In response to the latest round of silly playground taunts aimed leftward by the White House, Atrios writes:
Personally I don’t mind a bit of hippie punching as long as its used to achieve something. Pass some decent legislation and increase the number of jobs and I’ll go set myself on the front lawn of the White House in a dunk tank. Well, once the weather gets a bit warmer anyway.
There is no better way to score easy points with the empty headed fucktards at CNN or The Washington Post than to lash out at the always ill defined “left”, and we’d all be better off if that brand of paparazzi press disappeared from the American landscape never to return. But as long as they’re here, and as long as the extremely stupid idea of politics as a sporting event where one side is gloriously triumphant while the other is shamefully defeated remains, it’s going to continue. There’s no sense taking it personally, and if it helps get better government policy, then it’s worth it.
That said, you do have to feel some sympathy for Obama in particular and national Blues in general in cases like these. Whenever they look across the way and see the Reds falling in line with North Korean precision the urge to badmouth cranky liberals must be pretty strong. From the offices of FOX News all the way down to the lowest traffic keyboard kommando, the Reds stand shoulder to shoulder on the important issues. The Teabaggers may scare the shit out of the old Red establishment, but the reality is that the old establishment is no longer the Establishment. Command of the party starts at Rush Limbaugh’s microphone and ends with misspelled racist signs, and the result is a unified stand on pretty much everything. The common term invoked to explain this is “discipline”, but that formulation assumes more control than really exists.
The bedrock reason for the unanimity isn’t organization or even money; it’s the fact that the basic Red positions are all of a kind: fuck the poor, fuck the darkies, fuck the women, fuck the gays. Whatever the rhetoric or issue, you can be sure that none of those four propositions will be trespassed against. With that kind of philosophical unity, staying on message is laughably easy.
The left can never have that kind of cohesion because “fuck” has no antonym. Whether you’re talking about ending wars, getting the labor movement back on its feet, protecting women’s rights or any other thing, it’s never going to be as clear cut as “fuck them”. This is a much more adult way of looking at things, but as long as children like Wolf Blitzer and Glenn Beck are taken seriously looking at things in an adult manner isn’t going to be easy.
The question is whether Obama and company are just cynically playing the game, which would be a good thing, or whether they genuinely believe that if Firedoglake winked out of existence tomorrow they would get better press coverage. If it’s the former, then all their righteous hippie punching can basically be forgiven. But, sympathy or no, one increasingly gets the sense that the latter is closer to the truth. While it’s true that this has been the best two years of government policy in a generation, it’s also true that the reforms undertaken have been woefully inadequate when compared with the scale of the destruction wrought under Bush the Younger. That’s the real problem, and mugging for the dimwitted green room peanut gallery doesn’t do anything to address it.
The inadequacy of the reforms isn’t an aesthetic complaint, it isn’t about the egos of liberal pundits going un-stroked, and it isn’t about people’s varying levels of warm, fuzzy feelings for Obama himself. It’s about an unemployment level that’s still catastrophically high, it’s about climate change and immigration reform going completely unaddressed, and it’s about horrifying violations of civil rights. The liberals are unhappy about those things because they are real and they are important. Messaging and discipline don’t enter into the equation, and pretending they do won’t make it so.
