Change, we can believe in...

...but not this. Obama starts his Long March to the same-old, same-old. And Keith Olbermann isn't looking very good about now: Glenn Greenwald is on it, and Olbermann isn't happy. But his trademark rants won't save him this time. When his candidate flipped, Olbermann flopped, and that's all there is to it. One man's 4th Reich fascism, as it turns out, was another man's brave defiance of the Left. Sheesh. For my money, this makes Olbermann the Worst Man In The World, but you won't see that on MSNBC.

The FISA fiasco seems, however, like a good jumping-off point to discuss the art (or perhaps "craft" is a better word) of practical politics. The Bill that Obama is set to support will extend the government's ability to conduct warrantless wiretaps. Worse, information obtained in this manner may be used as evidence even if the tap is subsequently found to be unlawful--take a nice juicy bite of the fruit of the poisonous tree, folks. Finally, the Bill will allow bulk monitoring of electronic communications, making a hash of quaint notions like probable cause.A little safety trumps liberty anytime in Bush's America. And, it appears, in Obama's America too.

I'm not surprised or even very offended by this. American politics is a cramped room that simply doesn't permit a lot of new ideas to enter, as I've observed before. The best it can offer up is old, stodgy, sometimes dangerous ideas, adjusted for the times and presented in attractive new bottles. Obama is most probably just another one of those bottles. Heaven forbid that he seem Soft On Terrorism. Or Soft On Anything, where only a brutal hardness will do.

During a political campaign, it's important to remind ourselves that what a candidate says and does is a product of calculation. "Just be youself" tends to be bad advice. You aren't running by yourself, after all: a Verizon-like network is always right there with you, on and off the scene. Once a campaign starts, the aim is to win, and it's not just the candidate's personal ambitions that are at stake, to put it mildly. In some respects, almost everything goes; in others (when it comes to the candidate him- or herself) very little does that isn't scripted and vetted by a small army of handlers. The candidate could be Charlie McCarthy (and here I think of Ronald Reagan, for some reason). But that's no problem, if you've got a competent Edgar Bergen.

And the culture of US campaigns is a low culture, one of Sesame Street-like soundbites, swarms of politically-connected media talking heads parsing every syllable, continual appeals to emotion (usually negative), mines and deadfalls everywhere. Issues are important only as a collection of slick debating points and one-liners. Negative campaigning (imported to Canada by the Harperites) is the order of the day. "Swiftboating" is an ever-present threat. And that stuff works like a hot-damn: a candidate who golfed his way through the Vietnam War came off looking more patriotic and heroic than the guy who went and got wounded.

This dreadful style, furthermore, feeds on itself. Lapel pins! What your pastor said!* Your middle name! Every campaign seems to find a deeper barrel to scrape the bottom of.

Nice guys and gals finish last in this kind of contest. Ditto ones with vision, and overly thoughtful ones. There is little room for spontaneity on the campaign trail, and none at all for nuance. So political campaigns almost inevitably attract a certain type of person: glib, opportunistic, shallow, unprincipled. In fact, the people expect nothing more, and if you've got more, it's best to keep it to yourself until you win--and even thereafter, if you don't want to be a one-term wonder.

But suppose--just suppose--that Obama is more than just a bottle. Suppose he does have what Greenwald mockingly called a secret plan. What, then, in the American context, would Barack Obama do with his plan if he became President? Or, to put it a little differently, what could he do?

The US governance engine is never easy to influence, and, like the Borg, it absorbs those who find themselves in its toils. The President, even with all of his broad powers, can't do much by himself. He is surrounded by advisors, flacks, lobbyists, big-money donors calling in markers, the media, and countless elected officials. His powers are curbed by the Constitution, Congress and the Supreme Court, and their exercise is shaped and constrained by public opinion polls and the aforementioned interested parties. The new guy will be pushed and pulled this way and that until systemic stability is achieved.

We are so used to conceiving of leaders as almost by definition in charge that we seldom look at the human matrix, its complex set of associations, interactions and interrelations, that give a leader form and substance. In this vast, sticky web, leaders cannot easily act upon personal visions and hopes, wear their hearts on their sleeves, say what's on their minds, or even keep and maintain a functioning conscience. The "art of the possible" is a ceaseless series of compromises, big and small, that allows its practitioners to survive.

Obama is a fresh new face in American politics. In some ways his very candidacy is profoundly significant and positive. But I suspect that he's already had to put his official portrait in a closely-guarded closet somewhere. Welcome to the Machine, Barack. Resistance is futile.

H/t

(Crossposted from Dawg's Blawg.)
__________
*It goes without saying that every serious candidate needs a pastor, in a land where half the population rejects the theory of evolution and one-quarter not only believes in the Rapture, but thought it was going to happen last year.)

Releasing our inner Sweeney Todd

Dr. Dawg slices and dices Margaret Somerville's article against euthanasia so I don't have to.
But there's one thing I just have to comment on -- she asserts that if euthanasia is legalized people will be afraid to go to a doctor to get treated.
Now, this is just silly. First, it assumes that sick people have a single-minded fixation on making sure their doctors will let them die by inches, piously ignoring their suffering. And second, it assumes doctors are just champing at the bit to start slaughtering their patients.
But if the only argument she can come up with against legalizing euthanasia is how noble and meaningful it is for people to suffer, maybe the inner Sweeney Todd is closer to the surface than we would like.

There but for the grace of God

Alison introduces the saddest story you will ever read -- Ashley Smith:

"If I die then I will never have to worry about upsetting my Mom again."

Reading about what she went through, I realized I have known teenage girls who were almost as mixed up as Ashley was -- some girls just seem to spiral into disaster when they are 12 or 13, and they don't find their equilibrium again for four or five years, until they are 16 or 17. But the girls I knew lucked out, mainly because their parents could afford good lawyers and special schools and stays with relatives in other cities. So the criminal justice system never got the chance to chew them up and spit them out.

Great line of the day

Comment from DennisSCMM to TBogg's post about the mutual admiration society that is John McCain and Washington Post columnist David Broder:

In the good old days that both of them yearn for, McKrusty and Broder would, at this point in life, have both been smothered or stranded on an ice floe. They demonstrate that the custom is not without merit.

We're finally going to England!

Roger Miller - England Swings


Yes, on Saturday we're flying off to Merrie Olde England -- first London, then Edinburgh, for two weeks in all.
This was the trip which I had to cancel two years ago because of my car accident.
My sister has us all organized for day trips to Stonehenge and Stratford and Windsor Castle and Jack the Ripper's London and all that, and we also want to see the Imperial War Museum -- oh, and mustn't forget Westminster Abbey, the Tower of Big Ben, the rosy red cheeks of the little children...
My own posting on the blog will be light -- maybe a few photos if I can -- but I'm honoured to say that Dave from Galloping Beaver, Skdadl from POGGE and Dr. Dawg from Dawg's Blawg will all be posting some of their usual great stuff here while I am gone.

Immortality

There are 2,400 George Carlin videos on YouTube. with more than 700 posted today. Its a kind of immortality, I guess. He left us so much to remember.

Giving birth is not a choice issue

Shakesville has a skreed by a woman who has never given birth about how pregnant women have the right to give birth whatever way they want to -- turning it into a "choice" issue.
Sorry, no, it's not.
The only thing that is important in childbirth is a healthy baby.
The ONLY thing.
Nothing else matters -- the mother's experience, her doctor's opinions, her midwife's opinions, her husband's participation, whether or not she uses drugs, whether or not she uses technology, etc etc -- all of this is completely irrelevant to whether she has a healthy baby or not.
I get pretty hot about this issue -- my daughter would have died in childbirth if I hadn't been in a hospital and if I hadn't listened to my doctors -- who were quite candid about not knowing what was wrong and why my baby's heartbeat kept falling and why my labour was not progressing normally, but advised that I have a c-section.
Turned out the cord was wrapped around her neck, and was too short. If I had tried to give birth vaginally my daughter would have been severely brain damaged, if she had lived at all. I might have died, too, of course.
Then I had a neighbour tell me how sorry she was -- SORRY?
My daughter was alive and healthy. Nothing else mattered then, nothing else matters now.
Nothing else.

Snakes in a .....

Dawg's Blawg has progressive politics, Cherniak covers the latest from the Liberal party HQ, Galloping Beaver covers all things Canadian military, and I rely on TBogg for when I need some bassett blogging.
Nice to see that Shakesville has also found its niche.

Oil? Perish the thought!

We in the global so-called West can talk all we like about how our wars of choice in the Middle East are not about oil, but we cannot possibly be surprised when the people of the Middle East do not believe us.

Great line of the day

From Rev Paperboy:

The creationists sometimes try to pin the massacres, holocausts and pogroms of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot on atheism and their own misinterpretation of Darwin's theories as a justification of "survival of the fittest" -- when the real cause of these horrible events, and indeed most of the evil that men do, is the "true believerism" the notion that one is righteous that brooks no doubt, no reconsideration in the face of evidence that one's thesis is not airtight. It is that sort of inability to admit errors or tolerate dissent that leads to everything from the Iraq war to religiously driven fatal child abuse and deadly neglect.

I'm baaack!

So what did I miss?
Oh, just the destruction of the American Constitution -- no biggie.
I think MoveOn had better think twice before it dismantles its political outreach mechanism -- they may find that, even with an Obama adminstration, they still have something to say.

Away til Sunday

And I am having computer trouble so its hard to post -- I'll try, though.
I'm going to a conference in Windsor -- looking forward to seeing that city.

Great line of the day

Glenn Greenwald:

Threatening Americans with obliteration unless they support authoritarian and war-making hysteria ought to be the most discredited idea there is. But there is Newt Gingrich, invited on Face the Nation to opine, because he's a very Serious and important Ideas Man. As but one example, here's Time's Liberal Pundit Joe Klein, chatting with Hugh Hewitt about Gingrich:

I've always really respected Newt, because he's a man of honor, and he is a
real policy wonk, and he really cares about stuff.

That's how most media stars talk about Gingrich, as he wallows in his never-ending dreams about American cities being vaporized and how the only way we can prevent that is if we relinquish our Constitution -- or at least just small parts of it such as the First Amendment and habeas corpus -- and start more wars. That's squarely within mainstream American political discourse.

Why does anyone listen to Newt ("Cry-baby") Gingrich? Well, I suppose he makes as much sense as John McCain -- which isn't saying much because the Republican level is pretty low now, isn't it.

Great line of the day

NYT columnist Frank Rich writes about myth and reality in the American election campaign:

The ludicrous idea that votes from Clinton supporters would somehow make up for McCain defectors is merely the latest fairy tale brought to you by those same Washington soothsayers who said Fred Thompson was the man to beat and that young people don’t turn up to vote.

And remember how we kept hearing about how sexy Fred was, and now everybody just loved Mitt's shoulders, and how everything was good news for Rudy Guiliani? And remember how Bloomberg was going to announce any day now and this would cut the Democrats off at the knees? In reality, I think Bob Barr is going to be cutting McCain off at the knees.

This will be a problem

Glenn Greenwald writes about the increasing level of hysterical right wing fascism-- talk show host Laura Ingraham saying that the Bush administration should just ignore US Supreme Court rulings, while talk show host Michael Reagan says anybody who believes that the Bush Administration was responsible for 911 should just be shot outright :

... people like Laura Ingraham and Michael Reagan are crazed and absurd figures, but they have large audiences. There is a sizable portion of this country's population that has been fed a steady diet of ideas of this sort for years, a view of Government and political power that prevails in the worst tyrannies on the planet. The Leader has the right to break our laws. He should defy court rulings that enforce constitutional guarantees. The Government has the right to put people in cages for life with no process. People should be imprisoned or shot by virtue of the views they express.
As the Right comes to accept that their political movement lies in ruins -- as evidence of their rejection by the country becomes too compelling to ignore -- the desperation and frustration level increases and much of this rhetoric will become more extreme (note that Ingraham cited the President's low popularity ratings as a reason why he should ignore the Supreme Court's ruling; National Review's Andy McCarthy on Thursday suggested that in response to the Court's ruling, we should take all of the Guantanamo detainees and just slaughter them en masse). Having millions of citizens inculcated over many years with truly deranged, extremist tripe of this sort -- and Fox just announced that Ingraham would have her own show beginning next week -- obviously has consequences. We've seen just some of those over the last seven years, and the reaction is likely to intensify as that movement grows more impotent and marginalized.

Sometimes I think the US is heading toward some sort of cataclysm.
Politics in a democracy has a normal range, an ebb and flow -- we see this in Canada where the Liberals give way to the Conservatives who give way to the Liberals -- but where individuals including politicians still have a respect for government and where government has a respect for its own standards and traditions. Thus, however much I dislike Harper for his policies and his budgets, for example, I can give him the credit he deserves for actions like the residential school apology; however much Harper disagrees with the NDP he can still meet with Jack Layton to talk about issues like this. I think this is the kind of respect for each other and for the common good which Barak Obama is trying to achieve when he talks about making Washington less partisan.
But I wonder if this can still be done in the States or have they already moved too far away from civilized politics. Greenwald says their movement is in ruins, but millions of people in the States are still apparently so far down the rabbit hole that their only moral arbiter is whether the Bush administration is for something or agin it. These people want Bush to have a third term, and will happily vote for John McCain to provide it.
There is nothing more important to these people than their own personal safety, and they think they have made a bargain with Bush that he can do whatever he wants as long as he keeps them safe.
It's called a Faustian bargain, and generally it doesn't work out very well.