LEAVE OBAMA ALONE!! II - The Empire Strikes Back

[Cain]

How dare Matt Taibbi suggest the Dems are possibly, just maybe, in thrall to Wall Street and their own group think?

Offending Article

100,000 shrieking Obama supporters later...

Taibbi is now a conspiracy theorist who hates America (Taibbi responds here).

Its like 2003 all over again.  I know I shouldn't take anonymous comments on blogs seriously, but they're a fairly good guage of ideologically driven popular opinion, and while that opinion on the right tends to be "Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Communist Hitler", on the liberal side it seems to be that eeeeeeevil journos, radical leftists and purity trolls are damaging America by pointing out Obama has fucked up the bailout, Afghanistan, torture, government secrecy and a bunch of other shit I cannot be bothered to recall, and that the Boy Prince Is Trying His Best Given The Circumstances, which not only patently false, but even if it were true, wouldn't be a reason to not call him on it.  

Edit: Taibbi has more to say:

I've gotten some letters lately from people complaining about this whole concept of "purity," i.e. critics of Obama (like me) slapping him with some unrealistic "purity test." According to these letter-writers, such demands are unfair and journalists and politicians who are critical of Obama should recognize that a president sometimes has to make tough political decisions and is often forced to "work with" unsavory characters in order to "get things done."

First of all, we should get one thing out of the way — it's not any citizen's job to give a politician credit for his political calculations. In fact, that should rightly be part of the calculus of any political calculation; a politician should have to weigh the benefits of making, say, an unsavory insider alliance against the negative of public criticism for that move. If a leader doesn't have to earn the admiration you give him, then a) that admiration doesn't mean anything, and b) he will surely spend all his political capital on the people who do make him earn it.

Anyone who wonders why the Obama administration seems to be bending over so far backwards to appease conservatives and industry leaders in the health care debate and Wall Street in the financial regulatory reform debate can find their answer there: those groups make Obama pay for their financial/political support with real actions and policy concessions, while Obama's "base" will continue their feverish support in exchange for mere gestures and marketing hocus-pocus, for news about the new family puppy or an appearance on Jay Leno.

[Jenne]

The Cult of Obama is not strong in this one.  Matt Taibbi kicks some serious ass.  But I fear he is but a John the Baptist to the left-side of US politix.  No one wants to hear about fake promises and "yes we could have."

[Cain]

Taibbi's not even that much of a leftist, really.  That's the thing.  People are saying he's some sort of radical journalist, like H. L. Mencken with a Communist Party membership, but honestly, you look at the financial people who like him (Zero Hedge, Yves Smith, Calculated Risk et al) and they're for the most part fairly conservative financial types.

Hell, he pointed this out not too long ago. 

The term "left" goes back to the days of the French revolution and originally referred to the seating arrangements in the French parliament, where the anti-Monarchists and the radicals sat to on left side of the National Assembly. It went on to refer to radical anti-authoritarian politics of many stripes — socialists, Marxists, anarchists, secularists, labor movements, etc.

In the modern United States, "left" doesn't have any concrete meaning that I can see, but that doesn't mean we don't know what it means –  it's like pornography, people know it when they see it.

In 2004, on the Dean campaign plane, after seeing reporters throw the words "left" and "liberal" with Dean in a way that I didn't really understand given the governor's history, I polled the press corps on what its definition of "left" was. I got very few answers. While it was well understood that Howard Dean was "left" (and not just "left" but "too left" to win the White House, according to many reporters) no one could really say which of his policy ideas qualified him for that title.

In the end it was pretty clear to me anyway that "left" was basically a shorthand term for "pointy-headed weenie dissident." Except for his stance on the war, Dean's policies were much less traditionally "liberal" than, say, those of John Kerry — but Kerry made up for it by being much more full of shit than Dean.

Kerry was willing to say anything to get elected; he was willing to toe the Democratic Party's absurdly vacillating non-stance on the war (We like war in general, we're not wimps, but Bush should have invaded on a Tuesday, not a Thursday!), he nearly killed himself trying to give the press goofy photo-ops of the candidate playing manly sports like football and baseball, and was even willing to pose in a duck-hunting costume carrying a rifle.

Kerry's willingness to jump through all the usual idiotic hoops set out for him by the political media made him less "left" among those in the press corps than an economic centrist governor from Vermont who was openly critical of the media's war coverage and did not even have a Nerf ball on his plane. Which is normal and somehow made sense to all of us. If you scratch the surface of "left" you'll find that it has a lot more to do with attitudes and cultural markers relative to the bourgeois norm than it does to do with political beliefs, ideas about the role of government, taxes, and so on.

It's much easier to figure out who's "left" and who isn't using cultural litmus tests than it is using position papers. What's the left position on monetary policy? I have no idea. What's the left's position on American Idol? Easy: it rolls its eyes.

Getting back to the present, even though Andrew Sullivan is a Republican, it's not hard to see why Sarah Palin lumps him in with the left. Sullivan is gay, has probably been to a non-Christian bookstore more than once in the past six months, uses multi-syllabic words, is a member of the media and, most importantly, hates Sarah Palin. It may sound like a mistake to say that it was reporters "on the left" who harped on the whole Trig business, but it's not a mistake if she's using the word "left" in the sense of "Godless east-coast intellectual watcher of subtitled movies who disagrees with me," which is where we've allowed this word to go.

Anyway, the kicker in all of this is that we now have a left-right controversy that has nothing to do with either the left or the right. What we have here is the nutty Birther movement dueling with a mostly imaginary Trig-conspiracy movement that the Birthers believe comes from the left, or at least their idea of left, anyway. This battle will be hard-fought, prolonged, and ridiculous, sort of like that fight sequence in Naked Gun where Leslie Nielsen struggles with the pillow thrown in his face. I imagine this will also be a good preview of the kind of thing that will pass for "left-right debate" in 2012. God, I love politics in this country!

[Jenne]

True, but I think when he explains things about the current "messiah" of America, he's really talking to the Left in the US rather than the right.  Esp since they are now calling him a conspiracy theorist and trying to discredit him because they don't like his message.

[Cramulus]

Taibbi on Colbert:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/11/matt-taibbi-on-colbert-re_n_388793.html

[The Good Reverend Roger]

There are no leftists in America.  At least not in politics or the press.

[Jenne]

There are no leftists in America.  At least not in politics or the press.

There's left-of-Rush&Palin.  But that's about it.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

There are no leftists in America.  At least not in politics or the press.

There's left-of-Rush&Palin.  But that's about it.

But you can't go any farther right than them without hitting Atilla the Hun, so that isn't saying much.