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OK, I can grudgingly admit that there's some merit to the idea that one should refrain from dying a thousand deaths every time Obama hammers another neo-lib, Democratic neo-con, Zionist nail into the progressive coffin. He hasn't even taken office yet, fa Chrissake, and so forth...
That's as much of a disclaimer as I can cough up at the moment. Meanwhile, I suppose it's bad form to emerge from my Erection Year fetal position and resume my Cassandraesque screeching, my miserific vision that tragically, over the past few decades our federal political institutions have transmogrified right before our unseeing eyes into a para-corporate service delivery system occupied by a typically wealthy cadre of technocrats. The duopoly requires some degree of competitiveness, and permits a nominal amount of conflicting values and positions, but not enough to undermine the symbiosis upon which it depends for survival.
Our technocratic politicians are not "moral" or ethical in any ordinary, retail human sense, at least not while they're on the clock; every senator and congressman (and executive officer) is a wholly-owned franchise, or subsidiary, of Government, Inc. It's all about the benjamins, one way or the other-- from the wheeling and dealing to control and allocate public funds to the perpetual campaign fundraising to keep the franchise going.
Oh, ethics and morality are more popular than ever in political oratory-- it's no accident that skilled communicators are worshipped by a credulous public. We're a lip-service lovin' nation!
But, exactly as former Attorney General Gonzales implied that the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and effectively obsolete, so do our veteran and newly-elected politicians treat Constitutional duties and the rule of law as "quaint". Everything, and I mean everything, is reduced to a political calculus; in this reductionistic Flatland, messy, inefficient, and politically risky actions are rejected out of hand.
Oh, right-- I said that I wasn't going to mount that well-worn soapbox again. Sorry about that.
Instead, I'll resort to my penchant for a tedious personal anecdote to make a dubious point: True story-- for a few years I worked for a state gummint agency director who had been kicked way upstairs from humble origins into a regional directorship because he was supposedly a wunderkind. He was personable, articulate, seemingly intelligent, and even charismatic to many.
His deputy, my boss, was a firm believer in old-school "loyalty". But others in our small staff hinted from the outset that the director's unique management style was not exactly as advertised. He very much played his own game, and was in fact amazingly erratic and outright wifty in the way he handled-- or not-handled-- his administrative responsibilities.
Let me be clear: I'm not in any way insinuating that Obama is a bozo or a fraud as far as his abilities. I am, however, noting that during the many months of the director's golden honeymoon, that a majority of managers and supervisors believed that he not only knew exactly what he was doing, but that he was way over our heads, way ahead of us, etc. Even when his actions-- or more typically, inactions-- resulted in negative and even destructive consequences, most of his subordinates followed the lead of my boss, a consummate spin doctor. The director was treated like a master chess player; he's thinking twelve moves ahead, and if you don't appreciate that, you just don't understand chess.
Eventually, if fairly suddenly, this confidence and admiration just... evaporated. There was no Master Plan, and he wasn't expertly playing the system to quietly but firmly revolutionize the agency. His moves were exactly what they seemed to be. And his disciples just stopped claiming that things that seemed wrong-headed and troubling were actually part of some grand design. Yes, this man was clearly inept, but the groupthink he generated would've been the same if he had been ept.
I keep hearkening back to this experience as I listen to inside-politics pragmatists justifying and applauding Obama's Clinton 2.0 proto-administration, e.g. that Obama is shrewdly killing Lieberman and the other Republicans with kindness.
Oh, me of little faith. Sigh.
