From the Jed Report.
Change is coming November 4, 2008.
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Category: Videos
[digg-reddit-me]The rumor of a tape with Michelle Obama using a slur against white people has finally been substantiated and Barack Obama has been caught in a lie! I am disillusioned.
On to the videotape:
Thanks to Andrew Sullivan and John Cole for finally getting the word out there.
This is almost as serious as Dunkin Donuts’ promulgation of terrorism. Almost.
A few months ago, I spent a long sleepless night trying to find an old video cassette from my childhood that had a 1970s animated version of Noah’s ark that I remembered. When I finally found it, the cassette had deteriorated to such an extent that neither the color nor the sound was coherent. Without knowing the name of this particular trilogy, and barely remembering many of the details, it took me (and my brothers and sister who also remembered the tv movie) hours more before we found it.
Shamus Culhane, one of the foremost early animators at Disney, wrote, directed, and created a series in the late 1970s, retelling the story of Noah’s ark with a decidedly political slant. At the time, the politics largely passed me by unnoticed. Even when recalling the story, it seemed more ridiculous than political. One of the main characters of the series is a dragon – the last of the red hot dragons – who survived the apocalyptic flood by holding his breath. The dragon feels old and useless and is saddened by the fact that he will be the last of his species – until two young and rambunctious crocodile hatchlings adopt him as a grandfather. Then of course, there is the lion who, en route to becoming king of the beasts, demonstrates that he is also the clutziest of animals – “feet up”. All ridiculous, and funny in a way that is best appreciated by preschoolers. But what these pratfalls and silly asides distract us from is the political turmoil and theological arguments that this Noah trilogy is all about.
My sister remembered the ravens singing, with their leader the crocodile, and the two sidekick wolves, “Anarchy! Anarchy!” as they plotted to take possession of the last dry bit of land on earth. Noah, at one point, scolds the animals for taking advantage of the welfare system of the ark instead of setting off on their own as is God’s plan. The story demonstrates at least a half dozen political and theological concepts and yet manages to amuse preschoolers.
Which is part of my point – as I have been unable to get my hands on much more than small portions of the shows since I watched it many years ago, and my memory of the shows is rather incomplete – my point here is mainly to wonder at the power of the subconscious.
When the memory of this trilogy began to come back to me, I would remember how this line or that line from the series would come to my mind in an appropriate situation – with the source always somewhat obscured. I had absorbed these lessons, these ideas, these lines from the show and then forgotten the source. Upon identifying the source again, I was elated – which is why I stayed up through much of the night trying to track it down.
In case anyone is interested, the trilogy I am referring to is listed at IMDB: Noah’s Animals, The Last of the Red Hot Dragons, and The King of the Beasts.
Someone had the foresight to post three clips from the second part of Culhane’s Noah trilogy which you can watch to give you a taste of the series as a whole:
[digg-reddit-me]Rachel Ray was outed as a terrorist sympathizer and Dunkin Donuts was declared the official coffee of Al Qaeda ((Munchkins were declared an essential part of the ideal pre-suicide bombing meal.)) as Michelle Malkin, super-heroine extraordinaire, protected Americans from the jihadist message hidden within a recent Dunkin Donut commercial.
We should all be thankful that Malkin is out there, patrolling our culture, and protecting us from this filth.
Thanks to Malkin’s heroically supersensitive ability to be extremely offended (and to get other people to follow her ((Or is it “sheeple”?)) ), Dunkin Donuts has finally renounced terrorism and removed this ad from circulation.
Some liberal pansies may ask when a scarf is just a scarf. But what these liberals don’t get is that patriotism is not a function of “loving” one’s country; patriotism is not about wanting to make America a better place; and patriotism is certainly not about “independence.” And treason does not include things like deceiving a nation to start a war of choice, or looting the government treasury, or allowing our sworn enemy to determine our foreign policy. ((Oddly, as awful as all of these are, none of them necessarily fit the bill of “disloyalty to one’s nation.”))
What patriots like Michelle Malkin get is that patriotism and treason are not about intentions and actions, but about style. I know Michelle Malkin is a patriot because she is always on the lookout for traitors (who all happen to be Democrats.) She also talks about patriotism a lot, and I’m sure she wears a flag pin all the time (even though I could find a picture of her wearing one for this article.) Rachel Ray is obviously a jihadist because she wore a scarf that looks kind of like a traditional Arab headdress. That’s also how you can tell that Arabs hate America – because so many of them wear these keffiyehs.
That’s why everyone can see how ridiculous it is that presidential candidate (and super-secret Muslim) Barack Obama considers himself a patriot. He said he stopped wearing flag pins because people used them as substitutes for “true patriotism.” What he doesn’t get is that patriotism is only about the fashion statements.
And as for those jihadists at Dunkin Donuts who claimed to not know what a keffiyeh was, Malkin has a ready-made response:
Ignorance is no longer an excuse. In post-9/11 America, vigilance must never go out of style.
We should all be thankful that Dunkin Donuts had the courage to back down after the threats of boycotting spooked it’s fearless leader. And we should all be thankful that we live in a glorious liberal democracy where such bullying is possible. What better way is there to use our freedoms than to boycott those who wear items of clothing that resemble items of clothing from other nations?
Some may call such fashion-policing xenophobic neo-McCarthyism. But Malkin knows it is true patriotism.
The previous post reminded me of this classic Will Ferrell skit:
[digg-reddit-me]It’s becoming more and more clear between Bob Barr’s Libertarian bid for the presidency and Ron Paul’s continued campaign that George W. Bush has done more than almost any political figure to resurrect the libertarian movement.
The energy motivating this movement is still there, seeking an outlet, even as Ron Paul’s campaign has been stymied. This libertarianism will be disgusted by McCain’s visions of an American empire; and it will not be satisfied with Obama’s pragmatism, though some may hold their nose and vote for who they see as the lesser evil. The assimilation of libertarian ideas into the mainstream Democratic party ((The ideas having gained prominence in a large part due to the ascendance of Mountain West as a potential Democratic stronghold.)) will not be able to satisfy the revolutionary and vaguely anarchist ((Which is an unfair characterization of many libertarians, but the tendency towards anarchism does color the movement as a whole.)) goals of this movement.
While libertarianism is necessarily mainly concerned with process, the Ron Paul Revolution, and most of the rest of the animating forces behind libertarianism today are more ideological. It is this focus on ideology, on radicalism, on a refusal to compromise that leads me to reject libertarianism proper, even as I remain sympathetic to many of its basic ideas.
What I share with more ideological libertarians today is a sense that our nation has gone far astray from it’s founding ideals – that though George W. Bush has in many ways made this problems worse, the problems go far deeper than a single two-term presidency. The problems are systematic. That’s why I feel the appeal, the pull, the emotional release of revolutionary fervor motivating the libertarian movement today:
But I also am wary of such emotionalism. The martial beat is appealing, but dangerous from a historical point of view.
Jonah Goldberg and many other conservative pundits have talked about the “fascist” potential of Obama’s campaign. They see hundreds of thousands – millions – of people motivated and inspired. They are afraid and have been trying to paint Obama as a demagogue – perhaps to justify their own loathing of him. But Obama has refrained from inciting people’s fears or darker passions; he has called on people to hope and to act to create a better tomorrow. Historically, fascism has had an ugly element to its appeal – as it stirs nativism and unthinking jingoism to achieve it’s ends. This is not Obama’s approach.
This was the approach of Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, and many other libertarians during the 1990’s as they sought to try everything to win some power to reverse the crisis they saw as imminent. As these libertarians adopted the tactics of fascists, they became even more marginalized.
Ron Paul’s campaign today succeeded because it avoided such tactics – and because the presidency of George W. Bush has demonstrated to many both how corrupt both parties are and how endangered our liberty has become. But what was evident both then and now is that ideology is the motivation behind the changes they seek. That is why Ron Paul was willing to use race-baiting as a tactic – because achieving a libertarian revolution was worth the price. That is why Ron Paul’s opinions are so simple, appealing, and revolutionary – because they are based on ideology rather than reality. The appeal of these ideas today comes from the fact that the libertarian ideology is such a relief from the neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideologies of the past sixteen years.
But what is needed is neither of these neo-ideologies. What we need is pragmatism and activism at all levels of our society. To accomplish this, we need what Lawrence Lessig has called a “process revolution.”
And that is why I support Obama.
[Photo by Robert Scobel.]
[digg-reddit-me]Lawrence Lessig described an interesting concept in his “Change Congress” presentation. He briefly mentioned an idea that I do not recall hearing before; yet this idea neatly provides a missing explanation in my understanding of change and revolution.
Throughout history, revolutions, though beginning with glorious idealism, have almost never ended well. The French Revolution was a bloody affair that devolved into totalitarianism; the revolution of Communism was likewise bloody and totalitarian; the same can be said of many of the smaller and less ideological revolutions against colonial powers and monarchies. As often as not, the main change these revolutions accomplished was to replace one evil with another.
A period of change is always a period of danger – and when the leaders of a revolution are focused on achieving hubristic goals, especially goals based on abstractions and ideology, they must resort to totalitarian means. As Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon wrote about a fictional Communist revolution:
The sole object of revolution was the abolition of senseless suffering. But it had turned out that the removal of this second kind of suffering was only possible at the price of a temporary enormous increase in the sum total of the first.
The great anti-totalitarian novels of the second half of the twentieth century, Brave New World, 1984, Darkness at Noon, and Animal Farm, all drove home this single insight: that ideological, goal-oriented revolution inevitably led to totalitarianism; that when revolution prioritized the ends over the means, enormous suffering was the immediate result.
The rare alternative to these goal-oriented or ideological revolutions are process revolutions. While American history has had a number of ends-focused revolutions – the original American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement – these movements all had more or less discrete goals which could be achieved (seceding from Britain; preventing the secession of the South; and ending the legal discrimination against African Americans). These were revolutions whose purpose was not to tear down the existing social and governmental structures, but to amend them in discrete ways. The concrete nature of the goals of these revolutions in addition to extraordinary leadership ((George Washington; Abraham Lincoln; Martin Luther King, Jr.: all canny politicians who married idealism to pragmatism, who exercised great restraint, who called on our “better angels”, and who did not seek personal power.)) of these movements mitigated the dangers inherent in revolution and rapid change through American history.
What Lessig points to is that there have been other less dramatic, and equally as important, revolutions in American history. Lessig cites some examples: the Second Constitutional Convention; the Progressive movement; and the Watergate reforms. These revolutions focused on creating and changing processes rather than on specific ends; their results have profoundly affected our society and have been generally beneficial, standing in stark contrast to the more extreme and more painful ideological revolutions.
Lessig suggests that today our society may be primed for another process revolution, that a political movement may be able to reform our politics in order to allow us to tackle the many festering long-term problems we face: global climate change; terrorism; growing domestic and international inequality; a broken health care system; an imbalance of power in Washington; institutional corruption; a declining manufacturing sector. Senator John McCain in his 2000 campaign and Senator Barack Obama in his 2008 campaign ((Though John McCain has paid lip service to reform in his 2008 campaign, he now endorses most of the fruit of the tree he called corrupt.)) did and have based their candidacies on reforming our politics to allow us to tackle the more fundamental problems we must face.
Obama has taken the further step of advocating process-based change. He does not just want universal health care; he wants to televise the task force and committee meetings, and make as many of the discussions of how to implement this idea public and available via television and the internet. While Hillary Clinton, as First Lady, tried to push through health care reform by meeting secretly with lobbyists, cramming her bill with special deals for all sorts of special interests, and threatening members of her own party who proposed alternate plans, Obama believes that how we achieve health care reform is as important as achieving it. With this, and many other policies, and given many of Obama’s top advisers, it is clear that an Obama presidency would attempt a process revolution to set the country back on the right track.
As you might guess – based on his focus on long-term issues and on the corruption of the political process – Lawrence Lessig was an early endorser of Barack Obama. (Lessig’s lecture referenced here, is below the fold.)
[digg-reddit-me]In February, John McCain observed that:
To encourage a country with only rhetoric…is not a promise of hope. It is a platitude.
He has repeatedly criticized Senator Barack Obama for looking at the world with rose-colored lenses, for being naive, and for promising more than he could deliver
Let’s look McCain’s pie-in-the-sky projections released today:
After four years of a McCain administration, America will be more secure and working with its allies and partners around the world to make us safer. In 2013:
The Iraq War has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, violence is much reduced, and America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure.
There is a functioning League of Democracies that has effectively applied pressure on Sudan to agree to a multinational peacekeeping force to stop the genocide.
There is no longer any place in the world al Qaeda can consider a safe haven. An increase in actionable intelligence leads to the capture or death of Osama Bin Laden and his lieutenants.
After four years of a McCain administration, the economy is stronger, Americans once again have confidence in their economic future and businesses are empowered to thrive. In 2013:
The economy is growing and Americans again have confidence in their economic future…
A top to bottom review of government and reforms yield great reductions in spending.
Public education is much improved due to measures that lead to increased competition, higher quality teachers, a revolution in teaching methods, higher graduation rates and higher test scores.
Health care is more accessible to more Americans than at any other time in history.
Medicare’s solvency has been extended and both parties have worked together to fix Social Security without reducing benefits to those near retirement.
The United States is on its way to independence from foreign sources of oil
Border state governors have certified and the American people recognize that after tremendous improvements, our southern border is now secure. Illegal immigration is under control, and the American people accept the practical necessity to institute a temporary worker program and deal humanely with illegal immigrants. [My emphases.]
McCain’s speech in Ohio is here. I’m not sure what the appropriate response is to this. All of these are fine goals, although most of them are significantly outside the control of the president. What McCain doesn’t do here is get into the specifics he so harshly criticized Obama for avoiding (unfairly I might add.)
McCain’s rosy projections are the very model of misleading rhetoric. Why else mention capturing or killing Bin Laden? Does he think that George W. Bush hasn’t tried? Or is he just assuring us that he will get lucky? And does he really think it will be that easy to “win” Iraq? Does “winning” require Iraq to become a democracy as he suggests once again here? Does he really think he’ll be able to stop the genocide in Darfur, secure the Mexican-American border, solve America’s entitlement crises, revolutionize education, and democratize Iraq all at the same time?
Barack Obama – for all of his soaring rhetoric – focuses on what he will do, and what we together can do. To his credit, Obama focuses on how he will change the processes and he promises to address the serious issues we face. But Obama has not shown that he has a messiah complex that would lead him to believe that, with his election, all the world’s problems would be fixed within four years.
And isn’t it planning for the best-case scenario that got us into the whole Iraq fiasco in the first place?
This whole episode reminds me of Al Gore’s SNL skit, except Gore was being ironic:
McCain clearly was not promising to accomplish all of these things. And we all know he (and the rest of the Right) would be attacking Obama for being naive and having a messiah complex if Obama had had the poor judgment to give a speech like this.
But the real problem is that he is making the case for his presidency here by assuming the best-case scenario in every single area of policy. That’s irresponsible. That’s naive. That’s empty rhetoric.
[digg-reddit-me]Jon Stewart to Douglas Feith:
Just because your intentions are good and noble and you believe it to be the right move for the country doesn’t make this honesty. And I’ll why i think why – because you remove the ability for the American public to make an informed decision.
And once you have removed that then you no longer have the authority, because what you have done is you have told us what part of the argument you think it is appropriate for us to know about.
(Begins at about the 5:55 mark in the video.)
Thank God for Jon Stewart. I’m not sure what other media outlet would broadcast such a respectful yet challenging interview with one of the architects of this war, this national nightmare.
I’m not sure if it should be so cathartic to see one of the planners of this misbegotten gamble scolded by a comedian. But it was.
Now what’s next?