Over the weekend a bomb went off on a Gaza City beach, killing 6 people, including 5 members of Hamas. But it was not an IDF attack; rather, the prime suspects are members of Fatah, the organization currently in charge in the West Bank. In response, Hamas rounded up as many as 200 Fatah operatives in the Gaza strip — a move that in turn triggered the arrests of about 30 Hamas people, including 2 officials, in the West Bank.
Perhaps there is nothing new here, except that to use the word “crackdown” when the crackers are Hamas and the crackees are loyalists to PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas suggests how far we have come in accepting Hamas rule in Gaza as a fait accompli. There really are two Palestinian governments now, two authorities. So please, speak not of a “Palestinian State” happening any time soon. Right now it looks like there will be two of them, or none at all.
Imagine the # of all the bad things said about Bush and his administration and his party for eight years. The goal will be to equal that negativity for the coming eight years. As Obama’s popularity slips,the negativity will grow until he returns to Chicago. We’re a split nation,and it ain’t coming together. Then in 2016,there will be no Republican that can be president,that won’t suffer the same treatment.etc etc etc
“Some of the young people who supported Obama with such idealism will mature, we can hope, and some will come to see the world more clearly and more soberly”
and vote for Republicans? Fat chance. The idea that every person who voted for Obama did so with the naive hope that his existence is a cureall panacea is, I hate to point out, a fantasy of the embittered right.
Obama has been in office two weeks. It used to be a traditional grace to keep partisanship to a minimum during the first 100 days. Now you have true dolts like Tom Coburn leading a meaningless charge against Democrats, since the Republicans have governed so impressively for the past 8 years. The solution to the recession: tax cuts for the rich! All spending is pork!
They have forgotten what’s happening in the real world. As the hurt mounts, demand that something be done will grow. The stimulus will pass. And time will tell.
“The goal will be to equal that negativity for the coming eight years.”
Many of us do NOT have that goal despite our extreme reservations and suspicions of what Obama is about. But if he fulfills our greatest fears, should we remain silent so as to derail the charge of partisanship?
“As Obama’s popularity slips,the negativity will grow until he returns to Chicago.”
Not necessarily, the MSM will do their level best to characterize ANY criticism of Obama as unjustified. Characterizations from mean-spirited to sore losers, from racist to plain evil…
“We’re a split nation,and it ain’t coming together.”
It certainly appears so, future events however may yet prove decisively otherwise.
“Then in 2016,there will be no Republican that can be president,that won’t suffer the same treatment.etc etc etc”
That no Republican could be President was certainly the belief after Nixon but just 6 years later Reagan was in office… and, the media did their level best to portray him as unqualified, stupid and, put charitably, ‘wrong-headed’ on the issues.
Obama’s election ensures that the American public will experience ‘significant’ events in the future. And reality, in strong enough doses is remarkably effective at changing hearts and minds.
Obama has been campaigning for two years. Part of governing is the selection of underlings to carry out the anointed one’s wishes. You’d have thought that he’d have had all these ducks in a row long ago. After all, most of them were recycled from the Clinton mob and available with a sabbatical from the Washington lobbying outfits that were warehousing them. After the 24/7 invective of the left for the last 8 years and the classless inaugural speech by Obama, who can possibly expect conservatives, Republicans, Libertarians, or even the Amish to hold their tongues over this astonishing display. And worst of all, remember how concerned the utopians were about the opinion of Europe and the rest of world? Now even the most inconsequential states are looking down on us with derision and pity.
No Franglo, I think he means they will just bail out and vote for no one. Yes, only two weeks, and his nomination performance is awful, his interview on in the Arab media was a small disaster, his buy American first is fomenting exasperated remarks from the Europeans and his Treasury Secretary which we needed to have as the best possible nominee in this troubled time just managed to piss off China in his confirmation hearing. I love the skill and polish he brings. Lets face it, the hype was always too big. When you grow up in the sewer of CHicago politics we should be ashamed to think there was ever any hope and change there. Obama will be the next great Axelrod client, elected to aclaim and then plunging after everyone quickly understands the candidate isn’t the hope and change we were looking for, just a liberal hack.
And the stimulus will do no good, we know that, just as Hoover and FDR extended and deepened the economic troubles that became the great depression, so too will this slow the recovery. There are no one but Keynesian economists on crack and left wing partisians that believe it will help at all.
I’m sure if Obama, instead of proposing a stimulus package, proposed nothing (which, correct me if I’m wrong, is the only alternative), conservatives would be howling that he was a do-nothing, “lazy” Hoover.
Face it– conservatives have no new ideas. Just opposition. Only time, and whether or not the economy recovers, will determine anything.
As was stated during the election season, a caretaker president won’t cut it this time around, but when you are elected to actually do something, there are stern consequences for not delivering. If Obama falls on his face, the Democrats may have won the battle and lost the war. However its still early.
Oh rubbish!
Obama is not being criticized for his use of the English language. He is not being pilloried for things that he has not done.
He is being questioned because of two factors. Within two weeks in office he has made a farce of one his key campaign issues. He campaigned against the excessive influence of lobbyists in governmen; then in the first days he with great fanfare signed an Executive order to prevent their participation in his Administration. Then he immediately reneged.
Secondly, in just two weeks, despite a sympathetic Senate, two of his Cabinet appointees have withdrawn because of ethical problems. A third, the Treasury Secretary with oversight of the IRS no less, was confirmed despite tax problems only because the Senate has no respect for their own responsibilities, and no respect for the law-abiding tax payer.
Still pending is the confirmation of his Secretary of Labor designate who apparently was illegally a member of a BIG Labor lobbying organization while she was a member of Congress.
Obama apologists are either ignorant or are shoveling manure.
“The [Republican] solution to the recession: tax cuts for the rich! All spending is pork! The stimulus will pass. And time will tell.”
Who is denying that something must be done? Republicans have proposed an alternative solution, it’s half the size of the democratic bill. That works out to about $440Billion+. By ANY measure that’s REAL spending.
Aren’t democrats in favor of keeping american jobs? Please explain how American business can compete with foreign competition when their expenses are so much higher? American business tax rates are about 35%… the second highest in the industrial world.
How does reducing American competitiveness result in increased jobs?
In some form or another, yes the stimulus bill will pass. If it passes with as much pork as it presently carries and ‘time’ demonstrates it to have been ineffective, will you have the intellectual honesty to admit to its incompetence? Will you call for democrats to be accountable for their actions? Do you have the intellectual honesty to admit that $150Million for the Smithsonian, in a time of fiscal crises, is not a prudent use of debt? Debt that OUR children must repay…
Prior to the passage Franglo quotes at #2, right up there for all to see, the CoD concedes that “the story has been overplayed” and refers to “many young people.” Franglo instantaneously converts the argument into a straw man “idea that every person who voted for Obama did so with the naive hope that his existence is a cureall panacea.” He then pauses briefly to wipe some crocodile tears about “hat[ing] to point out…” that this belief is a “a fantasy of the embittered right.”
No, it’s quite obvious that the existence of this fantasy is a product of Franglo’s own projection: He’s the one quite clearly functioning under a set of exaggerated and absurd assumptions about his political opponents – the one who’s indulging in self-serving fantasies – just as he’s also the one who in virtually every post he makes to this board feels the need to engage in “bitter” (not to mention vulgar) attacks on other participants either individually or as a group.
Let’s not idealize the young Obamites. I’m sure that many are pleasant little flower children who’d love to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, but a good many of them are full of sophomoric certainty about a whole range of bad ideas. Add overindulgent parentage, educational experiences that over-emphasized the dishonest promotion of unjustified self-esteem, and a popular culture of disinvestment, snarky self-superiority, and crude bad manners, and they have the makings of very unpleasant fellow citizens. A painful comeuppance followed by some extended self-reflection would – will – do them a world of good.
Uh, what is a “painful comeuppance,” there, CK? As Obama is not just the president of his supporters, a painful comeuppance for him is a painful comeuppance for the country as a whole. Now, having been in office two weeks, do you really attribute the current state of the nation to the Obama administration? Perhaps with your long years, and your painfully accrued wisdom, you may agree with me that conditions take a bit longer than that to develop. Now I’m sure it’s a bit of cold comfort for you to sit on your haunches and cackle at all the real and imagined missteps of the Obama folks, probably because you could never imagine such an administration of socialists and muslim-lovers to be legitimate. However, being the fair victors of a democratic process (something of a tradition around these parts), the new administration deserves a little better than the drip of petty recriminations it is getting from the discredited opposition.
In other words, wouldn’t it be nice if folks could just get out of the way and let them work, at least for more than a microsecond.
many of the “rationalizations” were given by supposedly conservatives (Buckley, Powell)…
liberals don’t rationalize
I agree that we should all follow the Democrats’ impeccable example of graciously supporting President Bush through thick and thin and never placing politics above what’s good for the country.
Yes, CK.
Uh, would someone remind me of why I should care that the idiotic “young people” who elected Obama may “despair of politics altogether?”
What happened to “dissent is patriotism”?
You are children.
#16-Are you questioning my patriotism!?
I fear we are overlooking here another possibility for the Obama followers — particularly the political neophites. Many of them may well be ripe for the argument I predict will be made, which is that Obama has failed because of the cabal of the mean-spirited and vicious, who are throwing up obstacles to the implementation of his policies.
You, me, the House Republicans, Rush Limbaugh — Obama will have failed not because his proposals are unsound or his policies unworkable, but because his political opponents have not gotten onboard and supported him.
Even if he does get the whole, $880+ billion pile of pork, the reason sold to Obama supporters to explain why it isn’t stimulating the economy and causing Happy Days to Be Here Again will NOT be that it’s a bad idea in the first place, an irresponsible, inflationary idea that will drive our currency and treasury securities further into the toilet.
The scripted reason, to be alluded to on the Sunday talk shows and obliquely examined in the editorial pages (Paul Krugmanm gua-RON-teed), will be that Obama’s political opponents didn’t pitch in and do their part. His PR team won’t even have to make a logical case as to how that works, exactly. The media and Obama’s political supporters will simply take up the chant, and present us with a “consensus accompli.”
Watch for it.
“neophytes” … playing s*** GD-it with the keyboard here…
1. Everybody wants national unity when they’re in the driver’s seat.
2. The argument for every failed system that was doomed from the start is “If only _____ had allowed us to do _____ exactly as we planned, we’d have heaven on earth.”
#18-The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. What’s old is new, but hopefully we never get there.
Elections have consequences. We were stupid enough to elect a Chicago thug as our President. Now we have to live with our choice.
The country as a whole may have voted for a painful comeuppance, whether it meant to or not. In any event, it looks like pain’s in store. Limiting it may require defeating Obama politically, if possible, or at least cutting him down to human size and restraining him – and, even more, restraining certain leading members of his coalition.
We’re all getting very far ahead of ourselves, however – even if on another level this is only a taste of what was sending not tingles up our legs but shivers down our spines back around the time of the Democratic Primaries.
Excellent post. Only confirms my theory that this is truly the 1st Shabbtai Tzvi episode in American political history.
ian — I’d write down the date and bookmark this thread, because we WILL get there.
Not exactly to the VRWC theory again, because that was a different dynamic from the one we face here. Hillary’s VRWC theory was that there was a conspiracy by influential right-wingers to politically submarine her husband.
That’s a different situation from having an explanation ready and waiting for when Obama’s economic policy fails (and it will fail, if implemented. Trying to artificially stimulate demand while punishing everyone whose livelihood comes from supply CANNOT work). The argument won’t be that Obama’s enemies are after him in a political sense (as Hillary complained of with the “VRWC”), but that they are viciously refusing to pitch in and “make” Obama’s policies work.
It will be a propaganda argument eerily reminiscent of Marxist allegations about “enemies of the people.”
Again, save this date and this thread. This prediction will come true.
I would not be so quick to assume that this administration will not continue to be as unethical as it seems now. The Obama campaign was awash in obscene amounts of money and no end of hogs at the trough. Nothing will change for the better with Obama’s ascension to power. Election is the ultimate gravy train. An unusual number of financial scandals from this administration would not surprise me in the least. I expect it.
Maybe our country was in some sense looking for a comeuppence. It seems that politics as a practical art can only be learned by trial and error, and the error part is especially necessary. Jimmy Carter was a disastrous president, but a very good learning opportunity for those in my generation willing to learn. Despairing of politics can be the first step toward realistic expectations of government and healthy skepticism toward political saviors.
I voted for Carter in 1976 as a young man, wanting guess what, hope and change. After humiliation in Iran, 18% mortgage rates, gas lines and the malaise speech, not to mention Burt Lance, I voted for Reagan in ’80 and have voted straight GOP ever since.
“The argument won’t be that Obama’s enemies are after him in a political sense (as Hillary complained of with the “VRWC”), but that they are viciously refusing to pitch in and “make” Obama’s policies [to] work.”
Not to play semantic word games J.E. but I would only amend your comment to read “allow” instead of ‘make’.
Otherwise I fully agree. When I said, “the MSM will do their level best to characterize ANY criticism of Obama as unjustified. Characterizations from mean-spirited to sore losers, from racist to plain evil…” it was to that to which I referred.
It is a tactic likely to meet with substantial success, as evidenced by it’s prior use in getting Obama elected. The only possible ‘disruptive’ factor in the success of that ‘narrative’ is future events. And unexpected (by democrats) events will occur.
It is true that, “When Obama’s economic policy fails (and it will fail, if implemented. Trying to artificially stimulate demand while punishing everyone whose livelihood comes from supply CANNOT work).” And it’s also true that Obama’s liberal bromide of ‘dialog’ and accommodation with Iran MUST lead to greatly increased nuclear proliferation. China will get stronger and bolder. And, terrorists will strike the US again.
These entirely predictable eventuality’s lead me to say, “Obama’s election ensures that the American public will experience ’significant’ events in the future. And reality, in strong enough doses is remarkably effective at changing hearts and minds.”
HAHAHAHAHA!
A couple of nominees don’t make the cut — a speedbump that will be past and forgotten in days — and the windbag Ahotairfool sees it as confirmation that Obama cannot hope to live up to his billing.
You clowns kill me.
I’m dying. Seriously. You should take this act on the road.
But this is all good for Obama. The more he sees the GOP for what it is, the less likely he is to give you quarter.
…badda bing. But seriously, Paul, take my President, please.
funny, that a guy named Paul should be such a true believer.
#14
“Uh, would someone remind me of why I should care that the idiotic “young people” who elected Obama may “despair of politics altogether?””
Right, if I have my way, this rotiing corpse of a “stimulus” bill will fail, and those precious “young people” will not be stuck paying heavy taxes for the next 20 years to pay for Obomber’s terrible judgment. The mature ones will thank us! and the babies and dopes will move to Europe, hopefully, where they will be much happier.
#30
Let me get this straight. Obama appoints people, some of whom can’t even get into a Senate committee hearing because they’re such obvious thieves, and that’s good for Obama? And if the GOP comments on it, he’s going to do something bad to them? Like what? The best thing that you can do is make some appointments of your own, like to see a shrink, for sure. You’re certifiably crazy.
Well, one of my points was to say that Republicans should not rest on their laurels and wait for Obama to show still more of his incompetence; we should become the party of competence and professionalism, and should consistently offer not just criticisms but ideas. I know the Democrats did no such thing during their time in the minority; but we cannot get away with that kind of thing, because we don’t have the national media determined to serve our interests. It’s not fair, but it’s the way things are.
On the other issues, I agree with J. E. Dyer. Among those who are increasingly detached from reality, any transparent failure will have to be blamed on other forces, and the Republicans of course will be the natural targets. It cannot be that the Great One simply advanced a bad policy that was bound to fail by the logic of our political and economic systems–rather it has to be that he was undermined by nefarious evil ones, probably because he was so deeply good that he could not envision the depths to which they would stoop.
The danger in making Obama a cult-religious figure is that his supporters are no longer supporters–they are fanatics, and rather than abandon their religious faith in Obama they will turn on his enemies with extreme viciousness. The last thing they will want to believe is that Obama cynically manipulated them; the second-to-last thing they will want to believe is that he simply a failure on his own merits. So they will have to blame Republicans for his failure, and the fact that Republicans have so little power in Washington or in the media will only make their attempts to blame Republicans all the more strained and determined.
Obama shares in the blame for this. When it results in deeper political division than ever, and deeper political disenchantment and disengagement from the American public, he will have helped to bring this about by cynically encouraging his cult-religious status in order to get elected. He had to know the cult-religious status could only lead to delusion or disillusionment.
I know the liberals on the board will disagree; big surprise. I am just sharing my opinion. But I think it’s clear to everyone that dissent is quickly becoming unpatriotic. When Bush was the leading voice, even in a war or crisis, dissent was heroic and necessary to the democratic process. Now that Obama’s is the leading voice, the media will paint any dissent as anti-American insofar as it hinders our efforts to recover as a nation. This, I think, is going to be the grounds for the Fairness Doctrine, or some similar law. “America simply cannot afford to be divided anymore; and to the peddlers of animosity and division, we say that your time is ended. The United States, in this our hour of need, must be united again.” Not only will it be unpatriotic to dissent; it will be patriotic to squelch dissent.
Ahithophel – As I said above, I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves, and I thought your CoD was more aimed at decrying the loss of the Obama Youth to our political culture, rather than at what reads like the warning before some fascist turning point.
I keep thinking back to my father and his unemployable buddy sitting around the kitchen table with a few cans of cheap beer in front of them bemoaning the Reagan policies that were turning the country into a gulag. I never could get it. And the ethos became even more dramatic during the Bush tenure. A combination of the eternal class warfare, a fervently left-wing media, a president with at least the appearance of a communication problem, and a war that opposition elements could rally around has made Bush’s terms radioactive for decades to come. Just as the left wrote the history of the Viet Nam conflict, they will define the course of the Iraq one. However, the grunts at Khe Sahn didn’t have laptops or internet access. The left won’t be able to spin their yarns without an argument this time.
You’re right, CK. I don’t mean that we’re about to go fascist. Except perhaps for something similar to the Fairness Doctrine, I don’t think any legal measure will be taken to squelch dissent. I just mean that some of Obama’s supporters, including many in the media, are going to blame conservative naysaying and non-cooperation for Obama’s failures, and this would seem to lead them pretty naturally toward heaping abuse on naysaying and non-cooperation. I don’t think anyone’s going to take up arms, of course, and the American public would not stand for a law against disagreement; but I do think the political price for disagreement and opposition is going to go higher.
As for the Obama Youth, I disagree with whoever it was above who suggested that it’s no real loss if young Obama enthusiasts tune out. Call me a romantic, but I’d still like to see a high level of political involvement.
It is romantic A, I just wish as a whole the youth of America had a better grounding of economics and history before walking into the voting booth. I understand they don’t, and for that matter they are not alone. We have failed to inculcate successive generations with the knowledge that, however flawed, here are the principles upon which the country was founded. Here are the basics of a market economy, how and why it works. What we have left ourselves open to is the opportunity for hucksters (and Paul, I am not sure at this point if Obama is one or if he truly believed his own rhetoric) to con the populace on the notion that your life isn’t fair and its those guys fault and I will help you. Yes, I cannot point to one real important government program in the last 50 years that has actually helped you (except maybe Medicare and it is helping to bankrupt the country) but you will still vote for me anyway because I CARE. That was FDR and Hoover and they were from different parties.
So it falls to one’s outlook on life. If you are like the netroots left today and see conspiracies everywhere, you fall prey to the sweet song that my difficulties are not my own, and our educational system is set up to encourage that, especially in students who really need a good dose of reality. Life isn’t fair, it never has been. Those who realize that become more conservative over time and don’t need to play the victim card. Those who don’t are perpetually disappointed. How they will react to Obama’s impending failure, assuming he doesn’t change course, is probably pretty much what A and JE are suggesting.
#25-I don’t think you are really going out on a limb that Obama’s policies may not work. I mean he got elected to the Senate when his main competitor dropped out. He goes against a presumptive Democratic nominee, HRC, with major negatives where his own lack of credentials can be overlooked because HRC didn’t have any either. He is following a preternaturally unpopular president. The Republican nominee was not eaxctly exuding charisma. He had the media at his beck and call which avoinded asking tough questions while searching through Palin’s trash. And yet for all that he needed an historic fiscal meltdown weeks before the election to get over the top. Yeah I’d say there is a chance he will fall flat on his face with the usual recriminations, but I’m not a Democrat so I don’t root for failure.
JEM has made the case I would make here, that the young people who have invested so much in Obama may lack the cultural and spiritual grounding to learn from a comeuppance — as opposed to assuming that it is simply another manifestation of social injustice, and demonizing their fellow men over it. I predict that at least some politicians and pundits will encourage them to adopt the latter posture, and I am not sanguine about their ability to deconstruct the arguments that will be made.
I know that CKM, whom I respect and always look forward to reading, considers it overreaching to point out the similarities between current patterns and some of the dynamics observed with the triumph of fascism in much of Europe, 70-80 years ago. I will observe again that I am not predicting brown shirts in the streets of America in the next few years. But it is very important to recognize similarities in patterns, particularly destructive ones, and not to assume that there are failsafes that will reliably prevent further unfolding of unsavory patterns.
If I had to give an assessment, I would say that there are not yet enough people involved in an Alinsky-type effort to break down the American social order, for that effort to succeed as it did in Weimar Germany. I don’t at all believe that most Obama voters were hoping for blood-in-the-streets radicalism, and I doubt that even most of his younger supporters were.
But we have to recognize that Hitler’s radicalism was never the aspiration or intention of most of his supporters either, young or old. What the Nazis did was exploit their actual aspirations, and take advantage of their unfounded, ungrounded faith in the potential of new-style governance to alleviate their list of grievances.
Weimar Germany started with fewer “failsafes” than we might attribute to the America of 2009: less economic stability than the US is coming off of today, a citizenry with a big chip on its shoulder about how its new republican government had performed in the previous decade, crushing war debt from the WWI armistice agreements.
But we need to also recognize how easily many Americans, especially young people, have been persuaded that they have complaints against a particular, intensively demonized previous administration, and against economic and social classes, on the epic order of those campaigned on by the Nazis in 1932-33.
Objectively, nothing has been as bad as it has been described to be over the last eight years, by the media, the academic left, and the most left-wing politicians. There is simply no evidence to support the very hysterical characterization of the Bush administration by these entities. Even more disquieting, the news media have succeeded in perpetuating a narrative that increasingly diverges from ground truth, about the conditions in the country itself, as with the bizarre and utterly baseless theme of the Democrats’ 2004 campaign that millions of Americans were suffering economic hardship, particularly the loss of their jobs. There was no evidence of this, either anecdotal or statistical, yet the Democrats were not just given a pass by the news media, but assisted by them in selling this campaign theme.
There are many such instances, and it would take too long to list them all. I don’t find, in the unquestioning acceptance of these fabricated narratives by many young people, any reassurance that they will be too wise to be exploited by others with radical political purposes.
I must also point out that I do not think outright suppression of free speech will be an early symptom of incipient fascism. It never has been in the past. Freedom of speech and the press are always overtly suppressed later, after government power has been consolidated. The Democrats may indeed try to reinstitute the Orwellian “Fairness Doctrine,” but I don’t foresee attempts to literally shut down dissenting media any time soon.
The basic point to keep in mind is that fascism does not succeed in gaining political power because whole populations become radicalized, but because just enough of the population hits a mix of grievance, emotionalism, misguided idealism, radicalism, and apathy. America is not so different from Weimar Germany that we can point, today, to a series of redundant social or political backstops that will immunize us against radical opportunism.
I hope it will be possible for the older and wiser in America to help young Obama supporters deal with a comeuppance from reality — which will first involve recognizing it as one, rather than interpreting it as political warfare being waged by the right. I don’t by any means regard a descent into fascism as inevitable; but neither do I consider it unseemly to recognize similar patterns where they occur. I regard it rather as an intellectual duty. Humans are humans. America IS unique in a number of key ways, and I am very optimistic about our prospects if we persist in embracing what makes us unique. But I am concerned about how much of it we no longer require our young people to learn and ponder. I am not reassured about the extent to which we are raising those unique, well-equipped Americans today.
… and for Geoffrey Britain — agreed. “Allow” is better than “make.”
JED – as I remarked to Ahithophel on the “Meaning of Palin” thread, I decided to keep to myself my more speculative reactions to his post above. I’ll say here that I share your assessments in large part, but have to leave it at that for now. Speaking of looking forward to one another’s comments, I was hoping to hear your thoughts on what Levin had to say regarding Palin in that thread. In several ways the discussion there ends up overlapping the one here.