Thursday, March 31, 2016 

The Donald: exposing the true GOP.

Can we, just for a moment, talk about the Donald?  So many things about the abortion extract from yesterday's town hall style interview with him on MSNBC are wonderful.  Like how condescending the Donald is to the person who poses the question, asking if they understood his blindingly simple response.  Like how the Donald flails helplessly in attempting to answer Chris Matthews' follow-up, until he manages to discombobulate his interrogator merely by asking his opinion on the matter, at which point it becomes apparent both are incredibly uncomfortable with discussing abortion, despite both attempting to speak from a position of authority.  Like how the Donald admits that banning abortion will lead to women going to "illegal places" in his very first response when asked how you ban it.  And obviously, how the Donald might be a monster, but he's not so much of a monster that he knows the bullshit argument the vast majority of American pro-lifers put forward, that it's not women you punish by banning abortion, it's the doctors who "profit" from the "industry".  Instead, as someone who all along has been saying the most right-wing things he can without necessarily believing in them, he says you have to punish the women who get illegal abortions, without knowing what the punishment will be.

This gives the whole game away.  Pro-lifers know they cannot hope to win the argument if the woman seeking to end her pregnancy will also be seen in the eyes of the law as guilty of accessory to fetal homicide.  Abortion might be murder, as the most vociferous pro-lifers argue, but it's the medics that carry it out who are the murderers, not the woman carrying the baby however defective her own moral code might be.  This might be completely inconsistent with the law on homicide in every other case, but such are the compromises if you want to put a stop to women being "like their prenatal children, victims of our horrific abortion policy", as Charles Camosy has it in his piece for the New York Daily News.

Hence Trump is not a true pro-lifer in their eyes, as he isn't jumping through the ideological constructs they think necessary in order to eventually be able to punish women in precisely the way he suggested.  And they're right, only for entirely the wrong reasons.  Yes, he most likely doesn't believe a word he's saying, but he's saying it because it's what he thinks his base wants to hear.  Those that do care don't go in for all this pious, oh, you can't blame the woman while doing precisely that half-way crap, they very much do blame the woman. 

Trump's brilliance, or rather luck, has been in coming up with this formula at the precise moment when social media has made it possible to be unpleasant to almost everyone and still maintain a momentum that previously would have dissipated.  It almost certainly won't win him the presidency, possibly not even the Republican nomination, but it has exposed the fissures in American politics and society both.  In all the ironies of the 2016 presidential primaries so far, that it's a populist billionaire who has done the most to expose the failings of 35 years of Reagonomics has been the most delicious of all.

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3/31/2016 07:29:00 pm | |

Monday, March 14, 2016 

In praise of not doing stupid shit.

"Imagine," said Stewart Lee, in the first episode of his new series, in his style of not meaning it while somewhat meaning it while knowing that his audience will agree with him, "James Corden watching me.  It'd be like a dog listening to classical music."

We don't however have to imagine something highly similar.  Boris Johnson this morning accused President Obama of hypocrisy for sticking his oar in over the EU referendum vote.  Denis Healey once said that being attacked by Geoffrey Howe was like being savaged by a dead sheep, a decent put down turned into the complete destruction of a lesser foe, thanks to how awful politicians generally are at verbally pummelling their opponents into submission.  Boris, who likes to think of himself as a classical sophisticate when not acting the upper class twit, is in every way far more like good ol' Bill Clinton.  A charismatic dilettante who has repeatedly cheated on his wife, with a far higher opinion of himself than has ever been warranted, continually getting away with it thanks to how he's, well, Boris.  Boris Johnson laying into Barack Obama is like watching a toddler trying to knock over Geoff Capes.  It's like watching Nick Grimshaw and Rita Ora sit in judgement of other people.  It's like Chris Evans trying his damnedest to be Jeremy Clarkson.  It's like spending however much it is for a ticket to go and see Adele when you could stay at home and listen to next door's cat fight the tom from down the road for free.

It's ignorant, pathetic and stupid is what I'm getting at.  Obama has not been, the consensus seem to be, the greatest of presidents.  Especially for one who came to office promising so much, only to achieve relatively little.  He has still without a shadow of doubt been the best US president of my lifetime thus far, and barring something astonishing happening, I would say is odds on to be the best US president of my lifetime full stop.

This much is apparent just from reading the superb extended interview/feature in the Atlantic, somewhat hopefully titled the Obama Doctrine.  Each president must have a foreign policy doctrine.  Dubya's was to act pre-emptively against threats, both perceived and real.  It didn't go well.  Obama's, by contrast, so much as he has one, is "to not do stupid shit".  This not doing stupid shit itself has not always worked out.  Intervening in Libya might not have been stupid, if say there had been a plan for handling the aftermath.  Sadly, there was no plan for handling the aftermath.  Likewise, the going along with the Saudi/Qatari plan for Syria, arming and funding jihadists, and from almost the outset demanding that Assad must go has been stupid.  It has though been vastly preferable to the alternative, active US intervention in Syria, as demanded and urged by most of Obama's advisers and appointees.

"Not doing stupid shit" is in fact Obama playing down his impact on foreign policy, as is the notion that his time in office has signalled something of a retreat from the world.  Obama has it's true not sent US troops to other countries in anything like the numbers that Bush did.  He has though given the go ahead to a "surge" in Afghanistan; intervened again in Iraq; intervened in Syria, if only against Islamic State; intervened in Libya; and also has authorised an unknown number of drone strikes in countries from Somalia to Pakistan.  This is without considering the backing given by the US to other states to carry out their wars, like in Ukraine and to the Saudis in Yemen.  Oh, and he killed Osama bin Laden.

Obama sums it up best himself:
“Where am I controversial? When it comes to the use of military power,” he said. “That is the source of the controversy. There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses. Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions. In the midst of an international challenge like Syria, you get judged harshly if you don’t follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons why it does not apply.”

Almost needless to say, most of Obama's aides and his secretaries of state, including John Kerry and a certain Hillary Clinton do follow this playbook.  Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz will without doubt follow it. Trump you can't be certain of, just as you can't be certain of anything he says, but you'd wager he'll be far more of a traditionalist than he claims he would be currently.  Clinton gets it the neck repeatedly, and deservedly, and makes clear how she would operate, saying in reference to Obama's withdrawn red line on Syria that "If you say you’re going to strike, you have to strike. There’s no choice."  Hillary was gung-ho for the Libya intervention to the point where Joe Biden is reported to have said "Hillary just wants to be Golda Meir."

Most of the reaction over here to the piece was focused on Obama's criticism of David Cameron over Libya, or as Obama apparently refers to the Libyan intervention, a "shit show".  Cameron, according to Obama, stopped paying attention, "distracted by a range of other things.”  Which is in truth a fair summary of the intervention as a whole: we went in, Gaddafi got sodomised with a knife, Dave flew to Benghazi to be garlanded by the locals, and once that was over it was time to move on.  No messing around Iraq style with trying to create a new state out of the one we destroyed; we'd just leave the Libyans to it.  What we thought we knew turned out to be wrong, and soon liberated Benghazi became a city fit to be filmed as a hellhole of anti-Americanism by Michael Bay.  A couple of MPs, including Andrew Mitchell, claimed this was all terribly unfair without really putting their all into it, for the reason that it's true.  France and ourselves were the ones who wanted the intervention for reasons known only to Sarkozy and Cameron, and Obama went along with it in the belief that this time maybe his allies would pull their weight as well as anything for a quiet life.  Instead the Americans again had to do all the heavy lifting, just as they are doing in Syria while Cameron makes a song and dance in the Commons about our magnificent Brimstone missiles that so far haven't killed any Islamic State fighters.  No wonder Obama had to make clear to Dave that 2% spending on defence was truly non-negotiable.

Obama does of course want to portray the decisions he has made in the best possible light.  It's that he does so convincingly, or Jeffrey Goldberg is skilful enough in his write-up to present it that way.  He feels constrained by the pressure put him on by the foreign policy establishment, the foreign and military funded thinktanks, the "playbookers", the Samantha Power "responsibility to protect" agitators.  He would clearly have liked to have dumped Saudi Arabia as an ally given the chance, Pakistan probably too.  You can argue that a truly radical president would have done these things, would have refused to listen to people that he believed were advising him to do "stupid shit".  You can also look back through recent American history and see that by most measures Obama's foreign policy has been relatively sane, based mostly on correcting the mistakes of his predecessors.

Whoever wins the election in November (unless there is a Sanders miracle) will almost certainly have a doctrine that abandons the not doing stupid shit rule.  Difficult as it is to believe Clinton could be worse than Trump on this score, such are the advisers she has always had by her side (Susan Rice, Power and Anne-Marie Slaughter are all long term associates), such was the way her husband used foreign policy repeatedly as a distraction from problems at home.  The rise of Corbyn here has not stopped our once similarly critical of foreign adventures prime minister from following the playbook, while his potential successors, George Osborne especially, are if anything even more minded to act.  Labour itself has a core group of MPs that have never seen a war they didn't want to get involved in, who coincidentally tend to be the most critical of Corbyn and the left.

After 8 years of Bush, Obama was the most blessed relief.  I can't help but feel we're about to plunge into the maelstrom again.

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3/14/2016 09:44:00 pm | |

Thursday, March 03, 2016 

The history of America is the history of the charlatan.

How did Donald Trump get to be where he is today, asks the Graun's leader:

And how did the US get there with him? These are the questions that matter most in the wake of his Super Tuesday victories because, whatever else may be true about Trump’s candidacy, this is emphatically not politics as usual in the United States. Politics are not normal when a charlatan can rise so rapidly to the top.

Presumably the emphasis there is meant to be on can "rise so rapidly", as otherwise the history of America is practically a history of charlatans rising to the top, or damn near it. You've got your religious ones, from William Miller to Joseph Smith to L. Ron Hubbard. You've got your political ones, Nixon, Reagan and Dubya. And then you've got your financial ones, Charles Ponzi, Bernie Madoff, Kenneth Lay and a whole myriad of others.

Not that this makes America by any means unique: every country has its hucksters and frauds.  The point surely is that in America wealth tends to give you even more of a pass than elsewhere.  I've lost count of the number of spam emails I've had advising me to adopt Trump's patented plan to increase my wages threefold, for example, which tells you how quickly other scammers catch on.

This is then transferred down to the choice offered to the American voter.  Today's spat between Mitt Romney and the Donald is a microcosm of what American democracy has become: a billionaire disagreeing, sometimes violently, with another billionaire.  The difference is that Trump, unlike his fellow oligarchs, has made clear that he can't be bought.  It's driving the Kochs and the GOP hierarchy insane, and has struck a chord with a left and right equally frustrated with how nothing seems to change, and how the promise they and their children would always be better off has been broken.  Trump is a charlatan sure, but he's a charlatan speaking the same language as those previous charlatans did, just updated for America in 2016.  It really isn't much more complicated than that.

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3/03/2016 08:26:00 pm | |

Wednesday, February 10, 2016 

Trident and the new online tribes: the song remains the same.

According to no less a person than Ian Dunt, by far the worst thing about Jeremy Corbyn is his online supporters.  This it's worth noting is a claim made about every new political movement's online base, whether true or not. The same has been said, at length, repeatedly, interminably about Cybernats and Momentum.  Now it's notably jumped across the Atlantic, where the "Bernie Bros", young, strident, male supporters of Bernie Sanders supposedly ridicule anyone and everyone, but especially women thinking of voting for Hillary Clinton.  The original article about Bernie Bros could have been almost word for word written about the far noisier contingent (at least from my experience) of obsessive Ron Paul supporters around between 2008 and 2012, and who have since disappeared apparently off the face of the planet.  Or more likely are now supporting Trump.

You don't have to be particularly partial to the views of any of these groups to note those most likely to complain about them are the very people most directly challenged by their emergence.  The most virulent Cybernats will target anyone and anything that opposes independence, but they mainly focus on the already moribund Scottish Labour party.  The main complaints about Momentum were voiced during the debate on bombing Islamic State in Syria, and were wrapped up with criticism of the Stop the War group for doing little more than encouraging lobbying of MPs.  The Bernie Bros meanwhile have been criticised by no less a person than Billy Clinton himself, while supporters of Hillary have repeatedly suggested sexism is the reason Clinton has not already sown up the Democrat nomination, rather than say her support for every war going or her speeches to Wall Street execs in exchange for sackfuls of cash.  That it has since emerged much the same tactics were used against Obama back in 2008, if on a far lesser scale, doesn't seem to have stopped the moaning.

The point is clear, regardless.  The old are hardly likely to take the shock of the new gladly.  The media often finds itself siding with those claiming to be victimised by these online hoodlums, not least because the feedback experience has not on the whole been a happy one.  The Graun recently decided to stop opening comments on articles on Islam, race and immigration because the tenor had become so unpleasant.  Commentators who once only had to stomach the odd letter in green ink suddenly found themselves getting torn to shreds, called every name under the sun for only doing what they had for years.  Some attempted and still do try to engage, while others long since abandoned looking "below the line".  Almost as a whole the "mainstream" media finds itself under siege: apparently loathed and mistrusted by their own readers, increasingly ridiculed and ignored by politicians no longer on the fringes, their business models threatened by the collapse in print advertising and sales, while adblockers and social media timeline rips of their content do similar damage online.

And yet, at the same time, these groups, whether in the media or politics, still leverage remarkable power and often treat their opponents with far more contempt and arrogance than they have been subjected to.  Let's take as an example the debate, or rather lack of, on Trident, although you could just as easily focus on the response to the campaign against the Rhodes statue at Oriel college in Oxford, or practically any other issue where young and therefore stupid seems to come against older and wiser.

Trident it's worth reflecting has never sat easily with Labour, even post unilateralism.  95 Labour MPs voted against renewal back in 2007, leaving Tony Blair to rely on Tory support.  Not much truly has changed since then in the way of the threats we face, while the cost of replacing Trident has even on the lowest estimate increased.  The other change, far more key, is that Labour now has a leader who is against replacing Trident.  This leader has also taken the opportunity to appoint a defence secretary who is like minded, and to commission a review of the party's defence policy, both moves he is fully entitled to make.  Similarly, the party conference was within its right to take a vote on Trident that upheld the position in Labour's 2015 manifesto, to replace Trident.

Which group then do you think is the one screaming about the utter insanity of the other, indulging in shouting matches at meetings of the parliamentary party and chucking around insults at the first opportunity?  Not, as you might expect, the one that was so criticised for talking about blood being on the hands of MPs voting for airstrikes in Syria.  It is in fact the one that is in favour of spending billions of pounds on weapons of mass destruction while dismissing every critique, whether it be on cost, the potential for the technology to be out of date before the new class of submarines are so much as built, or on whether or not Trident is relevant in the 21st century.

It could well be right that Emily Thornberry's references to the potential for underwater drones to make the seas "transparent" is, as Lord West apparently phoned the Today programme to say, nonsense.  Lord Hutton (of Furness, which somewhat gives the game away) might be right to quote the former chief of the defence staff Lord Boyce who said we're more likely to put a man on Mars within the next six months than for the seas to become transparent in the next 30 years.  It could also be that there will emerge a technology or new weapons system within the next 30 years that does threaten Trident; 15 years ago we certainly didn't see drones playing as key a role in military action as they do now.  Hutton says you only have to look at those doing the nay-saying now to see through their new arguments for opposing; similarly, you only to have bear witness to the people who believe they know best to recognise this is about far more than just what's ultimately right for the country's defence.

The bluster and language is always the same.  They talk about "multilateral disarmament" while not for a moment believing that it is either possible, or so much as worth spending a moment attempting.  They make as many references as they can to "deterring", "nuclear blackmail" or "our independent nuclear deterrent".  They are not just convinced, they are absolutely certain that the public backs their position of renewal to the absolute hilt and that anything else is electoral suicide.  They might even bring "working people" into it, if they feel the need, just to stress how these middle class do-gooders from London don't understand how Joe Six Pints from Leeds feels about turning our missiles into plowshares.

Not that they can always get their lines straight.  Madeleine Moon, who Cameron today quoted at PMQs following her tweet about the PLP meeting, was daft enough to bring up how it's not just our nuclear weapon, it's also Nato's nuclear weapon.  Obviously it's our completely independent nuclear deterrent, but it's also Nato's totally independent nuclear deterrent.

Moon is still preferable to Jamie Reed MP, who first distinguished himself on the day of Jeremy Corbyn winning the leadership by congratulating him and resigning in the same tweet.  His piece for the Spectator still needs to be read to be believed.  And even then it's still not believable.  According to Reid, the party has deliberately abandoned political professionalism.  Trident renewal is not just Labour party policy, it is the "settled will" of the country.  This is presumably based on the number of votes parties committed to Trident renewal received at the election.  By the same yardstick there are whole legions of policies we know are hugely unpopular that would also be the settled will of the country, but let's move on.  Renewal is not just right, it is "morally" right.  It's always a bad idea to bring morals into politics full stop, but on Trident?  Blimey.

So it goes on.  "We should take great pride in being the standard bearers for one of Attlee’s most important legacies," Reed says.  The Attlee cabinet was so proud of its own decision that it didn't inform parliament for two years.  There is no credible case for scrapping Trident, Reed continues, and those that claim there is have the gall to call those supporting renewal right-wing!  There's nothing right-wing about protecting skilled jobs, taking pride in those communities or in seeking multilateral disarmament!  In about Reed's only salient point, he remarks there's no point in the party splitting over an issue that can't be influenced from opposition and will in any case be decided by 2020.  But by God, he'll complain about it and make absurd assumptions and generalisations, as it's nothing less than an informed choice to pursue electoral defeat.  "The leadership knows that an anti-Trident policy will lead to rejection at the ballot box. It knows that this is a litmus test of credibility. The leadership knows that an anti-Trident position means taking a pass on power; it’s an open-armed, wide-eyed, deliberate embrace of the wilderness."

In actual fact, the polling rather suggests that while there is a majority in favour of Trident renewal, it very much varies on how you ask the question and especially if you mention the cost.  But Reed obviously knows better, and knows this is the leadership deliberately making the party unelectable.  That's how deranged Corbyn and the leadership are.  Much the same points are made by Rafael Behr in the Graun.  He comments:
 
And everything about the conduct of that debate will accelerate Labour’s spiral away from power because it won’t really be a big, new strategic argument about the future of national defence, and whether Britain should be a nuclear power. It will be an old, parochial little bicker about the party’s torrid history and whether Labour really cares what the majority of people in Britain think.

It's fairly clear which side wants to have a strategic argument about the future of national defence and which wants an old, parochial little bicker.  It's the same side discombobulated by these new groupings, and rather than attempt to understand them, insults them.  It's the same side that as Gary Younge puts it, first derided Corbyn's base and has been throwing a tantrum ever since about being unable to win them over.  It's the same side that views and presents itself as the sensible, progressive one, in tune with the man on the street, while being just as removed as any Bernie Bro or CyberNat.  It's the same side the media has allied itself with, whether improperly or otherwise, and yet still wonders why it's regarded as part of the establishment, the problem rather than the solution.  Delusion affects all sides.  Some just delude themselves to a greater extent than others.

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2/10/2016 09:34:00 pm | |

Wednesday, November 07, 2012 

That much of the same then.

It was apparent by early morning our time that Obama had won a second term as US president.  Republican spokesmen were already reduced to pleading for journalists to wait for more districts to report in the swing states, ignoring the inevitable, while on the other news channels presenters were getting their excuses in early.  Bill O'Reilly no doubt spoke for much of his own constituency when he whined of how "it isn't a traditional America anymore" and "the white establishment is now the minority", as though the former were something of a revelation and the latter was anything approaching the truth.

The fundamental lesson from yesterday for the Republicans is that their base has become so extreme that undecided voters aren't prepared to give their candidates the benefit of the doubt.  Whether it's religion, abortion, gay marriage or immigration, one or the other tends to make them think twice.  In case this wasn't clear enough, yesterday also saw four states legalise gay marriage after plebiscites, while two decriminalised cannabis for personal use, something unthinkable just a few years ago.  Moreover, a staggering 68% of single women voted for Obama, according to one exit poll, while 54% did overall.  No surprise then that the two Republican candidates for the senate, who respectively said that a pregnancy as a result of rape was "something that God intended to happen", and that "the female body has ways of trying to shut that thing down [pregnancy]" if it was a "legitimate rape" both failed to win their seats.

This isn't to understate the fact that America remains a politically polarised nation.  It isn't so much polarised between the Republicans and Democrats anymore though as it is between the Democrats and moderate Republicans, who often share all but identical policies.  It's that moderate Republicans are a dying breed, as the senate race showed: just as Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell cost the GOP in 2010, so Todd Akin and Richard Mourduck did this time round.  Mitt Romney's campaign only started to pick up when he finally shifted towards the centre at the last moment, his team having realised that what just about won him the Republican primaries wasn't going to get him the presidency.  As much as there were certain local factors that helped Obama, such as the General Motors bailout (that Romney opposed) in Ohio, Romney has no excuse for failing to triumph in Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Virginia, the other four states he needed to win to reach the 270 required electoral college votes.  Only in Florida did it turn out to be close.

As with Bush in 2004, this was an election the incumbent should have lost.  Only the most devoted Obama supporters would argue that he's been a great president rather than an adequate one, such was the expectation following his '08 campaign.  Combined with the policy failures mentioned yesterday and the stuttering recovery, he ought to have suffered the same fate as George Bush Snr and Jimmy Carter, both single term presidents defeated by charismatic opponents.  Except, as with Kerry in 04, the opposition chose a poor candidate from a poor field.  The only major difference was that Kerry was ruthlessly smeared by the Republican machine, whereas Romney has been brought low both by his telling the truth (the 47% video) and his party's desire for ideological purity over power.

For the Republicans to win in 2016, one of two paths have to be followed. Either the party adjusts to a changed nation and realises that it has specific policies and prejudices which are holding it back among women and Latinos to name but two groups, or it can go for the Cameron model: attempt to detoxify itself without genuinely changing much of substance, while coalescing around an attractive leader.  At this precise moment it seems dubious as to whether either will happen, such is the influence and power of the hard right, but 8 years out of power is bound to concentrate minds.

We can then only hope that, as Obama said, the best is yet to come.  I think, on the whole, we'll settle for that much of the same.

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11/07/2012 11:16:00 pm | |

Tuesday, November 06, 2012 

4 more years of much the same.

It seems all but redundant at this point to say almost anything about the US presidential race.  Someone, somewhere, will have had the exact same thought and either blogged or tweeted it or posted it on Facebook.  In all likelihood, everything that could have been said was said months ago, and the only thing that's even slightly enlivened the contest was Obama's hopeless showing in the first debate.  Unless the polls and the vast majority of psephologists are catastrophically wrong, Obama will have another four years in the White House, and much of the rest of the world will once again sigh with relief.

Looking back on four years ago, I wrote that Obama's presidency would be "transformational". Hell, I even found myself in tears at the sight of Jesse Jackson weeping with joy, witnessing something he thought would never happen in his lifetime. The relief at the end of 8 miserable, literally torturous years under Bush was palpable. That it wasn't just any Democrat who won, but one with a seeming vision for his country and indeed the world, one who seemed to understand a new generation was emerging fundamentally disconnected from the cultural and historical battles of the past, was more than enough to overlook any doubts about how he would govern in reality.

Just as Michael Moore described Bill Clinton as the greatest ever Republican president, so then must Obama be judged, so skewed to the right has American politics become. By his own measure, he's failed on a number of crucial policies: Guantanamo Bay remains open; his healthcare policy is  the sheerest of safety nets; the economy, although positively booming compared to our own, is growing slowly, while unemployment remains stubbornly high; and his "surge" in Afghanistan has failed to either defeat the Taliban or bring them to the negotiation table.  He has also exercised powers that Bush acquired but didn't use: the US president can now assassinate American citizens without any due process, and be cheered by so-called liberals for doing so.  There may not be many who'll miss Anwar al-Awlaki, yet what possible crime did his son commit other than being born into the wrong family that justified his subsequent death?

While Obama can boast about killing his near namesake, one of the campaign promises he did deliver on, his foreign policy has been disappointingly shallow.  His vaunted speech in Cairo changed little, even if he did eventually drop support for Hosni Mubarak, albeit when it was already clear the Egyptian dictator could not remain in power.  The Arab spring has changed little: the US has continued to support friendly authoritarians until the very last moment.  On Israel/Palestine, American weakness has never been so apparent: rather than challenge Israeli behaviour on the continued building of settlements in the West Bank, Benjamin Netanyahu was twice allowed to lecture Obama in the White House, knowing the Israeli lobby is so powerful that the president would have to sit and take it.  The only positive to be taken is that American intransigence combined with opposition from the the Israeli military and security apparatus has prevented an attack on Iran's nuclear programme.  Whether the stand-off will continue once the election is out of the way, with Netanyahu's supposed "red line" fast approaching, is anyone's guess.

At the same time, Obama has massively expanded the drone assassination programme.  In recent weeks there have reports of drones flying in Mali; other countries where attacks have taken place include Somalia and Yemen as well as Pakistan, which has long bore the brunt of attacks.  Even taking at face value the insistence that such attacks have emasculated al-Qaida central's leadership, the number of civilians killed in the process is horrifying.  As the US refuses to do body counts, we'll never know exactly how many have become collateral damage, but the estimates by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism are terrible enough.  Just as the Bush administration considered itself above international law, so has Obama's.

It really doesn't need to be said that Obama is a massively better option than Romney, both for America and the world, such has been the ineptitude of the Republican campaign up until all but the last moment.  Romney was the best of a very bad lot, and he's a man who's spent his political career shapeshifting according to the situation: he was a moderate governor of Massachusetts, to the point where he introduced something very similar to Obamacare, a hard right-winger during the Republican primaries, and since the debates he's been the pragmatic businessman who can get the economy moving again.  A more credible, charismatic Republican candidate could well have strolled to victory; should Obama win, he will do so having smashed the rule that you can't get re-elected with unemployment of around 8%.

Such is the ridiculous nature of the American electoral cycle, Obama will have two years maximum before he becomes a lame duck.  Freed from the need to get himself re-elected, in theory he has the opportunity to be the president he promised to be: a fresh figure unencumbered by the failures and ideological rigidity of the past.  More likely is he'll just deliver more of the same, doing much that Bush did, except with less accountability.  Reduced to choosing the lesser of two evils, as we also are, even I at times feel like this now famous little girl.

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11/06/2012 10:36:00 pm | |

Wednesday, November 05, 2008 

Barack knew.

For all that has already been written, is currently being written, and will be written, for all of it that will come to be seen as the over-enthusiastic euphoria-influenced dementia that it was, for all of the similarly deluded denunciations of how America has in effect just signed away its freedom, it's still too easy to play down just how honestly transformational Barack Obama's election is and will be. Not because of the scale of the victory: whilst winning a more convincing victory than either of Bush's, it was not the landslide that some claim it was, broadly in line with the more successful Democratic victories; not because Obama won the popular vote; not because Obama overcame the GOP smear machine despite the filth that was consistently thrown at him; not because of the turnout, however unprecedented it was; but because of the one thing that never should have mattered: the colour of his skin.

Despite all of the hope and the expectation, we weren't willing to believe that he really could win, or really had won until McCain conceded. If McCain had ran his campaign with the same magnaminity, respect, grace, heartfeltness and humility with which he delivered his concession speech, the result could surely have been different. McCain always was a fundamentally decent, honourable man, undone on this occasion by his volatility, both in his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate, even if she did help to deliver the base, and then his behaviour over the crash, first claiming the economy was fundamentally sound, next cancelling his campaign to go back to Washington to attempt to fix things single-handed. He cannot be blamed for how the campaign was run; the smears were always going to happen, regardless of the candidate. In an ideal world, he would surely be offered some sort of job by Obama; thanks to those smears, that seems highly unlikely.

Before that speech, the paranoia was still overwhelming. We feared the polls had been wrong; we feared that the exit polls, like in 2004, were wrong; we feared the Bradley effect; we feared, that somehow, the Republicans would manage to steal a second election, if not a third. As it was, we need not have worried. Pennsylvania should have tipped us off, but it took Fox News, of all stations, to call Ohio for Obama, for it to finally begin to sink in. Florida followed, and before we knew it, the game, such as it was, was over. That was the point when I went to bed, and unlike the others, my tears waited until this morning. Not at McCain's dignity; not at Obama's beautifully worded, measured and delivered victory speech, with a crowd more befitting of Glastonbury than a political rally; but instead at the tears on the face of Jesse Jackson, the old warrior, the man who only a few months ago had wanted to cut the president-elect's nuts out, who had never believed that he would see an African-American win the presidency in his life-time, now overwhelmed by the emotion of seeing the reality before his eyes. For those of us who have been critical of the fatuity of the American dream when so many in that nation remain downtrodden without any real hope, this was the shattering of our cynicism happening in front of our noses. This doesn't just show the American child of whatever skin colour, gender or sexuality that anything is possible; it shows the world's children that anything is possible.

We should not give in to wilful exaggeration, or not confront the sad fact that from here the only way is inexorably down. Barack Obama becomes the 44th president of the United States of America at a time when few would want the job. His first task is to tame the recession which is coming, to rebuild an economy which like ours has for too long relied on the financial sector for its profits and growth. He faces two wars, one which appears to be winding down, with another which seems to coming up to boil. He faces a world which thanks to his predecessor has turned against America, no longer willing to listen to the chutzpah and bullying which has so often been the tone and content of diplomacy over the last 8 years. The amount of expectation on one man's shoulders would be enough to crush a lesser person's will. He will inevitably, especially to the European left, and maybe even the American anti-war left, be a disappointment, as the pragmatism which he will need to display will take precedence over populist measures. A swift withdrawal from Iraq, however welcome, cannot be countenanced whilst there is still the possibility that the former Sunni insurgents who now form the Awakening councils or what remains of them could go back to war, especially against a Shia administration that may yet abandon them. Likewise, in Afghanistan, where Obama seems to favour something resembling a "surge", we cannot expect him to come to the realisation that others have that Afghanistan cannot possibly exist as a democratic sovereign state in its current form. Deals with the Taliban, or what is described as it, will have to be considered. There is unlikely to be any significant difference between Obama's policy on Russia's re-emergence than that of the current administration.

The biggest problem Obama will face though is keeping together the incredibly fragile coalition that has brought him to power. America is still frighteningly polarised between the two parties, especially considering how little they often disagree over, even with Obama securing 52% of the vote to McCain's 46%. Overwhelmingly, the reason why he won that share of the vote is the economy, and those that voted for him will not be instant returns next time round. While some may have decided to be colour-blind this year, with voters directly in some cases saying to canvassers that they were "voting for the nigger", that will not last. While the Republican machine may be temporarily broken and bowed today, what Hillary Clinton long ago described as the "vast right-wing conspiracy" will shortly be doing everything in its power to make Obama a one-term president. The young that turned out yesterday, empowered by belief in this one man, will be the apathetic of the years to come. Whilst Obama is not Tony Blair, we should not dismiss the possibility that we don't yet know what we've let ourselves in for.

Tonight though such things are for another day. Today we should just enjoy the fact that after 8 years of seemingly endless war, abuses of power, contempt, arrogance, ignorance and imperial hubris, the underdog who almost became the establishment candidate has triumphed. Another world is possible. We need to hope, once again, that Barack Obama can begin to deliver on his and that exceptional promise.

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11/05/2008 09:04:00 pm | |

Tuesday, November 04, 2008 

Till tomorrow.

No point whatsoever in adding to the millions of words currently going unread, so here's the whole presidential election cycle as one very large image. Oh, and if Obama doesn't win, we just might be fucked.

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11/04/2008 11:03:00 pm | |

Friday, October 31, 2008 

And now for something completely different...

When things are getting you down, you can at least rely on Melanie Phillips to be a cool head of reason in a sea of insanity. She is incidentally here quoting someone else, but the point stands:

The flames of the urban uprisings in France, of the train bombings in Madrid, of the subway blasts in London and the school massacre in Beslan are only handwriting on the wall. The OPEC aggression against the US economy, the formation of gas cartels by Iran, Qatar and Venezuela with the enticement to Russia to join; all that are just ominous signs of what is ahead... The penetration of our systems, including educational, legal, bureaucratic, technological, defense and security by the Jihadists is ongoing and is projected to expand...

That was yesterday. Today she writes this:

So what if The One [Obama] should actually lose next week? The brainwashed hysteria whipped up on his behalf is, to put it mildly, dangerous.

Quite so. Thinking that there are jihadists under the bed though is perfectly rational.

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10/31/2008 10:02:00 pm | |

Monday, September 01, 2008 

All virgins are liars honey.

I haven't blogged much about the incessant background chorus which is the US presidential election mainly because I'm probably one of the few political creatures that isn't fascinated by the whole thing. The Democratic convention last week didn't help matters: it takes something to make our political parties' soirées at the seaside look meaningful and not like an exercise in navel gazing which both the politicos and the journalists spend getting lashed, but last week's convention and its screechingly mawkish sentimentality, which featured Obama's daughters on the stage talking to Daddy whilst he was elsewhere, the Hillary and Bill show where the least likable couple in political history failed culpably to get over their sour grapes at losing, and then Obama making a thunderously overrated speech, like all the rest, surrounded by a Roman-Greco backdrop which the Republicans themselves couldn't have constructed if they'd wanted him to look like a pseud, succeeded admirably.

All this was meant to have set-up McCain for what would have been a fight-back; instead what we've seen has been natural disaster and, well, human disaster. You can't plan for events like Gustav disrupting your enthronement, but McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate must in the pantheon of political choices go down as one of the worst of all time, without hyperbole, although who knows, come November I may be eating my words. This was a shockingly cynical but also shallow choice, at a stroke rendering the Republican attack on Obama as inexperienced dead in the water. If this was a further sop for the PUMAs, then it was one based on a flawed idea of what the average Hillary supporting Democrat was after: Palin doesn't just oppose abortion, but also opposes it for rape and incest victims. She has thanks to her reputation as an evangelical, NRA-supporting, global warming sceptic appealed to the Republican Christian conservative base, but on every other ground she comes up short.

To be completely juvenile and dwell on irrelevancy for a paragraph, that includes on naming her children. I mean seriously, Bristol, Track, Trig, Willow and Piper? We expect celebrities to call their children stupid, pretentious things, whether it be Peaches, Pixie, Apple, Shiloh, Romeo, Brooklyn and all the other assorted nightmares, but politicians generally have slightly more sense. Except for David Cameron, of course, but then he fits the profile alluded to. Bristol is apparently named after Bristol Bay in Alaska, which I am reliably informed by someone who used to live 12 miles from where Palin was formerly mayor is a huge salmon processing place which always smells like death, but Wikipedia informs us that it was named by James Cook in honour of the Admiral Earl of Bristol, so it takes its name from our own delightful city. Anton Vowl alludes to where next if Palin was to have any more children she could take influence from - Swindon, Bradford, Middlesbrough, to which I can only add that I don't think anyone has yet thought of calling their offspring Scunthorpe, Cockermouth (which is actually a rather lovely little town) or Llanfairpwllgwyngyll.

The issue that has emerged has however not been Palin herself having any more children, but that of her daughter, the aforementioned Bristol who it has been revealed is 5 months pregnant. Whether this was released because certain left-wing blogs in the US were scurrilously and completely erroneously alleging that Bristol had in fact given birth to Palin's last child, Trig, who was born with Down's Syndrome, is unclear, but it has nonetheless rather energised comment as only something resembling a scandal involving a politician can.

This shouldn't as some have already argued be either something to score points over or to even mention for fear that it will be seen, quite plausibly, as the lowest form of politics. The facts however do speak for themselves: Palin is an opponent of "explicit" sex education and has supported abstinence only education in its place. After all, if a politician's own daughter's experience appears to suggest that abstinence only education doesn't work, isn't that something that ought to be highlighted? Plausibly, but it will still be seen as it ought to be of bringing family into something that most will highly sympathise with; after all, we all make mistakes and this is one that Palin's daughter most likely bitterly regrets. There might be more in it if Palin additionally opposed contraception, but she doesn't. Probably the best case I've seen for it to be any sort of issue is made by innerbrat.

More pertinently I think that the real issue here, away from the fact that Palin doesn't seem to have been properly vetted by McCain's people, further suggesting that she was on-the-cuff choice designed to also pull some of the attention away from Obama's speech, is that it's been swiftly announced that Bristol will also be marrying the father of the child. Considering that she's already 5 months pregnant and there doesn't seem to have been any sign at all that there was to be a marriage prior to Palin's swift ascension to being McCain's number two, this seems to be even more cynical than our own Tessa Jowell's swift separation from her husband after the mortgage debacle. Quite aside from whether this is her daughter's own wishes and whether getting married at 17 is even anything resembling a good idea, it also rather exposes Palin's opposition to same-sex marriage, which she detests to such an extent that she supported a constitutional amendment which would have denied state health benefits to same-sex couples. The familiar argument against it is that it debases marriage and the sanctity of the institution; what more actually offends the institution than shotgun weddings in this day and age, either to appease a Christian conservative base or to spare a vice-presidential candidate's potential blushes?

Now, it might possibly be that her daughter fully intended to marry the father, and that theirs is a loving and committed relationship. Maybe I'm just being too cynical over potential cynicism, or then again, maybe I'm being realistic about the sort of relationships which most 17-year-olds have. In any case, Obama's campaign has quite rightly said that it won't be so much as mentioning it again. That doesn't matter though: already both left and right are squabbling online as only they can. The real question is exactly what those who previously hailed Palin as their sort of person based on her beliefs really think when they're not required to mind their language. As Michael Tomasky points out, Karl Rove thought that the revelation about Bush's DUI cost him three or four points with evangelical voters. We all know that such rigidity of dogma can only result in inevitable hypocrisy, but those self-same conservative warriors might not think too highly of her mother's skills as a parent, and that might just be enough to put the nail in the coffin of McCain's gamble.

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9/01/2008 11:59:00 pm | |

Thursday, June 05, 2008 

Barack knows.

When even the Sun, doubtless directly influenced by Murdoch's recent comments on the Democratic presidential candidate, praises to high heaven the first African-American to contest the White House, it's hard not to acknowledge that something has fundamentally changed, both in American society and also in American politics for Barack Obama to have finally won his party's nomination.

While it's easy to overstate his credentials, it's clear that Obama is certainly the most liberal presidential candidate for a generation, coming directly after what will certainly go down as one of, if not the most right-wing president of at least the last century. The hope that this signals the beginning of the end of the culture wars which have split America completely down the middle is probably still for now a pipe dream; it may well nature to take its course for that to be finally brought to a close.

It does however signify a generational shift. This wasn't just a rejection of the last 8 years; it was a rejection of the last 20. For those with a visceral dislike for Hillary Clinton, the slow collapse of her campaign, with her standing for nothing but her own personal vanity, believing from the beginning that she had a divine right to not just become the Democratic candidate, but also to become president, the last few months were little short of joyous. For someone who had spent their entire political career being the only woman in the nation with balls, even if she only wore them from her ears, her resorting to shallow femininity and even less feasibly, vulnerability before finally simple delusional intransigence, was completely shameless. Even with her plans for healthcare, and her defence of the right to choose, her comments on how she would "obliterate" Iran if it launched an attack on Israel using weapons which it doesn't have showed how the difference between her and John McCain were she to have won the candidacy would have been so slight as to warrant the spoiling of a ballot.

A little charisma can, as we've discovered to our cost, be a dangerous thing. The last thing that should be done is to give in to the hero worship towards Obama that some on the left both here and in America have displayed. As inspiring and hopeful as his campaign has been up until now, enough to make you wistful to wonder where our equivalent may come from, he's not the full package and doubtless we will be disappointed time and again from now until November as he tacks towards the right to head off some of McCain and the Republicans jibes. Already he's having to somewhat understandably row back on his pledge to talk to Iran and Cuba without pre-conditions, as welcome as that would be, purely because going too far all at once from the position which has been in the ascendance since the Iranian revolution causes irrational worry about just what else he might do. For all his rousing if ultimately vacuous rhetoric, he has to prove that he genuinely does have the power to both change the country and to unite it, and set out exactly how he intends to do so.

The first thing he could do to move towards that is to not give into the facile and desperate demands of some within the Democrats to appoint Hillary as his running mate. Despite her undoubted appeal to older voters and the white working classes yet to be convinced of Obama, she also still stands for the battles of the late 90s. She may have been right in denouncing the vast right-wing conspiracy which nearly brought her husband down, even if he was a liar caught with his pants around his ankles, but America desperately needs to move on, however painful in the short-term it might be for him and hurtful for Hillary herself. The dream would have been for the other main Democratic candidate, John Edwards, to join him, someone with undoubted appeal to the working class, but he's made clear that he doesn't want to be the prospective VP again after 2004. Most of his other options are ones that we in this country have barely and if at all have heard of, but he needs someone who can reach that parts that he either has trouble with or that have rejected him so far, but either James Webb or Ted Strickland of those already in frame appear on the surface to offer the most.

Secondly, he has to be prepared to take the Republicans on at their own game, something which both Al Gore and John Kerry failed to do. The Republicans will fight the only way they know how, as dirtily as they can without completely turning the electorate off, and Obama has to be ready to rebutt fiercely and repeatedly every claim and smear which they make. They're going to indulge if not backup those that have been claiming he's a Muslim, that he has the most "liberal" voting record in the Senate, and that he isn't "American" enough. They're going to use Jeremiah Wright against him, even if there might actually be more understanding if they actually listened to portions of what he said and how some have become embittered and almost ashamed to be American. They'll put his comments on guns, religion and small towns on billboards and adverts even if truer words had never been spoken.

The choice, whether from here or in America seems stark. Does the country want a continuation of the last 20 years, or does it want to attempt to start afresh? Does it want to continue an unwinnable war which should never have been fought or does it want to keep spending unaffordable billions on it for the next 100 years? Does it want a 71-year-old man who is by anyone's standards remarkable, honourable and indefatigable, but who offers just more of the same, or the 46-year-old whom, if doesn't quite want to rip it up and start again, wants fundamental change that the other candidate simply isn't interested in? If I was being pessimistic, and it's often difficult not to be, I'd fear they'd still plump for McCain. The hope, and the hope in this case is so important, has to be that Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States.

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6/05/2008 10:33:00 pm | |

Saturday, May 31, 2008 

Murdoch and Obama sitting in a tree?

Rupert Murdoch's lavishing praise for Barack Obama, while stopping short of a complete endorsement, makes it look increasingly likely that the Dirty Digger is intending to swing his stalwart support from the Republicans over to the Democrats come the election.

The reason why Murdoch's gambit is so fascinating is that Obama on most issues is far to the left of Murdoch, and certainly far to the left of the Fox News channel, the New York Post and the Sun, whom lest we forget, former Murdoch editor Andrew Neil told us to read if we wanted to know what he's thinking. It's potentially even more eye-catching that Murdoch switching his support from the Conservatives to New Labour in 1997; Obama is certainly further left than Tony Blair ever was.

As always however, this isn't Murdoch going soft in the head in his adage: it's his typical, some would say cunning, others heartless thinking which abandons politicians or even whole political parties once they are no longer any use to him or when it's obvious that their power is ebbing away. While the presidential election is probably going to be tighter than the polls currently suggest, it's still Obama's to lose at this point. Murdoch, as we know, backs winners. Some Labour figures might take heart from the fact that Murdoch has of yet not showed anything like the praise he gave to Obama to David Cameron, or indeed to the Conservatives as a whole. The Sun especially is still notably sniffy, asking recently exactly what George Osborne would do differently to Alastair Darling.

The contradiction here though is that if Murdoch is close to switching to Obama, then no one yet has informed Fox News, who were at the forefront of the Pastor Wright fiasco, repeating the video of his speech asking his congregation to say "Goddamn America" over and over. Only last weekend a guest joked and laughed about the idea of Obama (and (correction) Osama) being assassinated, while Karl Rove, turd blossom himself, having left the White House is now a regular pundit. There's no prospect of the station's notorious right-wing bias being toned down, but if the network starts being fairer to the prospective Democratic candidate, John McCain just might start to worry.

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5/31/2008 10:19:00 pm | |

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