O Fickle Democrats!

This just in: George W. Bush has endorsed Susan Collins, a Republican Senator from Maine, for re-election.  Collins has been a frequent target for Democratic ire, because despite the occasional lapse she has been a reliable supporter of Donald Trump's agenda.  This is, The Hill reports, Bush's "first endorsement of the 2020 cycle."  I presume this means there are more to come, and for the first time I'm genuinely curious to see what will happen next.

I'm also looking forward to reactions from the Democrats who've rehabilitated Dubya these past few years.  Already on Twitter there's been some consternation.  The word "disappointment" recurs.  So do versions of "I was just praising Ol' W. this morning. Well.... so much for that." Why were they praising a war criminal who killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, made refugees of millions more, crashed the world economy, and fiddled while New Orleans drowned?  You might well ask.  Of course, it's because he gave Michelle Obama a cough drop, she declared him her "partner in crime" who shares her values, and Ellen DeGeneres is his good friend and you don't have to agree with someone on every little thing to be their friend.  (They may have more in common than some of us thought.)  But never mind all that, they'll throw him under the bus now.  Cancel culture is real.

Another person remarked that Bush is "only reminding us what a disaster his presidency was."  Funny how many Democrats have forgotten.  But as I suggested recently, Democrats seem to have cheesecloth memories, and if you don't keep reminding them, they forget things.  I therefore have to hope that Bush will come up with more disappointing endorsements to keep their memories refreshed.

Six of One, Half a Dozen of the Other

I doubt it myself: More likely Americans will just hope for a new president they can deify, while demonizing the one currently in office.  Republican loyalists always found it easy to remember that Obama was human, and Democratic loyalists can see Trump's feet of clay without corrective lenses.  The hard part is not to deify the president you support, and most people seem to find it not just hard but impossible.

This meme, whose creator apparently removed it from Twitter after it was criticized, fits in nicely here:

The most obvious point the meme's maker overlooked was that he or she was describing Donald Trump.

I have to wonder whom it's addressed to.  Many liberals and progressives took exactly these points into consideration when they voted for Clinton.  Clinton won the popular vote; she only lost in the Electoral College.  Those who voted for Trump and tilted the Electoral College in his favor were mostly not, as far as I know, liberals or progressives.  So this appears to be just one more party-loyalist attack on the thought criminals who Let Hillary Down, though it's not clear just how they (we) did so. Things have come to such a turn that a loyalist like this could admit, if only rhetorically, that Clinton was not a very inspiring candidate, and so on.  That's of no importance.  More important is that whoever made this still has no idea what went wrong.

Some responses on Twitter indicated that the mememaker, faced with these and other criticisms, has deleted the tweet in which it appeared, saying that all they meant was that we should be good to each other, or some such vacuous prattle.  But this sort of barely passive-aggressive attack on the voters he or she pretends to be appealing to is the exact opposite of being good to each other.

... Posting has, I confess with tears and in sackcloth and ashes, been sparse around here lately, and I'm afraid it's not going to improve much very soon.  I may be moving to a new residence, and while everything is up in the air I'll be even less likely to write.  But I'm still alive and functional, at least in principle.

P.S.  Seth MacFarlane reposted the "Dear Liberals and Independents" meme on Twitter.  Someone replied with a corrected version:

Of course, that won a scolding from a Clintonbot.  Maybe a meaner version of the meme is called for.  I'll give it some thought.

I'm Sure I'm Not the Only Person Who Saw This Coming ...

Michael Moore told an interviewer for The Hollywood Reporter that in a hundred years, Barack Obama will be remembered only as America's first black president, and that his administration has been a "big disappointment."

That's right: a disappointment, the typical regretful liberal concession that Barack has turned out to be a very good man, but a very bad wizard.  Moore's been doing his best to give Obama the benefit of the doubt all along, so I suppose I must recognize just how disillusioned he must be, to make a disapproving face and give vent to that epithet.  A disappointment.

As I wrote about this before: If your favored football or basketball team loses a game or even a championship, that is a disappointment.   If George Lucas sells his production company and its prime properties to Disney, that is a disappointment.   If the President of the United States prosecutes whistleblowers to an unprecedented extent, kills American citizens without due process, demands the power of indefinite detainment, prolongs the wars he inherited and starts several more, and gives priority to the interests of the top one-tenth of one percent of the citizenry over the interests of the other ninety and nine, he's a murderous thug and a corporate enforcer.

Of course, Moore's very cautious criticism is thoughtcrime, and Obama fans responded in comments at the Hollywood Reporter site: Oh yeah?  Well, Moore is fat.  And not only that, he's fat.  Did I mention that he's fat?  And besides, he's fat.  And Obama killed Osama, you fat f*ck!  Elsewhere, Moore is a lard ass.  And a communist.  But mostly fat.

I don't take Moore's prediction very seriously, any more than I take the true believers' predictions about Obama's legacy.  Neither they nor I will be around in a century to see how they pan out.  But Moore's verdict was so very predictable.

In other news, this quotation from John Waters (via):

My idea of rich is that you can buy every book you ever want without looking at the price and you're never around assholes.  That's the two things to really fight for in life.

I'm certainly in sympathy with that first clause, though I don't think it really describes being rich.  I'm not rich, but I am a compulsive book buyer and I'm able to buy more books than I can read; that seems like satiation to me.  If I had more money, I'd probably buy more books, but then I'd get even farther behind in my reading.  I remember Gore Vidal once saying something similar, to the effect that he felt comfortable financially because he could buy new books in hardcover.  But that too is a different kettle of fish.  When I think about it, I'd say that for me, being rich would mean I could afford the space to have all my books on shelves where I live, not packed in storage -- but I think I could do that without enough money to put me in the One Percent.

As for the second clause, I don't see how being rich would keep assholes away.  Maybe Waters meant "rich" metaphorically, like your life is rich, spiritually speaking, if you're never around assholes?  The only difference I can imagine that would come from having lots of money is that the assholes around you would predominantly be rich assholes, and I'm not sure how much different that would be.

Disappointment?

It's a humbling experience to realize how long it takes me to sort out and focus my thoughts on some subjects.  I take some comfort from people like Noam Chomsky, who has often remembered how timid at first was the movement against the US invasion of Vietnam.  The same goes for my responses to Obama loyalists during the present election campaign.  But tonight I think I managed to clarify something in my own mind, if in no one else's.

One of my Facebook friends linked to someone's tweet, to the effect that Governor Romney blamed parents for the violent tendencies of their children.  "Then, Tagg Romney said he wanted to punch the President."  Fantasizing about violence against one's political enemies is popular among the ruling elites, let alone ordinary Americans, and Tagg's remark (like his Dad's "binders full of women" remark) mainly served as a distractive tactic for Obama's fans to dwell on.

Who, I asked, should I blame for Obama's violence (not just tendencies -- he has a lot of blood on his hands)?  My friend surprised me by answering "Obama."  That, at least, was honest, and I said so. My friend replied:

In all seriousness, Obama's use of drones is one of the reason that I consider him a disappointment as a president. He'd be better, all things considered, than Romney but he also hasn't done enough to distance the nation from the arrogant bomb-first attitude of the Bush administration. That said, I don't know of anyone out there who'd be much better; I doubt Ron Paul would really break that much from previous policies overseas -- too much of the economy is organized around the military to cut the defense budget as drastically and immediately as he has indicated he would do.

... Which wasn't honest, on any level. I replied:

What boggles my mind is people who say things like Obama's use of drones being a "disappointment", and think that has appropriate gravitas. He's a war criminal and a bloodsoaked butcher, not a disappointment. (This also relates to the Obama devotees who sneer about Obama supporters who've been "disappointed" by his failure to save the world in six months etc. "Disappointed" is not the word. I was never an Obama supporter and never had any illusions about him, any more than I had illusions about Bush, though I admit that both turned out to be much worse than even I had expected. The Left has often been accused of cynicism, but once again Obama has shown that we aren't nearly cynical enough.)

Let alone the fantasy that Obama ever intended to "distance the nation from the arrogant bomb-first attitude of the Bush Administration." Why do you bring in Ron Paul? I don't, and never have, endorsed or supported him. Nor does it matter if there's "anyone out there who'd be much better." It doesn't matter if there's any candidate who would do what I think should be done. I can still criticize the existing candidates for what they do and what they fail to do. (In Romney's case, remember, all such considerations are purely speculative. I know what Obama has done as President.)

Remember too that serious social change is not brought about by voting. It's brought about by direct action -- organizing, demonstrating, and so on. To cite a minor example: Harry Truman didn't issue an executive order forbidding racial segregation in the military because people voted for it, he did it because he was threatened with massive protests in an election year. There's a limit to the effectiveness of such tactics, but they are much more effective than voting. Change doesn't come from elected officials, it comes from groups of people putting pressure on them. Obama might have been less destructive if people had done the same to him, instead of sitting around in a puddle of drool over him and his adorable family. The moral vacuity of American liberals these past four years has been an education to me, though.

I think I put my finger on something here: the use of the word "disappointment" by Obama supporters to express their admission that the POTUS isn't perfect (though he's still awfully good), while remaining convinced of their own great seriousness, unlike Obama's shallow, immature, drug-addled critics from the left.  Some other Obama critics, including VastLeft I think, have pointed this out too, but I hadn't realized before how much weight that one word carries in apologetics for Obama's administration.  Imagine someone defending a serial killer, or a child rapist, by saying that they couldn't think of anyone out there who'd be much better.  That, of course, keeps the focus on personalities instead of structural factors, but also keeps the discussion (to use the word loosely) within the gamut from A to B that is typical of normal political discourse.  Real "transformative" hope and change don't come from political business-as-usual, they come from people who refuse to work within the system as it exists.