Crossposted from MY LEFT WING
My friend PHIL. I. STINE, one of the few Republicans I actually respect and admire, seems to think the liberal and not-so-liberal left (I being one of the former, the majority of the Netroots Nation being the latter) are naive with respect to Obama and the Democratic Party...
Phil, responding to Tim Gatto's Laissez Faire to Netroots Nation:
"Some of the people that I've seen interviewed at "Netroots" seem to be completely convinced that the Democratic Party is only leaning right to capture the presidency."Makes it easier and much more enjoyable experience to bullshit yourself.
Over here on the Right we have the exact opposite problem. McCain has moved to the right and nobody on the right believes him. They think he's still a quasi-liberal. I know he's a moderate because I've been watching him most of my life. So, I'll be voting for him but many on the right won't. That's your problem with Obama, you don't have a clue what he really is. One thing he definately (sic) is (is) a pol. I can promise you he won't allow the "netroots" to define him for Americans. Why? He's after the bitter/clitter and hispanic vote, not you guys.
No, I think I know what Obama is.
Ideologically, he is a cypher.
Politically, he is a well-intentioned centre-leaning liberal Democrat -- but "liberal" by today's mainstream standards, meaning "conservative" -- and "centre" meaning "right" by the standards of 30 years ago.
Again, we return to my standard complaint in the definition department: Almost no one today knows what the fuck they mean when they use the words "liberal," "conservative," "Democrat" or "Republican." And that's because the meanings of those words have not just evolved -- they have been deconstructed and reconstituted to the point where they mean nothing at all. Hard to have a political dialogue when most people don't even speak the same language.
I think Obama is a decent man who's well on his way to becoming as corrupt and ideologically diluted as his peers. Whether he is truly committed to anything beyond trying to "fix" things, I don't know. I do know that if you live in the rarified atmosphere of political power and manage to retain even a shred of integrity, let alone clarity of purpose, you probably have the sort of preternatural strength of character we usually ascribe to heroes, saints and martyrs.
Given Obama's evident fixation on things religious, I am inclined to believe he is probably disingenuous enough to succeed politically; if he is actually sincere in his religious beliefs, he doesn't have -- excuse the expression -- a prayer. But I think that's unlikely; anyone who truly believed the tenets of Christianity would long ago have entered a different arena.
Or, of course, his beliefs could be so genuine they blind him to reality to the point where he will be able to justify and rationalise anything he needs to in order to accomplish his goals -- Bush, but with a tan.
KIDDING!
Of course, I've never for a moment believed Bush actually believed his pseudo-Christian crap; cognitive dissonance requires cognition, whereas lying through your teeth requires nothing more than good handlers. Bush's problem is that he came to believe he was actually doing the heavy lifting, and having created an 800 pound retarded gorilla, his handlers discovered too late the dangers of investing too much power in a fool.
How did I come back to Bush? Well, it was easy, really: There are many differences between Obama and Bush, but the powerful commonality between them lies in the roles they occupy (or, in Obama's case, will soon occupy).
I wish Phil could try to explain to me why he believes we'd be better off with McCain. From what I've seen, McCain has become (or, more likely, always was) just another political whore willing to do and say whatever he thinks it will take to get to the seat of power -- and though he may truly believe that once he's there, he'll be free to Do Good and Affect Change from the Ultimate Inside, should he actually achieve that supposed apex, he'll find himself constrained by the same demands and necessities and compromises encountered by every other cockeyed idealist who's preceded him. Maybe in his 7th year in office he'll awaken to realise he's done neither what he ought nor what he wished -- and by then it will be too late.
Now, take that assessment and apply it in every respect to Obama. The only visible differences between them are what they WANT to achieve (and a little matter of what they've already done and will actually do, but never mind that now). But, absent anomalous deus ex machina of indescribable proportions, the purported goals of either man, whether genuine or expressed for mere political expedience, will meet the same inexorable fate as all the other men's goals: sacrifice on the altar of political necessity, dressed up as Compromise with the Promise to Eventually Getting Where We Want to Go and ultimately revealed as More of the Same.
I dare anyone to tell me, after reading this, that I ever had blinders on when I looked at Barack Obama -- or, for that matter, John McCain.
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