Jun 12 2008

Busy Bee, and Buyers’ Remorse

I haven’t been disappeared into a CIA torture chamber, if those of you concerned for my wellbeing have been wondering.  I started college again late last month, and it’s taken up a lot of my free time.  I’ll probably be doing my updates primarily on the weekends for a while.  Anyway, on to business.

Leave it to Paul Krugman to state what should have been obvious from the start:

Maybe I’m wrong, but my sense is that Jason Furman has become a proxy target for some Obama supporters who, now that the Great Satanness has been defeated, are suddenly starting to have the queasy feeling that their hero might be a bit of a …. centrist. I’m tempted to say I told you so; in fact, I guess I just did.

Although Krugman actually likes Furman, I think his remarks are — as usual — spot on.  The Obamamaniacs got the presidential candidate they wanted, but now that they’ve begun to realize they put their hopes in a fraud they’re getting nervous.  I would be too, if I suddenly realized I’d thrown my support behind another DLCer and in so doing, helped Democrats lose the White House again.

2 comments

  1. Since it is likely he will bring no systemic change. I’ve already seen praise for his speech to AIPAC at dkos. For the good liberals, it may not really sink in until well into the Obama administration, at which point they will hang their hopes on some other hero, as they seemingly are never able to learn this lesson.

    And those to the left of the liberals, it seems to me, were never fooled by the current campaign, and have so far been treated as a nuisance by the rest.

  2. at the Nation:

    Palmyra, Syria

    These days, it’s an almost irresistible temptation to believe that when the present incumbent finally rides his mountain bike off into the sunset in January, the world will be a better place merely by the fact of his absence. Amid the sinister twilight of the Bush years, such hopes are understandable. Looking at the blazing bodies of their comrades, used as torches to brighten up Nero’s royal banquets, the early Christians must certainly have rejoiced when he passed, little knowing that not so far over the horizon loomed Domitian and other emperors eager to add uplifting chapters to the Book of Martyrs.

    . . .

    The day I was in Palmyra the Emperor Bush II was in the Knesset giving his speech, a slab of rhetoric so ripe in its homage to Israel that the New York Times reprimanded him editorially for bad taste. In its immediate aftermath I had an opportunity to ask a member of the Syrian cabinet, Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban, whether she thought the installation of a new US President in January would diminish the forebodings she had just been outlining with great passion–from the continuing human catastrophe in Iraq, to the horrors of Israel’s siege of Gaza, to the obvious US intent to provoke another terrible civil war in Lebanon. (For the record, Dr. Shaaban does not think a war with Iran is likely.) She didn’t hesitate to answer me by saying she envisaged no change if a candidate such as Barack Obama settles into the Oval Office.

    The continuous policy of the United States is to divide and rule, she said–has been and will be for the foreseeable future–to fan schism and internecine bloodletting in the region, to set Arab against Arab, whether they be the communities of Lebanon or the Shia and Sunni in Iraq. Syria is paying a stiff price for the human catastrophe in Iraq, hosting nearly 2 million Iraqi refugees (Dr. Shaaban’s estimate), which is placing a huge drain on the country’s social services, as the US government is gleefully aware. While Dr. Shaaban was ridiculing Bush’s speech–a universal reaction among those I met–one member of the Times‘s extensive stable of neoconservative columnists, David Brooks, was fretting that a statement Obama had made after Bush’s Knesset speech did indeed constitute “appeasement,” indicating he had drifted off into “Noam Chomskyland.” Obama’s sin had been to say that “it’s time to engage in diplomatic efforts to help build a new Lebanese consensus,” focusing on electoral reform, an end to a corrupt patronage system and the promotion of an equitable economy.

    So anguished was Brooks by these dread prospects that he phoned Obama, who promptly furnished answers resoundingly mollifying the columnist’s suspicions. According to Brooks, Obama confided to him that “in some ways he’d be tougher than the Bush Administration,” doing more, to take one specific example, to arm the Lebanese military. (This schedules a bloodbath in Lebanon in Year One or Two of the Obama administration.) Obama’s bottom line to Brooks was straight-up Caesarism: “The [US] generals are light-years ahead of the civilians. They are trying to get the job done rather than look tough.”

    Let our prayers be for incompetent emperors who talk tough but screw up.

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