The Evil Boyar Leads the Little Father Astray Yet Again

On the other hand, Representative Alan Grayson appeared on CNN and, more in sorrow than in anger, declared that Robert Gibbs knows Fox Talking Points and little else.



One commenter at Joe.My.God lent support to an earlier suspicion of mine when he complained that Grayson is "always, always in frothing at the mouth attack mode, and that kind of constant over the top response wears thin after awhile." Even if I grant that this was meant literally, it's an odd way to characterize Grayson's mild, smiling demeanor in this clip. (Another, Obamabot commenter called Grayson "too radical" -- this middle-of-the-road Democrat from a Southern state! -- and predicted that he won't be re-elected.) If you say something that someone else doesn't want to hear, you'll be characterized as "angry," "frothing," "extreme," no matter how mild your demeanor or how moderate your opinion.

I disagree with Grayson, though, when he blames it all on Gibbs for not doing a better job of representing Obama, of selling the President to the nation's voters. As though Obama couldn't direct his Press Secretary to take a different line, or failing that, to replace him! Given Obama's own expressed contempt for his left critics and his inability to understand why many of his erstwhile supporters have come not to trust him, I see no reason to believe that Gibbs wasn't speaking for his boss on that fateful day. Yes, it was a stupid move, but I think Obama refuses to believe that his actions could be alienating his base.

The Check Is In The Mail

Watching this cozy exchange between Moore and Olberman, I began wondering just what audience Robert Gibbs thought he was addressing when he threw his tantrum for The Hill. Was it the Beltway, the Democratic insiders known as the Village? If so, they approved: the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, for example, wrote that "Gibbs has, in the space of just a few weeks, twice committed the unforgivable sin for a White House press secretary: He has carelessly spoken the truth." (Oh, not "carelessly," Dana -- Gibbs surely knew what he was doing.) When asked whether he had any response to Olbermann, "'I was watching my BlackBerry for primary returns and watching the Braves game on the Internet,' the press secretary replied.

"Ouch. This is not going to play well at Professional Left global headquarters in New York." Ah yes, all them New York Jews, hating on the only President we've got. There's something touching about the pretense that New York is the metropole and Washington DC is a hayseed backwater, the real America. But then, as FAIR's Peter Hart pointed out, Milbank's a longtime Obama booster. But contrary to Milbank, I'm not waiting for an apology from the White House; I never expected one.

On the other hand, I think Moore is fundamentally wrong here. Is the White House "frightened" about the November elections? Maybe so, but I don't think they believe that their slipping numbers are their fault. Of course they blame the cable news networks, those strongholds of the Left. (Like Rachel Maddow, who helped the President toot his own horn at Netroots nation last month.) And if the Republicans make any gains in November, they'll be protesting to the corporate media that they did so resist the Left and move diligently to the center! They did their best! Don't blame them! And for the people who matter, their best was good enough -- remember, profits are up 41 percent since Obama took office.

Take that bit about 2 minutes in where Moore says, "We're frightened about it too, because the last thing any of us want to have happen is for the Republicans to come back in any form of power." I'm not a professional leftist, alas -- as Alexander Cockburn's father used to say ruefully, "Where is that Moscow money? We could use it" -- but as far as I can tell, the Republicans never left power. Obama catered to them from the get-go, and has mostly continued their policies, even allowing some of their people to keep on doing damage in their old jobs. He protected even those who were out of office from any accountability for their crimes, and has gone further than even they did in the abuse of power. Even his actual attempts at change, like the stimulus bill, were half-hearted, full of compromises with the Republicans. Though they no longer controlled Congress or the White House, Obama gave them the veto over his actions.

"I just didn't understand why that was the first thing out of his mouth, was that Canadian health care was the big thing they're worried about." I guess the single-payer advocates managed to irk Obama after all, even if they couldn't budge him from his determination to sell out to the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry. That Gibbs was so enraged by it shows how hysterically right-wing the Obama administration really is. Whatever else you can say about it, Canadian health care is not a radical-left system.

"The hard-core base is gonna show up in November, and they're gonna vote for the Democrats, regardless of all this hoo-ha that's going on. The problem, and they know this from their own polling, is that next large group of people, that go to the soft middle, that voted for Obama but are no longer enthused and excited ... and those people aren't going to vote for Republicans either -- they're just gonna stay home. And that's the biggest fear, that people will just stay home in November, and Republicans may take power again in the House or the Senate." Again, "take power"? The Republicans never lost power. Moore may well be right about the "soft middle" -- only time will tell -- and it's true that many liberals are still bravely supporting him; that's what liberals do, they talk a hard line and then cave in. (Milbank says that, when asked if "progressives" would stay home in November, Gibbs replied, "I don't think they will.") But Obama's hard-core base is his big corporate donors -- Wall Street, the insurance companies, Big Pharma, and so on. (Some call them the elites...) As I've said before, Obama and the Democrats don't want my vote, and won't miss it.

"So the ball's in their court ... Nobody wants to go back to the old days, so Gibbs is right: we're all on the same team here, and we'd better start with a better game plan than the one they've been using for the last eighteen months or so." Are "we" all on the same team? You couldn't prove it by me. Gibbs and his master are indeed on the same team as the corporatists, and would like to be on the same team as the Republicans, but they're not on the same team as most voters. While the people at the top are enjoying an economic recovery, "half of American workers have suffered a job loss or a cut in hours or wages over the past 30 months." If American workers were on the same team as the White House, Obama would have worked a little harder for their interests.

It's not unusual for Presidents to lose touch with the country, if by "the country" you understand, as I do, the mass of the population rather than the political and media elites. Obama would have had to work very hard to do otherwise, and judging from his days as a "community organizer" as he reported them in his first book, he never had the common touch, never really identified with the people he was supposedly organizing. I'm not sure how a President would go about schmoozing with ordinary people after he takes office -- the Secret Service would go nuts. He could have appointed some people from the actual Left, such as it is, as advisors even if he couldn't give them real positions of power; they could have told him things he urgently needed to know. But he preferred to play golf with big-donor CEOs. So be it; Obama has made his choices, let him live with the consequences. They're not likely to be severe, for him.

Missed Oz, Back to Kansas

(image from Bartcop, via Sideshow)

I corrected the verb in the first sentence of yesterday's post, because Gibbs's performance was clearly put-on, planned, prepared. (For those of you who wish Obama would, like, show some emotion -- this is what it would look like. Let's leave these distasteful performances to his underlings, shall we?)

A lot of the liberal/prog blogosphere is indeed having hissyfits (via) over Gibbs's remarks, and while I don't blame them, I find their performances as amusing and predictable as Gibbs's. It must be painful to realize you've been played for a sucker by a smooth marketing hustler like Obama, especially after you and your partner "raised nearly $43,000 for the man", and in fairness I should mention that that fund-raising Obamaphile makes some very good points against Gibbs, such as:

Clarence Thomas added diversity to the Supreme Court too. The substance of the nominees' beliefs really don't matter? And yes, of course Kagan and Sotomayor are better than Clarence Thomas. But we didn't vote for Barack Obama to be simply "better than the worst Republicans."

But the hope for change that so many Obamaphiles harbored was only partly due to the campaign's smoke and mirrors. They ignored plenty of direct and explicit evidence that Obama wasn't a leftist, wasn't a liberal, was in fact a "centrist" (that is, right-wing) Democrat -- pro-corporate, pro-war, and only cosmetically pro-gay. Aravosis is correct that Gibbs "puts to the rest the White House's prior defense, whenever a senior unnamed official went after the base, of claiming it was a rogue employee who didn't represent the President," but again, somebody wasn't paying attention: Obama's personal contempt for the left has long been on the record. But that didn't bother the liberals, because they figured the President was talking about someone else -- the crazies, the extremists -- not them. (Remember how many Obama supporters attacked anyone who criticized Obama from the left, from the campaign onwards.) And I can't help wondering: are Mr. Aravosis and his partner ready to vote with their feet and their wallets this November and in 2012, or will they let themselves be panicked by whoever Obama's Republican opponent turns out to be? (Sure, the President isn't perfect, but we can't let the Rethugs take the White House, skree skree skree.)

Today I stumbled on this item, which takes Gibbs's conflation of "the left" and "liberals" and runs with it: "his words reverberated in the left-wing blogosphere, sparking discussion about liberal frustration during the Obama presidency." The quotation from Marc Ambinder is precious: "These voters are frustrated because, for all of the president's legislative successes, there haven't been moments of clear triumph or moments of emotional catharsis...". Well, no; these voters are frustrated because Obama took their money and their hard work and cheerfully sold out all their concerns.

The professionally sensible Nate Silver at 538.com also gets it wrong: "The euphoric feeling among liberals in the days between the election and the inauguration seems so quaint now -- like something that happened decades ago -- but it was very tangible at the time. Conservatives, for their part, were willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, with his approval and favorability ratings sometimes soaring into the 70s. ... But Obama was never really able to capitalize on that momentum." Conservatives gave Obama the benefit of the doubt? And Obama never tried "to capitalize on that momentum": he made it clear where he was going from his first appointments, and took for granted that those lovely volunteers he'd organized for his campaign would continue to do his bidding.

Most notable is this bit from David Weigel at Slate, who thinks the left isn't mad after all (he confuses "left" and "liberal" too):

Who are the liberal commentators or activists who refuse to give the White House credit for its big progressive bills? Jane Hamsher, David Sirota, Ed Schultz, maybe the editors of The Progressive. Among all liberals, the White House has soaring, 85 percent, Chavez-when-oil-is-expensive popularity. So the fight being picked is with a noisy crowd that doesn't speak for the base. Seriously, now -- even MoveOn is going easy on the White House, edging away from anti-war activism and toward anti-corporate activism. That's quite a solid it's doing for Obama, whom its members endorsed in 2008 in large part over the war issue.

I'm not sure what a "solid it's doing" is, but that's secondary. There are quite a few other people who "refuse to give the White House credit for its big progressive bills": Glenn Greenwald, in Update II of this post, listed TPM, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Charlie Savage and Bob Herbert of the New York Times, Russ Feingold, and more; he could have named many more. And it grieves me to report that Weigel's statistics are -- I won't say "dishonest," I'll just say "fishy." "Among all liberals, the White House has soaring, 85 percent, Chavez-when-oil-is-expensive popularity." I clicked through and found that that 85 percent doesn't represent "all liberals" but Obama's approval rating in Washington D.C. as found by a recent Gallup Poll. The other "liberal states" weren't quite so enthusiastic: Massachusetts, rated the second most liberal state, gave him 56%; Hawai'i, number 6, gave its favorite son 68%. Nah, I think I'll go with "dishonest" after all.

That's still too high, of course, for a President who pushed to accept evidence gained through torture of a teenaged soldier, and that "the sentence imposed on a Sudanese detainee Ibrahim al-Qosi -- convicted as part of a plea bargain of the dastardly crime of being Osama bin Laden's "cook" -- will be kept secret until he is released. What kind of country has secret sentences?" You know what kind. I'm not surprised that many liberals can approve a President like Obama, but that just confirms my long-held suspicion of liberals. Remember when Ralph Waldo Emerson asked Henry David Thoreau, who'd been incarcerated for refusing to pay the poll tax, "Henry! What are you doing in jail?" Thoreau replied, "What are you doing out?" What am I doing, picking on the President? ...

I'm a Loser

President Obama's press secretary Robert Gibbs staged a meltdown (via) in the West Wing the other day. He spluttered to an interviewer,

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

Glenn Greenwald (see especially Update II in the post) lists a number of centrists (such as Bob Herbert of the New York Times) who have criticized Obama not just for doing things that the Bush administration did, but for doing things Obama had formerly criticized when the Bush administration did them. These people are not "the left" by any reasonable standard, let alone the "professional left," except that they are perhaps to the left of Obama, in roughly the same way that William F. Buckley was perhaps to the left of Ronald Reagan.

Greenwald mocks Gibbs's outburst, telling the reader that

You may think that the reason you're dissatisfied with the Obama administration is because of substantive objections to their policies: that they've done so little about crisis-level unemployment, foreclosures and widespread economic misery. Or because of the White House's apparently endless devotion to Wall Street. Or because the President has escalated a miserable, pointless and unwinnable war that is entering its ninth year. Or because he has claimed the power to imprison people for life with no charges and to assassinate American citizens without due process, intensified the secrecy weapons and immunity instruments abused by his predecessor, and found all new ways of denying habeas corpus. Or because he granted full-scale legal immunity to those who committed serious crimes in the last administration. Or because he's failed to fulfill -- or affirmatively broken -- promises ranging from transparency to gay rights.

But Robert Gibbs ... is here to tell you that the real reason you're dissatisfied with the President is because you're a fringe, ideological, Leftist extremist ingrate who needs drug counseling ...

Right on target. But of course this is nothing new. It's normal to denounce critics and dissidents as mentally disturbed, immature, emotionally overwrought, grappling with father issues, and the like. And no doubt critics and dissidents do have their (our) little quirks, just like anyone else. We know Barack Obama has father issues, because he wrote about them at length in Dreams from My Father; Abraham Lincoln had a tormented psyche; and so on.

IOZ pointed to this chilling article from the New York Times about Bradley Manning, who's accused of giving all those documents to Wikileaks. ("Chilling" because it shows the propaganda machine gearing up to crush dissidents and resisters against the American Empire, which given Obama's record is not going to be pretty.) I hadn't heard before that Manning is gay, and his alleged actions put him way ahead of a whiner like Dan Choi in my book. IOZ quotes the Grey Lady and comments:

At school, Bradley Manning was clearly different from most of his peers. He preferred hacking computer games rather than playing them, former neighbors said. And they said he seemed opinionated beyond his years about politics, religion, and even about keeping religion out of politics.

Even about keeping religion out of politics. Hallelujah. We've got a gen-u-wine weirdo.

The Times throws in the usual soupçon of sexual confusion, even though Manning does not appear to be sexually confused in the slightest, and ties up the package neatly with a strongly implied motive of self-aggrandizement, ascribing an "inflated sense of purpose" to the young private, before--and this is why we can be glad that the Times appears to be run and edited by illiterates--dropping in a damning quote that makes exactly the opposite point it was plainly included to make.

“I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much,” he wrote, “if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me plastered all over the world press.”

Well, a negative statement followed by a negative subordinate clause is a little hard to parse. Either Thompson and her editors sought to undermine the entire thesis of the story in its ultimate paragraph, or else, far more likely, they misread the quotation and thought they'd caught out Manning proclaiming that he did it for fame.

So you see, Manning just exposed US malfeasance because he was a disturbed gay boy with a drag queen for a boyfriend. There couldn't possibly be anything wrong with the US mission in Afghanistan, or any reason to oppose or obstruct it. I wonder what neuroses the informer Adrian Lamo harbors? But who cares? Dwelling on such matters, while entertaining to a certain kind of mind, is a way of evading the real issues. It's also an indication that the criticism has been more effective than Gibbs (or Obama) wants to admit. Greenwald points out the contradiction: on the one hand, the Professional Left is just a tiny group of malcontents out of touch with reality; on the other, they are powerful, influential, and "they're ruining everything for the White House!!!" As numerous commentators have said already, if the Democrats suffer serious losses this November, they'll be able to blame it on the Professional Left, the Pure True Left, who want to turn the US into the People's Republic of Canada. (The corporate media will blame it on Obama's refusal to move far enough to the center.) But I'll take the White House at its word: I'm nobody, I'm a loser, and the Democrats won't need my vote this year or in 2012.