Still Crazy After All These Years

Of course Ron Paul has no chance of ever being president, but the following he has generated thanks to his off-the-wall ideas is far more scary than the man himself.

In the end he is just another Texas pol.

So don’t tell me about Paul’s political courage. It’s easy to be a fearless iconoclast when nothing’s at stake. That said, it was heartening to hear the Texas congressman, during a Fox News-sponsored Iowa debate of all places, stress the similarities between the current “bomb Iran” chorus and the 2003 propaganda campaign that led the U.S. to invade Iraq. Paul dismissed as “absurd” Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann’s assertions that the Iranian government’s “theology” would lead it to start a nuclear war for the sake of national martyrdom.

Dennis Kucinich is the Democrats' version of Ron Paul. He can take "courageous" stances because he will never be held accountable for them.

One Year Later,

the Democratic Party, far from being unified and having a coherent agenda, is even more screwed up and divided than ever, despite having the White House and both houses of Congress.

It shouldn't even BE this way at all. This should be LBJ II in getting major domestic legislation done.

But thanks to an appeaser in the White House and some in Congress, this country is screwed, for the GOP is sure to make a comeback from being on the sidelines it so much deserved:

One year into Obama’s presidency, good vibes are hard to find. The left has gone into a disappointed sulk, while many inhabiting FOX Nation seem to have gone stark raving mad.This was largely unavoidable. It’s unlikely that Obama himself ever believed his personal charm could heal the nation’s divisions. Any politician with half his intelligence had to see trouble coming.

So profound was the disorder left by the Bush administration that cleaning things up was bound to take time. By any rational standard, Obama has donea decent job, managing the financial crisis, warding off the specter of worldwide depression and restoring modest growth. Alas, politicians get little credit for disasters that didn’t happen.

Examining a recent ABC News/ Washington Post poll, it appears that the president’s declining popularity is largely due to the public’s sour mood about the economy. Indeed, his numbers track almost precisely those of Ronald Reagan during the first year of his presidency, and basically for the same reasons.

The message is also being muddled, but I contend Obama NEVER had ANY message going into last year's election. Just "hope" and "change" and other little platitudes.

It Looks Like Obama's Afghanistan Policy

is a long shot at best, and most likely will be a failure:

Something else Obama’s team confronted was the impossibility of military victory.

“Mr. Gates and others,” the Times reported, “talked about the limits of the American ability to actually defeat the Taliban; they were an indigenous force in Afghan society, part of the political fabric.”

One may as well talk of driving Baptists out of Texas.

That said, anybody who imagined that this president, any American president, was going to abruptly pull out of a NATO action in Afghanistan or negotiate from a position of weakness, potentially leading to the spectacle of rag-tag Taliban militiamen overrunning Kabul in beat-up Japanese pickups and threatening a consequent re-establishment of al-Qa’ida bases there simply isn’t dealing with political reality, Afghan or American.

The success of Obama’s plan further hinges upon Pakistan’s ability to confront jihadist elements on its side of the border. Essentially, the president is like a poker player trying to draw to an inside straight, gambling that his troop buildup can buy to enough time to bribe Taliban fighters motivated by dislike of foreign invaders more than jihad into changing sides, another Afghan tradition.

It’s definitely a long shot. The hopeful part of Obama’s policy, however, resides precisely in the calculated ambiguity of the July 2011 date.

Miscellaneous Columns

The Washington state murder case wherein four cops were killed marked the end of Mike Huckabee's future political aspirations, just as the Willie Horton case torpedoed Mike Dukakis's presidential run.

Another week, another grotesque mass shooting, in Washington state this time, leaving four police officers dead, four families destroyed and nine children’s lives shattered.

As it’s politically unfashionable to wonder if Americans shouldn’t do more to keep semi-automatic handguns away from crazy people, attention soon focused on why mass murderer Maurice Clemmons wasn’t locked away, where he belonged.

Once again, Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and GOP presidential candidate, struggled to explain his catastrophically poor judgment. Once again, a violent felon turned loose on his say-so had run amok. Once again, according to Huckabee, currently a FOX News channel talk show host, the disaster was everybody’s fault but his own. He issued a buck-passing statement blaming “a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington.”

Assisted by an absurdly deferential Bill O’Reilly on FOX, Huckabee attempted to shift blame to Washington judges who’d freed Clemmons on $150,000 bail pending trial on a charge of child rape. Why, had he known that Clemmons would go berserk, he claimed, he’d never have commuted the man’s sentence in 2000.

The Washington tragedy almost surely marks the end of Huckabee’s political career. Ironically, for once his alibi is more right than wrong. For his own protection and everybody else’s, Clemmons ought to have been inside a locked-down psychiatric unit. The system failed from top to bottom.

If the GOP's Followers

are following the bullshit rhetoric about health care reform, why in the hell are Democrats kowtowing to them?

Why is anybody taking the mandatory insurance proposal seriously when people can't afford health insurance in the first place if they are not covered by their employers or are not working?

Any bill without a public plan will fail big time.

Because Obama is a Democrat,

and we can debate how much of a Democrat he really is, he is getting the identical treatment Bill Clinton (or for that matter, Jimmy Carter) got. It is no surprise at all. The Republicans are worried that because Obama got huge chunks of red state votes and even carried red states like Indiana, Virginia, and North Carolina, the party will be marginalized for years to come.

When backed into a corner, the Republicans do what they do best, and that's smear, smear, smear until something sticks. Apparently it is working to some extent according to recent opinion polls.

Lyons:

But unease runs deeper. In my hometown paper today, there's word of a factory manufacturing stainless-steel sinks shutting down, a sawmill cutting production to one day a week and Eli Lilly & Co. announcing the elimination of 5,500 jobs.

Meanwhile, Obama's on Wall Street, talking about financial reforms, which mainly reminds people that these jokers damn near gambled the economy away, took billions in taxpayer bailouts, then kept awarding each other obscene bonuses as if nothing had happened. Fear and anger won't diminish until sawmills and factories start hiring again.

Alas, it appears to be considered bad form in the Obama White House to keep reminding voters that it was President George W. Bush's economic and tax policies -- the very miracle cures now championed by Fox News celebrities, politicians like Rep. Joe Wilson and "Teabaggers" alike -- that caused this economic Katrina to happen.

It's the economy, stupid.

Obama needs to focus on the economy, not wasting his time so much on the health care reform sideshow or especially giving handouts to the crooks who created this disaster.

If the GOP Isn't

a cult, then it's a party full of cultists:

A more significant mystery is why Democrats nationally don't make better use of the GOP's periodic episodes of paranoia. While it's impossible to anticipate the exact content of its delusions -- comparing Obama to Hitler and Korean strongman Kim Jong Il, "Birthers" denying his citizenship, "death panels," White House "czars," etc. -- their appearance should come as no surprise.

After all, millions of Americans are attracted to "End Times" narratives as theology and popular entertainment. Not for nothing did Tim LaHaye's ponderously bad "Left Behind" sell millions of copies. How thrilling to imagine that one's humdrum existence has cosmic meaning. Of course, it's questionable how deeply people investing in life insurance policies and 30-year mortgages actually believe that stuff.

It's much the same with the far right's political delusions. How many seriously believe that Democrats favor euthanasia? Relatively few.

But you can't beat something with nothing. Which is why the Democrats' collective failure to develop a strong counter-narrative remains so bewildering. Are they waiting for what Eric Alterman calls the So Called Liberal Media to step up?

That's never going to happen. To cable TV, in particular, politics is a carnival sideshow; they're peddling tickets. Countering one falsehood at a time keeps Democrats constantly on the defensive. People need to be told a competing story: Who's deceiving them, and why. Take "death panels." Who first concocted the lie? Who pays her? Where does the money come from?

The Democrats are once again sitting back and taking it. It's inexcusable to not fight back.

Gene Lyons

I agree Democrats are going to have to come up with a better counteroffensive against the GOP noice machine. Right now the GOP is getting the upper hand over health care and other issues, and Democrats are frittering away their majority if they allow this to continue.

Such tactics won't be effective overnight, but the GOP didn't "win" over suckers overnight, either, with their lies.

We All Know, or Should Know,

the GOP would in earnest go after Barack Obama with all kinds of crazy smears just as they did with Bill and Hillary Clinton:

Rush Limbaugh, currently comparing Obama to Adolf Hitler, reported that White House aide Vince Foster had been murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton. Several federal investigations eventually were required to stifle conspiracy theorists.

The so-called “mainstream” media provided little help. Fearful of the dread “liberal bias” charge, establishment reporters not only flogged the fake Whitewater scandal, but lionized figures such as Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck and Michael Savage.

On TV, conflict builds ratings. Balance often means equating reasonable views with fantastical untruths. Ordinary viewers too often can’t tell the difference. Short of an opportunity to chronicle the exploits of the risen Michael Jackson, that’s not going to stop.

As Bob Somerby has documented relentlessly at the dailyhowler.com Web site, the 2000 presidential election probably was decided by the falsehood that Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet, the 2004 contest by the “Swift Boat” smear against Democratic nominee John Kerry. Time was when journalists andpublic figures who habitually misrepresented facts were relegated to the fringes. But that time’s gone and it ain’t coming back.

Meanwhile, an entire industry devoted to inventing calumnies against Democrats has flourished while liberal and opinion leaders havegazed thoughtfully into the ambient air. Ironically, given the current rhetoric about Obama the Nazi, its themes have always been broadly fascist, depicting liberal Democrats as the enemy within.

P.T. Barnum is alive and well and active in the GOP smear machine.

More Cronkite

His memorial service is being carried live by CBS.

Meanwhile, like many other observers, Gene Lyons mourns the end of professionalism which Cronkite's death marks:

Two big things about Cronkite and his times made him different from today's multimillionaire news celebrities. First, he came up as a print journalist, covering ball games, school fires, city council meetings and the Texas state Legislature. He knew a fact from an opinion, how to distinguish a reliable source from the other kind and how to construct an airtight story. He was a news professional, devoted to craft. I suspect he'd have walked off the set rather than devote an entire newscast to a pop singer's death, never mind entire weeks.

Second, Cronkite grasped the purely arbitrary aspects of TV celebrity. Fame never went to his head. In retirement, he conducted a long-running feud with CBS executives he thought sacrificed journalistic values to the star system and bottom-line greed.

"Something is seriously out of balance," he wrote in his 1996 autobiography, "when the top people receive such huge wages while the networks drastically cut their staffs to meet grossly reduced budgets."

The exacting standards that Cronkite and his colleagues established have all but vanished. One of the right-wing noise machine's signal achievements has been to devalue even the possibility of his kind of professionalism. It's all propaganda to them.

We'll not soon see Walter Cronkite's like again.

How true, unfortunately.

Gene Lyons

The latest craze in our deteriorating culture is the self-pity act, as notably displayed by outgoing Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

It's not just Republicans or right-wingers who are engaging in such theatrics. I love this paragraph from Lyons' column:

The cultural left is sometimes as prone to dimwit populism as the right. Witness Al Sharpton's moving an audience to tears by assuring Michael Jackson's children that he wasn't "strange," but his critics were. Sleep-overs with other people's children? Compulsive plastic surgery? Gobbling pills? Mainlining IV drugs? Sorry, reverend, strange doesn't begin to describe the poor soul. But then, nobody ever proposed running Jackson for national office.

Sanford & Sin

This country has turned into a society of peeping Toms thanks to all of the recent sex shit involving politicians in both political parties.

As Lyons says, understanding somebody else's marriage is like a foreign language: if you don't speak it, then butt out.

Gene Lyons

Lyons is right when a tragedy like the Tiller murder is twisted into some kind of perverse "infotainment" by the media, especially by the likes of Bill O'Reilly.

The Bumblers of the GOP

and their handmaidens in the media are hoping somehow to turn the torture issue against Democrats, despite the fact the GOP and its previous administration are responsible for Gitmo, etc.

Although Obama Inherited

the foreign policy mess of our dictator, it remain a mess.

You'd think Joe Biden would be used to better effect than he has.

Bush and company left an almost unfixable mess both foreign and domestic. I just don't think Obama and the Democratic Party the ability to fix it.

Gene Lyons

The more the "Tea Party" bellyaches about Obama and whines about seceding from the country, the more popular Obama becomes.

Of course they are playing politics, hoping that somehow it helps them in future elections.

Gene Lyons

Barack Obama is battling problems from all sides, and now he has to contend with a war waged upon him by former president Dick Cheney.

Gene Lyons

has some comments about the so-called "terror memos" that were released by the Obama administration.

Gene Lyons

explains the decline of newspapers, which is NOT "good news."

The internet will not replace it; in fact, I fully expect sites to be charged subscriptions if and when print papers are gone.

And god forbid blogs become the new "news" given their miserable track record.

The Republican Party, Meaning the Far Right,

or vice versa, have always been delusional, but the delusions have gone beyond the breaking point with Obama now in the White House.

Newt, he with the three marriages and having dumped the first wife when she was in the hospital following a cancer operation and widely ridiculed as a buffoon, may actually run and be nominated for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012.