A great debate?

For them as has access to Teh Facebook, there's a fine political discussion brouhaha going on at this link among me (the original poster), and fellow beer/drinks-writing colleagues Alan Moen and Kerry Byrne.

If the wingnuts really want to accuse the Obama Adminstration of racism...

...it's pretty easy.

As soon as any black person connected to the Administration in any shape or form, past or current, is accused of anything, that person is fired, dismissed, blacklisted, gone.

Meanwhile, the criminals from the Bush Administration, mostly if not entirely white, roam free about the land collecting big bucks from TV News Propaganda Networks, Right Wing charitable groups Non-Profits and other Wingnut Financial Support Systems.

The fetal position into which most of the Democratic Establishment curls up whenever someone on the Right pokes at them is really sad to see.

While nobody is paying attention.

The polls indicate that the nation is losing its Obama love for a variety of reasons. These opening paragraphs from this morning's Mike Allen's Playbook (the "must read" email for the Washington establishment) suggest that they are missing the big picture...

--TOMORROW'S NEWSPAPERS TODAY -- Two legs of the triple crown: This means President Obama will sign health reform and Wall Street reform within four months of each other. Plus there's the likelihood he'll get some sort of energy-climate bill by year's end -- an astounding year.

--TIME's Mark Halperin, on 'Morning Joe': 'The president said he'd do certain things when he ran, and he's getting a lot of them done. ... That is a LOT of accomplishments in half a term. And you can bet the president's going to talk about that come September, when he's trying to rally the country behind the Democratic Party, saying: We're getting stuff done.

Whether or not the President and the Democrats can get that message out before next November in this teaparty world is a big question. It will still probably come back to the economy and jobs. It always does.

The evil among us.

The evil billionaire businessman or the evil corporation have been been staples of crime fiction since the middle of the last century, right after we got over all that gray-flannel-suit melodrama, and of more mainstream fiction for at least half that time. Such entities always used to seem somewhat overblown and sensationalized. No longer.

In the age of Halliburton and BP Oil, of Wall Street criminals and health care liars, in a time when great national banks have pissed away a significant portion of our wealth with risky and self-serving schemes, it has become more obvious than ever to anyone paying a modicum of attention that true evil lives among us. Such characters are all too real. If anything, the malevolence and disinterest in anything other than putting more money in their own coffers at any cost manifested by "corporate" sorts make most of those fictional versions almost laughably ineffective and short-sighted.

Oddly though, with all the evidence right there before our lyin' eyes, the same large minority of the population which suffers most from the machinations of connivers at the very top is still buying in to the self-serving myths propagated by big business and big media, still clinging to the idea that somehow allowing the rich to become richer and businesses to be entirely unfettered will work to their benefit in the long run.

That this condition still persists, indeed prevails, is an example of mind control beyond the visionary capabilities of most practitioners of fiction. George Orwell's 1984 and the host of anti-Utopian novels which followed in its wake envision a beaten and defeated populace held down by drugs or military forces or some other physical manifestation of power. But it was much simpler than that. All it took was a constant drumbeat of misinformation and the acquiescence of the comfortable. Which is to say, you and me.

The manipulators of what the average American sees and (much less often and  much more selectively) reads have managed to inculcate their message so thoroughly and completely that it is seen in many quarters as Un-American to even question that version of reality even at the edges, much less to challenge it openly. The Tepid Middle and the Timid Left bow before the roaring, if empty, winds of talk radio and Fox News. The Bright New Hope in the White House seems more and more The Conciliatory Overseer, the occasional flash of anger quickly erased by day-to-day policies which, in the face of all evidence, seem founded in a numbing belief that there is a way to reconcile with those who feast on the growing and continually stoked anger that threatens the very principles of the nation with platitudes and watered-down fixes.

We are becoming a nation which prizes ignorance above all else, just so long as it coincides with our own uninformed world view, because is easier and more comfortable than the truth. We rail against the present and long for a past that never was, all the while refusing to see who was to blame and how we got here.

It is a time when Dick Cheney, a creature who would have made Dr. Strangelove cringe in fear, was once the most powerful man in the country and remains a behind-the-scenes force for all that is wrong in our natures. That snarling visage is the face of the nation. God help us all.

"Continuity easily turns into inertia."

I have spent a lot of time in recent weeks trying to figure out exactly what I think about Barack Obama and his presidency at this point. Garry Wills' review of David Remnick's new book, The Bridge, in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review suggests that the manner of his rise to the Oval Office  hold the key to understanding why his first year in office, the time when a landslide victor with both charisma and party control of the Congress might have been expected to achieve a myriad of goals, was instead marked by turmoil and disappointment.

Yes, the mindless obstructionism and near-criminal demonization of the new president by his opponents played a crucial role and the ruined economic landscape left him by his inept and disinterested predecessor played an an even larger part. But it was not only exterior forces that thwarted Obama.

His long, foolish and obviously doomed effort for "bipartisanship," as if it were some sort of moral value rather than merely a political tactic, allowed much of the energy to escape from his historic election. Many of the people he surrounded himself with, especially on his economic team, had played significant roles in the disaster that may yet bring him down. The fire and passion of his arguments for new policies and directions, until very recently, was dimmed.

The central theme of Remnick's books, from all accounts, is that Obama's solution to his always being the outsider, the newcomer, has been to ingratiate himself by the oldest social rule of them all, to get along, go along. And especially in seeking the presidency and then assuming the Oval Office, that predilection was often paramount. He could never risk being the Angry Black Man on the campaign trail; he wanted above all to embed his presidency in the long history of the office even if it was undeniably a demarcation from all that had gone before.

Wills is one of my favorite intellectuals and the final two paragraphs of his review provide a summary of what he took from The Bridge and what that might portend:

Obama’s strategy everywhere before entering the White House was one of omnidirectional placation. It had always worked. Why should he abandon, at this point, a method of such proved effectiveness? Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril. To disarm fears of change (the first African-­American presidency is, in itself, a big jolt of change), Obama has stressed continuity. Though he first became known as a critic of the war in Iraq, he has kept aspects or offshoots of Bush’s war on terror — possible future “renditions” (kidnappings on foreign soil), trials of suspected terrorists in military tribunals, no investigations of torture, an expanded Afghan commitment, though he promised to avoid “a dumb war.” He appointed as his vice president and secretary of state people who voted for the Iraq war, and as secretary of defense and presiding generals people who conducted or defended that war.

To cope with the financial crisis, he turned to Messrs. Geithner, Summers and Bernanke, who were involved in fomenting the crisis. To launch reform of medical care, he huddled with the American Medical Association, big pharmaceutical companies and insurance firms, and announced that his effort had their backing (the best position to be in for stabbing purposes, which they did month after month). All these things speak to Obama’s concern with continuity and placation. But continuity easily turns into inertia, as we found when Obama wasted the first year of his term, the optimum time for getting things done. He may have drunk his own Kool-Aid — believing that his election could of itself usher in a post-racial, post-partisan, post-red-state and blue-state era. That is a change no one should ever have believed in. The price of winningness can be losing; and that, in this scary time, is enough to break the heart of hope.

The last time this sad excuse of a nation and what it used to be awoke from its stupor and put someone in charge to pick up the pieces left in wake of a destructive Republican non-stewardship of the nation, we chose The Man from Hope. If it turns out that this time we've chosen The Man form Inertia, then the broken heart of hope could turn out to be the least of the pain we will reap.

The other side of Obama's "race problem."

Also from Frank Rich's must-read column today:

Last week, after I wrote about the role race plays in some of the apocalyptic right-wing hysteria about the health care bill, a friend who is a prominent liberal Obama supporter sent me an e-mail flipping my point. He theorized that race also plays a role in “the often angry and intemperate talk” he has been hearing from “left-liberal friends for the past many months about what a failure and a disappointment” the president has been. In his view, “Obama never said anything, while running, to give anyone the idea” that he was other than a “deliberate, compromise-seeking bipartisan moderate.” My friend wondered if white liberals who voted for Obama expected a “sweeping Republicans-be-damned kind of agenda” in part — and he emphasized “in part!” — because “they expect a black guy to be intemperate, impetuous, impatient” rather than “measured, deliberate, patient.”

The enigma that is Obama.

Frank Rich this morning:

Depending on where you stand — or the given day — he is either an overintellectual, professorial wuss or a ruthless Chicago machine pol rivaling the original Boss Daley. He is either a socialist redistributing wealth to the undeserving poor or a tool of Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs elite. He is a terrorist-coddling, A.C.L.U.-tilting lawyer or a closet Cheneyite upholding the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s end run on the Constitution. He is a lightweight celebrity who’s clueless without a teleprompter or a Machiavellian mastermind who has ingeniously forged his Hawaiian birth certificate, covered up his ties to Islamic radicals and bamboozled the entire mainstream press. He is the reincarnation of J.F.K., L.B.J., F.D.R., Reagan, Hitler, Stalin, Adlai Stevenson or Nelson Mandela.