The term blowback was initially brought into political discussions by the CIA in predicting the results of US involvement in the 1953 coup in Iran that deposed Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq and his cabinet. Although the neo-cons are loath to admit it, US involvement with the coup and our subsequent support of the Shah, led to the blowback of the Iranian (or Islamic) Revolution in 1978.

But blowback isn’t just about Iran. The more we use force (either overt or covert) in the world to gain access to the resources we want, the more blowback we’ll see in the future. In his book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, Chalmers Johnson discusses the ways in which our country’s misguided policies are planting the seeds of future disaster.

Blowback is obviously something Bush and the neocons didn’t take seriously when they invaded 2 countries and utilized things like torture and rendition in their war of terror. But my guess is that the blowback from these crimes will be in evidence for decades if not centuries to come. That’s one of the reasons the petition for a Special Prosecutor is so important…holding them accountable might help limit the blowback.

My title might be a bit of an overstatement (ruh-roh), but its a reaction to just reading James Walcott’s The Good, The Bad, and Joe Lieberman in his annual roundup of winners and losers at Vanity Fair. This is one of the most entertaining pieces I’ve read in a long time!

In his summary of “winners,” after giving a bit of due credit to Plouffe and Axelrod for running Obama’s campaign “with a supersonic hum and a minimum of bared ego,” he jumps right to one of my favorite bloggers, Al Giodano (where I first learned of this article).

The first to grasp the portent of what was taking shape was the prophet of the Obama paradigm shift, the journalist/activist/online editor/blogger Al Giordano, who, as a student of the teachings and tactics of community organizer Saul Alinsky (whose Rules for Radicals is the guerrilla guide for domestic insurgents), divined the advantage that Obama’s small-donor base gave him against old-school juggernauts. In a prescient article for The Boston Phoenix in September 2007, …”It is Obama’s history as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago-and the application of that experience to organizing his campaign-that is making the 2008 cycle distinct from previous ones. Where [Howard] Dean failed to convert his donor-activist base into effective organization, Obama is apparently writing the book on how to do it.”

Emphasis mine because look how early he made that prediction!

Who’s up next? None other than Nate Silver from FiveThirtyEight. How cool is this description by Wolcott?????  

Yeah, I said it. And I’ll say it again…I hate New Years resolutions!!!

Most of all, I hate what they’ve become in our culture. A way to mostly look at the superficial qualities of our lives and think that somehow we’ll be happier if we change them. Oh, and there are usually tons of products we can buy that will “help” us achieve them, so its now time to pony up.

Secondly, I don’t think anyone really changes as a result of resolving to do so – at least not in the long term. Most changes that last come about as a result of fearless introspection combined with time and lots of patience.

I’ve written before about the limits I see to willpower. But there is something even more insidious about how most people approach resolutions. For some people (not all), this becomes a time to unleash all of the “shoulds” that have been rolling around in our heads. Most often, these are the shoulds that others in our lives or culture have laid on us as baggage. To resolve to meet those shoulds is usually not only doomed to fail, but negates our own true desires for ourselves.  

I’ve written before about what this current recession is doing to state budgets, the “first responders” in delivering whats left of this country’s safety net. But this morning, I read an essay from a very tired social worker at Whiskey Fire that brought it all down to a very personal level.

I have had a ringside seat to the economic downturn this year. It is not an abstraction to me. The folks at the bottom are always the first to feel the pinch, when it comes. Clients of the agency I work at come through our doors every day requesting assistance with basic necessities like food, clothing, shelter and medications. As the year has progressed and New York State has chosen to repeatedly victimize its most vulnerable citizens, it has become more difficult to help people meet these needs. I have visited food banks with empty shelves, been told clients were ineligible for help when I knew they were and had to challenge these decisions. I have sat with clients while their applications for public assistance were reviewed by fraud investigators at social services…

For nearly 30 years we have done our best to dismantle the safety net for the poor and struggling among us. I keep praying that we have reached the end of this folly. At 42, these policies are what I have known my entire work life. I dream about social service programs and rules that would treat people like human beings, rather than as an undesirable applicant to be culled out. I want so badly for us as a nation to stop punishing people for being poor, or elderly or a child of poor people. This holiday season was hellish as I watched scores of our clients navigate the realities of a holiday with nothing but further grinding poverty. Some days I am just weary from the strain of witnessing the suffering that goes on around me. It takes a toll that is more than physical, it eats away at the soul to see people ask for so little and receive far less.

I wonder if any of you can remember your life in politics before 2000? Before we were loaded with one outrage after another to the point that it became difficult to keep up?

I remember Monica and impeachment (ha-ha) and the “vast right-wing-conspiracy.” But things get more fuzzy when I try to think about what issues were on the table, or which ones were off the table and we were trying to get them on.

The reason I’m going down this memory lane is that I’m doing my best to try to imagine a world without Bushco. And its hard to get there. I feel like I’ve been fighting them with almost everything I’ve got for so long that I can’t imagine a world where that isn’t a centering theme. But its about to happen.

Over the next few days, we are sure to be bombarded with lists and summaries that try to capture our experience of the year that is known as 2008. To get ahead of the game a bit, I thought I’d post a couple I’ve seen for fun and consideration.

First of all, there is the JibJab version.

All of this talk about Rick Warren has taken me down a road of nostalgia. You see, there was a time that Warren would have been a hero of mine, (I’ll duck for awhile now) and it wasn’t in the beginning of my journey to wake up.

I went off to a fundamentalist christian college in about 1974 and was completely wrapped up in all the dogma I had been raised with. My awakening started there with an attraction to more liberal politics and tackling racism. That’s where I lived for years. I still held on to those evangelical positions about abortion and homosexuality. But the seeds for the rest of awakening were being planted all the same.

In college I was a transfer student because I’d done my first two years at other institutions. I never really “fit in” with the crowd and ended up finding a “home” with a group of women who were the athletes on campus. I had always been drawn to sports and might have been an athlete myself if I’d grow up in a time and place where girls could do something other than be the cheerleaders.  

In the final weekly address of 2008, President-elect Barack Obama calls for the season of giving to also be a season of common purpose and shared citizenship.

h/t to Edger