The Distant Ocean

Still evolving

Since the Dick Cheney is currently opening its haggard maw on television shows, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the Dick Cheney evolutionary cycle for anyone who missed it the first time around.  It's just a matter of time before this thing reaches full maturity, folks.

(That posting is currently the second hit on both Google and Ask when you search for "evolutionary cycle", and it was the top hit just a few days ago—further evidence that the Internet is irreparably broken.)

QED: Former Bush administration official Lawrence Wilkerson says "I simply don’t recognize Dick Cheney anymore."  A-ha!

And the winner for best Libya propaganda is...

Most of the lies we're fed to convince us to cheer for the killing machine are crafted to be plausible—laughing hysterically tends to undermine the effectiveness of propaganda, after all—but there's always at least one that sends my bullshit meter flying to the upper reaches.  And this time around there was no contest:

[ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo] said there were reports of the use of male sexual enhancement drugs, which he called a "tool of massive rape."

"There's some information with Viagra. So, it's like a machete," he said. "It's new. Viagra is a tool of massive rape. So we are investigating. We are not ready to present the case yet, but I hope in the coming month, we'll add charges or review the charges for rapes."

Now that Qaddafi has lost control of Tripoli I'm sure they'll be able to track down all the empty Viagra containers.  Right?  Personally I'm betting he hid them in the empty incubators Saddam Hussein shipped to him from Kuwait after the Iraqi army ripped out the helpless babies and threw them onto the bayonets of hungry German soldiers.

ADDING: You can imagine the phone calls:

OPERATOR: Pentagon International Rape Crisis Center.  How may I direct your call?

CALLER: Our government is sending soldiers to despoil our women!  You must help us!

OPERATOR: I'm sorry to hear that.  I'll transfer you to a targeting counselor to get your country information, and we'll send an air strike as soon as possible.

Responsibility 2 Pullyourheadout

I'm sure you've witnessed (and probably endured) this exchange more than once:

Credulous Liberal: Isn't it great that we're bombing <country A> because of our deep commitment to human rights?

Attractive Skeptic: Look, if the US is committed to human rights, why is it backing similar hideous crimes in <countries B, C, D...>?

Credulous Liberal: So you're saying just because we can't fix every problem we shouldn't do anything at all?  What kind of moral cretin are you!!?!

Seems like such a straightforward argument, doesn't it?  And yet whoosh, over and over again.  For a real life example, here's Juan Cole missing this point (as he's done regularly since his American Idol first considered attacking Libya) with his trademark soporofic banality:

But here I agree with President Obama and his citation of Reinhold Niebuhr. You can’t protect all victims of mass murder everywhere all the time. But where you can do some good, you should do it, even if you cannot do all good.

So for the Juan Coles of the world, this is the seemingly obvious syllogism that's nonetheless somehow eluding you: if the United States claims to be bombing country A to prevent crimes similar to ones it's actively enabling, supporting or financing in countries B/C/D/et al, that means that the United States is not actually bombing country A to prevent those crimes.  And any analysis that ignores that simple logic and instead takes the US's benevolent intentions as a core premise is fatally flawed from the outset, and will be fortunate if it's merely naively misguided rather than morally grotesque.

Maybe an analogy would help:

Credulous Liberal: Isn't it great that the Russian mafia is killing all the pimps in Las Vegas because of its deep commitment to women's rights?

Dapper Realist: You mean the same Russian mafia that kidnaps young women, addicts them to heroin and then sells them as sex slaves?

Credulous Liberal: So you're saying just because they can't help every woman they shouldn't help any at all?  Why do you hate America so much!!?!

Ok, I may have mixed my messages there.  But you get the idea.

Juan Cole still unperturbed by superfluous reality

There aren't enough hours in a lifetime to catalog all the ways war cheerleader and occasional military/CIA briefer Juan Cole is stupefyingly wrong on any given day.  Really, what can you do with someone whose level of naivete reaches dizzying heights like this?

But here I agree with President Obama and his citation of Reinhold Niebuhr. You can’t protect all victims of mass murder everywhere all the time. But where you can do some good, you should do it, even if you cannot do all good. [...] Moreover, those who question whether there were US interests in Libya seem to me a little blind. The US has an interest in there not being massacres of people for merely exercising their right to free assembly.

Yes, he should be sure to mention to those corpses of protesters in US allies Bahrain and Yemen how dedicated Obama is to "doing some good" and opposing "massacres of people for merely exercising their right to free assembly."  And when Cole goes on to talk about an entity that has "played a sinister role in Africa, bankrolling brutal dictators and helping foment ruinous wars," you'll be unsurprised to learn that he's not referring to the United States (in general, and the Obama administration in particular, which tried to instruct Egyptians to keep its faithful dictator Mubarak in place right up to the bitter end)—but to nefarious supervillian Moammar Qaddafi.

In a way I envy Cole; my mundane reality is no match for the exciting fantasyland he's constructed for himself, where Barack Obama vanquishes evil dictators because of his deep commitment to freedom of assembly.  I was thinking we shouldn't tell him there's no Santa Claus just in case he's still holding on to that one as well—no need to be cruel, after all—but I'm confident he could convince himself that the Santa evidence is overwhelming.

BONUS: One of Cole's "top myths" about the attack on Libya is that "the United States led the charge to war", a fanciful notion which Cole dismisses by saying "there is no evidence for this allegation whatsoever."  Probably a true statement in his mind, since I'm sure he's carefully expunged unpleasantly contradictory facts like this from his magical world:

At the end of the Tuesday night meeting, Obama gave U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice instructions to go the U.N. Security Council and push for a resolution that would give the international community authority to use force. Her instructions were to get a resolution that would give the international community broad authority to achieve Qaddafi's removal, including the use of force beyond the imposition of a no-fly zone.

That Tuesday evening was March 15th, by the way, and on the 17th the Security Council passed the war resolution Obama had just instructed Rice to push for.  This might strike less creatively-motivated observers as some sort of causal relationship, but Juan Cole has trained himself to recognize it as the utterly meaningless coincidence that it is.

Another victory for universal healthcare

Yet another judicial blow against President Obamney's corporate health insurance mandates:

[T]he individual mandate was enacted as a regulatory penalty, not a revenue-raising tax, and cannot be sustained as an exercise of Congress’s power under the Taxing and Spending Clause. The mandate is denominated as a penalty in the Act itself, and the legislative history and relevant case law confirm this reading of its function.

Further, the individual mandate exceeds Congress’s enumerated commerce power and is unconstitutional. This economic mandate represents a wholly novel and potentially unbounded assertion of congressional authority: the ability to compel Americans to purchase an expensive health insurance product they have elected not to buy, and to make them re-purchase that insurance product every month for their entire lives.

I've talked to liberals who aren't thrilled with Obama's health care plan but nonetheless think it must still be worthwhile, because a) after all, Obama likes it, and b) it at least does something.  The fact that the something it does is to entrench corporate power over health care in the US to the point where it would take a nuclear bomb to dislodge it, not to mention to put a lengthy debate about universal healthcare off the national agenda for decades, either doesn't occur to them or is subsumed by their knee-jerk partisan instinct to at least politely nibble at whatever shit sandwich the Democrats happen to be feeding them at any given moment.  And the imperative of dining on that questionable meal also makes them willing to spin tortured rationalizations around the notion that it's ok for the government to compel us to buy a product from private for-profit corporations for our entire lives.

So it's left to conservatives and their knee-jerk partisan instincts to try to nullify this government gift to some of the most predatory and exploitative corporations in the US.  Thanks for doing what you can to save universal healthcare from the ongoing assault by Democrats and their misguided liberal supporters, 26 Republican attorneys general and governors!

(Yes, I'm plagiarizing myself.)

MOREOVER: The 11th Circuit also explicitly concluded that the expansion of Medicaid in the act is not unconstitutional—they struck down just the individual mandate and nothing else:

We first conclude that the Act’s Medicaid expansion is constitutional. Existing Supreme Court precedent does not establish that Congress’s inducements are unconstitutionally coercive, especially when the federal government will bear nearly all the costs of the program’s amplified enrollments.

So if Congress wants to go back and handle health care the right way—by making Medicaid or some other form of federally-funded health care available to everyone in the nation—there's no reason they can't do it.  For people who'd actually like to see universal healthcare in this country within the next few decades, this decision couldn't possibly have been better.

Prepare thy sole for this, my unworthy tongue

For your enjoyment:

1. Obama is Too Good For Us
2. I Still Love Obama. Love. Love. Love.
3. How Can We Not Love Obama?

You're probably thinking you have an answer for that last question, right?  How wrong you are:

In 2011, it is possible to be a levelheaded, warmhearted, cold-blooded killer who can crack a joke and write a book for his daughters. It is possible to be many things at once. And even more miraculous, it is possible for that man to be the president of the United States. Barack Obama is developing into what Hegel called a "world-historical soul," an embodiment of the spirit of the times. He is what we hope we can be.

We love Obama — even those who claim to despise him — because deep in our hearts and all over our lives, we're the same way — both inside and outside our jobs, our races, our cities, our countries, ourselves. With great artists, often the most irritating feature of their work is the source of their talent. Obama's gift is the same as his curse: He's somehow managed to be like the rest of us, only infinitely more so.

See?  You only thought you didn't love Obama, but you can't stop loving him; Stephen Marche has made up your mind.

And from that second floater, I offer you this:

I'm also not convinced, my own hyperbolic tendencies aside, that I'm really the last Obama devotee standing. When I ask around, I find that the people who are disappointed in Obama aren't as disappointed as the media would have us believe, and that many aren't disappointed at all. In fact, some acquaintances have told me that they, too, feel surprised by the assumption that the Obama backlash is universal.  Sure, a lot of the people I know are like me—Whole Foods shoppers, NPR listeners, Slate readers and writers—but I do live in a state where I'd be unable to avoid voters of varying political persuasions even if I wanted to.

Smitten though she may be, I think our correspondent is dead on.  I think the backlash against Obama is nowhere near as strong or deep as it seems, even in the outraged squawks of people who claim to feel the most betrayed by him.  It's tritely but accurately observed that the opposite of love isn't hate but indifference, and I think if you could burrow just below the surface of many a "disillusioned" Obama fan's anger you'd find the smoldering core of devotion still there, patiently waiting for the magic words from their Lightworker-in-Chief that will bring it to full flame again.  As I've said before, they're just one speech from re-enchantment.

So take heart, Whole Foods-shopping, NPR-listening liberals: election season is almost here, with its intolerance for nuance and absolute demand for party unity.  And as the backlash against the backlash takes hold, loving Obama will be cool again—and then this great weight will be lifted from your hearts, and you can bask once more in the transcendent grace of your perfect devotion.

(Two of those three links courtesy of.)

Freedom is Slavery

In dredging through the sorry history of David Cobb's Green Party presidential candidacy of 2004 in this thread, I rediscovered this mind-blowing quote:

DAVID COBB: I will, however, in swing states, tell voters "vote your conscience". If your conscience says you cannot vote for the corporatists and militarists like John Kerry, invest your vote in the Green Party, which is the growing, vibrant party for the long-term future of the progressive movement independent this country.  If a progressive voter in a swing state you are genuinely terrified of four more years of George Bush, then I understand why you may hold your nose and vote against Bush, not for Kerry, but against Bush [...].

Cobb's use of the phrase "vote your conscience" was no accident, as you can see from this contemporary review of his strategy:

By nominating Cobb, Greens are seeking to build a credible counterforce while joining in the effort to remove Bush from the White House. The message in the 40 or so "safe states" will be, "Don't waste your vote by supporting a corporatist, militarist Democrat in a state where it won't help defeat Bush; invest your vote in building a progressive alternative." In the states considered too close to call come November, the message will be, "Vote your conscience."

Of course I'm sure y'all know that "vote your conscience, not your fears" was the central slogan/motto/theme of Ralph Nader's candidacy in 2000.  So Cobb actually took Nader's call for people to vote their consciences rather than their fears and precisely inverted it, turning it into a rationalization for them to "hold their nose" and vote for Kerry if they were "genuinely terrified".

Cobb may have accepted the nomination for President, but he would have been better qualified for Minister of Truth.

Monsters Battle Los Angeles

Two of my liberry hold DVDs came in this weekend.  The first was Battle: Los Angeles, which I hoped might at least be mindless entertainment; unfortunately I was only half right.  This is without a doubt one of the most boring movies I've ever seen, and that includes Eraserhead.  And though I expected to have to grit my teeth through the military worship it turns out I'd badly underestimated it; this movie has such a wet hot crush on Our Sacred Troops that it makes military recruiting ads look like hippie propaganda.  You will be asked to watch the extended torture-murder of one of The Enemies and not only approve, but applaud the dedication and ingenuity of our brave boys in uniform; I leave the odious analogy to current events to the reader.  If that sounds like your cup of tea, and if you're dying to hear yahoos in camouflage shout "Move move move!" for two hours straight, this is definitely your movie.  As for me, I kept nodding off for about an hour and then fast forwarded to the end, and as far as I can tell missed not a thing.  Execrable.

Next was Monsters, which turns out to have been the polar opposite of (and therefore the perfect antitode to) B:LA.  It's got aliens and the U.S. military as well, but they're relegated to the background much of the time, and far from being an extended recruiting video, Monsters offers a scathing indirect critique of U.S. immigration policy and military terrorism.  It has an oddly subdued vibe and moves along at a measured pace that might put some people off, but if you can take it on its own terms you're in for a treat.  This is an alien "invasion" flick a lefty can love.

(If you're questioning this weekend's choice of movies, what can I say?  Sometimes you want The Best of Youth and sometimes you want laser beams and dinosaurs.)