The Writer, Not the Words

An addendum to yesterday's post: In listing the ways in which he is fit to eat with the hogs, I might also have mentioned the Obama White House's evident -- or at any rate, asserted -- lack of preparation for Republican hostility.  As his cute but dumb advisor Van Jones complained, "you had provocateurs like Glenn Beck, Breitbart, Andrew Breitbart, now the late, stepping forward and basically taking a relatively advanced information system and firing into it lies, smears, viruses, for which we had no antibodies ... And for several months, the body politic does not know how to react to this virus."  (Notice too how the Obama Bunker becomes "the body politic" as a whole, which reminds me of Elizabeth Birch, the self-styled capitalist tool who thought that the whole gay movement had been put into her hands when she became president of one lousy PAC, the Human Rights Campaign -- which she then tried to drive into the ground.  But I digress.)  These guys not only can't play two-dimensional chess, they shouldn't be trusted to cross the street by themselves.  Luckily, or maybe not, while they're in office they don't have to: they have drivers.

My old and dear friend the Ambivalent Obama supporter linked to yesterday's post on Facebook, for which I thank him.  But he introduced it thusly: "What some on the far-left REALLY think of Pres. Obama..."

Whooooooa Nelly!  I won't quibble over whether my politics are far left.  I've been told numerous times by people who are sure that they are leftists that I am a centrist, an Obama fan who wants more and better Democrats.  There are others who think that the New York Times is a radical far-left rag.  I'm not concerned with labeling my own politics but with specific issues, and that post really only spoke for me, not "some" of any persuasion anyway.

But as I pointed out to my friend, where were the far-left politics in that post?  That the government should correct for downswings in the economy by increasing spending is ordinary Keynesianism, which only looks "far left" from the viewpoint of the far right, such as wacko Republicans and Ron Paul. That bargaining begins with asking for more than you want, and letting your demands be whittled down as your counterpart makes compromises of his or her own, has nothing to do with either left or right.

And it wasn't a far leftist who pointed out that President Obama had failed at the most basic level of negotiation, it was the President himself. I guess Barack Obama is just too "far left" for the Democratic Party as we know it today!  It's ironic, at a time when Obama and his minions are claiming that Ronald Reagan was too liberal or too far left for today's Republican Party, that the New Deal form of Keynesianism should be labeled far left. Franklin Roosevelt couldn't win nomination as President from the Democrats today, he'd be too far left!

My friend explained that he was referring to the writer and not the writing, but that only confirmed my argument: even granting that I'm a man of the left, which I don't deny, there are many positions to the left of me.  That most American media consumers have no idea what they are, or that they exist, is part of the same poverty of political discourse that I was talking about.  The far right, by contrast, gets a lot of exposure even in the corporate media.