A tip o' the hat to Prez O for his speech last night. His performance reminded me of his very best efforts on the campaign trail: the soaring rhetoric, the carefully planned moments when he continued speaking over the applause (a nuance learned from his true teacher, Martin Luther King), the natural aura of leadership. What was also fun was the way he boxed the Republicans in; at first they sat on their hands in angry defiance, but Barack forced them to cheer along. What were the Repubs going to do, act as if they were for bank executives buying up private jets and $85,000 area rugs? And once he had them cheering against the plutocrats, it was natural that the Republicans found themselves in favor of restoring the top marginal tax rate of 39% when Bush's tax plan expires. But if the Republicans desert the fat cats, who the hell do they represent? Everyone knows that their pretended advocacy for the Evangelicals is only a gag to give them a slightly broader base than the foursomes about to tee off at Burning Tree.
The First Dude is a master politician, a preternatural talent, no doubt about it. He threw in some red meat for the mouth-breathers, too. His non-withdrawal withdrawal from Iraq, for example. Will all the troops in Iraq really be home by the summer of 2010? "We are now carefully reviewing our policies in both wars, and I will soon announce a way forward that leaves Iraq to its people and responsibly ends this war." If all the troops were coming home next summer, wouldn't that be the "way forward" announced now? What the speech "announces" now is that we will "end this war," and that's what people hear, and are meant to hear. Meanwhile, one learns from the New York Times that the "end" of the war means that a garrison of 50,000 troops will still be in Iraq for "training" and to "guard American institutions." Those institutions, of course, would include the American embassy, permanent bases and the Iraqi oil industry, which we will not give up without a fight.
If you're scratching your head and wondering how this is different from what Bush would have done, do not distress yourself unduly. Bush, because of the obnoxiousness of his own personality, so exasperated Nouri al-Maliki that the Iraqis pushed for our expulsion. President Smooth, on the other hand, knows how to play people to get what he wants, and now Nouri doesn't want to lose his own access to Obamania. Pretty cool, huh?
Of course, that does mean that Americans will continue to get picked off over in Diyala, Anbar, Mosul, etc., but hell -- enlistment is way up because the economy sucks. It's a win-win! And meanwhile, the Afghanistan war is entering a growth phase because we need to make sure that no one can "use" that land "halfway" around the world to stage attacks against America; we want them to have to use Saudi Arabia or Yemen or Germany instead.
So, what do we got here? A "better" health care system is promised. Universal, free, like France?! Don't get hysterical. He didn't say that. Just tweak it to get rid of "waste."
We will double our supply of renewable energy in the next three years. That's better than nothing, especially if Obama is not counting his oxymoronic inclusion of "clean coal" in the mix. But current renewable use supplies only 10% of our energy, and reality-based hysterics, such as those at RealClimate.org (to the right), argue along with Al Gore that if we're going to avoid the worst effects of global warming (as opposed to those which are now inevitable), we really need to use goals like 100% by the year 2020. Obama proposes to invest $150 billion in renewable research over the next 10 years, or approximately the amount the United States was spending on Iraq on an annual basis during the height of the insurgency.
So: Obama is not really serious about an alternative energy regime. His policies in Iraq and Afghanistan are virtually indistinguishable from his predecessor, except to the extent his approach to Afghanistan is worse. He's carried forward a lot of the Bushian bullshit about detainee and "state secret" policy, using Bagram as his substitute for Guantanamo, just as Bush did when the Supreme Court went upside his head on the Cuban gulag.
But man - does he sound good! It's almost as if I can't believe I'm writing what I'm writing, because it's so hard to believe that in actuality, nothing much is changing. How can that be? Should I clap? Or scowl and sit on my hands? Republicans -- I feel you!
No comments:
Post a Comment