My ambivalence on Afghanistan has not diminished. On an almost-daily basis I feel self-contradictory and utterly torn.

I never wanted to send troops to Afghanistan. A timeworn memory in this house is me, stomping around the house shaking my fist, ranting about it. It wasn’t at all helpful to the dialogue, but then-President Bush wasn’t really listening to me either, nor did he really much care to listen.

In fact, not too many people really did. New York, Washington DC and Philadelphia had just been attacked by wild-eyed zealots, and that turned a whole lot of otherwise rational people into wild-eyed zealots, too.

The very idea that anyone could assault us in home territory was beyond the pale to nearly everyone, including me, though I stopped short of the idea of throwing our kids into yet another war in another country in that region, particularly when one of mine was serving in the Army.

But a President is supposed to lead, and make reasoned decisions, not throw a handful of troops into a country where no world power has succeeded before; in fact, a country which had, with our assistance, out-sieged the Soviets.

I can remember shouting at the television about how utterly stupid and arrogant it was to think we had some magic formula to march into Afghanistan and declare “victory”, and how my stomach still knots at the ensuing insanity that became our invasion to Iraq. And now, as Iraq winds down and leaves behind a country ravaged and unstable, it will still be Afghanistan that holds us all hostage.

I understand the President’s argument and effort there. I understand that this ‘war’ is really not traditional at all. I understand that the region is so utterly unstable that allowing Afghanistan to collapse on itself is an ugly and inhuman idea. But if it happens, it will be because we built the Frankenstein monster in the first place. If nothing else, our 20th century habit of believing the enemy of our enemy was our friend has been exposed as the lie it is.

Someone pointed me to Charlie Wilson’s War the other day. My response was that it was Charlie Wilson’s war that gave birth to the Taliban we know as an enemy today. It was Charlie Wilson’s War that justified building up and training young men to fight the Soviets without any thought or regard to what they might do with their anger and their arms when the Soviets were no more, and American dollars stopped flowing in.

And then it became Bush’s war, but Bush abandoned it like an ADHD teenager with a new video game for Iraq. Barely gave Afghanistan the time of day, much less a strategy, a timeline, and some funding.

And now it’s Obama’s war, mostly because someone’s got to inherit it and Obama said he would step it up over there. No, he said we’d win, whatever winning is. It was the one plank of his campaign I most disagreed with, this idea of “winning” in Afghanistan. There is no winning to be had in Afghanistan. Before we were there, and after we leave, it will still be Afghanistan.

And yet, there is a reality over there in Afghanistan, too. There are power plays and too-accessible nuclear weapons in Pakistan, Iran stirs the pot by proxy, and China shares a border and an interest in the mineral wealth in Afghanistan. The region is so destabilized, so utterly upside-down, that a rapid withdrawal will leave a vacuum for someone else to fill.

It will still be Afghanistan, with its poverty and its raw, magnificent, landscapes where names are etched on centuries-old art and carpets hang in the bazaars, woven with images of a uniquely Afghan past, present and future. It will still be Afghanistan, and maybe this is what I should come to understand: If no nation has conquered it, including us, perhaps we should simply allow Afghanistan to be…Afghanistan.

Today’s defense appropriation debate was painful to listen to on a number of levels. Painful, because war is hell even when the cause feels pure, but in this case, it just feels fruitless, old, and timeworn. We turn on each other and shake our fists at the military-industrial complex and call for our troops to come home…wait. Come home to what?

Come home, brave soldiers, head back to your families, but there will be no job for you, no place in line for the brave young men and women who just risked it all over there to come back here. There will be no industry to replace the machine that ground and ground and turned the weapons and airplanes and tanks and armor off the manufacturing line onto tools on the ground.

I never forget that the circle was drawn in 2002, when George W. Bush chose to fire up the war machine and keep the fires stoked for the next 8 years. Now one dwindles and one rages. When the rage dies down, what will the cost have been?

The Afghans will line up their US baubles next to the Soviet collectibles at the bazaar. They will sell a soldier’s boots from one war, and a cheap metal star from the cap of one who fought in the other. They will bargain with each other for the best price on these small things, building an economy out of the shards of an invasion.

It will still be Afghanistan, just as it has been each and every time a nation has invaded it. And we will still be the United States, but with a fading stain of war on our heads. Ambivalence transitions to resolve. It’s time to come home.

Lightning strikes three of the tallest buildings in Chicago at the same time! from Craig Shimala on Vimeo.

The fascinating thing to me about this video is the difference between the realtime capture of lightning striking three of Chicago’s tallest buildings at once, and the slower, more nuanced and detailed versions of the same event.

Last week’s Shirley Sherrod story and this week’s Wikileaks story feel like the lightning strike in real time. Everyone can see the flash and might even figure out that three buildings were hit at the same time if they had a wide enough view, which would leave an impression, but would also miss the deeper truths hidden in a slower view.

If you’ve been reading my blog from the early days, you know about my involvement with Julie Amero’s fight for justice. But for new readers, know this: Julie Amero was the victim of a poorly secured network, vicious malware, and a culture of suspicion and ignorance within the ranks of the law enforcement community in Norwich, Connecticut.

After very nearly being sentenced to forty years in prison for the heinous act of trying to shield students in a class where she was substitute teaching from pornography being served via popup to her school computer, after losing the child she was carrying as a result of the stress of her arrest, after living for another two years in limbo until finally being “allowed” (and I use that term with all sarcasm) to plea-bargain the charges down to ones that credited her time served and closed the case, one would think it was time for Julie and Wes to move on, enjoy their lives together, and let the past live in the past.

One would think.

The fates had a different idea, I guess. Via Sunbelt Blog, Wes Volle (Julie’s husband) writes:

As you have heard, I have terminal cancer with an original life expectancy of about one more week ( at best ). But following true to course, I never listen to anyone or anything when it comes to something that I don’t want to hear. I’ve never backed down from a good fight in my life and I’m not about to start now. I am going to beat this horrible disease.

Wes has been Julie’s rock through all of this. He has been her defender, her support, and her rock. He’s also not going down without a fight.

I’m feeling like I’ve been run over by a bus, but hey, even some of them survive. The doctors and some good friends are making me comfortable with lots of drugs, but sometimes I feel like Alice in Wonderland, you know the song – ( one pill makes you larger and one makes you small, but the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all) . I’m down to fighting weight now (195 lbs), I’ve lost almost 50 lbs and everyone says I look good, and I figure that they are saying that in the context for a guy that’s supposed to be dead now. Their words of encouragement help me through some of the the really tough times…

Make no mistake, times are tough for Wes and Julie. The police and the courts ruined Julie Amero’s life, and took her future. Now cancer comes in a closing act, and threatens to take the little that is left.

…because I need to stay alive for Julie, I don’t think she will last long when I’m gone even though she seems to listen to me when I tell her that she must continue to live on in the aftermath of my death. She is handling this like a trooper, but there is only so much she can handle. She can never work again, and we are in the final stage of appealing her social security case, but that will only go so far when and if she gets it. Her spirits are middling and the benefit that Herb is putting on will help ease her mind about being left behind with a ton of hospital and doctor bills.

The benefit Wes refers to is this one, put on by Herb Horner.

I will refrain from railing too much about the injustice of someone being faced with terminal cancer and still needing to be sure the medical bills don’t wipe out the family finances, which were already devastated by what they paid lawyers before the netroots stepped up and helped in the original case.

Alex, I feel terrible about having to ask for money. I wasn’t raised that way, but I wasn’t raised to think about dying of cancer either. So if you have contacts that are still willing to contribute to Julie, please do what you can to help her out (again).

If you can, please donate to Julie via the PayPal link here. Times are hard for us all, I know. Donating might not be possible. If that’s the case, leave a comment with some good wishes for Julie and Wes that I can pass along, and I’ll include it with a donation of my own.

On a personal note, my heart breaks for Julie and Wes, and my prayer for them will be that some redemptive good will emerge from the tatters of lives ruined by zealotry and a rush to judgment.

Previous posts about Julie’s case are here. The Julie Group blog is here.

This is just my take on it, based on my gut. I don’t have statements from inside the administration or any other inside information. Just gut sense, and actually, this is sort of my effort to work things out on my end, since I don’t believe Vilsack acted out of evil intent.

Fox and Breitbart set bait that triggered instinct ahead of rational and critical thought. The right loves the meme of “political correctness”, particularly when used in connection with liberals who they perceive as being intellectually dishonest. Of course, those liberals aren’t intellectually dishonest, but because they don’t fall into lockstep with conservative thought on questions of the poor, disabled, underprivileged and treatment of minorities, Republicans exploit their willingness to be open-minded as “political correctness.”

Blowing out the “racist tea party” meme

The day before it was posted, Mark Williams had been “ousted from the Tea Party Express” (whatever that really means) for posting a clearly racist “letter to Lincoln” on his website (now removed). All of this followed Williams’ contention that the NAACP is a racist organization.

Controversy swirls around the Tea Party, who is no party at all but really just the conservative wing of the mainstream Republican party. It is true, after all. There are racist elements in the Tea Party and always have been. Just go back to the Nashville Tea Party convention where Tom Tancredo made some of the most offensive remarks I can recall hearing in this day and age and the Tea Party applauded across the land.

Now it’s July, 2010, and going into the midterms, it’s important to Republicans that their conservative wing lose the ‘racist’ appearance. The NAACP’s call for them to purge their ranks of it was certainly unhelpful to the cause. This is bad. Lots of Republicans and conservatives aren’t racists, but they’re associated with them. A distraction was needed.

Breitbart knew dropping an edited video of a black government official claiming to have treated white people differently into the middle of the controversy would generate an almost knee-jerk response. And it did. Clearly it did.

It was played for maximum emotion in a high-emotion debate. Had the video been put out there when there was no discussion of racism on the right, it would have been viewed far more critically. Andrew Breitbart is a pimple on the butt of journalism, but his sense of timing has been quite devastating.

It’s no coincidence that he dropped the bogus ACORN tapes just after the town hall fiascos and before health care reform came up for a vote (and just after Al Franken was sworn in to the Senate…). The ACORN tapes were actually a bit late coming, since rumblings began back in the fall of 2008 before the general election, and came to a head during the debate over the Recovery Act when Republicans, with the assistance of Fox News, claimed that stimulus funds were going to be “funneled” to ACORN, and Darrell Issa released a report suggesting that ACORN was a criminal enterprise. Congress reacted then, too, and defunded ACORN’s tax assistance group.

The relentless targeting of ACORN ultimately spelled its demise, not because it was true, but because it might be true.

This is what Breitbart does. He unleashes lies that look “just enough true” to be cause for concern, and throws people trying to actually do something good into a tizzy over possibility.

But why, why, why do they react?

Because we haven’t really figured all of this out yet. We don’t live in a postracial world. We might have a black President, but that doesn’t mean racial bias — and white guilt over racial bias — doesn’t exist. In the Sherrod incident, Breitbart played on doubts we all harbor in one way or the other, especially in my generation.

Those of us raised in the 60s and 70s were raised in the days of busing, unrest, civil rights demonstrations, and ignorance. Now it’s 2010, and we know better. At least, many of us do. We know that black guy we elected is no radical. We knew that before he was elected! We know (or should know) that black, brown, gay and whatever else people are just as intelligent, just as creative, just as diligent, and just as diverse as the rest of us.

But we’re imperfect humans and fear is an instinctive reaction. Intellect doesn’t always overcome it. What’s known isn’t always what’s felt. When the NAACP called out the Tea Party’s racism and the response was swift with violent language (like what Mark Williams wrote), it was uncomfortable. When Breitbart produced what purported to be an act of hypocrisy in front of the NAACP by a government official, the emotional response welled up. In Vilsack’s case, there was the added pressure of managing an agency with a horrible track record on its treatment of black farmers in the South, and laboring to turn that around both in perception and reality, only to face the FEAR that it could all be undone with this one employee’s admission that ‘she didn’t work as hard for whites as she did for blacks.’

Fear and doubt. Tools of authoritarians and bullies. Play on the fears, play on the doubts, magnify it via a frontal assault on the internet, the news media and every right wing blog willing to take it on, and pretty soon it overwhelms reason and threatens everything good one is trying to do.

It was true of ACORN. It was true of Shirley Sherrod’s speech. I believe the Van Jones issue is more nuanced and has other factors so I exclude that one. But in these two instances, what appeared to be real-time documented evidence raised enough fear and archetypal reactions that caution and reason were overwhelmed.

Any lessons to learn?

Here’s mine, for what they’re worth.

Lesson #1: Repeat after me: Breitbart is a liar. Breitbart is a liar. Breitbart is a liar. He uses video and audio selectively to paint his version of an event. Count on this: If it came from Breitbart, it’s been edited and no longer accurately reflects reality.

Lesson #2: Know who the real villains are. They’re not black people and they’re not Vilsack and they’re not the President or the Administration. The real villains are Breitbart, Fox News, and the Minion Riders who trail along to magnify the message.

Lesson #3: Know myself. Isn’t it time to admit unspoken fears about the possibility ‘they’re’ right? Saying it out loud gives it the weight it deserves: absolutely none. OF COURSE they’re not right. But the only way to end doubt was for me to admit I had some. I spent too long wanting to believe that racial tension is a thing of the past. It’s not. It’s rooted in old ways, but it’s not gone. Not admitting it just buries it. Yes, there IS still tension. Can’t get past it until it’s out there, though.

Lesson #4: Be on guard. In the past 2 weeks, the right has stirred up the race issue directly in response to the left, raising the Reverend Wright specter again, the “we’re not racist by writing racist screeds” strategy, and their utterly unfounded accusations that the President is radical, racist (Glenn Beck’s favorite), and scary. The immigration issue in Arizona has stirred it up more. In that environment, expect an ambush.

This is what President Obama was saying in his speech in Philadelphia. What he said then is still true today:

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination – where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

And yes, in that same speech, the candidate Obama admitted that there is anger in the black community still, over past injustices.

Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

This is all true, and he also acknowledged the flip side:

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

It is that resentment that crawled out. Maybe only a little bit of resentment lingered, but it created doubt, and that doubt gave rise to permission to believe the worst of Shirley Sherrod.

It is that doubt and that resentment that isn’t overcome yet. All Breitbart and his friends did was play it in order to run interference for the very real, very visceral, and malevolent factions that inhabit their sphere.

In the end, it was really all about “they do it too”, the possibility he might be right, and lingering doubt about where we stand in relationship to each other’s race.

Next time, I hope we do better. There will be a next time, and a time after that, and one following that one until finally, it just doesn’t work anymore.

My reading list is more interesting than my opinion these days, so I figured I’d do a few reviews of the best ones. All of these are ones that I’d recommend to anyone really interested in politics, the dialogues, the narratives, and even the screw-ups.

Over the Cliff: How Barack Obama’s Election Drove the American Right Insane
John Amato & Dave Neiwert

Disclaimer: I write at Crooks & Liars. Take this review with a grain of bias, but not a lot, actually.

This book is a walk down recent memory lane. It’s a twisty lane, with lots of weeds and boulders. Amato and Neiwert take us back to the bad old days of town halls last year, death panels, nazi signs, and armed patriots with scary t-shirts on while reminding that what is today, was also yesterday. During Clinton, during the Kennedy/Johnson years, and really simply represents stirring-up by mainstream Republicans who re-activate the fringe groups in times when they’re out of power. The election of the nation’s first African-American president has magnified something that’s been around since the end of the civil war.

It’s tough to read, mostly because reading about last year when this year is no more sane is just difficult. All of the noise, the insanity and the lies just flood right back to front and center.

Still, it’s a book that should be on your bookshelf if for no other reason than to remind about what the agenda is, why it exists, who funds it, and how it’s used to undermine and thwart any meaningful progress that might benefit citizens who are not in the upper class or outside fringes. It’s also an excellent reference source, particularly when read at the same time as Jonathan Alter’s The Promise (reviewed below)
Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court
Jeff Shesol

This is one of those books that won’t be read by many, and should be read by all. It is the story, told through diary entries, narrative, interviews, and news blurbs, of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s tumultuous relationship with the Supreme Court and his plan to stack it in order to save the New Deal, which was in danger of being overturned by conservatives on the court.

Much of it reads like today’s news, right down to the ideological split on the court, on the left, and on the right. Nothing quite says “everything old is new again” like the narrative of this book. From contentions on the left that FDRs policies were corporatist sellout compromises to accusations from the right that FDR planned to turn the country into Europe, history plays out on a landscape of a President determined to turn around a country pillaged by speculators and thieves.

Here’s a rather classic quote from the section of the book dealing with FDR’s first presidential campaign.

“‘I am waging a war in this campaign,’ he declared, ‘a frontal attack against the ‘Four Horsemen’ of the present Republican leadership — the horsemen of Destruction. Delay. Deceit. Despair.’ The administration, he said, was in the grip of a failed doctrine, one ‘so unsound, so inimical to true progress, that it has left behind in its trail everywhere economic paralysis, industrial chaos, poverty and suffering.’”

And this, from the narrative around Roosevelt’s decision not to nationalize the banking industry. Sound familiar?

Indeed, in every sector, he left many established, entrenched interests untouched. He viewed them — for a time, anyway — as essential partners in this new national enterprise.

This book is one that goes on my “Essential Reading List for Liberals and Progressives”, because it grounds this present time firmly in the roots of the past, shows who Franklin Delano Roosevelt was, what factors caused him to move farther left over time (hint: it wasn’t criticism from the left; it was criticism from the RIGHT), and takes a hard look at what factors played into his successful New Deal policies, despite much resistance from the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court
William H. Rehnquist

My reasons for reading this go without saying: Who better to give an inside look at the Supreme Court than a Supreme Court justice? Rehnquist goes back to the beginning and gives a nice overview of the court, its key rulings, how they came to be, and what they meant for the country. Given how much of our electoral politics is staked in Supreme Court appointments, it’s a great read for a sense of how the judicial branch works.

The Promise: President Obama, Year One
Jonathan Alter

This is a great book to read side-by-side with Amato and Neiwert’s Over the Cliff. While Over the cliff describes what is going on in the press and at town halls, Alter’s book gives an inside look at the administration, how they came at problems, how the state of the economy played into their legislative priorities, and how they viewed the fight over health care reform. One of the best chapters in the book concerns the decision-making process on Afghanistan. Alter has some excellent inside sources and documentation, and brings the reader as close to the situation room as any of us are likely to get.

Highly recommended if you enjoy getting a sense of what goes on behind the scenes.

Other books I’m reading but haven’t read enough to review yet:

• Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus – Rick Perlstein
• Toxic Talk: How the Radical Right Has Poisoned America’s Airwaves – Bill Press
• What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America – Thomas Frank

1. By placing all of their requirements for the “win” on health reform in the public option basket and negating all other significant reforms such as an end to discrimination against sick people.
2. By refusing to support the true reforms contained in the Affordable Care Act because it didn’t have the public option in its final form. It plays straight to the music the GOP plays for repeal, and adds to their talking points.
3. By refusing to follow the lead of one of the most progressive Senators – Bernie Sanders – and lauding the Community Health Center initiative which comes online in 2010 and 2011 and which provides for local, community based affordable primary care and prescriptions for all residents of that community, regardless of ability to pay.
4. By using their “defeat” on health care reform as a grudge wedge on other issues.

All of these are their right and privilege. I have no argument with that, but it seems to be a self-defeating and self-fulfilling prophecy that leaves them on the edge of failure in their own agendas, and clearly opens the door to allow conservatives to roam free on the legislative landscape.

One possibility would be to begin to craft a more positive message. I see Blue America as making that effort — acknowledging the ones in Congress who make legislating and by extension, governing more difficult — and endeavoring to replace them with a more progressive and stronger caucus in both houses of Congress.

The question isn’t one of “for” or “against”. Do progressives truly believe that if their dream legislation passed through both Houses of Congress unscathed, the President would veto it? I doubt that very much. (Of course, I also acknowledge that the entire scenario is a fantasy…nothing passes through Congress unscathed.) The question is whether the progressive caucus understands that their message needs to be embraced by a majority in this country, and right now, it isn’t.

The Prop 8 folks in California found out the hard way that it wasn’t when it came to people voting rather than simply being polled, and set about trying to change hearts and minds about gay marriage alongside other progressives advocating for it. It is only NOW, in this time, that a tipping point appears to be emerging, and that’s even in question, given the difference between polls and actual votes in these circumstances (think Maine as another example).

This idea of being “pure” that seems to be traversing the Internet right now strikes me as being as wrong on the left as it is on the right. Someone just tweeted this to me:

you won’t see another Dem majority for a very long time. Should have enforced discipline-not pander to Baucus, Nelson, DINOs

Enforcing discipline in a party traditionally comprised of diverse coalitions? And if that were the case, then progressives have violated party discipline equally as much, given that the official party platform contained principles of health care reform that never included single payer and only an oblique and less specific idea of what a “public option” really was. It ranged from “like Congress gets” (private insurance without pre-existing conditions or caps) to a vague “federal agency” at one point. It certainly wasn’t the centerpiece of health care reform and doesn’t come close to qualifying as an ‘enforcement point’.

But that isn’t how liberals operate. The authoritarian model traditionally belongs to Republicans. Liberals tend to be more inclusive than that. Or did, until recently.

Update: I’ve gotten a lot of pushback on this post on Twitter, mostly for my contention of ‘liberal authoritarianism.’ I stand by that remark, not only because of the circular firing squad at Obama, but because I see a new theme emerging that seems to say anyone who considers pragmatism an asset is “of no use”. Now, it’s entirely possible that there are posers on Twitter intentionally stirring division and discontent to benefit conservative causes, so when it comes from a stranger, I’m less inclined to give weight to it than when it comes from others. Side by side with this theme, I see another: Punish those corporatist Dems by staying home and letting them lose. Give the Congress back to the Republicans! That’ll show ‘em.

Well, that’s a form of party discipline for sure, but if it’s not authoritarian, I don’t know what would be.

I will also say that I was angry when I wrote this, I was reacting not only to the prediction in that tweet but also this idea that pragmatism is somehow a failure of leadership. I just don’t quite understand that, but it’s not usually a good idea to write angry. The outcome rarely advances the ball to the goal, so for that, I do have regrets. However, the bell is rung. So it stays, warts and all.

This guy needs a recording deal. He’s awesome…The second part is poignant. The whole post is on Crooks and Liars.

Here’s a big sad pug face for Eric Alterman to go with his whining, entitled column over at The Nation today. Yes, you heard me right: He’s a big whiner who needs to put on his big boy pants and get with it. For someone who has been around long enough to know better, his latest column pours rain all over everyone’s sunniest day. You can read it here, but let me summarize it for you: We’re all doomed! Doomed!!!!

Ordinarily, I’d simply fume a little and move on, but there seems to be a real need on the part of the progressive blogosphere to give Republicans some decent ammunition at a point where Republicans are doing a great job of shooting themselves in the foot. It’s one thing to play fair and another to give the opposition a leg up when they’re about to lose, after all.

So let’s have a look at Eric Alterman’s screed about “Why a Progressive Presidency is Impossible, for Now“, and see where fantasy intersects reality.

The myth of the supermajority

Alterman: “But what they cannot do, even with supermajorities in both houses of Congress behind them, is pass the kind of transformative progressive legislation that Barack Obama promised in his 2008 presidential campaign.”

The House of Representatives has a nice healthy majority, and they’ve delivered consistently. The Senate has only had FIVE MONTHS of a majority, and not a supermajority. Al Franken wasn’t seated until July; Scott Brown was elected in January. The Senate was in recess in August, so Franken was on the vote count in September to January with Kirk, at which time 58 Democrats became 57. Further, Ben Nelson has a D behind his name and so adds to the number needed for a majority, but his votes are as Republican as they come.

No, Professor Alterman, there has been NO supermajority.

Never hold Congress accountable when you can blame the President

This just doesn’t die. From Alterman’s first paragraph:

In order to pass his healthcare legislation, for instance, Obama was required to specifically repudiate his pledge to prochoice voters to “make preserving women’s rights under Roe v. Wade a priority as president.” That promise apparently was lost in the same drawer as his insistence that “Any plan I sign must include an insurance exchange…including a public option.”

Of course, Alterman fails to note that there actually is a public option in the current health reform bill. It’s just not the public option he and everyone else wanted. It’s the option that includes the same health plans which are offered federal employees as negotiated by the OPM. What it isn’t, is a government-run public option, and that’s still got a lot of panties bunched up among the blogging elite.

Alterman also fails to note this: Obama could have kicked and screamed, sent Rahm down to Capitol Hill to bust kneecaps and break arms, held their children hostage, exiled their spouses to Guantanamo Bay and certain Senators — Nelson, Lincoln, and Lieberman — would have lifted their middle finger to the President, the 60% or so of the people who supported it, and everyone else who glared at them while they voted the big NO. On the question of whether a public option could have been slid through reconciliation, it’s doubtful, given that it would have required the establishment of an agency to administer it, amendments to include it in different sections regarding minimum benefits and the like, and those sections would not have been strictly budget-related.

As far as the Roe v. Wade issue goes, everyone paying attention knows exactly who was responsible for that problem, and it wasn’t the President. So yeah, let’s just blame the President anyway, because damn it all, that dude promised.

Alterman doesn’t stop there. He hangs the failure of climate change legislation (at least, as it stands today) on the President, too. And the horsetrading over financial regulation, also. All of which leads me to ask:

NO, to Alterman and his sidekick Cenk Uygur, it’s all the President’s fault, and worse yet, it proves — PROVES, I TELL YOU — that Democrats elected a Republican in Democrats’ clothing.

Comparing promises to results instead of fantasy to reality

Alterman seems to have watched an entirely different campaign than the one I saw and participated in back in 2008.

But the truth, dear reader, is that it does not much matter who is right about what Barack Obama dreams of in his political imagination. Nor is it all that important whether Obama’s team either did or didn’t make major strategic errors in its first year of governance: in choosing to do healthcare before financial reform; in not holding out for a larger, more people-focused stimulus bill, in eschewing a carbon tax; or in failing to nationalize banks and break up those that are “too big to fail.” Face it, the system is rigged, and it’s rigged against us. Sure, presidents can pretty easily pass tax cuts for the wealthy and powerful corporations. They can start whatever wars they wish and wiretap whomever they want without warrants. They can order the torture of terrorist suspects, lie about it and see that their intelligence services destroy the evidence. But what they cannot do, even with supermajorities in both houses of Congress behind them, is pass the kind of transformative progressive legislation that Barack Obama promised in his 2008 presidential campaign.

Here’s what was promised in 2008:

Health Care
As written to JAMA-AMA in response to their questionaire in October, 2008.

The Obama-Biden health care plan will:

• provide affordable and accessible health coverage for every American by building on the current insurance system and leaving Medicare intact for older and disabled Americans. Check
• lower annual health care costs by $2500 for a typical family. For Americans satisfied with their current health insurance, nothing will change except their costs will go down. - check, though there may be increased cost for those who don’t qualify for subsidies.
• Americans will also be able to choose from a range of private health insurance options through a new National Health Exchange, which will establish rules and standards for participating plans. The Exchange will also include a new public plan that will provide coverage similar to the kind members of Congress give themselves. Check-plus, just about to the exact letter of the promise.
• Cover all essential medical services, including preventive, maternity, disease management, and mental health care. Check.
• Costs will be low, and Americans who cannot afford it and do not qualify for Medicaid or SCHIP [State Children's Health Insurance Program] will receive a tax subsidy to pay for coverage. Care will be high-quality, and coverage will be portable and easy to enroll in and use. – Um, check.
• …will require coverage for all children and require that employers either make a meaningful contribution to coverage for their employees or contribute a percentage of payroll toward the cost of the national plan. Small businesses will be exempt from this requirement, but our plan will create an incentive for them to cover their employees via a refundable tax credit worth up to 50% on premiums paid. Yup. Check.

There’s more that looks exactly like the Affordable Care Act, but this is really the heart of things. The only piece of the plan that was laid out in 2008 and not passed in March, 2010 was the drug importation piece, which was a forcible Senate sacrifice.

Note what was NOT included in the Obama-Biden plan in October, 2008:

• Single-payer health insurance
• A public option administered in a similar way to Medicare
• Early Medicare buy-in

So, Mr. Alterman, what part of the promises here (which were in writing on the Obama site as early as January, 2008) disappointed you?

The largest stimulus package in US history fails to satisfy

In his very first month in office, the President spent all sorts of political capital to get the $787 Billion stimulus bill passed, which included such horrendously conservative benefits as a 65% government subsidy for COBRA premiums to the unemployed, funds to build out and improve infrastructure, funds for green industries, for high-speed rail, for improved broadband, for roads, for bridges, for extra money in unemployment checks, and more and more and more.

And yet, it wasn’t enough for Professor Alterman, or Cenk Ugyur, or just about every progressive out there who thinks, evidently, that John McCain would have rescued the economy in a better and more efficient way while spending more. Oh, and just in case they’ve forgotten, the vote on the stimulus bill (taken before teabaggers got shrill and all that) in the Senate was 61-36. There was no Senator from Minnesota named Franken seated at that time, and only three Republican Senators voted for it: Snowe, Collins, and Specter (who hadn’t switched parties at that time). Gregg and Cornyn didn’t vote on it at all.

Note, Professor Alterman, that it missed a filibuster by two Republican votes that were not available for any other votes of substance as the year went on.

And yet, it’s all this President’s fault. Gotcha.

Afghanistan – A promise kept, not broken

At no time during Barack Obama’s campaign did he ever, ever, ever promise to withdraw summarily from Afghanistan. In fact, this was his promise, verbatim and repeated throughout his campaign and memorialized in the 2008 Democratic Party platform (see page 4):

Defeating Al Qaeda and Combating Terrorism

• Win in Afghanistan
• Seek a new partnership with Pakistan
• Combat Terrorism
• Secure the Homeland
• Pursue Intelligence Reform

Check, check, and check. I guess I was listening but Professor Alterman was fantasizing.

Living in the ‘age of forgetting’

In fairness to Alterman, after he pummels the President verbally for a few paragraphs, he does acknowledge that the previous administration more or less brought the country, constitution, and system to its knees. By the time I got to those paragraphs I’d stopped paying attention. That’s because I arrived at this observation:

We live, as Tony Judt has written, in an “age of forgetting,” and nowhere is this truer than in our political discourse.

No frickin’ lie. I’ve just demonstrated how much has been forgotten (or fallen on deaf ears) by progressives.

In the age of forgetting, a plan EXACTLY like the health plan he promised in 2008 is delivered in 2010, yet all progressives can do is pout and stomp over the fact that the puny ineffective public option Congress offered didn’t make it into the final bill.

In the age of forgetting, progressives forget what an extraordinary feat it was to pass any health care reform bill at all, much less a bill that looked exactly like what the President promised before he was president. (Yep, that’s YOU I’m looking at, Jane Hamsher)

In the age of forgetting, progressives forget that despite the President’s order to close Guantanamo, funding for the transition has to be authorized by Congress.

In the age of forgetting, progressives forget that troops are being drawn down and are returning to this country from Iraq right on schedule, as promised.

In the age of forgetting, progressives forget that major steps have been taken toward negotiating nuclear non-proliferation and weapons reductions treaties with Russia, Australia and India, as promised.

In the age of forgetting, progressives imagine that $800 billion is a pittance, simply something to dismiss and write off as trifling and unimpressive. Congress, of course, had nothing to do with it, because progressives forget that in the Senate, it takes 60 to get anything done.

In the age of forgetting, progressives forget that we had a President who left the place in a mess, trashed, barely surviving and created the environment that led to millions of lost jobs, foreclosed homes, and a stalled economy.

In the age of forgetting, progressives forget that the President has repeatedly pushed on Wall Street, pushed for the Volcker rule to be part of the final financial regulatory legislation, and yet, Congress bargained it away to get something passed that would at least install some basic consumer protections. Not Rahm. Not Biden. Not the President. The conference committee, led by Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd.

Here’s something else forgotten in the age of forgetting. Telling your readers the ‘system is rigged’ is suppressive. It invites voters to sit down, cross their arms, pout and push the apathy button.

You think Republicans are apathetic? You think Republicans think this President has failed to deliver on his promises?

Think again.

It’s time to grow up, listen to what people actually say rather than what you want them to say, and take them at their word.

The ones who have broken the faith are progressives immersing themselves in self-indulgent fantasy. When reality bites their ankle, they wake up and scream BUT HE SAID!!! He didn’t say. You wanted him to say it, but he didn’t say it.

There is a difference between holding someone’s actual promises to account and inventing a fantasy from which a barrage of invective is launched. It would be worth learning to discern it.

Remember when we elected a President who said he’d do stuff and he did it and got re-elected despite shrill lies from the right and hating from the left?

Me either.

College Humor has some of the best videos I’ve seen. I’m posting this one in response to those here and elsewhere who get great joy out of calling me an Obama apologist. If you don’t laugh, you’re a Republican.

h/t Jack and Jill politics

Happy Independence Day! I mean that with all sincerity. A quick scroll of the posts and news I missed over the last week or so while hiding out in a warm tropical paradise tells me a little hope is in order, stat. Be forewarned: This post will not tell you how miserable our government is, or how awful our lives are, or how corporations own us all. If you were looking for that, skip over this one and look around. You’ll find plenty of folks elsewhere to reinforce that belief. I prefer success, and especially hope.

I am by nature an optimist. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the snark and snipe games as much as the next guy, but my natural inclination is to see the good rather than the bad. Despite popular themes, far more good has come out of the past 18 months of the Obama administration than bad. And that good is only now beginning to hatch. Is it as good as it gets? No. Can it be better? Sure, just ask any of the folks who lost their unemployment benefits (thanks to Republicans) or have exhausted them. Even so, what I see is a half-full glass that needs to be filled more, but still offers a refreshing break.

How many of you can count the number of accomplishments this administration has actually delivered over the past 18 months? Friends are working on a detailed list now, and the number of substantial, documented, quantifiable accomplishments of this President is well over 300. So far.

300 substantial positive changes in 18 months. That’s a remarkable number, certainly far more than we’d have seen if Almost-President McCain and Quitter Palin had been elected. Accomplishments that invest in present and future. Some correct past mistakes. Others seek to establish a strong foundation to build a future for us all. Still others affirm a commitment to opportunity for all of us.

Here are a few easily-forgotten examples.

• Offshore tax haven closure, which benefited rich investors, outsourcers and corporate tax dodgers. [Reference]
• Reformed Credit Card laws, adding consumer protections against predatory credit card lenders [Reference]
• Doubled federal funding for clean fuel research [Reference]
• Expanded Pell grants, enabling more low-income students to go to college. [Reference]
• Established climate change as a policy priority and set benchmarks for efficient energy standards. [Reference]

These accomplishments stand next to the ones most obvious: Turning the economy around, restoring our international standing, initiating a call for an end to nuclear proliferation worldwide, and getting universal health care passed, to name a few.

For those of you who are already sputtering “but, but, but….” and pointing out how each of the initiatives I listed or mentioned are impure, or somehow flawed from the original vision, I offer this: Legislation is an act of Congress. The health care bill, for example, teetered on the very, very edge of what was legislatively possible given the players in the House and in the Senate. One look at the vote counts should be all it takes to understand what that means. Changing one small provision could have killed the entire effort. Instead, we have a future which includes coverage for all, and subsidized coverage for those who cannot afford any health care, covered or otherwise.

All of this — all 300 separate accomplishments — are a down payment on future progress. This is what change looks like. It looks incremental, not immediate, and moves slower than any of us want. Some say it wears the tarnish of compromised promises. I say it wears the patina of unrivaled effort.

It is July 4, 2010. In 4 months, there will be an election. What is said today matters to that election of tomorrow. Ignoring what has been done in this short time will not win those elections. Using what has been done in 18 months to build upon a better, more progressive Congress will not only win elections, it will lay the foundation for more progress and more opportunity to rebuild what conservatives have spent the past 40 years tearing down.

Blue America is already working toward that future. If hope is kept at the forefront — yes, HOPE — we will make opportunities to perfect and refine the work in progress.

Hope pushed our founding fathers to sign their names to a Declaration of Independence. This country was founded on hope and optimism, not despair and criticism.

Digby is right:

I don’t cut President Obama much slack — the job is too important for that and he doesn’t need patronizing sycophants — but on Independence Day it pays to remember that the election of the first black president is still, as the Veep would say, a Big F$@#ing Deal:

I wonder too about whether President McCain would really care enough to do this for the baby turtles in the Gulf.

Know hope.

Cross-posted to Crooks & Liars