Oh. Those Guys.
Not-so-sMarty Peretz is displeased with Obama’s stance on the Iranian protests:
Let’s face it. The American president has not exactly been on the wrong side…. But he has certainly not been on the right side. Not with his mincing and parsimoniously petty escalations of do-nothing rhetoric.
Because as any neocon will tell you, there are two sides to every conflict; one is purely good and the other unspeakably evil — there are no shades of gray. Then, in Geddy Lee shrillo voce, neocons will insist that if you choose not to decide/ You still have made a choice. Thus by the neocons’ reckoning, Obama, who has refused to involve himself much with the conflict lest he jeopardize the protesters he actually sympathizes with, is somehow objectively pro-Ahmadinejad.
One piece I commend to you is Fouad Ajami’s op-ed in the June 22 Wall Street Journal, “Obama’s Personal Tutorial: The president has to choose between the regime and the people in the streets.”
And that is really the choice.
Yeah, yeah. Standard neocon boilerplate: the macho tone, faux idealism, barely-masked cynicism, the overflowing mendacity. Then, in his concluding, sell-a-subscription paragraph, he says something interesting:
If you don’t you’ll have to wait until the rich little essays on the Iranian revolt go on-line. They are all informative, really each and every one of them. Let me especially commend one. It is by Nader Mousavizadeh, a former student, a good friend and past assistant editor of this magazine. Oh, yes, he is also a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic Studies in London. Nader really knows what he is talking about, unlike many of those whose attitudes are drawn from their always cool and detached temperaments. I’ve learned much from his disciplined yet morally engaged mind, from this piece perhaps more than any other.
What a blurb! Somewhere, a jealous Jamie Kirchik just sobbed into his pillow. Extra credit to Marty for the next-to-last sentence, a bitter sneer at, he imagines, Obama’s and Brent Scowcroft’s expense. But just who is this Nader guy Peretz likes so much? A glance at his essay reveals sympathetic biographical details; also, a clever — by which I mean, devious — neoconservative take on Obama’s “loss of nerve.” The essay’s not nasty enough for Commentary and it’s too smart for The Weekly Standard; but Peretz’s rag is just right. Anyway… Institute of Strategic Studies… where have I seen that name? Ahhh, the time crapsule! Yep:
A FEARFUL ACCOUNTING The International Institute for Strategic Studies has released a comprehensive report detailing the stockpile of weapons of mass destruction currently available to the Iraqi government, and projecting how long it would take Iraq to develop on other weapons of mass destruction. This report is an eye-opener for anyone who still doubts that Saddam Hussein is a threat.
posted by Pejman at 9/09/2002 11:37:00 AM
Oh. Those guys. (Incidentally, Pejman’s site mysteriously vanished from blogger after the “Time Crapsule” post; IISS’s article, meanwhile, has been robots.txted for who knows how long.)
Before blaming Obama for an “emboldened” Iranian regime, Mousavizadeh concedes “[t]hat there are few lessons to be learned from the cheerleaders of the Iraq war… goes without saying.”
YA RLY.
Umm, test…test [feedback whine]…is this thing on?
Ahem. I’d like to take a few moments to tell you all about the Great Pumpkin…
Finally!
Now, if only I had something to say.
Oppress my ghost libs!
Seems to be working….
somehow objectively pro-Ahmadinejad
Somewhere in the afterlife Eric Blair is shaking his head and regretting that he came up with that phrase.
In Soviet Russia, Peretz troikas you!
Closed comments, open lying on Iran, bipartisan refusal to reform health care. What a country!
so hungry
The inability to comment here made me feel exactly like the people of Iran.
Before blaming Obama for an “emboldened” Iranian regime, Mousavizadeh concedes “[t]hat there are few lessons to be learned from the cheerleaders of the Iraq war… goes without saying.”
Lesson 1) They have no shame.
Lesson 2) They will never shut up.
In time, “Hoekstraing the thread” will be as well-known as an internet debating tactic as “Godwinning” is now.
“Mincing?” Fuck, why doesn’t the senile old twat come right out and call Obama a fa88ot?
This Peretz guy — let me tell you folks — this Peretz guy, he’s quite the neocon. One time Franni and I had him to dinner and he proceeded to accuse my kids, my dog, and the roast of “apathy to the problem of evil.” And I say, “what are you talking about? I complain about my mother in law all the time!”
Ba-DOOM!
In any case, folks, I share with Marty a deep and abiding love for the nation of Israel and a desire for its ongoing security and peace as a strong ally of the United States and a shining beacon of democracy in the region. Let’s not forget what’s really important, all right?
Fuck, why doesn’t the senile old twat come right out and call Obama a fa88ot?
No balls.
Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) said,
July 1, 2009 at 19:56
I have the awful feeling this commenter is trying to “be funny”. Tain’t working, Chuckles.
There is absolutely nothing funny about the Holocaust, how dare you, etc.
Not with his mincing and parsimoniously petty escalations of do-nothing rhetoric.
Because violent acts in line with fire-eating rhetoric solve problems, esp. if followed by prancing across the deck of an aircraft carrier in fighter-jock drag behind a ludicrously overstuffed codpiece. Which Marty adores, even though he’s totally not-gay, just like mumble mumble mumble and those other Republicans.
But he has certainly not been on the right side. Not with his mincing and parsimoniously petty escalations of do-nothing rhetoric.
“Obama needs to make THREATS! Really scary ones like, ‘do what I say or I’ll blow up your house!’ and then he should huff and puff about how EVIL and UGLY and SMELLY they are!”
“Then Obama has to tell us how Brave we all are for standing up to Iran!
“Then he should make some more threats . Some cool/scary ones!”
“Obama’s Personal Tutorial: The president has to choose between the regime and the people in the streets.”
And that is really the choice.
How about “not”? Not’s a choice, isn’t it?
Hey, I don’t go to your work and knock the cocks out of your mouth.
You had to ask, didn’t you?
In all seriousness, everything the neocons argue on Iran is in comprehensively bad faith – some of it recursively so, eldrich arguments in which one understands one’s arguments take place in an alternate universe in which one is also lying – so it’s really never worth it directly addressing them. They are to be refuted glibly and quickly; they are not actually interested in debate, just in provocation.
It might be funnier if the poster in question had the faintest idea what Al Franken actually sounded like.
Hey, I don’t go to your work and knock the cocks out of your mouth.
Ah. I had the feeling it was Troofy.
“Obama’s Personal Tutorial: The president has to choose between the regime and the people in the streets.”
And that is really the choice.
How about “not my business”?
Um, click that URL for “Franken.” It’s a regular.
THE PRESIDENT MUST SLAP-CHOP.
HEY HEY folks! If pro is the opposite of con, is progress the opposite of congress? Huh? See, I think about things. Crazy things. Like, what would happen if Michelle Bachmann and Ted Turner got married and had a kid and named it Overdrive? It’d be Overdrive Turner-Bachmann, wouldn’t it. This is the stuff I think about, folks. My mother’s out there somewhere.
Wakka wakka!
*smashes watermelon*
OT: a counter-resolution for the Oklahoma state legislature.
I think it’s supposed to be Routine 5-A , the “Liberals have no moral basis and are therefore waffling aimless wimps spouting empty phrases” bit.
Unlike, of course, all those tough-talking GOP types who’ve been so effective in deterring the North Korean nuclear program all these years.
Um, click that URL for “Franken.” It’s a regular.
Oops. Apologies.
And I’m behind the Iron Wall of Websense so I usually don’t clicky linkies in the first place. Otherwise I might have known.
They are to be refuted glibly and quickly; they are not actually interested in debate, just in provocation.
Well, we could say the same on pretty much every single issue upon which the far right and sane people disagree. And that’s what is so fucking maddening about it. The tactic is: “tell blatant lie that you know to be a blatant lie, and when called on it, change the subject, cut the mic, shout over the top of others who have the floor, run away, etc etc. Then when people get pissed off about the obvious bad faith inherent in your tactics, declare victory and proceed to try to do whatever it was that you couldn’t defend with any rationale in the first place.”
It’s like trying to reason with someone who has their eyes squeezed shut, their fingers in their ears, and is shouting “LA LA LA LA LA LA…” These people are inflicted with a type of autism when it comes to the rational exchange of ideas.
I had originally intended to do an Al Franken gimmick centering around absurdly trite ‘humor’, and Djur’s improvement was the absurd contractions, which makes it about Franken rather than just some generic hack. He’s got a unique facility for being irreverent and cutthroat one paragraph and horrifyingly pious the next.
I don’t do short form, so it’s his baby now.
Personally, I think Minnesota missed out. They could have had Senator Joel Hodgson if they’d tried.
Um, click that URL for “Franken.” It’s a regular.
It’s not just a regular, it’s alec, who has been contributing some of the most intelligent commentary lately. Oh well, maybe he just needs a break from it now and again.
Nice use of “objectively”, HTML. Really digging it.
Okay, disregard. I’m always two comments late.
It’s like trying to reason with someone who has their eyes squeezed shut, their fingers in their ears, and is shouting “LA LA LA LA LA LA…” These people are inflicted with a type of autism when it comes to the rational exchange of ideas.
Like that, but meaner. The only good ideas to a neocon are the ones that get the Other killed.
I think the pivotal thing is that on Iran, their underlying imperative isn’t “smash American society to make way for the second coming of Reagan” but “give Likud a free hand in foreign policy by any means necessary”. In the former case, the falsehoods are a way of defending some kind of intrinsically flawed project; in the latter, the project is the falsehoods. So they’re not just ignoring reality, they’re actively trying to undermine it and their arguments have no real weight outside of that effort. All they want is to make people think irrationally about Iran and convince them that the only good option there ever is is smashing the table and pouting.
Wingnuts are reacting to Franken as if the people of Minnesota elected Rip Taylor to the senate and suddenly that grave deliberative body is going to be turned into a three-ring circus — the Vice President’s gavel substituted with Gallagher’s hammer, “I must respectfully disagree with the gentleman from North Carolina” being replaced with eye-pokes and head-slaps, and “yea” and “nay” being replaced (respectively, of course) with the slide whistle and the honk of a clown’s nose.
Considering that this is the body which included both “Man On Dog” Santorum and “Tubes” Stevens, I’m not exactly sure what dignity there is to compromise. But I’ll say this — if my above reforms are enacted, C-SPAN will suddenly become the most popular channel on cable, if only for the chance to see Arlen Specter repeatedly hit in the face with a cream pie.
Considering that in my experience, the only people that watch C-Span to begin with are guys too stoned to notice Pants-Off Dance-Off isn’t on the television, I think Djur’s improvements would at least give those guys a reason to not care about finding the remote.
They could have had Senator Joel Hodgson if they’d tried.
I personally would rather see Trace Beaulieu instead. But only so long as he wore the day-glo green lab coat in session.
the Vice President’s gavel substituted with Gallagher’s hammer, “I must respectfully disagree with the gentleman from North Carolina” being replaced with eye-pokes and head-slaps, and “yea” and “nay” being replaced (respectively, of course) with the slide whistle and the honk of a clown’s nose
Sounds like the South Carolina leg, only Governor Sex Machine King David would be wandering around the aisles carrying a pair of pigs and whining about “pork spending”. Y’know, like he did in reality.
Senator Crow!!!!!!!
FYWP
mincing and parsimoniously petty escalations of do-nothing rhetoric.
Mmmm, minced parsimony and escallions…
Why has Barack Obama not yet parachuted into a secret location in Iran to personally assassinate all the members of the Iranian government? This proves that he is a secret Muslim who intends to impose shanana law in the U.S.
I personally would rather see Trace Beaulieu instead.
“Push the button, Nancy.”
Why hasn’t Barack Obama built a time machine, gone back in time, scooped Ahmedinejad from his mother’s arms, spiked him onto the floor and done a little touchdown victory dance? I think this is just more evidence that Barry “Nobama” Soetero is a secret Kenyo-fascist who is insufficiently respectful of our fine American tradition of football.
Soooooooo… any bets on how soon we’ll have people coming in to the pharmacy flailing their arms and fretting over how Obama’s goin’ take away their Vicodins and they need an early refill (as frickin’ usual) so they aren’t left quivering blobs of pain by the heartless nanny-state socialists in Washington?
I’m surprised it hasn’t started already, quite frankly.
It’s only 3:10, Pere. Got to give it until the 5 o’ clock cycle for it to kick off.
the Vice President’s gavel substituted with Gallagher’s hammer, “I must respectfully disagree with the gentleman from North Carolina” being replaced with eye-pokes and head-slaps, and “yea” and “nay” being replaced (respectively, of course) with the slide whistle and the honk of a clown’s nose.
Oh, like in the days of Cheney and “Go fuck yourself”!
The outcome of every dispute the world over can be decided by what Americans think and say about it.
It’s all about US.
I’m actually a little dismayed by the way it’s being reported right now, which is just straight-up talking about vicodin. The FDA’s stated reasons conform beautifully to the most typical formulation of vicodin (as Norco/hydrocodone) – that is, mixed with tylenol ostensibly for questionable theraputic benefit, but in reality because
1) vicodin, like a lot of modern opiates, has an efficient dose far, far lower than its lethal dose.
2) Ergo a society in which it is widely used will have some people consuming it in small quantities and some people consuming it in large quantities.
3) Both are equally bad for you in the you’re-addicted-to-drugs sense, but for various reasons insurers can’t charge a higher copay for the bigger dose (which long-term users inevitably wind up on).
4) Because the insurers are always right, there has to be some way to make long-term vicodin use a living hell, right?
5) Oh yeah – it’s got synergies with tylenol, whose efficient dose is a stone’s throw from its lethal dose and which for some people is potentially hepatoxic even at sub-therapeutic doses. Throw that shit in there.
6) Hey, you know what else that does? Makes pure vicodin an exclusive commodity. That way the wealthy get what they want without having to let the little people get what they need. Oh, and the pharmaceutical manufacturers get to pretty much name their price for it, and the artificial scarcity of the pure product makes it valuable as an illicit drug.
7) Can you imagine if big government bureaucrats were messing with all of this, though? Heavens to betsy.
The thing about the Vicodin and Percocet bans is that the APAP content of those pills is both intended to improve the analgesic properties and to reduce ‘abuse’. That is, the fact that you can’t take a lot of Vicodin without killing your liver is expected to be a deterrent. Because we certainly can’t have people getting high — better to kill a few hundred people a year than to let those people get stoned in peace.
The way this works is that opioid + APAP is Schedule III while opioids alone are Schedule II or I. The only reasonable explanation for this is that APAP reduces the amount of the drug that can be safely consumed — by being liver poison.
A regulatory apparatus concerned with safety over puritanism would permit the sale of uncut opioids. APAP combined with hydrocodone does have higher efficacy, but there is no reason not to dispense the two separately except to sicken and kill junkies.
That is, the fact that you can’t take a lot of Vicodin without killing your liver is expected to be a deterrent.
Forgetting, of course, the insistent stupidity of the average American.
Now, the important question here is how will this Vicodin ban affect the guys writing scripts for House, M.D.?
The thing about the Vicodin and Percocet bans is that the APAP content of those pills is both intended to improve the analgesic properties and to reduce ‘abuse’.
So they can continue to sell it, unlike Quaaludes.
I’m the god! I’M THE GOD!
Do you want fries with that?
Trotsky: Well, Percodan and OxyContin would still be legal. Neither are cut with APAP. And OxyContin is, as a result, Schedule II which makes it extremely inconvenient for sufferers of chronic pain (Schedule II prescriptions can’t be refilled, and can only be legally prescribed via phone in ’emergency’ situations).
Pere Ubu: And the effects of addiction on normal rational behavior.
I’m hoping that’s what the current decision is, because that’s what the methodology behind it (along with a great deal of emphasis on the danger of tylenol toxicity – the fact is that APAP isn’t the only adulterant they can use and, in the similar case of Percocet, adds almost nothing in synergy) has been. Then again, I’m personally of the belief that pain is as necessary as unplanned pregnancy and people are entitled to avoid either, but what do I know.
A regulatory apparatus concerned with safety over puritanism would permit the sale of uncut opioids.
Well, you can still get opium tincture, you know. (Surprised the hell out of me, but it’s still available.)
Percodan and OxyContin would still be legal. Neither are cut with APAP.
God help me, it took me a while to realize the fact that “~cet” implied the presence of APAP.
Oh, and fun fact: Methamphetamine is schedule II, while marijuana and psilocybin are schedule I.
alec, pain is a necessary character builder. It’s all about motivating the wage-slaves to work as hard as they can for their bosses, so they can afford that high-dollar medication.
See also.
Added note: I knew Franken & Davis in the mid-’70s, just before they got their SNL gigs. Tom was much more fun to hang with. (Not being power-crazed helps, though there wasn’t much indication of that from Al then.)
It wasn’t until I looked it up that I realized that Paregoric was opium tincture (so is laudanum, but it’s a different form), and was actually available over the counter in many states until the FDA designated it a class III drug.
I remember buying Paregoric when I was a kid. Who knew???
“Not-so-smarty”? A bit Emperor Misha, don’t you think?
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Laudanum.
Laudanum who?
Laudin’ Obama because we’re the MAINSTREAM MEDIA with a LEFT-WING BIAS!!
OT but too funny to pass up:
The whole thing is a strikingly
scholarlyJonahishworkemesis.It works the other way, too: the meth boom happening post-Reagan isn’t a coincidence. American labor standards have been plummeting; we work harder for more hours and are paid less money and are treated worse doing it. You want to party after two shifts – you want to do anything but drop dead after two shifts – then whatever species of amphetamine you have available to you (depending on whether you’re poor, white, young, female, etc) is gonna be more than just a nicety. No Keynes or caffeines for labor machines.
once they’ve experienced sex with other men, Catullus tells us, men are unsatisfied with what their new wives provide them.
And Catullus ought to know because he did a LOT of research.
And Catullus ought to know because he did a LOT of research.
Well, why didn’t Governor Sex Machine make the comparison with him instead of King David, then?
Well, why didn’t Governor Sex Machine make the comparison with him instead of King David, then?
Ahhh, but who was King David’s lover in his younger days? Does the name Jonathon ring a bell?
@Jennifer:
The far right isn’t interested in a rational exchange of ideas and never has been. The screamers of hate talk are are diagnosable mental health cases. They wouldn’t know ‘rational’ if it came up and slapped them.
The oligarchs who fund wingnut welfare are more sane but are most likely sociopathic. They run wingnut welfare specifically to prevent rational exchanges of ideas that might make it slightly harder for the oligarchs to further enrich themselves by impoverishing everyone else.
It’s much easier for billionaires to run a country for their own gain when they can sabotage the political culture and civil society by goading the stupid third of the population to go to war against the other 2/3rds over things like oral sex, scary evil islamofascist Iraqi dictators, birth certificates, scary evil islamofacistcommunist muslins, and raising marginal taxes on the wealthy.
Wow, two or three works of art/fiction from the past prove gay marriage will RUIN EVERYTHING! Also: Catullus loved LESBIANS!
As opposed to the trenchant wit usually demonstrated at Teh Sadly, e.g. badgers, toilets, sammiches?
By the way, I’ve been working on a curse and haven’t thought of anyone to use it on yet. But you mentioning Misha helps me out. Ahem:
“To the creepy psychopath who calls himself Emperor Misha: may you be cursed to play Wizardry IV without a hintbook for all eternity.”
once they’ve experienced sex with other men, Catullus tells us, men are unsatisfied with what their new wives provide them
Due to buttsecks being that much more pleasurable, Homo sapiens died out 40000 years ago.
“Any theory that predicts the non-existence of the theorist is probably wrong.” Is that Dirac’s Law, or am I thinking of some other physicist?
Due to buttsecks being that much more pleasurable, Homo sapiens died out 40000 years ago.
Nice try, heretic! About 34,000 years before Homersexual sapiens was created, at least according to mah King James.
Catullus wouldn’t be talking about ass fucking, would he? I thought the Greeks and Romans preferred frottage, J/O, and intracrural sex, since getting it in the rear made you too much like a terrible woman.
As Catullus and his contemporaries would have it, sex with women was something done passionlessly for issue or in foolish, youthful haste – taking the ‘sexuality as reproductive oath’ concept to its logical extreme.
Mind you, we as a country came pretty late to the idea of sodomy – where ‘queer’ in Britain meant what it does now, its conceptual cognate in 19th-c America would refer to a man of means who refused to plan his future around advantageous marriage and childrearing. Thus Honest Abe and a roommate rhapsodizing about one another’s thighs seems like innocent jolly-offing to his peers, but Buchanan failing to live with a woman infuriated everyone.
When you combine those two, you get either a reasonably permissive view of the world in which the unusual thing is to spurn lasting physical or personal attachments or a horrific psychosexual nightmare in which society has a pressing interest both in what you do with your genitals and how well your copulatory calendar fits homeowners’ association standards.
And speaking of engorging various things to please self-appointed real estate value juntas, any good translation of Catullus is a gift without compare for the young lover. (The Romans, after all, had a verb for what the bottom does.)
Getting it in the rear was perfectly acceptable as long as it was in keeping with the natural order of things. There’s an understandable bias in the surviving corpus of Roman manners towards the upper class, and the Roman aristocracy fancied even its boys above anal, but the odd pooper-popping was to be expected. As long as the top was some combination of higher in rank, older in age, or more virile of social carriage (by all accounts the primary thing auctoritas or natural authority was used for), all was right with the world.
Intracrural sex was for tutors; anal was for noblemen. And prostitutes were intrinsically toppy in some weird way.
The best part of all of this is that in five hundred years, not just the ‘it’s not gay if X’ but the stuff that seems perfectly natural to us will probably be as absurd to our descendants as this is to us.
alec: Of course. How could I have forgotten your handy how-to guide on sexual etiquette? (Visually SFW, albeit not in content. Halfway down, in sepia.)
Pity poor Catullus, who never knew the pleasures to be had from a watermelon.
if you choose not to decide/ You still have made a choice.
Wow. Hilarious.
America’s Racist Uncle has finally lost it.
I can’t bring myself to check at Pharyngula to see PZ’s reaction.
Pity poor Catullus, he never met
The pleasures to be had from a cucurbit…
his mincing and parsimoniously petty escalations of do-nothing rhetoric.
Peretz reckons that Obama should have escalated his do-nothing rhetoric more rapidly. Is that it? Do I get a cookie?
PZ’s reaction
Honestly though this is pretty ordinary level of crazy for buchanon, I thought that time he lost his temper on an MSNBC panel and told someone to shut up, and Maddow took him on was crazier than this.
As Atrios says, it’s nothing that will cause MSNBC to take away his couch in the green room.
Catullus truly was a fool
He never made it with a mule.
Not only that, He picked the ugly one…
Poor poor Catullus
Acolyte of Priapus
Never knew the pleasure of the watermelon fuck
Poor poor Catullus
History is warning us
Life is short so go out now and buy yourself a duck…
{Beats head against desk to stop Boney M music loop]
There lived a certain man…
Why a duck?
Our vaunted freedom fighters, the ‘rule of law’ death squad Honduran military which is totally totally justified because some court somewhere said the President acted illegally and post-coup the parliament voted to slob the military’s knob, has now gone and had to suspend the Constitution’s guarantee of Honduran individual rights, because, you know, they love freedom and the Constitution and the rule of law so much, and just because they feel nostalgic for the Reagan years.
Had Americans been able to stop obsessing over the color of Barack Obama’s skin and instead paid more attention to his cultural identity, maybe he would not be in the White House today. The key to understanding him lies with his identification with his father, and his adoption of a cultural and political mindset rooted in postcolonial Africa.
Like many educated intellectuals in postcolonial Africa, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. was enraged at the transformation of his native land by its colonial conqueror. But instead of embracing the traditional values of his own tribal cultural past, he embraced an imported Western ideology, Marxism. I call such frustrated and angry modern Africans who embrace various foreign “isms”, instead of looking homeward for repair of societies that are broken, African Colonials. They are Africans who serve foreign ideas.
The tropes of America’s racial history as a way of understanding all things black are useless in understanding the man who got his dreams from his father, a Kenyan exemplar of the African Colonial.
Before I continue, I need to say this: I am a first generation born West African-American woman whose parents emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970’s from the country now called Nigeria. I travel to Nigeria frequently. I see myself as both a proud American and as a proud Igbo (the tribe that we come from — also sometimes spelled Ibo). Politically, I have always been conservative (though it took this past election for me to commit to this once and for all!); my conservative values come from my Igbo heritage and my place of birth. Of course, none of this qualifies me to say what I am about to — but at the same time it does.
My friends, despite what CNN and the rest are telling you, Barack Obama is nothing more than an old school African Colonial who is on his way to turning this country into one of the developing nations that you learn about on the National Geographic Channel. Many conservative (East, West, South, North) African-Americans like myself — those of us who know our history — have seen this movie before. Here are two main reasons why many Americans allowed Obama to slip through the cracks despite all of his glaring inconsistencies:
First, Obama has been living on American soil for most of his adult life. Therefore, he has been able to masquerade as one who understands and believes in American democratic ideals. But he does not. Barack Obama is intrinsically undemocratic and as his presidency plays out, this will become more obvious. Second, and most importantly, too many Americans know very little about Africa. The one-size-fits-all understanding that many Americans (both black and white) continue to have of Africa might end up bringing dire consequences for this country.
Contrary to the way it continues to be portrayed in mainstream Western culture, Africa is not a continent that can be solely defined by AIDS, ethnic rivalries, poverty and safaris. Africa, like any other continent, has an immense history defined by much diversity and complexity. Africa’s long-standing relationship with Europe speaks especially to some of these complexities — particularly the relationship that has existed between the two continents over the past two centuries. Europe’s complete colonization of Africa during the nineteenth century, also known as the Scramble for Africa, produced many unfortunate consequences, the African colonial being one of them.
The African colonial (AC) is a person who by means of their birth or lineage has a direct connection with Africa. However, unlike Africans like me, their worldviews have been largely shaped not by the indigenous beliefs of a specific African tribe but by the ideals of the European imperialism that overwhelmed and dominated Africa during the colonial period. AC’s have no real regard for their specific African traditions or histories. AC’s use aspects of their African culture as one would use pieces of costume jewelry: things of little or no value that can be thoughtlessly discarded when they become a negative distraction, or used on a whim to decorate oneself in order to seem exotic. (Hint: Obama’s Muslim heritage).
On the other hand, AC’s strive to be the best at the culture that they inherited from Europe. Throughout the West, they are tops in their professions as lawyers, doctors, engineers, Ivy League professors and business moguls; this is all well and good. It’s when they decide to engage us as politicians that things become messy and convoluted.
The African colonial politician (ACP) feigns repulsion towards the hegemonic paradigms of Western civilization. But at the same time, he is completely enamored of the trappings of its aristocracy or elite culture. The ACP blames and caricatures whitey to no end for all that has gone wrong in the world. He convinces the masses that various forms of African socialism are the best way for redressing the problems that European colonialism motivated in Africa. However, as opposed to really being a hard-core African Leftist who actually believes in something, the ACP uses socialist themes as a way to disguise his true ambitions: a complete power grab whereby the “will of the people” becomes completely irrelevant.
Barack Obama is all of the above. The only difference is that he is here playing (colonial) African politics as usual.
In his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father — an eloquent piece of political propaganda — Obama styles himself as a misunderstood intellectual who is deeply affected by the sufferings of black people, especially in America and Africa. In the book, Obama clearly sees himself as an African, not as a black American. And to prove this, he goes on a quest to understand his Kenyan roots. He is extremely thoughtful of his deceased father’s legacy; this provides the main clue for understanding Barack Obama.
Barack Obama Sr. was an African colonial to the core; in his case, the apple did not fall far from the tree. All of the telltale signs of Obama’s African colonialist attitudes are on full display in the book — from his feigned antipathy towards Europeans to his view of African tribal associations as distracting elements that get in the way of “progress”. (On p. 308 of Dreams From My Father, Obama says that African tribes should be viewed as an “ancient loyalties”.)
Like imperialists of Old World Europe, the ACP sees their constituents not as free thinking individuals who best know how to go about achieving and creating their own means for success. Instead, the ACP sees his constituents as a flock of ignorant sheep that need to be led — oftentimes to their own slaughter.
Like the European imperialist who spawned him, the ACP is a destroyer of all forms of democracy.
Here are a few examples of what the British did in order to create (in 1914) what is now called Nigeria and what Obama is doing to you:
1. Convince the people that “clinging” to any aspect of their cultural (tribal) identity or history is bad and regresses the process of “unity”. British Imperialists deeply feared people who were loyal to anything other than the state. “Tribalism” made the imperialists have to work harder to get people to just fall in line. Imperialists pitted tribes against each other in order to create chaos that they then blamed on ethnic rivalry. Today many “educated” Nigerians, having believed that their traditions were irrelevant, remain completely ignorant of their ancestry and the history of their own tribes.
2. Confiscate the wealth and resources of the area that you govern by any means necessary in order to redistribute wealth. The British used this tactic to present themselves as empathetic and benevolent leaders who wanted everyone to have a “fair shake”. Imperialists are not interested in equality for all. They are interested in controlling all.
3. Convince the masses that your upper-crust university education naturally puts you on an intellectual plane from which to understand everything even when you understand nothing. Imperialists were able to convince the people that their elite university educations allowed them to understand what Africa needed. Many of today’s Nigerians-having followed that lead-hold all sorts of degrees and certificates-but what good are they if you can’t find a job?
4. Lie to the people and tell them that progress is being made even though things are clearly becoming worse. One thing that the British forgot to mention to their Nigerian constituents was that one day, the resources that were being used to engineer “progress” (which the British had confiscated from the Africans to begin with!) would eventually run out. After WWII, Western Europe could no longer afford to hold on to their African colonies. So all of the counterfeit countries that the Europeans created were then left high-and-dry to fend for themselves. This was the main reason behind the African independence movements of the1950 and 60’s. What will a post-Obama America look like?
5. Use every available media outlet to perpetuate the belief that you and your followers are the enlightened ones-and that those who refuse to support you are just barbaric, uncivilized, ignorant curmudgeons. This speaks for itself.
America, don’t be fooled. The Igbos were once made up of a confederacy of clans that ascribed to various forms of democratic government. They took their eyes off the ball and before they knew it, the British were upon them. Also, understand this: the African colonial who is given too much political power can only become one thing: a despot.
I forgot — like Pinochet in Chile, they had to have the military take over and abrogate free speech and individual liberty and the right to be free of unwarranted detention because they had become afraid that some leftist guy might someday do the same exact things, so, they sure as hell ain’t gonna let that sumbitch do it first, by god.
Had Americans been able to stop obsessing over the color of Barack Obama’s skin and instead paid more attention to his cultural identity, maybe he would not be in the White House today. The key to understanding him lies with his identification with his father, and his adoption of a cultural and political mindset rooted in postcolonial Africa.
Like many educated intellectuals in postcolonial Africa, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. was enraged at the transformation of his native land by its colonial conqueror. But instead of embracing the traditional values of his own tribal cultural past, he embraced an imported Western ideology, Marxism. I call such frustrated and angry modern Africans who embrace various foreign “isms”, instead of looking homeward for repair of societies that are broken, African Colonials. They are Africans who serve foreign ideas.
The tropes of America’s racial history as a way of understanding all things black are useless in understanding the man who got his dreams from his father, a Kenyan exemplar of the African Colonial.
Before I continue, I need to say this: I am a first generation born West African-American woman whose parents emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970’s from the country now called Nigeria. I travel to Nigeria frequently. I see myself as both a proud American and as a proud Igbo (the tribe that we come from — also sometimes spelled Ibo). Politically, I have always been conservative (though it took this past election for me to commit to this once and for all!); my conservative values come from my Igbo heritage and my place of birth. Of course, none of this qualifies me to say what I am about to — but at the same time it does.
OMFG. This exchange is almost enough to make me start listening to FOX News Radio:
Mule-fucking? It has historically been the case.
How about anal insertion of random vegetables? Well Alan, there are long-standing cultural traditions – these are things that are totally out of context to anyone without several years of cultural anthropology background.
President Obama squirmed and weaseled his words with the Iranian Mullahs and their puppet-tyrant, Ahmadinejad, not wanting to be seen as meddling in a tyrannical theocracy, known throughout the world as beneath-contempt oppressors of every human right under the sun. No, no, no, it just wouldn’t do to publicly lend support to all those moderate, freedom-loving throngs of Iranians taking to the streets, risking life and limb for more liberty. Not until the Iranians killed demonstrators on camera, the pictures went round the world, and criticism of himself mounted at home, did this President put his hands on his hips and use the words, “appalled” and “outraged.”
And the words that quickly came to my own mind as Obama gave this tiny, petulant nod to liberty: “Wimp in Chief.”
This week, the Honduran socialist president, seeking to eviscerate his country’s constitution in a shameless power-grab, has evoked Obama’s true colors, and spread them out like yellow underwear on a backyard clothesline.
Obama’s response to the Honduran military removing a dictator-wannabe from office (at the behest, it must be noted, of the Supreme Court and the Honduran Congress), and escorting him to the border, was sure and fast. He declared the military action an “illegal coup” faster than you can say Fidel Castro. And just as quickly the rest of the region’s socialist gang chimed in too. The real Castro brothers. Hugo Chavez. Daniel Ortega.
Obama made a choice by not choosing, huh. I agree. He chose not to choose. Which makes more sense than sMarty does.
Whaddaya mean “random?” We choose our insertion vegetables very carefully.
Oh, you might wanna wash that cuke again before you slice it up.
What am I, chopped liver?
To play devil’s advocate a little bit, the tendency of power to concentrate in the executive branch has produced in most non-American presidential systems a strong tendency towards civic coups as a check against the President within the executive, which have a specific format and represent a sort of political reset button. It is in fact possible, and in some time periods has been prevalent, for such events to either overstep their legitimate boundaries or present an actual coup as a civic coup.
On the balance, the Honduran event seems like it was sketchy to begin with and has gone from sketchy to indefensible, but throwing out the widely-despised but institutionally-entrenched President and installing a caretaker government for the couple of months it takes to hold new elections is a legitimate feature isn’t any more intrinsically malicious than campaign contributions or First Past The Post.
“Nobody can make me resign unless… Hey! Why are these soldiers stuffing me in this burlap sack?!”
alec, this is ridiculous. There is an actual country, Honduras, and there is an empirical record. There pretty much is no civilian government without the approval of the military.
Really. No, this isn’t that complicated. Not this part of it. The Honduran military is a nasty legacy of oligarchic domination and death squad brutality that continues until this day, and it carried out a coup d’etat in alliance with at least some members of the courts and the legislature.
This is not some sophisticated debate about the role of the executive. For god’s sake, context matters. Under the very democratically elected Uribe, Colombians now wonder about the extent to which their government can ever be un-penetrated by a narco-paramilitary establishment which functions at nearly every level.
We have in Honduras yet another assertion of the military dominance of civilian life, and no pile of bullshit from old guard legislators about how they weep for their fears of executive power, when in Honduras, the power has never been in the executive, but with the executors.
Larry Birns’ Council on Hemispheric Affairs offers about the sanest view setting out the context of Honduran military rule while indeed pointing out the nitwittery of Zelaya’s gamesmanship.
One of the worst aspects of Zelaya’s behavior is that either he didn’t realize how close he was to pushing the military into reasserting dominance absolutely, or he really didn’t care what the consequences to ordinary people might be once the beasts were on the street again, or it didn’t even occur to him to maybe try and figure out what he and the country should do if it looked like the death squad military was about to roll out onto the streets again.
It’s one thing if the time arrives where one must challenge the military autocrats; it’s another thing if you bring that time about without the sort of preparedness that civil society would need.
Zelaya has at least now publicly promised (at the UN) to not pursue any further constitutional re-writing — something which I actually support, because it’s a crappy constitution written at the height of Reaganite fakery of creating fig leaf central governments to rule as stooges in front of the real military rulers. That said, it would be nice if someone better, more dedicated, and more capable than Zelaya could do it.
Peak Goldberg.
Peak Goldberg.
Apparently, Goldbergs have been whining in print about the oppression inherent in the English language for two generations now, and still haven’t been given a fair chance.
NOT A PHOTOSHOP
NOT A PHOTOSHOP
OK, she’s officially jumped the shark.
Remember that language is a virus, so no surprises that it has a liberal bias.
Love the Blue Star Family thing in the window. Work those kids, honey.
Is that really what she wants to do w/ the flag? I do not think it is supposed to be crumpled up & dumped over a fucking K-Mart bar-stool. There are laws about that!
Sarah’s beauty pageant training still holds -she always has that left knee slightly bent to improve the silhouette.
Obama, the African Colonial
Had a very shiny nose.
Hey, I happen to like mincing and parsimoniously petty escalations of do-nothing rhetoric!
Jesus. I’m guessing he started with “parsimoniously pusillanimous” and dialed it down.
Apparently, Goldbergs have been whining in print about the oppression inherent in the English language for two generations now, and still haven’t been given a fair chance.
Perhaps a multigenerational experiment is in order… someday they’ll want them.
Point of cluefulness: methamphetamine is Sched I — no recognized medical usefulness. Amphetamine salts, like Adderall, are indeed Sched II, and new regulations force physicians to jump through their assholes every 30 days to basically write a brand new first-time scrip all over again. (Those pads are worth their weight in moon rocks.)
(Fun fact II: Methyl-diethyl methamphetamine was patented by Merck in 1914 as an appetite suppressant, forgotten about for decades, was legally produced and unclassified until the mid-eighties, when it went from GRAS to Sched I in a single bound. Bathtub “X” is still available, but it’s like pouring wood alcohol directly onto your brain; MDMA is not available, and the precursors are watched as closely as fifty-pound bags of pure ammonium nitrate.)
Hospices do indeed have access to pint bottles of what amounts to tincture of opium, because the final stages of dying at home with dignity can get pretty ugly, and what the fuck, you’re a living skeleton in constant pain, why not. Still, it’s pretty odd to hold one in your hand. Late 19th century mail-order colic medicine, you know? Smack dissolved in ethanol, what a bizarre concept. Dosage instructions: “Who cares? Are you serious? Just keep pouring. At this point, it doesn’t matter.”