To me, Obama’s SOTU was a giant horse syringe of lidocaine injected into the frontal cortex of America, an attempt to numb failed expectations of hope and change. Theoretically, such a lesion is reversible, when the lidocaine eventually wears off, although some gliosis may be evident due to the excessive volume of the injection. Whether the full extent of the damage is reversible or not, the lesion has predictably resulted in the spontaneous recovery, renewal or reinstatement of previous conditioned responding on “leftward” leaning blogs. The lesion was made bi-lateral during Obama’s “schooling” of GOoPers. The previously extinguished conditioned response, “hope,” was called forth immediately and was wholly redintegrated from memory on the basis of the most impoverished, partial, and secondary conditioned stimuli, resulting in the following response topography: “That’s the President I elected!”
While I suspect the ultimate goal is the complete euthanasia of hope and change, it at least gets my attention that Volcker is signaling a bust-up of the big banks. I’ll believe that when I see it. In the mean time enjoy this piece by John Caruso:
Ilk
While I was reading Howard Zinn over the past few days, I happened across Adolph Reed’s take on Obama-from January of 1996:
In Chicago, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program–the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics.
Reed quoted this himself (and probably does at every opportunity, annoying his mechanic, his dentist, and friends at faculty parties to no end), since he’s apparently pleased with it. And justifiably so; that’s some serious perspicacity.
Read the rest for the punchline.
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http://charliedavis.blogspot.c…
reality in the ass backward game going on and the cheers for our side. Both the SOTU and the televised David takes on the Philistines, filled me with despair. He won of course but we knew he would, the dregs left in the minority are teh stupid. The substance seemed to be that we are all Republicans now, the Democrats just being the ‘moderate’ better smarter choice. This defies any logic or common sense as the whole battle electoral has unhinged itself from policy or reform or any real solutions to our current state. I find it sad that in ‘the fierce urgency of now’ our agent for bottom up and change says to the knuckledraggers of the right that that his agenda is closer to theirs then they think. Sadder still is that this seems to have fueled the party loyalists to proclaim he won. now they will support any and all of the policy and agenda that this administration dishes out and take it on ‘faith’ that Obama knows best.
‘Power corrupts, and party politics corrupt absolutely.’