The United Grapes of America

What's red and blue, and purple all over?  The United Grapes of America.
(For those of you who remember the "Alexander the Grape" jokes.)

The electoral map (cartogram, actually) that is much more reflective of the reality of the American populace than the silly and misleading Mercator-projection (?) geographical map they show us all the time.  Check out the link.  Many other interesting variations.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2012/ 

Election Choices: What to Do Instead

[Escape from New York delayed completion of this post this until after election night. All the better. Now that the great danger has been dodged, let’s look to the future.  Advisories: 1) I’m talking here about presidential elections.  2) You really have to see the videos.]

Having made the case against voting for Obama in a previous post, it’s only fair for me to suggest the alternative. 

I value the right to vote as fundamental.  I have seen how people who don’t have that right fight for it, and how people who get it for the first time eagerly embrace it, and go to extraordinary lengths to use it.  Although I consider electoral politics only one aspect of a thoroughgoing democratic polity and of individual democratic engagement, it would be hard to conceive of a democratic schema, no matter how revolutionary, in which a transparent, trusted voting process was not important.  It may be one among many, but a vote is an important political tool/weapon, and a terrible thing to waste.

Election Choices: Obama or Not?

We’re up against it now.  Less than two weeks left.  Those on the left confront their quadrennial quandary, and the inescapable debate: to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee or not.  “The lesser evil is still evil.”  “Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.” “The Supreme Court!”  ‘Round and ‘round we go.  It is a frustrating, enervating ritual, a passionate argument between speakers who are not going to change each other’s minds, but do hope to influence those who overhear. In other words, politics.  Inescapable.

Act of Terrible

Update below.

Today, self-identified liberals and progressives are all a-twitter and high-fivin’ each other because in yesterday’s debate their guy “proved” that he actually and immediately did use, and does embrace, the term “act of terror” to describe the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi.  Thus have Obama, and, following him, the bulk of the liberal caste, demonstrated their complete acceptance of the vapid, self-serving, hypocritical, obfuscatory, and dangerous language of “terror” as a touchstone of foreign policy credibility.  That this has happened, and that nobody notices or cares that it has happened, is one of the more shameful facts about this debate, and the whole discourse of this sham campaign.

Debate Question for Joe Biden

Can Americans trust Mitt Romney with a Kill List?

(If you’re not familiar with the “Kill List,” see here.)

Sure, ask Paul Ryan, too, but we know the answer he’ll give. It’s the answer we expect.  On the other hand, this question instantly and dramatically reveals that you’re never going to get from the Democrats what you are led to expect.

What can Biden (and Democratic supporters of Obama) say?  It’s a done deal.  Mitt has a kill list, because Obama handed it to him.  He can put anybody he wants on it, and kill them at any time, and the Democrats can have nothing to say in objection.  This is what Obama has wrought.

The Debate Debacle

The MSNBC meltdown after Wednesday’s Presidential debate was certainly more passionate, entertaining, and instructive than the debate itself.

Chris Matthews was apoplectic: "There's a hot debate going on in this country, and you know where it's being held? Here, on this network, is where we're having this debate. We have our knives out. We go after the people and the facts. What was he doing tonight? He went in disarmed!" 

Ed Schultz was “absolutely stunned.” The president, he proclaimed, made a “deal with the devil" by saying he agreed with Mitt Romney on Social Security. (“A somewhat similar position” is how Obama put it.)  Ed was not brooking any of Rachel Maddow’s excuses about how Romney muscled in for time: “The president needs to go in there and fight for that time.  There’s people out there who expect him to fight for that time.”  (Another ideological illusion: According to one analyst, Obama actually got 11% more microphone time than Romney, while saying 9% fewer words. The problem wasn’t time. It was energy.)

Politics Upside-Down: Fictional Campaigns, Invisible Issues, and Disappearing Jobs

The fictive nature of American presidential electoral campaigns never ceases to amaze. 

“Fictive,” of course, does not mean simply “false.” It’s not a word that describes some internal flaw of a discourse, but that describes a specific relation between a discourse and its audience.  The difference between non-fiction and fiction is not exactly that the former is true and the latter false, but that the audience is expected to fault the former, but not the latter, for describing a world in which werewolves roam London and Russian nationalists nuke Baltimore, when they don’t.  (Everybody knows it’s vampires, and they’re in Louisiana.  Or is it Seattle?)

During this presidential campaign, liberals and progressives have, rightly, been busy excoriating Romney, Ryan, and the Republicans for their blatant falsity, their proclivity to make assertions and accusations that, it is easy to demonstrate, are contrary to fact.  Romney is also, correctly, charged with constantly taking positions that are contrary to his own previous statements and actions.  These charges can, and should, persuade those citizens whose capacity for intellectually-honest critical thought is not overwhelmed by other, captivating, non-rational identifications to reject Romney-Ryan-Republicanism as false and dishonest.

Everybody Knows:The Jerusalem Amendment and American Celebrity Politics

As The New York Times reported last week: “President Obama, seeking to quell a storm of criticism from Republicans and pro-Israel groups, directed the Democratic Party on Wednesday to amend its platform to restore language declaring Jerusalem the Israeli capital.”

A neat little paragraph that reveals a number of the fundamental, and seemingly intractable, problems with American politics in general and the Democratic Party in particular. 

First of all, Obama “directed” the party to amend its platform. This describes a political party that is the epitome of undemocratic, one that is, in fact, nothing more than a vehicle to serve as an instrument of the Great Leader’s will.  We may be inured to that condition of the Democratic Party, but we should nonetheless take a moment to register its significance.  The major political party that claims to act as the tribune of the people, the one party into which our political and media system relentlessly channels all constituents interested in working-class, progressive, and secular democratic policies, is what we would call anywhere else a Stalinist party.

Can anyone with a semblance of intellectual honesty, whatever else s/he thinks of the Democratic Party, deny this?  Keeping in mind what Mark Landler’s Times article neglected to mention, namely that the revised amendment required a two-thirds vote of approval, please watch what happened: 

 

No Account: The Social Security Hope-a-Dope

There’s an email petition appeal going around from firedoglake (FDL), encouraging us to “Hold The Obama Campaign To Its Guarantee of 'No Changes' to Social Security". It lays out very nicely how, on the one hand, “Joe Biden 'guaranteed' the president would not touch Social Security if re-elected,” and, on the other, “the president again voiced support for ‘tough spending cuts’ to programs like Social Security and Medicare... and complains he doesn't get enough credit for his own willingness to cut benefits.” [FDL’s emphasis]

FDL has been good on a lot of issues, especially healthcare reform, where they campaigned for single-payer relentlessly.  But how, exactly, are they going to “make sure the Obama administration honors this commitment”?  With a petition?  Really?  Isn’t it obvious, from their own experience, that Obama is going to talk out of both sides of his mouth during the campaign, and do whatever he wants after the election?  And what he wants is to be remembered as the fiscally-responsible Democrat who cut Social Security.

Too Many Cooks: The Syrian Demise

With Syria at full boil, it’s becoming clearer who exactly will be burned once this pot finally explodes: everybody.

The Assad/Alawite regime is cooking in a stew of its own penchant for brutality, which has been folded into the cleverness of the United States and Saudi Arabia in crafting a strategy for hijacking “Arab Spring” anti-authoritarian uprisings for counterrevolutionary purposes. 

To be clear: This is not a critique based on some notion of pacifism or national purity.  Non-violent resistance is a powerful tactic that can be quite effective in broadening political support, but revolutionary movements do not have to abjure the use of force to maintain their ethical legitimacy.  It is virtually impossible to imagine a successful revolution that does not use force to defend its gains and to advance its objectives.  Nor are revolutionary movements (or besieged governments) obliged to abjure foreign support in order to maintain national legitimacy.  Whether foreign support undermines a movement’s national legitimacy depends on the political content and consequences of that support – for our purposes, whether it advances or derails the purported objective of creating a renewed national polity that radically increases the democratic power, social well-being, and fundamental rights of the people.  This, in turn, depends on whether foreign allies accept the limits of their supporting role, and refrain from taking over or directing the course of the movement they claim to support.  Seen from the outside, in the course of frantic struggle, how this is unfolding can only be a judgement call, based on what one knows about the relative power, political cohesion, and the actual consequences of past and present actions, of the various players.