alias Bruce.

You Name It.

I saw a bumper sticker like this one on a truck the other day.

What a tribute to the awe-inspiringly seductive powers of delusion. For the sake of a sought-after feeling of potency, or a fearful swipe at the specter of a black president, or a sense of heroic devotion to a single cause (e.g., guns), gaggles of scared and struggling folks are able to convince themselves that by nodding at the power of citizen-stomping corporations in a near-depression economy they are "keeping their freedom and their money." This while the New York Times reports that national unemployment has hit 17.5 percent when you factor in those who are seeking jobs, those who have given up looking, and those who are working part-time because they can't find full-time jobs.

We could detour here into a rant about far-right gullibility and brain failure, but why? It is hardly news that the back-slapping refrain of, "You've got yours, just like us, and don't let those people take any of it away from you" has been the ruling class's most effective sop for white wage slaves ever since the days of black non-wage slavery.

I heard a Republican say on the radio a few days ago that the rise of so-called social conservatism has been the worst thing that ever happened to the G.O.P. Its passing off a mob-mentality moralism as "conservatism," he said, has splintered the party's planks of true conservatism: those being belief in small government, maximum market competition, staying out of people's private lives, etc. This isn't news, either, since we know very well that today's farthest right is not "conservative" at all but a loose posse of reactionaries who like big government and violation of individual rights just fine when it does what they want: punishing women for abortions, using military and police surveillance and violence with abandon, detaining assorted feared "others" without due process, passing laws forbidding gay people to marry, and so on.

So all of this gets me to thinking: We need to make it a public point to delete the word "conservative" from the terms we use to describe such people, and substitute another.

How about "coercive?" As in, "Social coercives have shown support for a measure that would make public the names and medical records of women who have abortions." (This is true, by the way.) Or as in, "In an intra-party conflict among Republicans, coercives are calling for harsh government policies toward illegal immigrants, while business-oriented conservatives are not."

I'm still mulling over other possible terms. Maybe you'll want to as well. It's definitely time to change the lexicon. Calling people "conservatives" when they embrace government-as-God's-goon just won't cut it.

Argue No More?

A friend told me a couple of days ago that she avoids political blogs because most of them are less about dialogue than about spitfire opinion. She is right, of course; most political blogs are online opinion columns. Of those I read (the "Blogs and Friends" roster at left will give you an idea), my favorites are those where the writers think hard about issues and where readers and commenters do as well, whether there is agreement or not.

I think my own trajectory about discourse has moved, over the past 10 years or so, more and more toward trying to muster the energy of people of good will toward the pursuit of progressive (generally leftward) social change and away from the notion of more purely even-handed exchange, which is where I think I was when my first book, the original Race Manners, came out in 1999. I guess, like a lot of civil rights and racial justice advocates, I reached a point where I felt my energy was better used in service of those ready to carry out actual social change than in trying to pull in those who are invested in resisting it. To be blunt about it, I think history gives us pretty vivid evidence (abolitionism, women's suffrage, black and gay civil rights) that there is generally a majority that stands around watching while a committed minority doggedly pursues change until it is achieved.

Anyway, just after I had this conversation about blogs and discourse, I received an email from my friend Rob Levy pointing me toward an October 15 manifesto by Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, a fiercely liberal church reformer and author of, among other works, Why Christianity Must Change or Die. Spong's new manifesto, "The Time Has Come!", is a scathing critique of Christian homophopia, and it basically argues that the time has passed for debating, engaging or even responding to the Christian Right on issues of gay rights, because those rights are on an inevitable path toward victory and there is no longer any moral, religious or political argument to be had.

Spong declares, in part, that:

 "...it is time to move on. The battle is over. The victory has been won. There is no reasonable doubt as to what the final outcome of this struggle will be. Homosexual people will be accepted as equal, full human beings, who have a legitimate claim on every right that both church and society have to offer any of us. Homosexual marriages will become legal, recognized by the state and pronounced holy by the church. "Don't ask, don't tell" will be dismantled as the policy of our armed forces. We will and we must learn that equality of citizenship is not something that should ever be submitted to a referendum. Equality under and before the law is a solemn promise conveyed to all our citizens in the Constitution itself. Can any of us imagine having a public referendum on whether slavery should continue, whether segregation should be dismantled, whether voting privileges should be offered to women?"

And he goes on to say:

"The battle in both our culture and our church to rid our souls of this dying prejudice is finished. A new consciousness has arisen. A decision has quite clearly been made. Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state. Therefore, I will from this moment on refuse to dignify the continued public expression of ignorant prejudice by engaging it. ...I have been part of this debate for years, but things do get settled and this issue is now settled for me. I do not debate any longer with members of the "Flat Earth Society" either. I do not debate with people who think we should treat epilepsy by casting demons out of the epileptic person; I do not waste time engaging those medical opinions that suggest that bleeding the patient might release the infection. I do not converse with people who think that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans as punishment for the sin of being the birthplace of Ellen DeGeneres or that the terrorists hit the United Sates on 9/11 because we tolerated homosexual people, abortions, feminism or the American Civil Liberties Union."

I challenge the idea that the battle is won, but I also get it that Spong is speaking of the engine of spirit more than the machinery of politics. I suspect he knows very well that there are many more lawsuits yet to be filed, more gay family tragedies and triumphs to be played out, more wicked voter propositions to be fought, more insults and awful injuries to be endured. But at the heart of it, Spong is telling advocates of gay rights that it is now time to act victorious and to stop stooping to bicker with bigots who have already lost to the inertia of spiritual advancement. History has already spoken on this issue, Spong is saying, and it is time for progressives to act like it.

We could apply this idea to other fronts on which it has become an article of faith for progressives to exhaustively rebut the hard right: abortion rights, the socially supportive role of government, racial justice. What if we were to confidently wield the moral triumph of these ideas instead of yelling about them on Hardball or Crossfire? What would the progressive movement look like if we steadily affirmed the inevitability of meaningful reform of health care and campaign financing? How much time did the black civil rights movement spend debating with the sworn enemies of human rights? How much of their energy did Cuban visionaries of economic equality devote to shouting matches with the Batista regime and United Fruit Company?

I'm simply asking questions here. But I think Spong is trying to tell us something. Maybe argument isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Obama, the Nobel Prize, and Jazz.

It's a fair question whether President Barack Obama really deserved to win the Nobel Peace Prize. It's just that, in the scheme of things, I don't think it's a very interesting question.

I'm still digesting all of this, of course. Talk about a weekend surprise. But if we go by the usual Nobel standards, I can't see, at the moment, how Obama even comes close to deserving the laurels, which generally reward either a life commitment to changing the world (think Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela) or a huge accomplishment in the cause of peace (think Mikhail Gorbachev, pivotal in ending the Cold War, or Woodrow Wilson, instrumental in the Treaty of Versailles). Not that every Nobel Peace Prize winner has that kind of global veneration; recent recipients include former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari and Mohamed Elbaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency. And anyway, I do think Obama has the potential for greatness in leadership -- if someday soon he would gird his loins to lead his party and his wobbly nation.

No doubt, there is plenty of sound and fury in the "is he worthy?" Nobel debate that is now rattling our American windows. Head Republican buffoon Michael Steele darted into traffic to yell public insults to the effect that Obama is a sorry excuse for a Nobel laureate. Some prominent Washington figures with better home training than Steele have murmured their tepid congratulations. Others are heartily slapping the prez on the back. Obama himself, wisely, comes across as humbled and overwhelmed by the honor. If nothing else, the event illustrates in thick bright-red crayon just how childishly single-minded some Republicans are in finding any Obama outcome to be proof of his evil. (RNC position if Obama wins Nobel: Of course he won. He's a slick black strutter who has managed to sweet-talk the world. RNC position if Obama does not win Nobel: Of course he didn't win. Did you really think this gibbering fascist huckster was even in the running?)

But as I said, to me what's important about this is not how we in our Americanness try to hash out Obama's Nobel merit. What's important is what Europeans are actually trying to say in giving him the award and in their response to his receiving it. It looks to me as if, for Europe, this award is less about what Obama has accomplished and more about what he makes possible, which I'm guessing they see as a bona fide hallelujah moment after the apocalypse of the Bush years.

Listen to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who the New York Times quoted as saying the award marked “America’s return to the hearts of the world’s peoples.”

And here is German Chancellor Angela Merkel, proclaiming that “In a short time [Obama] has been able to set a new tone throughout the world and to create a readiness for dialogue.”

Then there was Nobel committee chairman Thorbjorn Jagland, who declared, “The question we have to ask is who has done the most in the previous year to enhance peace in the world. And who has done more than Barack Obama?”

That whooshing sound you hear is a great gasp of relief from across the Atlantic at their now having an American partner who studies, thinks, plays well with others, and who keeps the cover securely locked over the blinking red buttons on the console.

Which is where jazz comes in.

Our country has a long tradition of missing or dissing the global meaning of things African-American. Just as jazz has been revered in Europe as essentially a very advanced and creative form of classical music while its primarily-black American practitioners have struggled here to be viewed as more than barroom entertainers, Europe now bows to a man (who happens to be black) who represents a return to global statesmanship on a teetering planet -- while Americans squabble about whether he is really a legal citizen and whether he really hates white people.

We Americans really need to get out more often.

Public Option: Whose Math?

The Senate Finance Committee has just voted down a public health insurance option in its health reform bill.

This is thanks both to Republicans and some Democrats, including Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), who mumbles that he likes the idea but that in the real world it won't get enough senate votes.

Meanwhile, in the real  real world, nearly two-thirds of Americans continue to favor a public option, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

Which apparently answers the question of whose opinion actually counts.

"Fed."

When you get beyond the raw awfulness of the apparent murder of a cancer patient and father who was holding down three part-time jobs, the second-worst thing about the death of Bill Sparkman is the kind of political act it appears to be.

The body of Sparkman, 51, you may know, was found September 12 hanging from a tree in a remote dirt-poor section of rural Kentucky, a noose around his neck and his feet touching the ground. The word "Fed" was written across his chest.

One of Sparkman's three jobs was as a canvasser for the U.S. Census Bureau.

In other words, what this looks like is a man being murdered for being a government worker in a climate in which hateful howlers on the far right are now doing their best to convince the white poor and near-poor that government initiative is the work of Satan.

This is striking, given that Sheriff Kevin Johnson of Clay County, where Sparkman worked as a census taker, told the Washington Post, "The government's taking care of 70 percent of people here, through Social Security, SSI, food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid." Thirty percent of the residents of Clay County live below the poverty line (three times the national average), and the median household income is $20,000 (as opposed to $50,000 nationally), according to the Post.

So the question is whether Sparkman's death -- if he was murdered -- has anything to do with the perversely rising "You lie!" tide of government-hatred among government-needers, or if instead it's the work of one of the notorious backwoods paranoiacs in a community where Sheriff Johnson and many residents say most folks appreciate government instead of hating it. Or maybe it's both: the current spread of anti-government fever has spiked the delirium of some while still leaving most in possession of their faculties.

We don't yet know the answer to this question. We do know that being a census worker who goes out alone in moonshining/marijuana-farming/meth-lab country is dangerous. We know that census canvassers have been attacked and murdered before, if not with "Fed" emblazoned across their chests.

And we know that some poor whites' narcissistic illusion of their own flesh-ripping power in the face of a perceived black threat -- now fostered by talk-show barkers who use the Obama presidency to spur an all-out war against government, even in flagrant denial of what government does for suffering whites -- is the oldest game in town for inducing down-and-out American whites to lustily cheer that which routinely screws them.

As I've said before, it's an elegantly effective way of causing the brains of some whites to fall out of the backs of their heads.

Holder Holding Back on Justice?

It's looking as if Attorney General Eric Holder may be following the Obama Administration's approach of proclaiming bold action for a just cause but then backpedaling and apologizing its way out of any meaningful initiative.

Which is to say, Holder may find himself mired by the same feet of clay that are slowly and agonizingly discrediting his boss.

Current talk has it that Holder's Justice Department, after having the nerve to re-open criminal investigation of CIA abuse of detainees against the wishes of a nervous Obama, is slowly yielding to withering criticism of the probe. Holder last month issued a statement assuring critics that "neither the opening of a preliminary review nor, if evidence warrants it, the commencement of a full investigation, means that charges will necessarily follow," according to the Washington Post. And now, according to the Post, sources say Justice's review will focus on a "very small number of cases." That may be legally wise if these are the most winnable cases. But the language coming out of Justice continues to sound more like equivocation than energetic prosecution.

No question, Holder is getting hammered by those who would like to weaken or kill this investigation. Seven former CIA directors called on Friday for the entire investigation to be scrapped on the grounds that it would impede future intelligence work and demoralize CIA employees who thought they had the government's protection and who believed they had been cleared by previous investigators' decision to not pursue the cases, according to the Post. This is truly fun-house logic. It's like claiming that an apparently crooked police department should not be investigated because it would demoralize those who were previously assured under the crooked regime that their nasty acts were okay, and it might scare employees who may be asked to carry out questionable acts in the future.

This one is easy: Receiving orders or soothing assurances from one's organization never, ever insulates one from the personal obligation to do the correct thing. We learned this at Nuremberg, we learned it during Watergate, we learned it from Enron, we learned it in the recent bank meltdown, and we have learned it in countless whistle-blower cases. Being assured protection under the amoral Bush Administration for using "enhanced" interrogation techniques, and being promised by a stooge Justice Department that no investigations would follow, provide no more excuse for CIA personnel violating international standards of human rights than did the commands handed down to the guards at Auschwitz or the orders given by Lt. William Calley at My Lai. If you work for a bad boss, his being your boss does not spare you the consequences of your having chosen to follow his instructions to behave badly. Eric Holder should aggressively push forward with the CIA investigations, remind his critics that no chain of command negates the Geneva Conventions, and respectfully remind his boss in the Oval Office of the job he was hired to do as Attorney General.

The compelling reason to prosecute any CIA operatives shown to have violated standards for human rights is one that any conservative should understand: it's called taking personal responsibility.

What's Wrong with This Picture?

Good intention. Bad idea.

Everything that's wrong with current assumptions about the innate nature of opinion is on this sign.

I took the photo at a gas station on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.

Obama, Spock, and Rocky.

Nobody wants for Barack Obama to start grunting like Sylvester Stallone and trading haymakers to the head. (Although some left hooks and an occasional right cross would be good.)

But Maureen Dowd hits it on the nose in her recent New York Times column, "Obama needs to be less Spocky, more Rocky."

A lot of folks, including me, have been bemoaning Obama's Incredible Shrinking Man syndrome, and grieving at how the fully-statured man we thought we elected is now trapped inside the silverware drawer trying to hold off a ravenous spider with a sword made from a hat pin.

Dowd gives an incisive telling of this sad parable of Little Mr. Nice Guy. A sample:

President Obama is so wrapped up in his desire to be a different, more conciliatory, beer-summit kind of leader, he ignores some verities.

Sometimes, when you've got the mojo, you have to keep your foot on your opponent's neck. When you're trying to get a Sisyphean agenda passed, it's good if people in the way - including rebellious elements in your own party - fear you.

Civil discourse is fine, but when the other side is fighting dirty, you should get angry. Don't let the bully kick sand in your face. The White House should have impaled death panel malarkey as soon as it came up.

By the time the president got feisty in a speech on Monday, the inmates had taken over cable TV, much like the spooky spirits swarming up over Bald Mountain in "Fantasia."

Her entire piece is worth reading and sharing.

Thanks to Rob.

Obama: Big Speech, Small Talk.

President Barack Obama is a great orator.

It's a shame that he is shaping up to be a mediocre leader.

Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress last night was oratorically masterful, soaring with lines that get the heart racing and that tell it like it is: "I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last." "I will not back down on the basic principle that if Americans can't find affordable coverage, we will provide you with a choice." "[Health reform will cost] less than we have spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.” "The time for games has passed." "If you misrepresent what's in the bill, we will call you out."

And the speech gave long-overdue satisfaction on some scores. Obama bluntly confronted the lies of his opponents, telling them flat-out that the death-panel rumor "is a lie, plain and simple." He reminded legislators that health care is not just an economic equation but a moral value, and he unveiled a personal letter from the late Senator Edward Kennedy in which Ted made this very point, devastatingly, from the grave.

But the rest of Obama's talk was cheap. His almost apologetic defense of a public option -- which he made sure to say would constitute only a small percentage of the market, and which he seemed to imply would be available only to those who now lack any insurance -- was a pathetic shadow of Obama's former commitment to providing a robust federal competitor to pull down the outrageous prices most Americans pay for private insurance and drugs. And the way Obama last night tossed up the public option as a mere "possibility" for consideration is a virtual guarantee that it will eventually be dropped from any bill, unless there is some sudden and explosive insurrection among Democrats. Obama's backpedaling, in which he assured the audience that a public option is simply one of many possible means to increase consumer choice and is not necessarily a goal in and of itself, is shamefully disingenuous. Only a public competitor will have the clout to exert meaningful downward pressure on the price of health coverage; scared Dems and angry Republicans tacitly acknowledge this when they claim that a public option will put insurers out of business because the government can deliver a health plan more cheaply. Voters, who in polls have repeatedly shown broad support for a public option, will be shown the door on this issue by a senate, a congress, and a president who lack the guts for a showdown with the insurance industry.

Obama's non-explanation of an "insurance exchange" to allegedly increase choice (within which he buried the public option as a possible contender) left even more empty space for rearrangement of the deck chairs on the industry Titanic. And his declaration that "it makes more sense to build on what works... rather than to build an entirely new system from scratch" pretty much spells out in neon Obama's willingness to protect and preserve the supreme dominance of a thoroughly broken for-profit insurance system.

If our president has his way, the best we will possibly see is some improvements in regulation of the insurance industry, such as outlawing the infamous prohibition of pre-existing conditions and pushing insurers to relax some of their draconian restrictions. That would be a good thing. But reform of American health care? Hardly. Obama is sticking with the same M.O. that has failed his policy agenda all along: trying to rise above conflict by reasoning with the unreasonable, instead of kicking ass and taking names within his party and throughout Congress and the Senate for the sake of what citizens want and need. In pursuing his top priorities, he'd do well to use less TLC and more LBJ.

We will see if and how the President follows up on the things he said last night that do carry actual substance. As I continue to stubbornly insist, Obama has the tools and the high intentions for the astronomical demands of this presidency if he can find the heart for it. So far, though, he acts like a man who plays a rhetorically formidable president on TV but who has little idea how to actually do the job. Nearly 30 years after The Gipper took office, that's some irony.

Discipline.

In response to the question of whether support for any non-laughable health reform bill from "moderate" Republicans like Chuck Grassley was ever a possibility, Lindsay Beyerstein nails it:

Simple answers to simple questions: No, there was never any realistic prospect of getting Chuck Grassley to support healthcare reform. Grassley is a Republican and, unlike Democrats, Republicans have party discipline. Scuttling health reform is the GOP's number one priority. It should have been clear from the outset that any plan that depended on the cooperation of Republicans was doomed.

When you get beyond the by-now reflexive timidity of most Democrats on hot issues, the Dems' second-biggest mistake is their confusing party discipline with goose-stepping anti-democracy. The two are not the same, and although they sometimes go together, they don't have to.

For instance: ironclad party discipline in the service of a dishonest war or the smearing of a popular idea such as a public health care option is indeed anti-democratic discipline. It is the closing of ranks to sabotage the public will or the public interest. But ironclad party discipline to hold together the votes needed for a bill that will give a majority of Americans the choice they want in health care is pro-democratic discipline. It is the force required to fend off reactionary opposition to giving non-wealthy Americans a slightly fairer shake. Stern party unity for the sake of greater social or economic equality is not a vice. It is a virtue.

Ask anyone who has led an egalitarian social revolution – say, Nelson Mandela – if "bipartisanship" mattered at the height of the conflict between an entrenched controlling minority and the rest of the society.

The Dems don't get this. Softened by lack of true pressure from the left in a corporate-controlled campaign system, Democrats have forgotten how to fight, how to risk personal harm for the sake of the public good. True, somewhere deep in the Dems' lizard brains, the labor and civil rights legacies of their party still nudge them subliminally toward a "high road" sensibility that the GOP lacks. But the Dems have forgotten that the high road – the road of King and Mandela – has also been a bloody one, and that surviving and prevailing on that road has demanded, above all else, a soldierly unity unbroken by shattered bones on the back roads of the South or shattered political decorum in the Capitol dome. Today, all that remains of the high road for today's Democratic Party is its sense of style and etiquette: its aversion to combat, its refusal to meet the amorality of the GOP with righteous Democratic ruthlessness, its naive insistence on the freedom of Democratic politicians to follow their own personal muses through the grassy fields while a united Republican Party erects iron walls hemming in the political landscape.

And so we now have Democratic President Barack Obama. He is eminently civilized. He is almost saintly in comparison with the opponents whose daggers hack away at his bowels. He gives a great speech. His aides tell us he'll wow us on Wednesday night.

But in the darkness away from the cameras, will he fight?