America is a nine-hundred pound man imprisoned in a fetid trailer bedroom begging for one more case of Little Debbie Cocoa Cremes

post headline from a james howard kunstler piece on obama's sotu entitled "Jive Talkin"...

America is a nine-hundred pound man imprisoned in a fetid trailer bedroom begging for one more case of Little Debbie Cocoa Cremes before the front-end-loader bashes through the wall to haul him to intensive care. America just wants to hear another story about its own wonderfulness before that happens. America's soul is so lost that it has disappeared into the same cosmic wilderness that MF Global's client accounts were last seen entering.

[...]

I've had enough of Obama, though I voted for him in 2008. I won't vote for him again. But I'm not altogether confident that any of us will be voting for anyone in the fall of 2012. Too many systems we depend on are spinning out of control. I suppose we will continue feeding ourselves a diet of lies and evasions until circumstances become so extreme that language itself loses all relevance and only real action will answer. I believe that moment is approaching in the yet-to-be-acted-out political uproars of the spring and summer. In the meantime, American leadership is bankrupt. Just accept the fact that America has no legitimate leadership. The vacuum is total and we know how nature feels about a vacuum.

occasionally, kunstler is a fun read but i can't imagine being cooped up in the same room with him for very long without one or the other of us starting to foam at the mouth...

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At some point people might get wise to the fact that Obama is the most powerful political figure in the world

jane hamsher...

You know at some point people might get wise to the fact that Obama is the most powerful political figure in the world, and he does have options beyond being a corporate tool who lets his campaign manager rearrange the national lawn furniture.

I guess it’s time to fire up the “What Obama Could Do Now” series again:

• Question: What Things Can Obama Do Now?
• Bill Black: What Obama Could Do Now
• Alan Grayson: What Obama Could Do Now
• Cynthia Kouril: What Obama Can Do Now
• Lloyd Chapman: What Obama Could Do Now
• Glenn Greenwald: What Obama Could Do Now
• James Galbraith: What Obama Could Do Now
• Jon Walker: What Obama Could Do Now

The White House does not seem to be able to conceive of actual governance as a viable option, and appear to be counting on the fact that Republicans are so crazy that if they don’t piss off elites they can cruise to victory in 2012 by flim-flamming the public with a series of PR stunts, even in the midst of soaring unemployment.

After watching the Iowa Republican debate devolve into an argument over whether aborting innocent fetuses conceived in rape means victimizing them twice, I’m afraid they might well be right.

but, hey... there are still quite a few people out there who can't deal with the fact that a democratic president, particularly one who was elected to save us all from some of the worst, most excessive and outrageous abuses of presidential power in our lifetimes, has turned out to be a wolf in sheep's clothing... i know the truth is hard to face... i've had to do a lot of it over my nearly 64 years, but continuing to stick your head in the sand and pretend that we've got somebody at the top who is really on our side, is nothing less than pathetic at a time when the health and well-being of virtually the entire globe is at stake...

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Demonstrable proof of Obama’s impressive political muscle

more and more people are wising up to the horrendous choice we made in electing obama... more horrendous than john mccain...? as lewis black would so succinctly put it, "we had the choice of two bowls of shit and the only difference was the smell..."

david sirota...

[I]t is silly to insist that the national political events during Obama’s term represent a lack of presidential strength or will. And it’s more than just silly—it’s a narcissistic form of wishful thinking coming primarily from liberals who desperately want to believe “their” president is with them.

Such apologism, of course, allows liberals to avoid the more painful truth that Obama is one of America’s strongest presidents ever and is achieving exactly what he wants.

Obama is not a flaccid Jimmy Carter, as some of his critics insist. He is instead a Franklin Delano Roosevelt—but a Bizarro FDR. He has mustered the legislative strength of his New Deal predecessor, but he has channeled that strength into propping up the very forces of “organized money” that FDR once challenged.

[...]

As hideous and destructive as it is, [Obama's] record is anything but weak. It is, on the contrary, demonstrable proof of Obama’s impressive political muscle, especially because polls show he has achieved these goals despite the large majority of Americans who oppose them.

Importantly, though, Obama himself has not suffered from equally negative polling numbers. While his approval rating is not terrific, he is in decent shape for re-election—and, more significantly, he has suffered only a minimal erosion of Democratic support. He is relatively popular, in other words, despite advocating wildly unpopular policies. Thanks to that reality, every one of his stunning legislative triumphs now has the previously unprecedented imprimatur of rank-and-file Democratic support.

here i sit on friday, my one-day weekend in kabul, afghanistan, reading about my country, the country i am here to be a role model for, watching the dispatches from the u.s. as they positively drip with the bullshit of uncontrolled money, power and hypocrisy, watching as we literally bulldoze everything we touch, while i try to coach my afghanistan counterparts in the essence of principled leadership... HA...!

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A truly uplifting experience - in AFGHANISTAN...!

i simply must share one of the most amazing, uplifting experiences of my professional career...

the number two senior manager in the very large afghanistan government organization in which i'm working came and sat down with our team this afternoon and proceeded to - very nicely, but most sincerely - lecture us on his views of leadership...

what he had to say was perhaps the most right-on profession of enlightened leadership principles i've ever heard from a person at his level... my jaw was literally on the floor as he went on for nearly a half hour... i ended up telling him that i had spent the vast majority of my career trying to get other senior managers i've worked with to subscribe to those principles and found that i was usually wasting my breath...

i simply never would have believed that i would hear such an intuitive, principled view of leadership so grandly articulated by any senior manager ANYWHERE, much less in AFGHANISTAN... who woulda thunk it...?

it's been a good day...!

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The universal obsession with identifying a "leader" for a self-organizing system - the anti-government protesters in Egypt

it would be laughable if it wasn't so sad... even the most comprehensive and generally straightforward reporting (yes, i believe that would be al jazeera), seemingly can't get past the fact that no leader has yet emerged to be anointed as the spokesperson for the protesters in tahrir square... nobody can quite grasp that truly empowered people - as the demonstrators have consistently shown themselves to be - don't NEED a goddam leader...

the correct technical term for what's happening in egypt is a phenomenon that is an element of complexity theory - the "emergent properties" of "self-organizing systems," to be specific - a phenomenon that has only recently been identified and studied, principally through the efforts of the santa fe institute... i can't do it justice in attempting to describe it here, but basically it means that, if the various independent actors in a system - in this case, the protesters - are sufficiently well-connected and in agreement on what they're all about, they don't NEED a leader...

as you can imagine, the entire concept of a group involved in changing the dynamics in an entire region, upending the power structure and insisting on being recognized and dealt with that doesn't either HAVE or NEED a leader scares the ever-loving shit out of our super-rich elites and their bought and paid-for governmental puppets...

p.s. i can't tell you how many times i've been looked at like i'm crazy when i say that empowered, informed, well-intended, decent people don't need a leader... the persistent myth is that there HAS to be a leader, a myth that's as strong and as durable an article of faith as the myth of "if there's a winner, there HAS to be a loser"...

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Americans should never be compared to primitive, evil foreign Muslim jihadists

glenn is commenting on reaction to markos moulitsas' recently published book, american taliban, and, as usual, offers a much larger and more trenchant observation than would normally be part of a mere book review...

[O]bnoxious jingoism and nationalistic exceptionalism: to wit, no matter how bad the American Right is, they are still Americans, and thus should never be compared to primitive, evil foreign Muslim jihadists. Illustrative of that mentality is this passage from Jamelle Bouie's extremely negative and widely-cited review in The American Prospect:

Like Liberal Fascism, American Taliban is another entry in the tired genre of "my political opponents are monsters" . . . . Yes, progressives are depressed and despondent about the future, but that's no reason for dishonesty and scaremongering, and it doesn't excuse the obscenity of comparing our political opponents to killers and terrorists. As reality-based members of the American community, we have an obligation toward the truth, even when it isn't particularly convenient.

In what universe is it "obscene" to compare the architects of the Iraq War, the torture regime, and endless War with Muslims "to killers and terrorists"? The comparison is true by definition. The people who launched the attack on Iraq are guilty of an aggressive war -- what the Nuremberg prosecutors condemned as the "kingpin crime" that "holds together" all other war crimes -- which killed hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings, turned millions more into refugees, and destroyed an entire nation. The aptly named "Shock and Awe" was designed to terrify an entire civilian population into submission. John Podhoretz criticized the brutal assault on Fallujah for failing to exterminate all "Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35," while his father has spent years agitating for a devastating military attack on Iran. At least 100 War on Terror detainees in American custody died as a result of their treatment, tens of thousands more (including clearly innocent ones) were put in cages for years with no due process (where many remain), and as recent mosque-related controversies reveal, a substantial portion of the American population craves a religious war with Islam. And that's to say nothing of the acts of other countries which this faction supports: from mauling an imprisoned population in Gaza and attacking a harmless, civilian ship in international waters to propping up some of the most oppressive tyrannies on the planet, including many in the Muslim world.

in my travels, i've become acutely aware of a sad and poignant fact... people in other countries seem to have no problem accepting that their leaders are not only capable of bad things, they routinely ENGAGE in bad things, almost always at the expense of the common folk and their welfare...

those of us steeped in the mythology of the united states have this extraordinarily naive notion that we are somehow above all that... sure, we have the occasional miscreant, the government official or corporate titan "gone bad," but, for the most part, we nourish the delusion that the majority of our leaders have our best interests at heart... we can't seem to grasp that while, yes, we do have some wonderful and remarkable people in our midst, we also have some truly evil types, hell-bent on accruing as much money and power as humanly possible, just like - GASP - every other country... and it is THOSE putrid excrescences who, just like in every other country, tend to gravitate to positions where they can pursue their greedy megalomania even if thousands of people have to die to help them achieve their dark aims...

there are fantastic people everywhere and there are assholes and creeps everywhere... what a concept...!

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Employees want good leadership...? I'm shocked, I tell you, SHOCKED...!!

i've been pounding on this point for years... every single goddam book on management and leadership you pick up says virtually the same thing... it's taught in both graduate and undergraduate management programs... it's proudly pointed to as the way the company does business in the opening pages of every corporate annual report... there's only one problem... it isn't practiced, but i guess that's also the american way... we're at our best when we're telling everybody how things should be done but heaven forbid we should do it ourselves...

Money's Nice, but a Good Boss Is Better

When it comes to sizing up the quality of their workplaces, federal workers value strong leadership and straight answers from their bosses more than even pay and benefits, according to a new comprehensive study of the federal workforce.

one of the things i like best about teaching and training non-u.s. folks is when, after making a point about leadership or management, i get the inevitable comment that says, "well, that may work in the u.s., but you gotta understand this is (fill in name of country here)"... that's when i throw back my head and laugh... after looking at all the nonplussed stares, i lean forward conspiratorially and say, "here's a dirty little secret... it doesn't work THERE either because we don't practice what we preach... so, if you figure it out and do it, you'll be WAY ahead of the u.s..."

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"Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self"

i wonder who in the world the above description could possibly be referring to...?

No individual president can compare to the second Bush. Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.

sometimes the irony i experience on a daily basis is almost overwhelming... i just concluded a three-hour seminar on leadership that i offered for fourteen afghan staff members who work for the same project i'm working for here in kabul... imagine...! me...! an american...! an american with george bush as my country's leader, offering perspectives on effective leadership to afghanis...! talk about IRONY...!

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Assuming, of course, you’re the kind of boss who doesn’t WANT to be sucked up to

it is to laugh… the following is excerpted from a regular newsletter i receive from booz allen hamilton on strategy and business… senior vice president for booz allen, you may remember, was the most recent position held by mike mcconnell, the recently-confirmed director of national security… perhaps mike could wrangle a few minutes with george and go over the key points of the article…

Not one [presidential] profile has ever included a desired behavior that reads “effectively sucks up to management the president.” Although given the dedication to fawning and sucking up in most corporations presidential administrations — and how often such behavior is rewarded — it probably should. Almost every company president says it he wants people to “challenge the system,” “be empowered to express their opinion,” and “say what they really think,” but there sure are a lot of companies presidential administrations that are stuck on sucking up.

Not only do companies presidents say they abhor such comically servile behavior, but so do individual leaders their subordinates. Almost all the leaders presidents I have met say that they would never encourage such a thing in their organizations administrations. I have no doubt that they are sincere. Most of us are easily irritated, if not disgusted, by derrière kissers. Which raises a question: If leaders presidents say they discourage sucking up, why does it dominate the workplace Bush administration? Keep in mind that these leaders presidents are generally very shrewd judges of character. They spend their lives sizing people up: taking in first impressions and recalibrating them against later impressions. And yet, they still fall for the super-skilled suck-up. They still play favorites.

(as you can see, i’ve taken the liberty to make a few changes…)

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