Funny, with a great point, and educational!

But there was always a problem with Obama’s “post-partisan” positioning and it had nothing to do with whether he had to be a “legislative president.”

It had everything to do with the fact that the people Obama said he’d reach out to are batshit crazy, and finding some workable middle ground with people who think tax cuts increase revenue, global warming is a hoax, saving General Motors is Hitler-esque, whose policies ran the country into a ditch–and who think Sarah Palin was qualified to be president–was always a flawed premise, to say the least.

Some of us believe that there really has been and can be progress in human affairs. Examples are plentiful: the development of democratic government, the abolition of slavery, the improvement of working conditions, civil rights for oppressed groups, universal suffrage, national independence from colonial powers, a social safety net, and great leaps forward in scientific understanding. Other people seek to undo many of these changes because they limit the power of elites. Of course there will be compromises along the way, but to elevate compromise, without regard to the merits, to a primary goal is both bad policy and in the long run a political loser.

The best thing is the voice, which lets me keep my eyes on the road. The unit gives me plenty of warning before turns. If two turns come close together, it will tell me about both turns in the same sentence. It knows which lane I am in and which lane I need to be in for the next turn. When I get off the route, TomTom instantly adjusts the travel plan to get me back on track. Overall, excellent purchase!

Across a whole range of problems there’s a class of responses I’ll dub the “low road” and another class I’ll call the “high road.” Examples of the former include war, torture, sanctions and blockades, imprisonment, aversive conditioning of all types (spanking; “dominance”-based animal training). Examples of the latter include diplomacy, rapport-building, civil disobedience, the free exchange of goods and ideas, decriminalization and rehabilitation, positive conditioning (of humans and animals).

I don’t presently care to argue that there is never any “need” to go down any given low road. In some cases I may support some low roads for some purposes. Locking up murderers, for instance. In other cases – torture – I have a much easier time saying “Never go there.” But what we see over and over again is that we judge high-road approaches as failures unless they produce nigh-instant and complete favorable results, while we show nearly infinite patience for journeys down the low road.

So true!

A few weeks ago, I saw a YouTube video by way of a Firedoglake After Hours post. It featured a living room jam by bluegrass prodigy Sarah Jarosz and friends. The song was Look at Miss Ohio, with bare-bones lyrics that sounded like a decades-old classic. Fooled again! I tracked down the original, by Gillian Welch, and saw that it came out in 2003. (It’s been covered a lot since then, so I guess I’m not alone in considering it an instant classic.) I bought it together with Corner of My Room from iTunes. I haven’t gotten anything by Jarosz yet, but I am sure I will eventually.

However, I hope that it is a subtle sign that serious regulation is back. For decades, Republicans worked to dismantle and cripple the regulatory regime that protects consumers, and Democrats too often lent a hand. Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress have disappointed progressives in almost every way, but perhaps they will return to pre-Reagan values on regulation.

Republican Gomorrah

Blumenthal bases his analysis on the work of Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst who left Germany after the Nazis came to power. In Escape From Freedom, Fromm wrote that having freedom is not always pleasant. Sometimes it can be a burden because you have to make your own decisions and you are responsible for the outcomes. Many people gladly give up their freedom by submitting themselves to obey without question a trusted authority figure. In the political realm, this can lead to a mass movement such as the Nazis created.

Christian theology has similar dynamics with respect to freedom. On the one hand, free will means you are responsible for your sins and will be punished for them – with hellfire according to the more conservative sects. However, there is an out. If you accept Jesus as your Savior, all your sins are forgiven.

A modern twist involves the industry that offers therapy/treatment for personal crisis. People make mistakes in their personal lives or simply don’t know how to handle certain things. So they turn to the therapy industry to tell them what to do about problems such as addiction, abuse, and infidelity. There is a promise that parallels the promises of political authoritarianism and religious salvation: obey the therapist and all your problems will be solved.

The Christian Right has put together all these modes of escaping from freedom into a single movement. A pioneer and the most successful practitioner has been James Dobson, a child psychiatrist who founded Focus on the Family. His newsletter gives advice about how to deal with problems in the family. His organization now gets so many requests for help that it has its own zip code. All these people mailing or calling in for help get put into a database, which is used to send out calls to political action. Dobson and similar figures function as what Fromm calls “the magic helper,” who then exploits this dependent relationship to further both a political movement and their own finances.

Unfortunately, many personal problems cannot be prayed away or otherwise cured with a simple fix. These people become involved in the movement, which distracts them momentarily from their personal problems. However, problems such as addiction are still there and not being effectively addressed. This is especially true for gay Evangelicals, who believe that homosexuality is a sin, a personal choice (“lifestyle”), that can be cured by prayer and spiritual counseling. So gays, alcoholics, drug addicts, gamblers, and others lead double lives – preaching against the actions by day and overdosing on them by night. (I bet a similar analysis would apply well to the problems the Catholic Church has had with deviant priests.)

Viewed in this light, all the scandals involving Christian Right leaders – and the list is huge! – make sense. It also makes sense how the followers tend to forgive these lapses, and often the leaders are able to resume their leadership roles after a period of public repentance. Instead of seeing virtue as something that can be attained and maintained, it is a constant struggle, a war against Satan, and they expect (and have personally experienced) many setbacks. As long as the disgraced leader frames his personal failure in terms of a cosmic religious war, he is treated as a good soldier who suffered a wound in battle.

Although “faith-based” and “reality-based” approaches were coined in other domains, the terms also make sense in the area of personal problems. Most personal problems can’t be solved in a single moment of insight; they have to be managed and moderated over years, maybe a whole lifetime. (And in the case of homosexuality, it isn’t a problem in itself; the problem is the self-loathing and denial caused by the hateful position of the Christian Right.) Instead of a slow and steady course of treatment, the Christian Right has institutionalized an approach that almost guarantees a roller coaster ride, from euphoric highs of participating in a mass movement to self-loathing lows of indulgence.

Joe Wilson

One of the big problems with American democracy is that the presidency has over the years been elevated to the level of a monarchy, with all the imperial trappings and pomposity formerly associated with royalty. Presidents surely should get no more respect than a prime minister, and look at the hoots and catcalls PMs have to endure when they address Parliament in the UK. That’s a good thing.

I agree. Linderhoff goes on to describe a handful of contentious points in Obama’s speech. He calls them lies, though I wouldn’t go that far.

Nevertheless, I have some reservations. Taiwan’s Parliament is infamous for breaking out into fistfights. That’s out of bounds, as I see it. The British Parliament at the Prime Minister’s Question Time is the golden mean–neither deferential nor violent.

Here’s a conundrum to be considered and filed away under the rubric “impossible to measure” as you leave the world of Afghan War metrics: The U.S. continues to struggle to train Afghan police and soldiers who will actually turn out and fight with discipline (see above). In the meantime, as a recent Washington Post piece by Karen DeYoung indicated, the Taliban regularly turn out fighters who are reportedly using ever more sophisticated and tenacious fire-and-maneuver techniques against the overwhelming firepower of U.S. and NATO forces. (“To many of the Americans, it appeared as if the insurgents had attended something akin to the U.S. Army’s Ranger school, which teaches soldiers how to fight in small groups in austere environments.”)

Both groups are, of course, Afghans. It might be worth considering why “their” Afghans are the fierce fighters of history books and legend and ours, despite billions of dollars and massive training efforts, are not. This puzzling situation had its parallel in Vietnam decades ago when American military advisors regularly claimed they would give up a division of U.S.-trained South Vietnamese forces for a single battalion of “VC.”

I once asked a right-wing jingoist how Americans would react to a foreign occupying army in the U.S., whatever the reason given for invasion. Wouldn’t we fight the occupiers tooth and nail? His response was that we would greet them as heroic liberators if we were in the same situation that Iraqis and Afghans were in. Uh huh. Sure.

Long-term occupations fail. Period. The natives are there to stay, barring some act of genocide. This war started in October 2001. It’s 2009 now, and the generals quoted in Tom’s post are talking about staying for decades. This is how empires fall.

Bill Moyers talks about it on Bill Maher’s show in the context of healthcare reform.