Matt Taibbi on the 2012 election: Two calculating centrists, fighting for the right to serve as figurehead atop a bloated state apparatus

just a short dose of reality from glenn...

Matt Taibbi has an excellent post on the 2012 presidential election, focusing on how boring and apathy-producing it is, particularly compared to the 2008 election, and how this threatens to undermine one of the prime purposes of American elections — distracting citizens’ attention from what is actually being done:

Meanwhile, Obama has turned out to represent continuity with the Bush administration on a range of key issues, from torture to rendition to economic deregulation. Obama is doing things with extralegal drone strikes that would have liberals marching in the streets if they’d been done by Bush. . . .

In other words, Obama versus McCain actually felt like a clash of ideological opposites. But Obama and Romney feels like a contest between two calculating centrists, fighting for the right to serve as figurehead atop a bloated state apparatus that will operate according to the same demented imperial logic irrespective of who wins the White House.

Then there’s one more thing – Obama versus Romney is the worst reality show on TV since the Tila Tequila days. The characters are terrible, there’s no suspense, and the biggest thing is, it lacks both spontaneity and a gross-out factor. In Reality TV, if you don’t have really sexy half-naked young people scheming against each other over campfires in the Cook Islands, you need to have grown men eating millipedes or chicks in bikinis drinking donkey semen. And if you don’t have that, you really need Sarah Palin.

This race has none of that. . . . The presidential race is always a great illusion, designed to distract people from the more hardcore politics in this country, the minutiae of trade and tax and monetary policy that’s too boring to cover. When the presidential race is a bad show, people might not have any choice but to pay attention to those other things. And this year’s version is the worst show in memory. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Digby dissents from that last point on the ground that political strategists and media mavens are adept at keeping interest levels high by manufacturing the appearance of meaningful conflicts: “It’s like one of those Housewife reality shows where everyone is obscenely wealthy and they create phony feuds and stage screaming fights and then magically become bffs the next season. It’s kind of a trainwreck that you can’t keep your eyes off of at first, but then you just end up falling asleep in front of the TV.”

and, lest we forget, this incredibly shallow, superficial reality show has been pushing its way onto our television screens and nagging us from every conceivable media outlet for the past 18+ months... beam me up, scotty...

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The rich no longer need the rest of us

i find it somewhat encouraging that a thoughtful, articulate, non-conspiracy-theory-prone, liberal, progressive blogger like digby seems to be leaning more toward what i consider to be a fairly obvious reality...

So the new business of America is looting the coffers of the US treasury. Sounds about right.

she's responding to two items... first, an article in the wsj that offered this interesting perspective...

[Michael Lind] says the wealthy increasingly earn their fortunes with overseas labor, selling to overseas consumers and managing financial transactions that have little to do with the rest of the U.S. “A member of the elite can make money from factories in China that sell to consumers in India, while relying entirely or almost entirely on immigrant servants at one of several homes around the country.”

and second, a post from yves smith at naked capitalism...

The financial crisis resulted in the greatest looting of the public purse in history. While the banksters were the obvious beneficiaries, most of the rest of the rich were carried along with them. The sudden recovery in the fortunes of the wealthy was no accident, but the result of a host of policies to prop up asset values.

while i rarely post excerpts from digby and almost never visit her blog, i've always respected her as one of the less ideological, more open-minded and intellectually honest individuals of the liberal-progressive persuasion... maybe it's time to add her blog to my newsreader...

p.s. nah... digby's gonna hafta wait... i just dropped by her blog and, without going past the first page, i noted posts devoted to glenn beck, howard kurtz, sarah palin, tasers, tea party, andrew breitbart, the catfood commission, newt gingrich, lindsey graham, and michele bachmann... while none of those are without significance in and of themselves, they comprise the essential laundry list of tired liberal-progressive talking points, the same things to be found in blogs from think progress to daily kos, the manufactured diversions so strongly decried by glenn that serve in place of us talking about what really matters... in fact, so strongly do i feel about this, i'm re-posting glenn's perspective...

If you read and write about politics full-time and are thus forced to subject yourself to the political media -- as I am -- what's most striking aren't the outrages and corruptions, but the overwhelming, suffocating, numbing stream of stupidity and triviality that floods the brain. One has to battle the temptation to just turn away and ignore it all. Every day, day after day, is consumed by some totally irrelevant though distracting melodrama: what Sarah Palin wrote on her Facebook page, some "outrageous" snippet of a comment made by John Boehner or Harry Reid, some "crazy," attention-attracting statement from some fringe idiot-figure or TV blowhard that is exploited for superficial partisan gain or distraction value (hey, look over there: I think Michelle Bachmann just said something outrageous!!!!).

nothing against ya, digby, i just think you need to seriously contemplate the larger implications of the statement you made included at the top of this post cuz, trust me, it ain't about sarah, glenn, michele or the tea party... those are just the squashed bugs on the windshield obstructing the view of the 16-wheeler that swerved out of the oncoming traffic lane and is headed right for us...

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The dark underbelly of the beast

digby's reaction to michael moore's film via atrios...

This is not just a rehash of what happens when the capitalist dream dies, however, but an attempt to examine why it so often does. Moore digs deep into the dark underbelly of the beast in this outing; he gives us many eye-opening examples of truly soulless profiteering and unchecked vulture capitalism at its most egregious, including a very interesting business arrangement between a privately-run juvenile detention center and a hanging judge that will leave you slack-jawed with disbelief, and an animal glibly referred to by insurance company insiders as a “dead peasant policy” that will blow your fucking mind.

The film’s trailer has misled many people into assuming that they are just going to be seeing Moore doing another series of his patented grandstanding pranks. Although you do see him running around Wall Street armed with a megaphone, yellow crime scene tape and a rented Loomis truck, demanding a refund from bailed out financial institutions on behalf of the American taxpayers and generally being a pain-in-the-ass to hapless security guards, these types of shenanigans really only take up a relative fraction of screen time. Those moments of shtick aside, I think that the film represents the most cohesive and mature film-making Moore has done to date. Interestingly, from a purely polemical standpoint, it is also one of his least partisan, which I’m sure is going to make some of his usual knee-jerk critics develop a little twitch. Not that it really matters; his haters will continue to despise him no matter what kind of film he makes, and likely condemn it as anti-American, unpatriotic and full of lies (without bothering to actually see it, of course).

Okay, so he does close the film with a lounge-y version of “The Internationale” playing over the end credits (you just know he can’t help himself). Yet despite that rather obvious provocation (and the film’s title, of course), at the end of the day I didn’t really find his message to be so much “down with capitalism” as it is “up with people”. There is a streak of genuine and heartfelt humanism that runs through all his work, and it continues to be puzzlingly overlooked by many film-goers (and most film critics). Isn’t that kind of what the founding fathers were all about? After all, I believe that little Declaration thingy reads that we all have the right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”, not “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, even at the expense of someone else’s”. Or does it?

i'd REALLY like to see this flick and wish i didn't have to wait until i return to the states, altho' this IS kabul and the pirated version may already be on the streets... guess i oughta look, huh...?

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Digby on Mukasey: "The ends justify the means"

it depends on what your definition of "is" is...



digby...

I'd like to once again thank all those who voted to confirm Michael Mukasey and those who didn't bother to vote. It was an excellent demonstration of leadership. (My recollection is that many of the Democrats felt they had already "won" by forcing out Alberto Gonzales.) But maybe next time, we could just have a a little baseline that the Attorney General of the United States can't believe that torture can legally be used if it might save lives. I think that might be considered a basic qualification going forward.

bastard... (i'm speaking of mukasey, of course...)

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"The wisest course would have been for President Bush to use his nuclear weapons to slaughter Iraqis until they complied with his demands"

digby has the entire nine yards on this one... i'm not even going to excerpt... you simply HAVE to read it for yourself... when you have, and have picked your jaw up off the floor, come back here and let me know what you think...

Exclusive: Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy
Philip Atkinson

Author: Philip Atkinson
Source: The Family Security Foundation, Inc.
Date: August 3, 2007

(thanks to markos...)

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