It’s just too awful to contemplate. . .
1968, U.S. Attention Deficit Disorder And Obama’s Boomer Attack (Updated 8:30 PM)
Obama’s assuredly unqualified to be president but assuredly charismatic. Soft expectations also allow him to embrace Rove-esque tactics and get away with it. A fascinating example of mass conspiratorial hypocrisy. Like Rove, but without his direct ‘honesty’, Obama indirectly seeks to smear, attack and misrepresent his opponent’s (HRC) strength. Tonight on Tweety, a woman journalist blurts that Obama “gets me hot and bothered” and “gushing”. (Let’s put that awful mental picture aside, shall we?).
Media’s rush to bring down HRC gives Obama a pass on so many things. Most distrubingly, we see Obama embrace the most bigoted elements of religious intolerance in his campaign; it gets an article here and there but no real sustained coverage. His progressive and netroots backers collude in this under the table courting of the intolerant vote — after all, anyone but HRC, right?
Would any other candidate get this pass? Republican or Democrat? Then, Obama trots out a new accent and cadence every three days. Not a peep from his fawning cheerleaders. And now Obama claims his complete and utter lack of life experience makes him the better candidate. After all, he has discovered something new and apocalyptic — HRC (Biden et. al.) are – gasp – Boomers. And we all know what that means (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know what I mean?). This is a car wreck in the making my friends, akin to the Democratics ignorant and all too predictably doomed embrace of John Kerry (of all people given his history with veterans) in 2004. “Reporting for duty”, indeed.
We hold no brief for HRC per se. See our WWLD post elsewhere. We do note, however, that the Clinton White House, even under the most ferocious effort of the Movement to mount a coup d’etat, was more interested in who had good ideas rather than whether one had a R or D after their name. We had terrific access to senior personnel (that you saw on TV and the like — even though we were nominally a card-carrying member (albeit increasingly in form only) of the VRWC) . Totallty unlike this regime, Bush 41 or RWR. That part of the Clinton legacy is willfully ignored. Largely, in our opinion, because the Washington Press corps is utterly bereft of any ideas; they wouldn’t know an original one if it kicked them in the groin with the force of 10,000 sledgehammers. (And they resent that Clinton finished the NY Times crossword puzzles in ink).
You may recall Dear Reader that we were on the ground in South Carolina during 2000. We saw first hand Ralph Reed and Karl Rove’s fear and hate mongering in action. We also dined at the table with close members of the family as we watched the results came in. We will never forgive or forget. (That our candidate then morphed into one of the Warlord’s most reliable delusionists is (in Kevin Kline’s words from a ‘Fish Called Wanda’ — “DISAPPOINTING”) merely shows the weakness of the human spirit.) Still, watching Obama try to take the high road mimicking a Chinese-made Dollar Store version of MLK while also calling out the mouth breathers on bottom track is appalling. Especially for such an empty suit.
If Obama were a plagarist ala Biden, he might as well steal these words:
“The hippies were utopian, deluded, egomaniacs – and fundamentally very stupid. Think Neil from The Young Ones. They had this infantile delusion, which still permeates our society, that when bad things happen it is a sign that the order of the world is somehow disharmonious, and that as a remedy – in that most hideous Blairite mantra – ‘something must be done’.”
But one thing trivial Law Review tenure teaches anyone (besides tedium beyond imagination) — and Harvard Law Review is as trivial as any other of the Ivy or near Ivy Reviews — is how to avoid plagarism even while summoning its ethereal facsimile. The whole mediocre versus great artists thing, but with footnotes.
Yet the essay by Jerome Weeks on music revolutions above makes some good points. Monterey and Jefferson Airplane’s “Volunteers of America” may not have changed much in absorbtive Western capitalism, but it moved the world elsewhere. (Who can remember the absurdity — yet still profound in its significance of soft power — of Boris Yeltsin standing atop a tank in 1991 reading a statement of support from Mick Jagger to the crowd? Or the incredible fact that when we were about 10 rows back in the Billy Joel Moscow show in the 1980s the Russians actually treated him as a bona fide rock star? The most amusing memory was standing in a sea of people at a Russian air field in 1991 for the ‘Monsters of Rock’ tour and watching all these young Sovs hoisting confederate flags obtained by God-doesn’t-want-to-know-how).
W remain at the mercy of CNNMSNBCFOX who need a horse race: for ratings, for narrative, and to employ promo and graphics departments. HRC generates such hostility there for many reason, not the least is that all are bored — too many books, too little new to talk about.
But make no mistake: given the Warlord regime’s relentless assault on the Republic and the international order, we need more than a State Senator with 2 years in the Senate riffing Karl Rove poorly. Obama, in our opinion, simply is too weak, too superficial, and all too inexperienced for our historical moment.
So we politely say “Screw AUDACITY”. Cheney’s left pinky showed more audacity than Obama can ever conceive. No matter how often he name checks Beyonce to adoring, guilt-ridden 50 year old white journalists. If Obama won’t go get some real executive, political knife fighting and managerial experience, then let’s dump into Gore Corp. somewhere. He’d look ok in green. We’d love to see an African American president unite and heal this country. Unfortunately, it won’t be him.
Oh, and Senator? We like contemporary pop/urban music as much as anyone. Especially if trapped in a stalled Beltway parking lot. But as our regulars know, we really are partial to the volume, melodic chaos and composition of the Boomer’s best Music. (One of our favorite clips). Check in with us in 4 our 8 years when you have the battle scars to show you can be taken seriously. We promise a fresh look then.
Hard To Port
We’ve made no secret over our sadness watching the Giuliani campaign. As long time readers know, in an earlier incarnation the Stiftung worked directly for him. Our interaction with the man confirmed his basic social tolerance and inherent decency. One way to measure a public persona is how they treat the most junior members of society or staff when no one is watching, there are no cameras and no possibility of public benefit. His bout with cancer and attending the funerals of 9/11 we are confident only enhanced this trait.
We also credit him (and Ed Rendell in Philadephia) for largely turning those metropolitan areas around. Both proved again that large cities are governable. Contemporary thinking wrote them off. Did he make mistakes? Undoubtedly. Is Bloomberg even better? He’s building on a stable legacy — who’s to say what and how he would have done if he inherited a Dinkins handoff.
Re 2008, tactical political reasons — as you know — forced Giuliani’s lurch to the extreme Right on foreign policy. The political logic is inescapable. It also all but extinguishes prospect of supporting him personally. (We have not approached the campaign in any way and have no contact with them).
You, Dear Reader, already know that he’s surrounded himself with the likes of Wedgewood, Frum, Rubin, Norman Podhoretz, Stephen Rosen and Martin Kramer. The campaign also signed up Hoover Institute’s Peter Berkowitz,who also runs the George Mason University Law School’s Israel Program on Constitutional Government.
Now Team Rudy recognizes they’ve over done it. Via Eli Lake at The Sun comes a disingenuous and stunningly cynical article. Team Rudy now claims that everyone should ignore the Neocons and Straussians behind the curtain. Instead, they hope to offer us the refurbished and allegedly centrist Charles Hill. Like the New Nixon, Hill purports to be a moderate and cashes in on his brief association with George Schultz. Hill, oddly and perversely, even brags as a token of diversity that the campaign has hired “Robert Conquest, who has worked as both an adviser to Margaret Thatcher and a mentor of Christopher Hitchens”.
Aftermath
Open mike nite on the Republican debate circus in Dearborn . . .
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