Humanizing The Vacuum

Let the games begin: the NYT’s comprehensive account of how Obama decides who dies. Thanks to a “legalistic” mind that can both shade and obscure nuance, Obama’s managed to fulfill a few public pledges while still killing more terrorists, keeping black sites open for rendition, and withholding Miranda rights from suspects for as long as possible. An excerpt:

A phalanx of retired generals and admirals stood behind Mr. Obama on the second day of his presidency, providing martial cover as he signed several executive orders to make good on campaign pledges. Brutal interrogation techniques were banned, he declared. And the prison at Guantánamo Bay would be closed.

What the new president did not say was that the orders contained a few subtle loopholes. They reflected a still unfamiliar Barack Obama, a realist who, unlike some of his fervent supporters, was never carried away by his own rhetoric. Instead, he was already putting his lawyerly mind to carving out the maximum amount of maneuvering room to fight terrorism as he saw fit.

It was a pattern that would be seen repeatedly, from his response to Republican complaints that he wanted to read terrorists their rights, to his acceptance of the C.I.A.’s method for counting civilian casualties in drone strikes.

The day before the executive orders were issued, the C.I.A.’s top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, had called the White House in a panic. The order prohibited the agency from operating detention facilities, closing once and for all the secret overseas “black sites” where interrogators had brutalized terrorist suspects.

“The way this is written, you are going to take us out of the rendition business,” Mr. Rizzo told Gregory B. Craig, Mr. Obama’s White House counsel, referring to the much-criticized practice of grabbing a terrorist suspect abroad and delivering him to another country for interrogation or trial. The problem, Mr. Rizzo explained, was that the C.I.A. sometimes held such suspects for a day or two while awaiting a flight. The order appeared to outlaw that.

Mr. Craig assured him that the new president had no intention of ending rendition — only its abuse, which could lead to American complicity in torture abroad. So a new definition of “detention facility” was inserted, excluding places used to hold people “on a short-term, transitory basis.” Problem solved — and no messy public explanation damped Mr. Obama’s celebration.

“Pragmatism over ideology,” his campaign national security team had advised in a memo in March 2008. It was counsel that only reinforced the president’s instincts.

Taibbi:

Most likely, [the election will] be Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama, meaning the voters’ choices in the midst of a massive global economic crisis brought on in large part by corruption in the financial services industry will be a private equity parasite who has been a lifelong champion of the Gordon Gekko Greed-is-Good ethos (Romney), versus a paper progressive who in 2008 took, by himself, more money from Wall Street than any two previous presidential candidates, and in the four years since has showered Wall Street with bailouts while failing to push even one successful corruption prosecution (Obama).

There are obvious, even significant differences between Obama and someone like Mitt Romney, particularly on social issues, but no matter how Obama markets himself this time around, a choice between these two will not in any way represent a choice between “change” and the status quo. This is a choice between two different versions of the status quo, and everyone knows it.

The real fight against the status quo is coming in places like the Supreme Court of Montana, which with this recent ruling correctly identified the real battle lines in the upcoming political season by boldly rejecting the concept of unlimited corporate campaign spending.

Boilerplate, especially for Taibbi. Who wants to hear another both-sides-are-the-same argument? Most likely you’ll read this and say, “The Dems suck, but I don’t want President Romney appointing Supreme Court justices.” Which makes the news made by Montana’s supreme court more prescient:

The Montana Supreme Court said Montana has a “compelling interest” to uphold its rationally tailored campaign-finance laws that include a combination of restrictions and disclosure requirements.

A group seeking to undo the Citizens United decision lauded the Montana high court, with its co-founder saying it was a “huge victory for democracy.”

“With this ruling, the Montana Supreme Court now sets up the first test case for the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit its Citizens United decision, a decision which poses a direct and serious threat to our democracy,” John Bonifaz, of Free Speech For People, said in a statement.

The Montana court agreed with [Montana Attorney General Steve] Bullock’s argument that past political corruption, led by the famed Butte “Copper Kings” that dominated state politics long ago, gives Montana a compelling interest in regulating corporate spending. They pointed out also that corporations can form voluntary political action committees — subject to disclosure requirements — as a way to remain politically active.

This is the news: grass roots efforts spur state officials to challenge the law, one state at a time.

Some yuletide cheer: President Obama will not veto the Levin-McCain indefinite detention bill:

The law, contained in the defence authorisation bill that funds the US military, effectively extends the battlefield in the “war on terror” to the US and applies the established principle that combatants in any war are subject to military detention.

The legislation’s supporters in Congress say it simply codifies existing practice, such as the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists at Guantánamo Bay. But the law’s critics describe it as a draconian piece of legislation that extends the reach of detention without trial to include US citizens arrested in their own country.

“It’s something so radical that it would have been considered crazy had it been pushed by the Bush administration,” said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. “It establishes precisely the kind of system that the United States has consistently urged other countries not to adopt. At a time when the United States is urging Egypt, for example, to scrap its emergency law and military courts, this is not consistent.”

The key paragraphs:

The Senate is expected to give final approval to the bill before the end of the week. It will then go to the president, who previously said he would block the legislation not on moral grounds but because it would “cause confusion” in the intelligence community and encroached on his own powers.

But on Wednesday the White House said Obama had lifted the threat of a veto after changes to the law giving the president greater discretion to prevent individuals from being handed to the military.

The veto threat wasn’t to torpedo the bill — it was to preserve executive control over incarceration.

There’s no particular reason for me to note this news except that, on first glance, it represents a rare grace note from the Obama administration.

I’m lucky not to have anything immediately at stake: unlike millions of Americans I’ve got a job. From the moment Barack Obama announced a speech delivered to both houses of Congress, I was skeptical — what could he initiate now, a bit over twelve months from an election? What I’d read so far dispirited me. If Congress passes the President’s plan we will at best preserve a status quo and invigorate an enervated Democratic base, still reeling from Obama’s assault on clean air laws announced on Sept. 2. So as a campaign speech this worked as rhetoric; maybe it will “fire up the base” or some such thing. “Holding pattern” is right. From what I’ve read so far — I’m willing to be convinced — Obama’s proposals will preserve a teetering status quo: the status quo of indies he hopes will reeelect him next year.

In the past, Barack Obama’s most unabashed supporters proffered the notion that, contra liberal complaints about his bumblings and vacillations, Mister Halfway is a Grand Chessmaster whose mind is so strategic and eye so far-seeing that he plans five or six moves ahead of his opponents. Now that the debt ceiling farrago is almost over and the Beltway oligarchy has started judging “winners and losers,” I will concede that the Obama claque is right. I know I’ve published pieces like this one and this one. But the impulse is correct: he’ss a Grand Chessmaster, just not in the way the left expected. This man never wanted the public option, endorses (and has invigorated) Bush-era foreign policy muscularity, never thought twice about the Fourteenth Amendment solution for raising the debt ceiling, and talked from the beginning of his campaign about “reforming” the way in which “entitlements” are run.

Aside from the collapse of the Grand Bargain for which he genuinely wanted to share credit with House Speaker John Boehner and putting the country through another enervating debt ceiling debate in 2013 – a confirmation that now and forever the debt ceiling becomes a way for political parties to preen for their bases – I’m failing to see how Obama is a “loser.” He had no interest in raising “revenue” and wanted to cut spending. He got both! I attack him as a weak Democrat who regards centrism as a virtue, not as a weak negotiator or a sudden sellout.

EDIT: Matt Taibbi: “The Democrats aren’t failing to stand up to Republicans and failing to enact sensible reforms that benefit the middle class because they genuinely believe there’s political hay to be made moving to the right. They’re doing it because they do not represent any actual voters…they are not a progressive political party, not even secretly, deep inside. They just play one on television.”

I don’t want to keep beating Barack Obama up, especially when his reelection prospects matter to so many people, but when a phalanx of anonymous GOP and White House sources go on the record to admit he’s ready to consider cuts to Social Security and Medicare, I wonder why my liberal friends worry about electing Republicans. Glenn Greenwald, often accused of one dimensionality, is right:

When I first began writing about politics in late 2005, the standard liberal blogosphere critique — one I naively believed back then — was that Democrats were capitulating so continuously to the Bush agenda because they “lacked spine” and were inept political strategists: i.e., they found those policies so very offensive but were simply unwilling or unable to resist them. It became apparent to me that this was little more than a self-soothing conceit: Democrats continuously voted for Bush policies because they were either indifferent to their enactment or actively supported them, and were owned and controlled by the same factions as the GOP.

Now, Democratic commentators — mostly the President’s most hardened loyalists — continue to invoke this “he’s-weak-and-inept” excuse for Obama, but the evidence is far too abundant to sustain it any longer.

I got in another argument last Saturday with liberals who wanted to chortle over Bachmann’s latest outrage. “Never mind what she said. Did you hear the stupid shit the President said last week?” I said to one. Of course it’s easier to mock a freak when the President speaks so soberly and passionately about the drastic cuts required of a program that won’t start paying just 75% of benefits until 2034 and runs a surplus of $4.2 trillion until 2024, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

But what matters is reelecting Barack Obama: the opposition will produce So Much Worse. Really? So much worse than this? I’d rather ten Scalias and Alitos on the court than Obama’s evisceration of the only programs separating working people from the parties endorsed by Wall Street plutocrats. Greenwald again:

Of course enough Democrats will get in line behind Obama’s proposal to pass it once they’re told they must. Similarly, those progressive commentators who are first and foremost Democratic loyalists — who rose up in angry and effective unison (along with actual progressives) to prevent George Bush from privatizing Social Security in 2005 — will mount no meaningful opposition out of fear of weakening the President’s political prospects. White House aides will just utter Michele Bachmann enough times like some magical spell and snap more than enough people into fear-induced compliance. The last thing the White House is worried about — the last thing — is its “base.”

For our sakes, I hope today’s stories were more examples of “trial balloons.”

For partisan hacks who blame Obama for the decline in median wages, the news is worse: with the exception of a rather generous spike in the late nineties, wages have been declining since the eighties. Study the chart.

I lack the reserves to comment on the events of the last twenty-four hours. Euphoria and contrarianism both look like unsavory options. Two of the best dispatches look past catharsis: Steve Coll’s analysis of the future of al-Qaeda and the late Osama bin Laden’s centrality in its operations; and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ solemn parsing of the tumult an event like this inspires in citizens who want justice yet recoil from the way that justice and revenge are often indistinguishable:

What actually sticks with me is Bin Laden killed mass quantities of human beings with almost regard for distinctions. It’s not that he killed Muslims. It’s that he didn’t much care who he killed.

Osama Bin Laden The body-count, in number and means, is spectacular–I think Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who video-taped himself beheading human beings. I think about the hundreds of people killed in the bombing of al-Askaria Mosque, with the apparent hope of fomenting a Civil War. I think about the deaths in Nairobi, and bombing of night-clubs in Bali. It really is bigger than 9/11.

Faced with that level of callous disregard for life, I find it a little difficult to lecture 25-year olds who came of age during this time on their varied reactions. Americans are humans too.

I understand the impulse whereby liberal friends post clips from the correspondents’ dinner last night of Obama and his claque beating Donald Trump’s palms with a ruler. But how quaint. As this year’s Sarah Palin — a man with less than zero chance of getting the GOP nomination for president — Donald Trump inspires liberal handwringing because his hair is awful and provoked the president into one of the most cowardly demonstrations of obeisance to Beltway politics I’ve ever seen. Concentrate instead on Obama’s policies, not dead enders.

Discos best provide the space in which to conflate apocalyptic hysteria and desire, but this hasn’t stopped Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, and recent Britney, not to mention Prince and the Frankie Goes To Hollywood of “Two Tribes.” I suspect TV On the Radio demand the conflation because this art-rock collective can convincingly evoke neither hysteria nor desire. Despite the pulpiest titles of this serious band’s career (“Keep Your Heart”? “New Cannonball Run”? “Caffeinated Consciousness”?), Nine Types of Light indulges what Ulysses‘ Buck Mulligan called moody brooding, with tempos to match.  With Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone’s vocals mixed high, there’s no escaping Meaning and Significance. “Appetites and impulses confuse me,” Adebimpe confesses in a no-shit-Sherlock moment on “Second Song,” so sincerely that he forgets the rhythm guitar part and phased piano part competing for attention. The disco falsetto in the chorus comes too late to appease both appetites and impulses. Malone’s impressive programming skills manifest themselves here as bleating clutter (the electronic effects on “New Cannonball Run” are right out of Security-era Gabriel). There may be more horn sections than on an Earth Wind & Fire record, but Maurice White can keep his kalimba: not when TVotR can pluck at a banjo on “Killer Crane.” No songs match the skittery fury of Dear Science‘s “Red Dress” and “DLZ.” The latter, their apex to date, mates keening harmonies, a relentless rhythm track, and all kinds of minor chord ominousness to the most absurd political lyrics this side of The Cranberrries (“Never you mind, DEATH PROFESSOR!”), but it never stops flinging musical punches. The most graceful moments on Nine Types of Light peek out of the sulphuric air, like “Will Do,” a long song whose lovely chorus follows a series of verses as awkward about delineating pragmatic love as any since Bowie sang “Such a wonderful person/But you got problems” in 1977. I’m probably in the minority. TVotR opened for, I think, Mates of State in 2004: one  of the worst concerts I’ve ever seen. Talk about clatter and clutter. The crowd, responding to “Staring at the Sun” and an embryonic version of “I Was a Lover,” marveled, though, tingling with the sense that they’d witnessed an I Was Here moment. These guys either miscalculate their strengths or know exactly to whom they’re selling themselves. But no way will this follow Contra to Number One.

The truth about Beltway darling Paul Ryan — the anointed one about whom pundits use the adjectives  “serious,” “mature,” and “sobering”  for his ascetic commitment to the evisceration of support systems for the poor — and his budget reduction plan. Not that we can trust the  Democratic majority in the Senate either. As digby put it today:

It’s always possible that the Republicans will fold without any more cuts. But they are delirious kamikazees at this point — they’ve gotten everything they wanted so far and figure they might as well go the distance. But I would still put my money on a deal that spares the worst culture war stuff in exchange for some truly horrifying cuts. Sticking it to the poor is one thing the mainstream and the Tea Party can certainly agree on.

Last December, the Democrats gave us DADT repeal in exchange for the Bush tax cut and now they’re angling to give us Planned Parenthood in exchange for massive, immediate cuts in discretionary spending. At some point you have to wonder if everyone isn’t getting exactly what they want out of this deal — except, of course, those who are already clinging to the lowest rungs of society and working people.

As usual the media, devoted to the banalities of “narrative,” concentrates on the competitive angle: which “side” is “winning” and would be most hurt by a government shutdown. Other than a rather decent but abbreviated synopsis by ABC News earlier this week (no link available), the cable and broadcast networks have eschewed their responsibility to parse the details of Rep. Ryan’s proposal and what it would mean for the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress to accede to the GOP’s budget.