OpEds: “When Obama Bombs”

Editor’s Note:

The smoothest bloviator of them all.

As our readers know, at TGP and Cyrano’s Journal Today we aim to publish a full spectrum of informative and hopefully provocative progressive opinion, from independent left-liberals (i.e., Chris Hedges, Glenn Greenwald) to Marxian radicals, socialists of various stripes, and a rich complement of simply unclassifiable iconoclastic folks, the likes of Paul Craig Roberts, for example, a man of impeccable rightwing pedigree who also frequently blasts the American establishment and the current insufferable status quo with accuracy and valor.

Yes, it’s fair to say we are not in the least sectarian, and that  none of our editors or contributors need fit a narrow Procustean mould to secure publication.  Similarly, we are not afraid to run opposing opinions or outlying topics when they come wrapped in original, entertaining and lucid formulations.  The idea here is to expand and provoke the mind, and to provide our audience with as much liberating material as possible, hopefully without boring them to tears.

The above doesn’t mean we don’t draw the line somewhere.  As independent radicals, we do, and the line is very clear when it comes to mainstream liberals and social democrats, corpodems, and their ilk, and the huge phalanx of fellow radical centrists who in various capacities are happy to carry water for the global capitalist system. These types we despise. So if you really want to insult us, call us “liberals.”

As you are well aware, besides politicians, many of these mainstream liberals (think Howard Fineman, Chris Matthews, Maureen Dowd, etc.), also comprise the nation’s punditoriat, while in the political slot proper the category includes the vast majority of the Democratic party leadership, from the utterly corrupt DLC with its Clintons, Rahm Emanuels, and Barack Obamas, to their transatlantic accomplices in Britain’s Labor/Liberal alliance—the David Camerons, Tony Blairs, and other less well recognized figures on American shores—and their equally culpable counterparts on the continent, among which the German, French and Spanish Socialist parties stand out for mendacity and collaborationism.

In this taxonomy, left liberals are the trickiest tribe to define. Almost uniformly gifted analysts of the political situation, many of them demonstrably well-meaning, they still maintain an exasperating allegiance to the capitalist system, which they tend to perceive much too often through the glasses of anti-communism. As such, and although there are encouraging exceptions,  far too many of them see themselves—like their mainstream brethren— as “mature players” on the political scene, leftists armed with enough stomach fortitude to practice “realpolitik” in a world which in their view allows for only evil and lesser evil choices. Not surprisingly, militating by choice or by default in the Democratic party, many end up joining periodic crusades to “sweep the rascals out of the temple,” forever believing—and making others believe—that it’s the capitalist figureheads who occupy the throne momentarily, and not the system itself, that needs replacing. (In the process they will often berate Marxists and real socialists and anti-corporatists like Nader for what they regard as petulant infantilism, “spoilerism”, “impossible purity”, and other vices, with the same condescension used recently by Obama to dismiss his grassroots critics.)

Such outbursts of hope  in a “saviour candidate”  invariably lead to bitter disappointment, which lasts, more or less, until the next round of phony elections requires them to rise anew against the latest godawful ticket fielded by the Republicans, a party of such unspeakable corruption, cynicism and criminality that it should have been relegated to the trashbin of history long ago, but wasn’t, precisely because their cousins, the corporate Democrats (centrist/rightist liberals), refused to apply the necessary coup de grace when the monster was flailing on the ground.

In any case, as we all know, the left-liberals’ latest misguided spasm was in support of Barack Obama, the Man from Hope. People of notable intelligence fell for this transparent scam (and still do).  I’m talking here about people in the caliber of  Cornel West, a self-admitted Obama booster who—after almost a decade—recently saw the light and has begun to distance himself from his former hero. Or Keith Olbermann, another prominent liberal capable of scathing analyses, but who used to fall curiously silent when it came to noting Obama’s glaring deficits and betrayals. (In fairness, he was beginning to change, become more vocal in his criticism of Obama when he got the ax at MSNBC-Comcast.)  Others of equal intellectual distinction can be found easily by examining the pages of Mother Jones, The Nation, or The Progressive, or television precincts like PBS or NPR, where even the estimable Bill Moyers still doesn’t seem to “get it” when it comes to the inevitable toxicity generated by the market system’s antisocial dynamics.

So what really distinguishes this kind of liberal, so close to a true socialist, at times even sounding like a Marxian, but who, for some peculiar reason, stubbornly maintains one foot in the fetid capitalist cesspool? In my view, aside from not wanting to let go of the privileges of inclusion—isolation can be punishing—the single most important trait is their refusal to use (or ignorance of) Marxian analysis, which renders a lot of their perceptions obtuse or stillborn. Thus no matter how brilliant their ability to describe the symptoms of the disease—and they frequently do excel at that—they never manage to produce a truly curative prescription: the diagnosis and the therapy are forever and grotesquely out of sync. It can’t be otherwise because even (a big “even” in this case) when their proposed solutions do not fall within the self-serving logic and boundaries of the system, the feature that marks all “solutions” advanced by centrist liberals (like Obama’s Rube Goldberg healthcare reform), they still seek to retain, in some utopian manner, a capitalist framework for the task of social reconstruction. (They insist that capitalism and democracy are not inherently antithetical, an argument no doubt based on the experience of the rapidly shrinking “Scandinavian socialism”.)

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If you’re still with me, perhaps now you will see the reason for my  long-winded intro. Fact is, at the suggestion of a Facebook friend (Amy Mueller) I came across a gifted writer who apparently also happens to be a left liberal (well, maybe I’m wrong, I get my labels confused sometimes, and for all I know M. Tristam may see himself as a socialist).  In any case, Pierre Tristam is certainly iconoclastic enough to be welcome in our pages, even if he makes his debut on TGP by proclaiming recklessly a viva voce that he has been a longstanding admirer of Obama. If you wish to ponder the mysterious contradictions of the liberal mind, the essay below will provide plenty of grist to keep you busy for a while. Naturally, if you find the key to the riddle, let us hear. —Patrice Greanville

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PIERRE TRISTAM

“When Obama Bombs”
Originally at FlaglerLive.com

I’VE MADE NO SECRET OF MY ADMIRATION FOR BARACK OBAMA. He had the easiest act to follow since the Buchanan-Lincoln transition. But his speech on the Middle East this week must be a low point. The rhetoric sounded like it was on autopilot. The substance was all over the place. No wonder Obama aides were arguing over the speech until the last minute (the speech was delayed by more than half an hour because they were haggling over wording as if White House policy were a shop front in an Arab bazaar). There’s no clarity of vision in this administration regarding the Middle East. Past the soaring phrases, it’s a salad of contradictions, of hollow presumptions, of back-tracking and hair-splitting.

This was no landmark speech. There was no sizing of opportunities created by the killing of bin Laden. It was stylishly written clichés. I’m amazed at how easily the domestic audience, domesticated as it is by the patronizing and infantile simplicities of television networks (whether Fox or CNN, delude yourself of a difference), bought into the narrative of the “groundbreaking,” or pumped up the hype. Even in print, where, unlike television, IQ is occasionally recognizable. “Obama’s Israel Bombshell,” was the Wall Street Journal’s four-column headline.

Bombshell, no. A bomb of a speech, yes.

Obama was still speaking as if the United States could make much of a difference in the region. But it’s not just al-Qaeda that’s become irrelevant. The events of the last few months have shown to what extent American influence has shrunk, and how compromised America’s moral standing continues to be. It’s not Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, secret prisons and the no-exit muddles of Iraq and Afghanistan so much anymore, though those blights continue to accrue interest in America’s bank of shame. These days it’s Obama’s refusal to see thuggery for what it is and deal with it on equal terms. He starts another war against Libya because that country’s mad man turned his tanks against his own people. But Bahrain’s and Syria’s mad men are doing the same, and all Obama can do is slap a few sanctions on Syria, after saying nothing for weeks of massacres, and keep hugging and kissing the Bahraini king, because America’s Fifth Fleet is anchored in his port, while the king’s murderous troops crush demonstrators and invite Saudi troops to boot.

Obama continues to be a flip-flopper on these Arab revolutions, which are losing their momentum. For weeks he couldn’t figure out how to respond to the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt. He hedged his bets. He wanted to make sure that if the tyrants didn’t fall, he could still be friends with them. He aligned himself with the insurgents only when he was certain that the gangsters he’d called allies and friends all those years were done for good. That’s not courage. It’s keeping up with CNN.

The big news Thursday was supposedly Obama’s endorsement of Israel’s pre-1967 borders as the starting point for negotiations over a Palestinian state. But all he’s doing is catching up to international law, to United Nations resolutions, to where the rest of the world has been, to where even several previous presidents were when American policy wasn’t a subset of whatever Israel was asking for. The only big news about those 1967 borders is that it took the United States so long to rediscover them, and the law.

Even then, Obama was all about hedging. A president who’s allegedly all for self-determination and human rights derided the Palestinians move toward declaring an independent state next September at the United Nations, much in the way that Israel declared itself a state in 1948. It took Harry Truman 20 minutes to recognize Israel back then. It’s been 63 years that the United States has joined Israel in denying Palestinians the right to exist. That hasn’t changed. Yet Israel still grouses, from its invulnerable and immovable existence, that Palestinians deny it the right to exist. Talk about illusion in the service of rhetoric.

In that sense (as in a few others, terrorizing Palestinians militarily, killing them arbitrarily and calling it collateral damage, and repressing them widely and illegally through occupation) Israel is worse than Hamas. Hamas denies Israel’s right to exist in words as idiotic as they are divorced from reality. That’s the mark of imbecilic fanaticism (forgive the oxymoron;  the Palestinian Authority and the PLO, incidentally, explicitly recognized Israel’s right to exist in 1993. But Israel denies not only Palestine’s right to exist in actual fact; it denies Palestinians the right to exist—in history, in culture, in textbooks, and of course in the most important state of them all: in a state of their own. Obama, like most of his predecessors, have been complicit in that denial, swallowing whole the disingenuous Israel’s rhetoric about its existence hinging in the least on what Hamas’s moronic charter says. That didn’t change in Thursday’s speech. It was instead emphasized with Obama’s obnoxious suggestion that September’s UN vote for Palestinian statehood would be counter-productive. That from a president fighting four wars in the Middle East—Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, “terror”—allegedly in the name of Arab and Afghan self-determination against those who’d deny it.

But the square-peg-in-round-hole-hypocrisy of American presidents has no bounds in the Middle East. Arabs and Muslims briefly imagined Barack Obama to be different. He’s been an improvement. But improving from catastrophic to dismal isn’t much of an improvement. There was not a word about Saudi Arabia in Thursday’s speech, either, though Saudi Arabia, as close an ally as any in the Middle East, is in the same league of regressive tyrannies as the Taliban or North Korea—a sheikhdom as corrupt as they come, an illegitimate monarchy, an insult to women and an offense against liberty that the United States nevertheless embraces with strategic abandon. No word about the United Arab Republic, for that matter—a nation that’s just hired Blackwater’s private mercenaries to build it a private army of Seal-wannabes, apparently with the Obama administration’s quiet approval—and no word about other Arab clients that are no less illegitimate than Libya: Algeria, Morocco, Kuwai, Oman, Yemen, even Qatar and Iraq, where democracy is a vague glimmer.

And no word about the region’s backsliding. Egypt hasn’t been much different since Hosni Mubarak’s departure. The country is ruled by a military dictatorship. Arbitrary arrests, military trials, torture, censorship and the humiliation of citizens goes on. A blogger who had the temerity to criticize the military in a few sentences was sentenced to three years in prison, after the obligatory torture and humiliation that substitutes for Miranda rights in Egypt as it does in virtually every Arab state. In Egypt now there’s the added anxiety of street crime, which was rare during the old regime. Instead of reminding Egypt that it’s still the second-richest recipient of American aid after Israel, and that those billions should depend on immediate and verifiable civil rights reforms, Obama has accepted the new dictatorship as if the revolution never took place.

Elevating the Bush administration’s Mideast policy, which really was no policy other than war by every mean, would be ludicrous: American legitimacy and credibility is bankrupt primarily because of Bush’s trigger-happy cavalcades in the region, and his blind eye to Israel’s disproportionate clobberings of Palestinians on one hand and its South Florida-like development of the occupied West Bank by illegal settlements on the other. But Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s secretary of state, delivered one speech in 2005 in which which she admitted in a few lines what Obama has yet to do: “For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither,” she said.

Make that 65 years.

The victorious people of Cairo’s Tahrir Square now have kindred spirits in the people of Chicago’s Grant Park, who must be wondering what happened to the man they elected in 2008. It’s like the Seth Myers joke at the White House correspondents’ dinner three weeks ago. Myers made fun of the Republican field of presidential candidates which, lucky for Obama, stars a line-up of suits approximating life forms. “So it’s not a strong field, and who knows if they can beat you in 2012,” Myers told the president, “but I can tell you who can definitely beat you Mr. President: 2008 Barack Obama.”

That’s assuming that that man’s existence was ever any more real than, say, a Palestinian state.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Says Pierre Tristam: “I was born and raised in Lebanon, schooled in the United States, salaried in journalism, and now write editorials and a weekly column for the Daytona Beach News-Journal in Florida, making me one of the 0.3 Arab-Americans with a column in the mainstream American press.”  He runs a highly idiosyncratic web site (Candide’s Notebooks) which he warns us, “is entirely independent of the newspaper. I welcome contributors, even from the opposition: this is a no-censorship zone (except for dull and poor writing), preaching to the choir is pointless, and progress begins with disagreement. But the usual journalistic standards of accuracy, fairness and prohibitions on libel and defamation very much apply.”  We are pleased to open our pages to Tristam’s original contributions.

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