been to stay out of Libya. Right now, that strategy seems to be working.

Look at it this way: coal companies have been bombing Appalachia for a decade now, to staggering effect on communities and people in the region. At least as many West Virginians and Kentuckians have died of carcinogenic heavy metals released into streams as Pakistanis have died of drone strikes. There is no accountability for Don Blankenship, either, no matter how much he pissed on mine safety and the miners union. So you’ll excuse me if I just don’t place drone strikes at the top of my list of concerns.

The horror I share with Punk Patriot is that such crimes are not actually crimes at all, at least not in terms of individual accountability. It is perfectly legal for Don Blankenship to kill Americans with an unsafe workplace, and kill their communities with mountaintop removal mining. It was also perfectly legal to call toxic subprime mortgage debt a AAA good-as-cash investment. I am less concerned by putting people in the dock, however, than I am in making laws that stop these practices. And who writes the laws? Again, that would be Congress. Punk Patriot should talk to the folks at Appalachia Rising about how long they’ve pushed legislation to end mountaintop removal mining, and how much luck they’ve had (none).

Punk Patriot is concerned about the president’s progressivism, but what he’s really complaining about is the presidency. It’s a limited office, though until the election of Barack Obama the president’s wartime powers had very few limits. This is actually not the first time the United States has pursued a non-state actor into uncertain territory. If then-Lieutenant George S. Patton had access to a drone while chasing down Pancho Villa’s guerilla forces in Mexico, he would have used it. Indeed, the US Army used biplanes in 1916. That wasn’t fair, either, and it brought negative attention from pacifists to President Wilson’s policy. We have been here before.

The United States has been at war now for a decade. Congress passed an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) after 9/11, and it requires the destruction of al-Qaeda. If, on the other hand, the president were to begin his tenure by purging the Pentagon, Langley, and the NSA of everyone who knew about torture, who would be left to tell him where Osama bin Laden is?

The Punk Patriot wants peace. So do I. And on the other side of AUMF is a place where the “war on terror” ends, which is why the president has applied force to get there. Hate it if you want. In the meantime, he just declared his intentions to shrink the nuclear stockpile even further, to reduce the active duty land force so America cannot invade more than one country at a time, and continue withdrawing from Afghanistan. He has transformed the Department of Defense with solar Marines, alternative fuels, and the reversal of DADT. These changes will have permanent positive effects on the progressive agenda.

The alternative is to wait for a more progressive president (as Punk Patriot would define one) to come along. Pardon the talking point, but we can’t wait. Progressives cannot sit out the chance to displace the Congressional war machine and install candidates who will back up plans to shrink the military. If we don’t get that done, then the 113th Congress will fight to maintain the size of the active force, keep Camp X-Ray open forever, and stymie reform — just like the 112th Congress is doing. And how progressive is that?