Wear Clean Draws  (’coz there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

I was poking around, reading politically-oriented mainstream blogs the other day and got completely fed up with the whole Obama praises Reagan discussions. It just turned my stomach. Maybe it’s an age thing, because Reagan? I have nothing nice to say about that president (though, truth is, I have nothing nice to say about any of them!) but he holds a special place in my heart: Iran-Contra, El Salvador, not to mention the attack on unions and working people in general.

And I was especially NOT amused to see how so many people ignored the key words in that bit of hagiography. “Excesses of the 60s and 70s”? Hmm? What was excessive about it? A government that had “grown and grown and grown” without any accountability? Hmm? The need for “entrepreneurialism” and “dynamism” is code for free market capitalism to correct the excesses and exact some discipline damn it!

These are right wring tropes — and they got ignored, largely. Frankly, I think most people love that crap — and especially “progressives” as I learned in ye Olde LimpDick where progressive apparently means sucking it up for any democrat, always, and rah rah rahing Clinton’s attack on “welfare as we know it.” Sweet. But what made matters worse was the Queen of Triangulatin’ Bullshit’s own entry into the debate. She latched on to his “party of ideas” crap and then got to select which ideas she disagreed with and leave alone the ones she either doesn’t disagree with or doesn’t want to say.

So I post about it at a discussion list and a man I admire a great deal, C.G. Estabrook, wrote to say that he thinks that the excesses of the 60s and 70s that Obama was talking about was the protests over the war and the growing critique of colonialism and u.s. imperialism. The horror. The left dared attack things like the ‘military industrial complex’. (Speaking of, the blogger Lenin’s Tomb, who most of you know from Lbo, has some good posts up lately re: Palestine)

Man, I gave up on Obama when he sabered rattled about Iran, just like Clinton did. I’m going to read this book and if C.G. E. has the right, I’ll be especially irritated with all this rah rah Obama. In which case, I think I will just not pay attention and watch some other spectacle so I can keep my blood pressure in check.

Meanwhile, here’s C.G. Estabrook:

I think that, by the “excesses of the 60s and 70s,” Obama means in the first place the anti-war movement.

Obama’s known for a long time that the way forward (for him) is to cover over the yawning gap between the interests of the elites and those of the majority. That’s why we hear so much from him about “unity.” (”Change” and “hope” are effective synonyms.)

In his book, The Mendacity of Hope, he writes “…perhaps the biggest casualty of [the Vietnam] war was the bond of trust between the American people and their government ­ and between American themselves … Increasingly, many on the left voiced opposition not only to the Vietnam War but also to the broader aims of American foreign policy. In their view, President Johnson, General Westmoreland, the CIA, the ‘military industrial complex,’ and international institutions like the World Bank were all manifestations of American arrogance, jingoism, racism, capitalism and imperialism.” Now, that’s serious and has to be dealt with.

Obama and his co-conspirators know that those are the views that have to be put down (along with the incidental objection that “the biggest casualty of the war” may have been four million dead Asians). Therefore he praises Reagan for “changing the trajectory of America” — as he intends to do. (Nixon and Clinton didn’t, he said, but Kennedy did — ranking presidents on the success of their media-aided lies to the country.)

Now, this is right in line with the way he slips in other imperializing words in things like his N.H. speech where in we learn that the settlers who sallied forth, Westward Ho, said, “Yes We can!” In all that, nothing was mentioned about the Native Americans that were sallied forth and westward ho’d over.