The Obama Gambit

First of all, to state the obvious, if Barack Obama were the ordinary type of American President, that is, a white guy from a somewhat privileged background with a room temperature IQ and a sketchy resume (the apotheosis of such specimens being George W. Bush), we would never hear a word about "Birthers" or Kenyan ancestors or the rest of this racist nonsense. We all know this to be true; the rage, the intemperate screaming from people like Orly Taitz, the Queen of Birther Nation, would just never happen. Look at the old pictures (such as that above) of the intolerant Southerners who made the lives of African-Americans a living hell in the Jim Crow days; look at those faces, those masks of hatred and bigotry, that irrational madness that was Southern racism. That's what "Birtherism" is, all dressed up in its Neo-Fascist finery. The pretense of "protecting the Constitution" is a lot of happy horseshit; sadly these days, nobody really cares about the Constitution anymore, except for a few diehards like Glenn Greenwald, Jonathan Turley and even, on my better days -- me.

Unfortunately, the list of those who don't care much about our Constitutional framework must also include Barack Obama himself. I have come around gradually to the idea that Mr. O, that preternaturally gifted political chameleon, has grokked in his pitch-perfect way that the current political consensus is that the Constitution can be safely bargained away, that the Bill of Rights is just a negotiable, political "issue," and that the Beltway doesn't have time in its mad scramble to raise campaign cash and line up lobbying jobs to worry about the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Ninth Amendments, to name just the most important and most serially-abused of the original charter.

Obama knows that he can get away with this approach. I imagine, in our debased civics culture, that the average Man on the Street is unaware of the content of the Bill of Rights; indeed, some studies have suggested that the majority of those interviewed, when not told of the origin of the rights being described, have found the first Ten Amendments vaguely "radical" or maybe even "Communist," and that there is little chance, starting from scratch, that we would enact the same set of basic civil liberties again.

I find that passing strange, but then - it's probably just me. So anyway, to return to the theme, the text for this Sunday morning sermon: I don't know exactly what I expected, but I was sort of hoping that Obama would not treat Constitutional rights, or the whole question of the impartial application of the rule of law to everyone, as just another politicized "issue" to be bargained away when convenient to do so, that he would not immediately succumb to this Look Forward, Not Backward mantra that he used to evade all difficult questions about looking into the obvious war crimes committed by the previous Administration, and all his other sell-outs.

But he did. He's got a big job, the biggest in the country, and with that job comes the responsibility to make tough decisions, decisions that might make it extremely uncomfortable, for example, to stand in group photos with "all the living Presidents" in the Oval Office on account of your Attorney General is busting your predecessor for multiple-count violations of the international Convention Against Torture and the War Crimes Act. Naturally, such a scenario is unthinkable when we reflect on the true nature of the ever-accommodating, always-compromising, go along to get along President, who is guided by one thing and one thing only, the effect of a given decision on his reelection chances. And then in his second term, the effect on his golf schedule.

Thus, Obama has taken his place in the gradual evolution of the American Presidency from the days when we had strong and resolute leaders, such as Teddy Roosevelt, FDR or Harry Truman, people who were willing to make hard decisions when the circumstances demanded them, to the modern version, where the office is really more a part of the Public Relations industry. The whole idea is to be vaguely inoffensive, to be lenient and to let everything slide, to never make a member of your powerful Peer Group in the least bit uncomfortable or inconvenienced. If we are offensive and violent, it's always at the expense of some completely overmatched Muslim country over there someplace that we bomb into the Stone Age while here at home we worry and fret primarily about whether Americans are exhibiting sufficient "demand" for consumer goods and services, in order to "get the economy moving again."

I don't think that's really unfair at all, as a characterization, as a description of Mr. Obama's modus decidendi. Thus, the question: how do you get excited about the reelection of Obama for a second term if you look at things that way? I'm continually amazed at the way liberal commentators in the media have gotten on the Obama bandwagon, people such as Randi Rhodes or Andrew Sullivan, who used to positively excoriate George W. Bush for doing things such as escalating the war in Iraq, or running a due process-free concentration camp on Cuba, and yet simply overlook the exact same offenses when committed by Mr. Obama, as he escalates the war in Afghanistan by a factor of three or refuses to shut down Guantanamo, for fear of looking "soft on terror." Or the easygoing acceptance by the same liberal pundits of assassination of American citizens on Presidential whim with no objective standards and no explanations.

The point being, if you continually adopt practices for the sake of looking "tough" and "realistic" that undercut basic American civil liberties, and establish the atmosphere of a police state, all in the proclaimed effort to "save" the American way of life from the evils of terrorism or whatever it is that we say we're doing, don't you eventually arrive at the point where there's nothing much left to protect? And shouldn't Obama be talking about that?

Thus, that is the central mystery to me of the Obama Gambit. Not the Kenyan grandfather. I don't care about the Kenyan grandfather, I am perfectly content to believe that Barack Obama was born in Honolulu in August, 1961, an American citizen, as American as I am, as or more American than his Birther antagonists. That's all a ridiculous sideshow, a disguised form of saying that a black man should not hold what the Birthers regard as a white man's job. I just wish we had an American citizen, born in any state of the Union, of any color or mix of "races" (as mythical as the whole concept of "race" actually is in light of our common African Mother), who would stand up for American citizenship.

I gave up Hope long before it was fashionable to give up Hope

I don't mean to pull rank or anything, but these Cassandras-come-lately such as Drew Westen in the Sunday New York Times need to respect their elders in the disillusionment game. Westen wrote a long jeremiad about the strange inability of Barack Obama to fight for anything - well, at all, but in particular for any of the progressive values which an enraptured nation thought they might have a shot at only three years ago.

I don't like it but I guess things happen that way.

I became alarmed way back in 2009 when it became apparent that Barack Obama had no respect whatsoever for the Bill of Rights. What this now "controversial" charter was all about, what engendered its inclusion with the Constitution way back in the late 18th century, was the concern of these recently liberated colonial subjects that tyrannical powers must be held in check, and the best way (the only way, as John Stuart Mill made clear in On Liberty) was a system which guaranteed the rights of the individual against the majority, and which did not permit rule by mob in matters of justice and civil liberties. When Barack Obama came out squarely against the use of military tribunals for civilian trials when he was a candidate, I thought he endorsed this principle. And then, as in so many subsequent reversals on absolutely fundamental issues of fairness, transparency, and due process, Obama just blew the whole thing off. Guantanamo is still open for business, all important criminal trials against anyone vaguely associated with "terrorism" will be conducted by military kangaroo courts where tainted evidence and torture-induced hearsay are freely admissible, and the trial itself is probably pointless because a defendant can be held forever whether he can be convicted or not.

We comfort ourselves with the reassurance that these outrages are only directed against Muslims; if you're not a Muslim, where's the problem? We often forget that our own guarantee of due process, at having a chance at fairness if a bad turn in life should suddenly propel you into the gulag of the criminal justice system, depends, first and foremost, on a mind set which honors such fairness. Once a nation allows exceptions for "special circumstances," because of a felt need for enhanced security, when it just seems too dangerous to play fair, then that country is well on the way toward tyranny. I hear arguments for such "exceptions" all the time from Republican legislators in Congress -- it's just too dangerous to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City, where his crime was allegedly committed, although other Muslim terrorists have been tried in Manhattan in regular civilian (Article III) courts without incident and without endangering security. New York's Republican Congressman Peter King is especially awful at this kind of demagoguery, this fear-mongering, but he is joined in his play to the cheap seats by the likes of Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

The great shame is that Obama, and Eric Holder (apparently the Attorney General, based on rumors and occasional public sightings), have played along with this profoundly unconstitutional approach. It has always seemed to me that it's possible to disagree on the substance of a subject such as terrorism, for example (how big a problem it is, whether "blowback" is responsible for the threats that exist), while still agreeing on the procedure for determining guilt or innocence for those who get caught up in our system of justice. That is our great legacy from the Enlightenment thinkers who founded our nation. It is always the most stirring theme in any movie or book featuring the legal system, when you think about it, from "To Kill a Mockingbird" to "Inherit the Wind." We were ashamed when an African-American could not get a fair shake in "To Kill a Mockingbird," despite the heroic efforts of Atticus Finch, precisely because it offended our sense of justice. It should not matter whether a person is a pariah in a given social context, that is what Atticus Finch tried to tell the jury. It remains the bedrock of due process.

I saw early on that the concepts of due process and fair play were easy for Barack Obama to sacrifice, if it meant he could pander to those same regressive, unenlightened Americans that Peter King likes to impress. If Obama could give up on something like that, he could give up on anything, and he has not disappointed.

Well, I note with satisfaction that a new CNN poll concludes that a majority of both Democratic and Republican voters, at levels around 57-58%, have expressed the opinion that their own Congressional Representative should not be reelected. Disenchantment with both political parties has reached epidemic levels, in fact, since approval of Congress does not reach even 20%. That's remarkable, as if the general electorate has awakened to the startling realization that the freeloaders under the Capitol dome don't represent them and never did. Upon such a realization stands the basis for genuine third (and fourth through nth) party viability. And if the duopolistic strangle-hold of the two big parties could be broken, why, who knows? Maybe even campaign finance reform could follow and the ownership of Congress by the military-industrial-media complex might come crashing down.

There I go, hoping again.

Obama Bombs Los Angeles for 3rd Consecutive Day; Congress Vows Action after July 4 Holiday

June 27, 2011

Burbank, (AP) -

Tensions mounted on Capitol Hill in Washington today as President Obama ordered a third consecutive day of Predator Drone attacks on downtown Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. Many buildings downtown and large swaths of residential housing in the Valley were said to be ablaze, with confused firefighters responding to the scene amid continuous strafing from American, French and British fighters. There was no official tally of casualties, but they were expected to be heavy.

The attacks began without warning Friday night during rush hour, with the 405 and I-210 especially hard hit. Collapsing overpasses from a relentless barrage of Cruise missiles and unmanned Drone attacks created panic and pandemonium for commuters, adding to what was already a difficult drive home. Governor Jerry Brown ordered an immediate curfew to prevent looting and a ban on use of all elevated freeways where, said the Governor, frowning, "they're just sitting ducks."

Drone attacks have concentrated mainly on downtown areas over the weekend, with NATO fighter-bombers enforcing a no-fly zone over Burbank and Glendale, but also using precision-guided bombs on certain, strategic subdivisions. All regional airports, including LAX and John Wayne International in Orange County, were closed and commercial aircraft rerouted "to avoid getting blasted out of the sky," according to one air traffic controller contacted by phone.

Reaction in Congress was mixed. Senator John McCain (R, AZ) expressed unequivocal support for this latest use of U.S. military muscle, joined by Sens. John Kerry (D, Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (Unhinged, CT). "The terrorists need to know we mean business," said Lieberman. McCain expressed his hope that Obama "would see something to completion for once." Other Congress members expressed some reservations. "I don't think this is necessarily the best approach," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, "although a limited bombing campaign confined to the south of the state, if it's necessary at all, is probably advisable."

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D, OH) was predictably inflexible in his criticism. "This is an outrage," the elfin representative bellowed. "What possible purpose can it serve to bomb Los Angeles when we have so many pressing needs right here at home, including in cities like Los Angeles? If we had spent the money wasted in Iraq on mass transit in Los Angeles, a lot of innocent commuters would be alive right now."

A White House insider, speaking on condition of anonymity in light of the unconventional nature of this latest Presidential initiative, said that President Obama's decision to attack Southern California was "the other side of the coin" from ensuring an adequate oil supply, the rationale motivating the ongoing, illegal war in Libya. "The President is willing to do what it takes. We've got supply covered. The next logical step is destroying demand, and this is the right place to start."

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney answered questions at a press conference earlier today, fielding often abrasive and derisive questions from media representatives who were skeptical that the President's "unitary executive" powers went so far as to allow the fire-bombing of Santa Monica. "We don't consider the U.S., at this point, engaged in hostilities, under the War Powers Act or the Constitution," Carney stated. "No one is fighting back, since the Pentagon ordered them not to. There are no 'boots on the ground' as part of our attacking force, other than soldiers already based in California, and they're too busy taking cover."

Representative Ron Paul of Texas cited this latest bombing campaign as evidence that Congress was not fulfilling its role as the government branch properly overseeing the use of American force. He predicted that the same ten Congress members who joined in litigation to stop the Libyan war would probably meet just after the July 4 break to discuss a similar lawsuit against the Los Angeles war.

The Comeback Kid, Redux

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k

If you're looking for a creative outlet during this slow time of year, you might want to sign up at xtranormal.com and begin making your own cartoons, using such characters as displayed in the linked cartoon or the familiar bears at right. I've written a couple of screenplays myself, collaborating with a buddy of mine who holds an MFA from the UCLA Film School, and thus has serious chops. One of these screenplays (based on my novel) went so far as to be read (and rejected) by a script editor at Lion's Gate. This is considered street cred in the amorphous world of movie making. Anyway, I pass along a couple of screenwriting tips for your use as you put together your YouTube viral instant classic:

As you write your script, remember the basic improv formula: build, don't refute. A character says one thing, and the other character says something which extends that comment or leads to a new turn. For example, if one character says, "Do you want to go with me?" the other character can't simply say, "No," or the skit is over. Instead, character 2 should say something like, "I'd like to, but I'm blowing up the Chinese Embassy." Then character 1 can say, "Well, how about Tuesday," or "Did you get a bad pot sticker?"

Keep the statements of the characters short. It doesn't have to get mannered in the style of David Mamet, but soliloquies are boring unless you can write like the Bard himself. Rapid interchange of dialogue is more interesting than two characters weighing each other down with speeches.

I'm working on a cartoon with two ready-made characters, Obama and George W. Bush, from the xtranormal.site. It's getting pretty obvious that the two are far more alike than different, and not just in the sense that they are both Harvard grads. Neither of them is (was) really up to the job of being President and Obama relies, and Bush relied, completely on a group of advisors to tell them what to do. Indeed, the three main advisors, David Petraeus, Robert Gates and Ben Bernanke, are the same for both of them. When you've accounted for the military-industrial-financial complex, there really isn't much left to talk about as far as American policy is concerned, and the same people call the shots now as did during Bush's reign. Obama kept Bush's desk, his Oval Office rug and his government, so it isn't really surprising that things don't seem very different. The fact that Obama would choose to copy George W. Bush in making most of his calls tells you probably everything you need to know about Obama's insecurities and internal resources.

In retrospect, it was Bush's unfortunate fate to fall under the insidious sway of Dick Cheney, and Bush the Elder was probably responsible for that, knowing, as he did, that his eldest son was a consummate lightweight and needed heavy guidance from a D.C. insider. But Pappy Bush misunderestimated just how radical Cheney was (I can't figure out why Blogger is underlining in wavy red a perfectly good verb form like "misunderestimated"). Thus, our Constitutional form of government went down the toilet during the Bush years and is probably not coming back.

I note that the MSM has lightened up on the O-Man recently, right about the time I decided to terminate Obama-bashing. Positing a causal connection between my decision and this more general trend, however, would amount to megalomania bordering on solipsism, so I will search for a different explanation. And it's this: the MSM and their corporate owners have decided to Manufacture Consent (thank you again, Noam, for this useful analytical tool) around the idea that Obama's list of trivial "victories" on DADT and Reagan's START negotiations (Obama being one of Ron's major Groupies) should kickstart the Barack's comeback. I believe that this decision (reflected in many opinion pieces from David Brooks at the NY Times to Howard Fineman) was in turn a result of these learned opinion-makers staring into the yawning abyss of a Palin Presidency and not liking at all what they were seeing. Obama, meanwhile, had given the rich a huge tax break in his "deal" with the Republicans (I hope he checked for his wallet as he left the room), and furthermore kicked the stool out from underneath Social Security with his really idiotic "tax holiday," which will cause the "trust fund" to bleed from every orifice over the next year and set it up for sacrificial slaughter. That really was the most evil ploy I've ever seen a Democratic President fall for.

Nevertheless, the MSM, and their dwindling band of mega-owners (Rupert Murdoch, Comcast, General Electric, a few others), must have asked themselves: what's not to like about Barry? He's given us trillions in tax breaks, he's gutted Social Security, he's agreed to leave Guantanamo open in perpetuity, he's "surged" the war in Afghanistan - what does he have to do for us? Why are we giving this guy a hard time? Meanwhile, Sarah Palin is a step into the great unknown. Some of the things she did during her brief reign as Governor of Alaska were scarily populist, such as dividing up oil revenues with common people. She's not controllable and malleable in the same way Obama is. Thus, the trick must be to maneuver the 2012 election toward an outcome where either the proto-Republican Obama is reelected, or (worst case) Jeb Bush is the Third Bush to ascend to the Kennebunkport Throne.

We should all take a great deal of comfort in that. The Powers That Be, while looking primarily to their own interest, of course, accidentally may look out for ours. I guess.

The Naive Manchurian Lawn Chair

I saw "Inside Job" at my local trendy-art theater recently and can report that it is a good, clear exposition of how the financial crash of 2008 came about. The movie is narrated by the sincere, trustworthy voice of Matt Damon, but the star of the show is the writer/producer Charles Ferguson, who never actually appears on screen; however, the intelligent, incredulous questions he asks of the various vermin who stupidly agreed to be interviewed for the documentary are the best part of the movie. Ferguson (who graduated from Berkeley in 1978 with a mathematics degree, then obtained a PhD from MIT in political science) is certainly a match for the shifty economists, politicians, investment bankers and other scum placed under his unrelenting microscope.

At the end of the movie, you have little doubt that American business and politics have descended completely into gangsterism. There is really no other word for it. I've been reading about all this stuff for a couple of years, particularly on sites such as zerohedge.com, Karl Denninger's themarketticker.com, Yves Smith and her nakedcapitalism.com and others, so I didn't really encounter too much that was new or surprising. The American people have been sold out by politicians who take bribes from a highly organized kleptocracy. Yawn. Who didn't know that? You learn in more detail just how vile all the people running the rackets and swindles are, the constant whoring (literally), cocaine abuse, obscene displays of wealth, tax fraud (putting their call girl bills on invoices marked "investment research," etc.). It is a world totally drenched in fraud, with no socially redeeming purpose whatsoever.

The only thing I noticed, watching the movie in a crowded theater, was that the reactions to the moronic visage of George W. Bush are different now. No booing or hissing, not even here in liberal Northern California. What's going on, I think, is that Bush is now seen as nothing particularly special. When you look at the Wall Street/Washington Complex, you realize it was given its first big impetus during the Reagan years, when the idea of government regulation was first characterized as an unmitigated evil. This attitude was carried forward by Bill Clinton, who often sided with pro-business, anti-government Republicans against his own party in passing such bad ideas as NAFTA and the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which gave tremendous impetus to the financialization of the American economy. Bush was kind of a bit player in all this; his focus was always on unnecessary wars, and he left the destruction of the American economy to others.

The movie does not spare Obama. It meticulously notes that all the same characters who promoted the deregulated and over-leveraged Wall Street of Clinton & Bush are still on the scene - Bernanke, Geithner, Summers, Rubin, Gensler, et alia. Nothing has changed. The FinReg bill accomplished nothing - just a lot of populist hot air. Obama's comatose Attorney General, Eric Holder, comes to life only when someone's First Amendment rights need to be squelched. All the frauds and thieves responsible for the financial crash are still running loose, still earning millions. There has been no accountability at all. Obama is forever Looking Forward, Not Backward.

Thus, the liberal side of the American political scene has turned the page on Obama. He's simply another part of the problem. My guess is that this latest fiasco, his collapse in the face of Republican demands that the Bush tax cuts be perpetuated, will turn out to be the last time that the liberal/progressive wing even expected Obama to do the right thing. It will be different now; his cooperation with Republicans, his betrayal of his campaign rhetoric, will be seen as de rigeur, nothing to even talk about. Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Cenk Ugyur, Robert Reich, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taiibi, all of the liberal pundits have markedly changed their tune in the face of this latest outrage.

The question for now, where Obama is concerned, is which of the three competing theories is closest to the truth: 1. Obama is in over his head, lacks leadership experience, and just gets taken (Naivete Theory). 2. Obama is in some way congenitally incapable of a fight; he doesn't like controversy or discord, so he folds to avoid unpleasantness, thinking the liberals will forgive him because they're nice, whereas the Republicans are meanies and must be appeased (the Lawn Chair hypothesis). 3. Obama is actually a Reagan conservative who's doing exactly what he always intended to do, shares no values with liberals, and sees the Presidency as a way to set himself up as a plutocrat in the coming years (Manchurian Candidate theory).

I'm beginning to think #3 is definitely the answer. There are definite elements of truth to Nos. 1 and 2; Obama doesn't intimidate anybody, and particularly in terms of organizing his agenda to do the most important things first, Obama is pathetic as a leader. This tax situation is a classic illustration of this problem. Why on Earth are the Democrats trying to negotiate this issue now, after the 2010 elections in which they got hammered, when they had a full two years, with overwhelming majorities and control of both houses, to deal with a Bush tax program which had been enacted in 2001 and 2003? Did it never occur to Obama that one way he might have ameliorated his $1.5 trillion yearly deficits was to roll back the top bracket giveaway to the "Inside Job" crowd?

Well, under Theory #3, it might have occurred to him and he decided he didn't want to do anything about it. More important to spend a year on driving more American citizens into the waiting clutches of the medical insurance complex.

Anyway, no wonder George W. Bush makes it a policy never to criticize Barack Obama in public. Obama's the best thing that ever happened to him.

President confined to couch, not allowed on rug

from today's Washington Post (Dec. 6)

Incoming Speaker of the House and Republican Bully John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader and Republican Bully Mitch McConnell continued their Oval Office occupation today with even more onerous restrictions on President Barack Obama's use of his West Wing quarters. Obama was forced to sit on one of the sofas with his feet flat on the hardwood floor and not touching the large oval area rug in the office. Last week the President was allowed to use his desk occasionally to take telephone calls, but that privilege was revoked today. Senator John McCain of Arizona was the only politician allowed to sit behind the President's desk.

Obama is allowed to walk around in the Oval Office, provided he does not step on the rug or touch any of the stuff on the desk. The President was upbeat in his assessment of these new restrictions.

"Mitch and John have been here for about a week now," the President said, smiling. "They've made some demands, such as telling me where I can walk, and of course the rule about not stepping on the rug."

(As he spoke, the President appeared to step on the edge of the rug with his right shoe. Both Boehner and McConnell were quick to point emphatically and yell "Hey!" in unison. The President stepped quickly off the rug.)

"Working with the other side is part of the job," Obama continued, stepping backwards toward his desk. (McCain reached out and poked him in the back with a ballpoint pen, causing Obama to jump forward and almost step on the rug.) "It's made running the Executive Branch a little harder in this case, but I just don't think, with the country needing cooperation from both sides of the aisle, that this is the time to play politics. So I'm working with my friends in the Republican Party."

Obama returned to his seat in the corner of the sofa by carefully walking heel-toe along the edge of the rug and sat down facing Boehner and McConnell. "Can I go to the bathroom now?" he asked.

McConnell checked his watch. "In another twenty minutes," he said.

Since the midterms the Republicans have seemed to flex their political muscle and grow in confidence about their ability to extract concessions from Obama, such as the amazing coup of gaining a Democratic President's agreement to extend the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which were only temporary and would have expired without Congressional action in another 25 days; thus, the Democrats only needed to refuse to take a vote, an easy task when they currently control both houses of Congress. Nevertheless, the Democrats and Obama capitulated, completely unnecessary as it may have seemed.

Some White House observers believe that this show of weakness on the President's part may be part of the reason the Republicans have upped the ante and are now restricting Obama's use of the Oval Office. A high White House official, speaking off the record because he is afraid of his own shadow, indicated that starting tomorrow Boehner and McConnell may not allow Obama the use of the sofa, confining the President instead to a side chair in the hall.

"It's one of the options we're looking at," the President said. "Right now, the Republicans are refusing to allow me back to my desk, but politics is the art of compromise and it's possible a bipartisan consensus can be reached which allows me to use my office, at least for a while."

McConnell was less optimistic about reaching a deal. "I think we've made our position plain," the multi-chinned solon drawled. "We're open to suggestions, but I just don't see a compromise where the President uses his desk or starts walking on the rug again. I think the American people need a clear position from us on that."

Not even wrong

I've been reading a very good book about theoretical physics titled Quantum, by an English philosopher-physicist named Manjit Kumar. It's all about the debate between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr about the nature of reality at the subatomic level. Like most liberal arts types with intellectual pretensions, I like to read this kind of stuff so I can throw around terms like "quantum jump" and "valence electrons" and "uncertainty principle" (that's the formula pictured) and sound real rigorous and, you know, smart. Kumar even allows the lay reader some respect: he uses actual formulas in his book. Imagine that. American scientists who write for the general public might throw in E=mc2, but that's as far as they'll go. Otherwise, they lose book sales, of course.

Among the colorful characters and anecdotes, Kumar recites one I had heard before about Wolfgang Pauli, the Austrian physicist who many considered a virtual peer of Einstein. Einstein and Bohr agreed that Pauli's immense intellect and mental quickness, coupled with his scathing wit, intimidated them both. That seems like quite an achievement: to intimidate Albert Einstein intellectually. Goes to show, I guess: there's always somebody faster. At one point, Pauli, commenting on a paper written about quantum physics by another, lesser light, dismissed it as "not even wrong." I'd heard that before but didn't try to figure out what he meant. So thinking about it, and coupling it with something I had read recently by Richard Feynman (I take my pretensions seriously, you see) in which Feynman said that the true method of science was trial and error, that we learn by mistakes and constant improvement of accepted knowledge, I thought I had a glimmer. What Pauli was saying was that the work in question was worthless even as elimination of a wrong approach. It didn't suggest a different approach to other scientists (enlightened by the failed analysis in question), it wasn't even "in error," it was simply irrelevant. It was so far off it didn't have anything to do with anything. Pretty funny, thought about that way. The depth of some minds...

Okay, so watching the Obama speech last night about the BP oil spill, I had the same kind of reaction. Obama is not even wrong. His leadership has become so completely irrelevant that it cannot be judged as helpful or counterproductive. His way of approaching things cannot be used to suggest another, better way of handling things. All that you can do at this point is to say that whatever it is that he's doing has nothing to do anymore with the fate of the nation.

I don't know if you've seen this clip from The Daily Show, but here it is in living color: Jon Stewart going through Obama's complete repetition of the Bush-era transgressions against civil liberties:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/16/stewart-critiques-obama-f_n_613937.html.

Glenn Greenwald has been writing about these things in meticulous detail for a long time, and I suppose I have, too. I just don't get it. What is he doing? I have no idea. Anthony Romero, head of the ACLU, began a speech recently in which he stated, quite frankly, that he was "disgusted" by the Obama Administration's approach to due process and civil liberties.

There's really no hope here, none at all. If Obama abdicates the throne and does not run in 2012, then the ascension of the Right Wing is a virtual given. 2012 is so far away, and economically the country just keeps sinking. The commercial real estate market, the public pension plans, the state budgets -- they're all in dire peril, in danger of failing. The level of national indebtedness and the delta between tax receipts and government spending have moved to absolutely preposterous dimensions. There is no movement to reorder public spending away from military campaigns, even though the obviousness of their unaffordability is ridiculously apparent. There is simply no plan, nothing, a complete vacuum.

Adrift upon a sea of oil-filled troubles, with no captain, no one to lead us to try anything new. No one even wrong.

Obama at the Fillmore

I'm working full-time again, the way a New American should; that is, an American disabused of retirement fantasies based on exponential annual increases in the value of his house. I see this new regime as on a continuum with the lifestyle "chosen" by my Greek immigrant grandfather Milteadis, who ran cafes until well into his 70's. I'm seeing now what he saw then: a man who chooses to work for himself can never be fired, and perhaps can never be retired either.

Well, what of it? I can steal a moment from my creditors to write my blog, can't I? Certainly, since I'm doing my patriotic duty in hoisting the national GDP back to its former greatness. Someone has to do it. I just never thought it would be me, back in that halcyon period between 2000 and 2006. Those were the days, my friend. Well, Saint Paul advised that in whatever state a man finds himself, therein be content. I like that. Go with the flow. h/t to Paul and his Apostle peeps.

It seems to this amateur economic analyst that the naysayers, the Dr. Dooms, the Econobummers -- their arguments have carried the day. They have made their case convincingly, and routed all others from the field. America is settling down into a new way of being, which will probably mutate into one of two future states. State #1 is the Japanese-style lengthy deflation/recession, lasting a decade or two; or, State #2, which is the hyperinflationary Zimbabwe Zombie Jamboree. Knowing my fellow Americans as I do, I find it hard to imagine that a country as fundamentally whacked-out as this one would actually approach a lengthy period of hard times and just getting by in the stoic, long-suffering, honor-revering style I associate with the land of the Rising Sun. That's just not us, you know? Know-nothing economists, some of whom have even won Nobel Prizes, throw the analogy around - we're going to have "Japan in our future," but I don't think they're thinking it through, as usual. They're too wedded to their charts and recession-cycle calendars.

No, the Tea Party is more our style. Protestors who rail against Big Government and over-regulation, and its negative effect on Big Business, except that Big Business (Wall Street) should not be bailed out by Big Government, so Big Government should simply stop meddling in the free enterprise system and allow Big Business to fail, except that's no good because the Tea Party people are pro-business, and especially pro-gun, and guns should never be regulated, especially in National Parks, which Big Government owns and generally the Tea Party believes that an owner of property should be allowed to do with that property whatever they want, including telling a Negro he can't take a leak in the gas station on this blue highway here in Kentucky, and he should try further up the road, say in Newark, New Jersey. Where was I? Yeah, that's right -- guns must be allowed in National Parks!

Americans, in other words, are completely out of their minds, and the idea that our undereducated & seriously confused (and massively well-armed) citizenry is simply going to accept Japanese-style deflation quietly and unobtrusively is crazy. Nope, different strokes for different folks (h/t Sly). And as we head for uncertain times, perhaps as uncertain as the Antebellum Days....

I've been thinking about a historical comparison for the Presidency of Barack Obama, and I think I've found my man: Millard Fillmore. Millard served one term between 1850 and 1853, far enough in advance of the Civil War that you can't say he was completely undone by national divisions, but the rumblings were definitely there. He succeeded Zachary Taylor as President when Zack died of gastroenteritis, or something like that. Millard's big problem, a precursor to the War Between the States, was enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, which required slaves, as property, to be returned to their owners when apprehended (and not to permit them to use any gas stations along the way which might have belonged to Rand Paul's ancestors). From WikiPedia, here is how Millard sought to finesse the issue:

Fillmore's greatest difficulty with the fugitive slave law was how to enforce it without seeming to show favor towards Southern Whigs. His solution was to appease both northern and southern Whigs by calling for the enforcement of the fugitive slave law in the North, and enforcing in the South a law forbidding involvement in Cuba (for the sole purpose of adding it as a slave state).

I'm wondering if you find that a little reminiscent of anything. It has the salient features of an Obama compromise: (a) it is devoid of any underlying principle; (b) it attempts to give something to everyone except a group of people (slaves) whose rights can be safely overlooked; and (c) it didn't work, because everyone wound up despising Fillmore anyway. It reminds me of the exact way that Obama's Justice Department, for example, handles the problem of habeas corpus rights for detainees shipped to Bagram in Afghanistan, to wit, they don't have any habeas rights.

If a terrorist suspect is picked up in Thailand and shipped to Guantanamo, the detainee has habeas rights, under Boumediene vs. Bush, the 2006 Supreme Court decision ruling the habeas-stripping provisions of the Military Commissions Act unconstitutional; and he has a good chance of winning his "right" to freedom (though not actual freedom itself, since Obama has decided that "preventive detention" forever is okay, without charges or trial), since detainees, at last count, had won 35 out of 48 habeas reviews (73%) in federal court.

A simple remedy for this inconvenience (to the government) is instead to ship them to Afghanistan, where the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled (at Elena Kagan's urging as Solicitor General and with Obama's blessing) the detainee has no such rights. Which is curious, because here's Senator Obama railing against the Military Commissions Act, with its habeas-stripping provision, in September, 2006:

As a parent, I can also imagine the terror I would feel if one of my family members were rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to Guantanamo without even getting one chance to ask why they were being held and being able to prove their innocence. . . .

By giving suspects a chance -- even one chance -- to challenge the terms of their detention in court, to have a judge confirm that the Government has detained the right person for the right suspicions, we could solve this problem without harming our efforts in the war on terror one bit. . . .

Most of us have been willing to make some sacrifices because we know that, in the end, it helps to make us safer. But restricting somebody's right to challenge their imprisonment indefinitely is not going to make us safer. In fact, recent evidence shows it is probably making us less safe.

I suppose there are ways to reconcile the seeming conflict. Is Obama no longer a parent? Did he only mean that he would feel terror if Malia were sent to Guantanamo, but not to Bagram? See, you have to be wary of analyses that seem too easy on the surface.

Other explanations come to mind, such as, Obama doesn't give a shit about detainees in Bagram, Afghanistan because they're politically unimportant, just as slaves were to Millard Fillmore, except he was trying to find the most politically popular way of mistreating them.

Millard was the last Whig President. His party died, really, before the 1856 election, and so Millard served one term, followed by another one-termer, James Buchanan. Then all hell broke loose under Lincoln. Maybe the moral of the story is that a President may as well be principled, if he has it in him, during office because you never really get away with unprincipled compromises. Your former supporters desert you because you seem weak, and your enemies go right on hating you anyway, adding to their hatred a measure of contempt. And then everyone is done with you, because a blatant hypocrite is never anyone's true friend.

On the important question of whether Barack is a good jock

I did see the game of H-O-R-S-E between President Obama and Clark Kellogg during Saturday's Final Four games. Obama won the game with nothin' but net on a left-angle 3-pointer. It was a thrilling game (they were actually spelling out POTUS instead of HORSE), since the Prez had to come back from P-O-T-U to nothing in order to win. As a result, some have wondered whether Special K went in the tank. Obama himself said something to this effect at the conclusion of the game, but he's notoriously good-natured about such things. Remember how he laughed off his 37 score in bowling (which actually was stopped early at 7 frames - I assume his handlers threw in the drying towel).

Here's a nasty take on Obama's athleticism from some anti-Obama blogger at the Sundries Shack:

Yesterday, a mighty horde of conservative bloggers had a good chuckle overPresident Obama’s sad attempt to throw an opening day first pitch. Okay, I admit it was funny to watch the President we’ve been told is a top-notch athlete lob a dying quail that came down somewhere in the general vicinity of home plate, but it leads me to wonder if the President’s storied athletic ability hasn’t been just the teeniestbit exaggerated.

The guy who posted this snark looks as though he broke into the sundries (or sundaes) shack in the dead of night and ate everything he could find. Still, as an aging ex-jock, I take the whole subject of athleticism seriously, far more seriously than I should, in fact. Ex-jocks are too quick to assign too much importance to athletics and athleticism, in my opinion. Whether or not Van Cliburn would have done as well against Special K as the Prez does not mean Van couldn't play the piano, but there is some unconscious connection, in the minds of male jocks, between general competence in sports and leadership or Presidentialness. I suppose at an atavistic level it computes: whom do you choose to round out the mastodon hunting party, a lithe, quick, natural-born killer like Barack, or a corpulent sack o' guts like the guy who writes on "Sundries Shack?"

But burrowing a little deeper: here's what I think might be going on, to the extent this has any importance at all, which it probably doesn't. Barack does look funny throwing a baseball. On the other hand, he's pretty natural at shooting a basketball, although he has an odd, inside-out, twisting release on his 3-point set shot (mistakenly called a "jump shot" often by TV news pundits, but what do they know? Most of them are wussy non-jocks and thus incompetent at their work). One can deduce from Barack's specialization that he's mostly a basketball player and not a "general" kind of athlete who grew up in a jocky household in a neighborhood full of kids playing pick-up games, or he would probably throw a baseball better and bowl a game at a score higher than one normally associates with birthday parties for girls just turning six years old.

George W. Bush looked quite natural throwing out the first pitch. In general, however, he looked and acted like a klutz and was famous for dumb moves like falling off his bike while riding over level ground in broad daylight (even at one point plowing into a Scottish policeman and seriously injuring him). Yet I imagine his years in West Texas, particularly as a not-serious student, meant that W played lots and lots of baseball and every other sport, and it shows. On the other hand, I never saw Bush attempt a three-pointer. Wish I could have seen that.

I bowled my first game at about age ten and rolled a 64; then again, the circumstances of my upbringing meant that, in order to survive in my household and in my neighborhood, it was necessary to play every sport there was, beginning at a young age. Thus, football, basketball, baseball, as absolute requirements, and then anything else that came along, such as bowling, tennis, ping pong, water skiing, whatever the course of life threw at us. You tried it, learned the rudiments. The President, I sense, was raised in his peculiar circumstances as more of a hothouse orchid, stage-managed and guided by a highly attentive mother who valued scholastics above all else. Nevertheless, he needed rounding out and basketball was his outlet (he's also a very good body surfer, as video has shown). Since this was the primary pastime permitted him, he took full advantage of it and developed his game, including an impressive knack for knocking down long-range set shots. Nevertheless, the action photo taken above, which shows Barack driving the left lane against North Carolina's Tyler Hansbrough, demonstrates that Barack has the natural instincts of a player trying to avoid eating the pumpkin. He missed this shot, but still...

Therefore, contrary to the uninformed blathering of the lipoid-challenged blatherer eating his way through the Sundaes Shack, I conclude that Barack is, indeed, a good athlete who did not become a great player, like Special K (who scored 51 points, an Ohio state record, in the state championship game when he was a senior in high school), primarily because that was not his main focus, but channeled his natural athletic ability into (a) general basketball proficiency and (b) a gym rat knack for knocking down threes. He does throw a baseball like a girl, but it could have been otherwise if he had grown up playing baseball.

And yes, Special K definitely tanked.

Michael Moore stoops to assist

I watched with amusement last night as Michael Moore, in a satellite interview with Bill Maher on "Real Time," offered to replace Rahm Emanuel as Barack Obama's Chief of Staff. Moore was standing in front of Goldman Sachs in New York as he spoke, and the failure to enact any regulatory reform whatsoever in the last year was one of Michael's talking points. It's one of the things he's going to help Obama with when Moore becomes Chief of Staff, at a salary of $1 per year, sleeping on a cot in the White House basement.

This seems to be one of the recurring myths among liberals - that Barack just needs the right person whispering in his ear, and then all those dynamic changes we heard about during the campaign will begin to blossom like a host of golden daffodils in spring. I realize that Moore (who is represented by Rahm's brother Ari Emanuel, the flesh-eating super agent in Los Angeles) was simply looking for a little publicity. All in good fun.

His last movie, "Capitalism: A Love Story," didn't do all that well, and for good reason. It really wasn't a very good movie. If you want to understand the financial crisis better, try reading "The Quants" by Scott Patterson . That's what I'm doing. If you've ever wondered why the securities industry in the United States continues to exist, despite the fact that the major indices (Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq) have been essentially flat (at best) over the last eleven years, the book will explain it for you. I mean, think about it: in real dollars, the markets have probably lost 40% of their value since they reached their high point during the Clinton years. So what are all those people doing? You can't buy long and hold and hope to get anywhere, the way the "stock brokers" of our fathers' generation recommended. The answer is that "Wall Street" (which is also headquartered in the richer areas of Connecticut and Southern California) was taken over by mathematicians, physicists, statisticians and game theorists. Although the overall motion of the markets is stagnant (because the United States itself is not really getting anywhere, and hasn't for a long time), within this stagnant pond are many opportunities to take advantage of the misery (mortgage-backed securities, for example, and credit default swaps, and front-running and various other forms of arbitrage), and all of this is enhanced by the use of High Frequency Trading, computerized algorithms and dark pools. Indeed, the whole system depends on such automation. Wall Street is simply a hi-tech casino gamed by very bright people who nevertheless periodically (1987, Long-Term Capital Management in 1999, 2008) create stupendous catastrophes because of the inherent instability and excessive complexity of the financial system. It's driven by greed, but greed isn't exactly the problem. The problem is that the United States has allowed its financial stability and prosperity to become completely dependent on such a sick arrangement, to the point that even "change agent" Presidents like Barack Obama kowtow to the powers that be and throw as much public money as possible at this Geek-infested Monte Carlo because we now think our survival depends upon it. And now the federal government is broke-ass, having taken on the fantastic debts associated with this dysfunctional system (and all the poverty and lost productivity the system caused) and well on its way to complete fiscal unsustainability.

But back to the main point. I wonder if Michael Moore realizes how utterly patronizing his idea is (I won't say "arrogant," because Mr. Moore doesn't strike me as arrogant, just a little naive and clueless, which is probably where Ari helps him so much. Moore doesn't understand how the system really works and so his "populist" ranting just sounds dumb.) It's a common meme, however; Barack is misguided, that's all, and I could straighten him out. Can you imagine saying something like that about Bill Clinton as he moved farther and farther to the "center" of the political spectrum? Neither can I. Moore is saying that Barack Obama is a somewhat lost, overwhelmed little African-American boy who needs guidance.

I really doubt that. I think the O Man is simply a lot more conservative and Establishment than "progressives" thought he would be. He's good on "progressive" issues like global warming and stem cell research (and science funding in general), but those are issues where he can find common ground with Joe Lieberman and Orrin Hatch. They're "safely" progressive ideas. For the rest of it, he's pretty much where George W. Bush was. Ol' W probably knew that, and I'm certain that Bush voted for Obama (he's come close to saying it). The older members of the Baby Boom generation who consider themselve old line Liberals (like your humble Blooger) grew up at a different time and under different influences. We make the mistake of believing that all "liberals" are alike, of whatever age or generation, and whatever their disparate influences. In truth, someone like Bill Moyers has a lot more in common with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. than Barack Obama does. Obama has a "pragmatic" and politically-determined view of civil liberties, for example, which would have completely appalled Dr. King.

Different strokes for different folks. If you want, you can see these developments as progress in a post-racist society. Increasingly, that's how I'm looking at it. As Woody Allen might lead in, people of all races, creeds and colors can disappoint the hell out of you in our free and equal opportunity society.