The Distant Ocean

I can believe the news today

You've probably seen this by now, but in case you've missed it here's Seymour Hersh talking about a meeting the Bush administration held to plot ways they could gin up a war with Iran:

HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives.

And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about.

It's a real testament to media discipline in this country that not only is this not headline news, but the very notion that the Bush administration is eagerly searching for any excuse it can find to attack Iran is considered so outrageous as to be beyond the pale of reasonable discourse.

It's not all bad news

"After 7 Years, Talks on Trade Collapse". Organized labor opines:

"Once again, the Doha round of global trade discussions have collapsed -- a glaring sign that it is time to finally let the World Trade Organization negotiations officially end. It is time to replace the failed WTO model with a new and fair model of trade that benefits the majority of workers in the United States and across the globe.

"All workers have seen what these failed trade policies have done to our jobs, food safety, product safety, wages, the environment and the middle class -- and they have had enough.

"The Teamsters were on the front lines protesting the WTO in Seattle and in Hong Kong. And we're continuing the fight today. It's an outrage that labor rights and the environment are not even a consideration at the WTO."

Testify!

(As always, it's important to keep in mind that about 40% of "international trade" is actually intra-corporate transfers: a corporation manufactures components in one country, ships them to another country where low-wage workers can be exploited to assemble them into a final product, and then ships the product again for final sale—and thanks to the WTO, all without any bothersome tariffs that might make this cycle of exploitation unprofitable.  Here are some figures:

In North America trade associated with U.S. parent multinationals or their foreign affiliates accounted for 54 percent of U.S. exports of goods and 36 percent of imports.[2] Forty percent of trade between the US and Canada in 1998 was intra-corporate.[3]. “Forty percent of the US-Europe trade is between parent firms and their affiliates, and in respect of Japan and Europe, it is 55 per cent; with regard to US-Japan trade, it is 80 %.”[4]

)

Now that's not very quill

You may have read about the launch of Google-killer search site Cuil (apparently pronounced like Spanish "culo").  I checked it out when it was first announced, was mildly amused that the first hit for "distant ocean" was "Ogunquit Maine Bed and Breakfast Lodging Accommodations," tried several other easy searches with equally zany results, and gave up on it forever.

But the funniest bit (as pointed out by commenters here): if you search for "Cuil", it doesn't even return itself as a result.  I can practically hear the laughter at Google headquarters from 40 miles away.

My interpretation: it's not perjury if you cross your fingers

Yesterday Amy Goodman hosted a debate between Cass Sunstein, apparently the partially-animated zombie of a recently dead sensible liberal, and Glenn Greenwald.  Sunstein's comatose recitation of conventional talking points has to be seen to be believed, but I warn you: you can actually feel your brain transforming into tapioca as he speaks.  Delicious, maybe, but still deeply unpleasant.

Here's a sample, as Sunstein drones on about why it would be imprudent to impeach George Bush for, you know, breaking the law:

CASS SUNSTEIN: Well, there has been a big debate among law professors and within the Supreme Court about the President’s adherent authority to wiretap people. And while I agree with Senator Feingold that the President’s position is wrong and the Supreme Court has recently, indirectly at least, given a very strong signal that the Supreme Court itself has rejected the Bush position, the idea that it’s an impeachable offense to adopt an incorrect interpretation of the President’s power, that, I think, is too far-reaching. There are people in the Clinton administration who share Bush’s view with respect to foreign surveillance. There are past attorney generals who suggested that the Bush administration position is right. So, I do think the Bush administration is wrong—let’s be very clear on that—but the notion that it’s an impeachable offense seems to me to distort the notion of what an impeachable offense is. That’s high crimes and misdemeanors. And an incorrect, even a badly incorrect, interpretation of the law is not impeachable.

It's just not the same without the plodding certitude he imparts to every syllable, but still: is Sunstein, a former University of Chicago (and soon to be Harvard) law professor, seriously suggesting that we should allow criminals in high office to go unpunished based on their professed interpretation of the law?  Is he honestly unaware that the most serious crimes committed by the political class in this country are regularly accompanied by tortured legal justifications intended to give them a patina of legitimacy?  And that the Bush administration in particular has rationalized its every crime as a legitimate exercise of presidential power?  As I listened to him, that's certainly the impression I got.  In Sunstein's world, even the peerlessly corrupt Bush coterie—a group that regularly wipes its collective ass with legal principles—is just a set of earnest public servants acting in good faith, erring only in their sincere but misguided interpretations of the law.

I can't bring myself to dissect or even quote him further, so you'll have to go to the tape if you want the full performance (and if you want to hear Greenwald's evisceration of the boggleworthy bits above).  But there are two other things you should know: first, Sunstein is an adviser to Barack Obama; and second, he just married Samantha "other people's genocide is a problem from hell" Power, herself a former Obama adviser.

(If I seem a bit harsh toward Sunstein, who no doubt pets dogs and loves his mother, it's because he epitomizes the bureaucratic apologist for power whose bloodless analyses provide the intellectual cover for state crimes that are anything but bloodless.  Real people suffer and die as a direct result of just these kinds of sophistries.)

One less excuse

A little tidbit for your California friends who're trapped in the clutches of desperate fear that their vote for anyone but Barack Obama could mean the end of the world as we know it:

California Democrats and independent voters who backed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton have gravitated in huge numbers to Sen. Barack Obama - a consolidation of support that has boosted him to a commanding 24-point lead over Republican rival John McCain in the nation's most populous state, the latest Field Poll shows.

Not that I expect it will make a difference.  I tried this argument out on a Nader-leaning friend back in 2004, but she said straight out that she was too scared to do anything but vote for Kerry—and the fact that Kerry was guaranteed to win the state no matter how she voted, which she fully accepted, didn't even come close to making a dent in that.  I had other progressive friends who weren't even willing to vote for Kucinich in the primary this year because they were worried that their one vote might hand the nomination to the greater Democratic evil.

In my wistful moments I sometimes wonder what kind of world we might have if more people were willing to act with honesty, from the heart, rather than out of fear.

Another election perspective

By guest columnist: Rodan

hi rodan here to write you about monster election. sorry for typos but typings hard with stubby hands on wings.  and theyre like 70 feet apart too so i cant reach shift key so i cant make exclamtion point and stuff oh well.  any way here goes.

everyone tells you should vote mothra but theyre stupid.  i mean come on mothra is just a moth.  wow scary.  quick everyone turn off lamp or moth might attak us.  ok sure hes moth size of footbal field with windy wings and shoots yelow stuff from his mouth but hes still a moth for pete sake.  what are you goin to get scared of next, giant roly poly or mean potted fern.  ok maybe really huge roly poly could be scary but come on MOTH.  hey capslock thats help.

insted you should vote guiron.  whats guiron well who knows but wow check out that big knife head.  THATs scary.  they should call him ginsu ha ha.  i never did fite him myslf but man he looks tough.  guiron says hell figure out how to put kibosh on japs its about time.  now everyone thinks watch out guiron cause hell pick bad monsteres on high monster counsel but thats silly, you can wash hog with it if you want.  go on wash that hog.  guiron has lots of brain in knife head and hell totally wipe out tokyo finally and dont worry about monster counsel you worry too much.

ok any way thats it what do you want scary knife head or stupid pansy moth.  you dont have to be rodan to figur that one.  thats all thanks.

Progressively more liberal

I've managed to avoid George Lakoff for most of my life.  I frequently spend weeks, months, even years entirely Lakoff-free.  But every once in a while, despite my best efforts, I find myself knee-deep in Lakoff—most recently thanks to an article of his about Obama's shift to the right.

This is Lakoff writing in "Metaphor, Morality, and Politics" (the precursor to his book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think):

...there is a worldview that underlies liberal thought that is every bit as unified as the conservative worldview.

The family-based morality that structures liberal thought is diametrically opposed to Strict Father morality. It centers around the Nurturant Parent model of the family.

But here's Lakoff harping on the same theme in his recent article:

There are two major modes of thought in American politics -- conservative and progressive, what I've called "strict" and "nurturant."

I bet you've spotted the subtle difference, haven't you?  And if you read through the article you'll find 15 instances of "progressive" but only one of "liberal" (used pejoratively, in the phrase "too liberal").  Gilbert and Sullivan would be surprised to learn that we're now all little progressives or little conservatives, but that's Lakoff's frame, and he's pimping it as hard as he can.  He's even gone so far as to gainsay the content and the very title of his own book, which he now describes as an "analysis...of conservative and progressive ideologies."

In poking around a bit I found that Lakoff takes his "liberal"-excommunication to ludicrous extremes, as in this taxonomy from his 2006 call for liberal unity ("unity" here meaning unity around the Democratic Party, naturally):

Those on the Democratic right break down into a number of types:

1. Progressives who are genuinely pragmatic and adopt right-wing views for reasons of real-world pragmatism: They want things to work and they honestly think that in certain cases the right's policies may work better.
2. Progressives who are politically pragmatic: ...
3. Biconceptuals: partially progressive and partially conservative in their views.

Note that this entire taxonomy addresses the "Democratic right", and even here we find nothing but progressives in the Democratic party.

I've kvetched several times before about the determined efforts of liberals to shake off their centuries-old yet fatally-tainted label.  If I ever had any doubts about how serious they were about it, though, they're gone now; Lakoff is the high priest of framing, and so his fervid leg-humping of "progressive" basically seals its demise as a meaningful political term.

There's at least one important point behind the triviality here, if you'll permit me to analogize: when organic foods started becoming more popular, rather than adopting organic practices the food industry started trying to redefine the word "organic" to include the full gamut of Frankensteinian techniques (GMOs, irradiation, and so on).  They didn't care about the core concepts behind the word—they just wanted to piggyback on its cachet.  And so it is with modern Democrats and their liberal fellow travellers, who want to latch parasitically onto "progressive" and suck it dry without embracing any of the principles that make it a meaningfully distinct political philosophy in the first place.  Every time I hear yet another conservative Democrat self-describing as a "progressive", it just cements the fact that the party is little more than a marketing machine, using every trick in the PR handbook to spin its pro-corporate positions into something palatable enough to mollify its much-abused base.

And that's just the point, of course.  There's no chance that Lakoff and the Democrats he so admires will be able to remove "liberal" from the popular lexicon; if nothing else, the conservatives who've worked so diligently to turn it into a political swear word will make sure they fail.  But in terms of the real purpose of this rebranding—namely, gulling the more liberal segments of the Democratic base into seeing themselves and the party in a new and better light—it's a success already.

You, on the other hand, are just the right size to fail

(article)

Two out of two Lawrences agree

Via Glenn Greenwald, here's Obama myrmidon Lawrence Lessig describing his conversations with Obama campaign workers:

When you talk to people close to the campaign about this, they say stuff like: "Come on, who really cares about that issue? Does anyone think the left is going to vote for McCain rather than Obama?"

You can practically hear the sneer.  And here's Lawrence O'Donnell from An Unreasonable Man, talking about his days as a Democratic Party operative (going back to at least 1988):

If you want to pull the party—the major party that is closest to the way you're thinking—to what you're thinking, YOU MUST, YOU MUST show them that you're capable of not voting for them.  If you don't show them you're capable of not voting for them, they don't...have...to listen to you.  I promise you that.  I worked within the Democratic Party.  I didn't listen, or have to listen, to anything on the left while I was working in the Democratic Party, because the left had nowhere to go.

Two out of two Lawrences agree: if you're on the left, the Democrats expect you to shut up, lie back, and think of England as you hand them your vote.  After all, it was never really your vote anyway—it passed into Democratic ownership the moment you decided you weren't a conservative.

There's a crucial flip side to the wisdom of the two Lawrences which is crystal clear if you invert what they're saying, and it's this: if you've been voting for Democrats despite your conscience, you are personally responsible for what the Democrats are and for what they do, because you've handed them your support without the conditions that might force them to take your concerns seriously.  You've made it clear that no matter how bad they become, you'll still dutifully march into the booth in November and give them your vote.  All the agonized indecision and ethical struggling in the world don't matter one bit at that point; the votes count the same whether they're cast enthusiastically or under protest.  All they want is for you to put them back in power so they can ignore you and piss on your deepest concerns for another few years—until it's time for you to do it all over again.

So if you want to be responsible (in your own small way) for impeachment being off the table, for supporting and funding the continuation of the Iraq war, for the threat of nuclear strikes on Iran, for expanded wiretapping, for telecom immunity, for corporate bailouts and tax cuts, etc, etc, etc, just vote for the Democrats again in 2008.  After all, it's what they not only expect but demand that you do.

Takes one to know one

Here's Michael Greve, director of the Federalism Project at the American Enterprise Institute, explaining one of the things that could turn more conservatives to Obama:

"It could be the second coming of the Clinton administration. If people have any confidence in that, I think a whole lot of conservatives would vote for him."

I find it inordinately amusing that a mouthpiece for the AEI so casually (albeit indirectly) asserts a truth about the Clinton administration that legions of liberals have spent years furiously denying.

We're having a(nother) heat wave

...the sixth this year, and just the first of the summer.  So you won't think I've gone completely Chicken Little on you, here are some of the things Californians should expect by 2070 under even a relatively optimistic emissions scenario (according to a document prepared by the Union of Concerned Scientists):

• 2-2.5 as many heat wave days in major urban centers
• 30-60% loss in Sierra snowpack
• Up to 1.5 times more critically dry years

The only problem is that it's 2008, not 2070, and all of these are happening right now (and the latter two have been happening for the past two years).

Now, it's possible that this is just be a statistical anomaly; maybe next year we'll see record rainfall, an increased snowpack, and a return to the normal pattern of about three heat waves per year.  But I can't help but notice that it sounds awfully similar to this:

"We kind of have an informal betting pool going around in our center and that betting pool is 'does the North Pole melt out this summer?' and it may well," said the center's senior research scientist, Mark Serreze.

It's a 50-50 bet that the thin Arctic sea ice, which was frozen in autumn, will completely melt away at the geographic North Pole, Serreze said. [...]

"If you talked to me or other scientists just a few years ago, we were saying that we might lose all or most of the summer sea ice cover by anywhere from 2050 to 2100," Serreze said. "Then, recently, we kind of revised those estimates, maybe as early as 2030. Now, there's people out there saying it might be even before that. So, things are happening pretty quick up there."

And down here too, Mark.

So maybe 2007 and especially 2008 are statistical outliers where California's concerned (and hey, maybe seals with blowtorches are secretly working to help Serreze win his betting pool).  But the pattern lately is that predictions of climate change effects have been too cautious, targets have been too high, and timelines have been too generous; I don't know of a single case of a climate scientist pointing to anything that's turning out better than expected.  So as I sit here sweating and sucking down smog-filled air over the next few days, I'm going to throw caution to the wind and blame the whole damn thing on anthropogenic global warming.

William Blum on patriotism

William Blum shares some worthwhile thoughts and quotes on one of the more crippling mental afflictions, here.  Some tidbits:

I'm sick and tired of this thing called "patriotism".

The Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor were being patriotic. The German people who supported Hitler and his conquests were being patriotic, fighting for the Fatherland. All the Latin American military dictators who overthrew democratically-elected governments and routinely tortured people were being patriotic -- saving their beloved country from "communism".

General Augusto Pinochet of Chile: "I would like to be remembered as a man who served his country."

P.W. Botha, former president of apartheid South Africa: "I am not going to repent. I am not going to ask for favours. What I did, I did for my country."

Pol Pot, mass murderer of Cambodia: "I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country."

Tony Blair, former British prime minister, defending his role in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis: "I did what I thought was right for our country."

And more.

My independence day

Over the past decade, as I've become aware of the full extent of this country's true history, celebrating the fourth of July has come to feel a bit like celebrating Hitler's birthday (aww, look at the little guy! I wonder what he'll do when he grows up?).  But as jingoistic displays go it's actually one of the least offensive, at least in San Francisco.  Around here you see fireworks associated with baseball much more often than with glorifying the most violent nation on the planet, and ultimately all you really have to put up with from this stinking cesspool of patriotism is a half hour's worth of poomp-poomp-poomp.

No, a far worse time in San Francisco is Fleet Week, when F/A-18 Hornets strafe the city in simulated attack formations, low and fast, rattling windows and frightening children and dogs, day after day.  They're so close you can feel the rumble in your chest; sometimes you can actually see the pilots.  On each pass all I think about are the people in Iraq (the current primary victim; it changes regularly) who hear these same sounds and know that in the next few moments someone they love may be reduced to scraps of meat, bone, and blood around a smoking impact crater.  At times it's hard for me to contain the fury that bubbles up during a close flyby, and I find myself shouting at the sky—noiselessly, since a human voice has no chance against the thunderous roar of the jet engines of these beautiful killers.

Yes, beautiful.  It's a complex set of emotions for me, since some of my fondest childhood memories are the yearly trips to Armed Forces Day demonstrations with my father, a career military man, at air force bases around the country (wherever we happened to be living at the time).  No one else in the family shared the same level of martial appreciation, so it was our day.  At that time the F/A-18 was one of my favorite fighter jets—bolstered in large part by how overjoyed we were when the Blue Angels, who'd gone from the awe-inspiring F-4 Phantom to the whiny A-4 Skyhawk, finally ditched the latter and started using F/A-18s in their demonstrations.

Still, my favorite plane was always the A-10 Thunderbolt, whose ugliness on the ground was more than matched by the seemingly impossible maneuvers it could pull off once it was in the air.  We always tried to fight our way through the miles of traffic to get to Andrews Air Force Base early enough to see the A-10 (never the star of the show, and therefore always relegated to an early slot in the schedule).

That was then.  Now when I see an A-10 I just think about its popular nickname ("tank killer"), and how it earned it: by being the primary delivery mechanism for the depleted uranium rounds that poison Iraq, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, among other places.  I think about the thousands of Iraqi children born with horrific birth defects since 1991.  And the aerobatics that enthralled me so many years ago finally look like the dark, ugly military porn they always were.

But no matter how much reality I absorb and how much anger and disgust my adult self might feel at the glorification of these murderous weapons, there'll always be that kid inside me as well, sitting on my father's shoulders on a bright spring day, staring in wide-eyed wonder at the planes roaring by overhead.

Bulldozer relativism

In the wake of this, it seems like a good time to remember one Israeli bulldozer operator's fond memories of his his role in the destruction of the Jenin refugee camp during the 2002 Israeli assault on the West Bank:

They were warned by loudspeaker to get out of the house before I come, but I gave no one a chance. I didn't wait. I didn't give one blow, and wait for them to come out. I would just ram the house with full power, to bring it down as fast as possible. I wanted to get to the other houses. To get as many as possible. ...

Many people were inside houses we started to demolish. They would come out of the houses we were working on. I didn't see, with my own eyes, people dying under the blade of the D-9. and I didn't see house falling down on live people. But if there were any, I wouldn't care at all. I am sure people died inside these houses, but it was difficult to see, there was lots of dust everywhere, and we worked a lot at night. I found joy with every house that came down, because I knew they didn't mind dying, but they cared for their homes. If you knocked down a house, you buried 40 or 50 people for generations. If I am sorry for anything, it is for not tearing the whole camp down.

Here's one of the people to whom the Israelis didn't give a chance:

Jamal Fayid was a thirty-seven-year-old paralyzed man living in the Jurrat al-Dahab area of the camp, and his family could not evacuate him in time. Despite the pleas of the family, the IDF bulldozer refused to stop the demolition of the home on April 6. Jamal Fayid was killed in the collapsed building.

I saw the results of the Israeli military's handiwork when I reached Jenin about a week after they'd pulled out.  This was the center of the camp, seen from the minaret of the local mosque:

And the center of the camp, looking back toward the mosque (which gives you a sense of just how tall the pile of rubble was):

I wrote a detailed account of my time in the West Bank and Gaza, and in the not-too-distant future I plan to post it here along with more of the photographs I took.  For now, here's an excerpt that describes these scenes:

___________________

We finally reached our destination: the center of the camp.  An area comprising several city blocks had been completely razed by Israeli bulldozers and tanks, every house first torn down, then ground up, and then flattened by tanks.  The Israelis use a modified version of the Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer, a hulking monstrosity that has to be seen to be believed.  With a massive blade that comes to a point in the front and a spiked arm in the back used (in this instance) to dig up pavement and churn rubble, it looks like some kind of prehistoric monster—and the Israelis had unleashed these monsters within the center of the camp.  In a preliminary report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that this act was “vastly disproportionate to the military objectives pursued” and suggested that priority should be given to “establishing whether this extensive destruction so exceeded military necessity as to constitute wanton destruction—or a war crime.”  On the ground, looking at it for myself, there was no question about it: this was terrorism.

We walked up onto the rubble pile.  It was so wide and high that it had a terrain of its own; in places it was as tall as a three-story house.  There was a reason for that, of course: it was made of houses (more than a hundred, according to HRW).  I refer to it as the “rubble pile”, as though there’s rubble in every town and in Jenin it had just been collected in the center of town—but I never forgot as I stood there that I was standing on people’s homes.  You could see their personal belongings crushed and twisted underneath the stone.  The wheels of a mangled baby carriage pointed toward the sky at the top of one rise.  And above all, as you walked on this horrifying monument to brutality, you knew that you were standing on a tomb.  Some people had not been able to escape their houses before the bulldozers came, and they had been buried alive, trapped inside as the walls collapsed in on them.

Shattered dreams

It's been breathtaking trying to follow Obama's sprint to the right since he clinched the nomination—and I say "trying" because he's moving so fast he's actually starting to redshift, and soon it'll take hours just for the light from his receding back to reach us.  You've got to admire the thoroughness and breadth of his disguise-shedding: the death penalty, FISA and telecom immunity, scolding the (ostensible) left, scapegoating black fathers, backtracking from his previous lies about NAFTA, positioning himself to the right of Likud, vowing to go Bush one better in giving government funds to religious organizations, and even hedging on the one and only thing he's said that at all merited the "change" label—his vow to talk to leaders like Ahmadinejad.  Among other things.  Really, it's been like Christmas every day...I can hardly wait to see what's next!

So how will the faithful respond?  Over at A Tiny Revolution I went miles out on a limb with this wildly speculative prediction (in response to the italicized remark):

It'll be interesting to see what happens when the guy crushes all that hope he's been building up.

That won't happen. No matter how bad he is, he'll be better than Bush—and that'll be enough for the true believers. The vast majority of Obama voters will rationalize the inevitable "compromises" (i.e. betrayals) as necessary bows to pragmatism; he has to work within the realm of the possible, you see. In 2012 they'll have no time for our silly quibbles about how he bombed Iran, continued the occupation of Iraq, and circumvented any meaningful action on global warming. It'll be just like 2000, when after eight years of Clinton murdering Iraqi children by the hundreds of thousands, among other hideous crimes, a Gore-pimping Democrat actually pointed me towards the earned income tax credit as the glorious achievement that so clearly illustrates why we must, must, must keep the Democrats in power.

And just a few hours later "Dave" offered this comment on the same thread (addressing Obama's choice to make common cause with Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts on the application of the death penalty):

His alternate choice would have been to appeal to the "child rapist" vote in one way or another. That second choice of action, even though principled, would have guaranteed the biggest loss in the history of national elections. Is that what you want?

Sure sounds like Dave's saying that Obama took a necessary bow to pragmatism, doesn't it?  Yeah, I thought so too.  Score!  I hit the fish, right there in the barrel!  And as I say, I don't doubt that it's going to go that way in the vast majority of cases.

Still, there are some hopeful signs, like the rumblings on this thread:

Quinty: His remarks today on faith based organizations for me are the last straw. He has told his original backers to collectively go to hell. He has not even attempted to hide his open contempt for us. ...

anne faith: I hate admitting that I’m wrong. But here goes: all of you out there who warned that Obama was full of crap and that we had drunk the kool-aid and that we would be sorely disappointed and that he was no progressive…. YOU WERE RIGHT. And you have every right to say, loudly, “I told you so!!!” ...

Bluetickle: I am angry and ready to rip the Obama bumper sticker off the back of my car and re-join the sane people who ignore this political blather.

And there are a few more like that if you read through.  But for every Quinty, anne, and Bluetickle. there are dozens of people insisting that that's not really a shit sandwich they're eating, but a tastefully-prepared ham and cheese:

jlees: Is pushing for “conservative” ideas like self-reliance while having the liberal safety net a bad thing? Does that move him to the “center” so he can “pander”? I don’t think so. I think it makes him a realist, a pragmatist ...

(There's that word again!)

Will the de-illusioned finally outnumber the permanently-illusioned this time around?  Gosh, what a perplexing mystery.  But it'll at least be amusing to see how it all falls out—especially if Obama continues trying to top himself every day in seeing how far he can jam a screwdriver into the eye sockets of his most ardent supporters.