What's In a Name?

Barack Obama is truly blessed.

The “useful idiots” Ronald Reagan and his ruling class masters drew into the GOP have taken over the party’s public face completely– and they are dragging the party down beyond anyone’s expectations. Nevada Senator John Ensign and South Carolina governor Mark Sanford are the latest, most spectacular examples of God-fearing, gay baiting, family values and, especially in Sanford’s case, free-marketeering imbeciles self-destructing. That liberal pundits depict Sanford’s travails as tragic, rather than deliciously bathetic, only goes to show how mindless liberal pundits are.

As Obama gears up to be the first American President since Eisenhower to try, albeit gingerly, to exert pressure on our utterly dependent client state, Israel, the viciously right-wing Netanyahu government, outflanked by parties to its right and to the right of their right are busily involved in enacting transparently racist laws. They want to disenfranchise Israeli Arabs by requiring their political representatives to swear oaths to support Israel as a Jewish and democratic state; and they want to imperil, and perhaps someday even deport, Israeli leftists by imposing prison terms on anyone who dares say or write otherwise. [Thus their policies are not only racist but also patently self-contradictory.] Were this turn in Israeli politics more widely known, it would relieve some of the Israel-right-or-wrong pressure that deforms our political culture. That it is not more widely known only goes to show how morally bankrupt liberal pundits, and the media they work for, are.

As Obama prepares to engage Iran diplomatically, his critics to the Right – John “Bomb Bomb Iran” McCain especially, along with his sidekick Lindsey Graham – have been busy making fools of themselves and showing how little they’ve learned from the debacle the neo-conservative Bush foreign policy establishment has visited upon the world, by insisting that Obama do more to make American “support for democracy and freedom” the issue in Iran. Obama was blessed during the campaign to be running against fools such as these, and now they’re back in full swing. It’s not just that they’re obviously wrong; they’re also playing a self-defeating game. By calling on Obama to be more outspoken in support of opponents of the Ahmadinejad government, the neo-neo-cons of the Republican Party have made it harder for themselves (and their Israeli colleagues) to get their way. Do they really think that public opinion will support “bomb bomb bomb(ing)” people they depict as heroes?

The list goes on. Polls reveal enormous public support for freeing the health care system from the scourge of health care profiteers – private insurance companies especially; for sticking it to Wall Street predators rather than sticking everything back in their bloated pockets; for doing away with Clinton and Bush era homophobic laws; for coming out strongly against right-wing, homegrown terrorists and supporting women’s reproductive rights; and so on. But what does Obama do about it? The short answer is: very little.

With each passing day, Obama waxes more and more Pelosiite. [As I have explained in counteless entries, going back to the beginning of this blog, Pelosiism is later day Clintonism. Like classical Clintonites, Pelosiites overestimate the power of the Right and then triangulate with a view to placing themselves, as best they can, in the center of the center. If this means betraying their most ardent supporters, so be it; they can always be taken for granted. If it means displaying abject spinelessness, they not only don’t care; they’re oblivious. If it means acquiescing in crimes of historical dimensions, then that’s OK too. Pelosiism is opportunism for opportunism’s sake.] The difference from the Clinton era is that now the opportunities for “real change” are so much greater and the stakes so much higher. This is why there is even more reason to reproach Pelosiites than the Clintonites of yesteryear; and why it is rapidly becoming the case that Obama is even worse than Bill Clinton. But none of this has yet dawned on most of the already betrayed Obamamaniacs still out there. Along with the “boost don’t knock crowd” in Washington’s “liberal” “think” tanks, they remain all too willing to give their Supreme Leader the benefit of every doubt.

The gods have truly blessed Barack Obama by handing him a consummately pathetic GOP, unworthy of its semi-established status. But, along with his co-thinkers in the POP, the Party of Pusillanimity (or, what comes to the same thing, the Party of Pelosiites), he has so far seen fit to squander his blessings with reckless, “bipartisan,” “pragmatic,” “centrist” abandon.