Jay Adler has a must-read post over at Sad Red Earth entitled ”From the People Who Brought You Richard Nixon & George W. Bush.” Here’s a snippet, but do click over and read the rest:
Who has a shorter memory than the perpetual loser? Over and over the perpetual loser performs the same self-defeating act. Again and again, the loser fails, and failing, finds cause for failure in the inadequacy of others. Charlie Brown runs, as he has run countless times before, for the football Lucy holds to the ground, and which she withdraws yet again, at the ultimate instant, just before Charlie’s flailing kick. Upending himself, he falls to the ground, and cries out in despair, “How long, O Lord.”
Lucy, analyzing Charlie’s unknowing allusion to scripture, offers the final verdict.
“All your life, Charlie Brown. All your life.”
And you thought Peanuts was all sweetness and Christmas specials.
If you are a self-described liberal or progressive anticipating the 2012 presidential election, then you need to beware. For Lucy is coming and she brings her football with her. The same Puritopians who helped elect Richard Nixon president and who practically gave the 2000 election away to George W. Bush, now want to persuade you that the reelection of Barak Obama is not a momentous and meaningful prospect.
Here is Glenn Greenwald, one of the more popular voices of Puritopia (and neither liberal nor progressive anyway) sounding the meme:
Watch the Soros video yourselves. Apparently for the lawyer Greenwald, nuance is like the exculpatory evidence that refutes appearance and shows the defendant innocent. If a mainstream journalist distorted events like this, Glenn Greenwald, blogger, would burn his ass. But who made George Soros the arbiter, and that isn’t even the point.
Seriously. Go read the rest.
(h/t Shoq)
[via Sad Red Earth]
“I continue to support him, actually…”
–George Soros, on Obama (as NOT quoted by Greenwald)
Honest question: does Greenwald have someone he likes for the presidency, or is this just all about the whining?
Honest question: does Greenwald have someone he likes for the presidency, or is this just all about the whining?
No one. His primary pol orientation is liberatarian and anti authority, especially the authority bestowed to our presidents via the constitution. His nasty persona and all around assholishness, seems to me as coming from a daddy issue unresolved, for whatever reason. He attacks central authority to the emo degree he does, because that is what soothes his inner demons. His hatred for all things Obama, I think, comes from the fact he has decided to latch onto liberals and dems for an audience more close to his overall world view. Except, that with exceptions, to a small group of so called internet progressives, the dem party and liberals at large in the countryside, and in a few nooks and crannies of the blogosphere, this president is approved of by and large from the center left, and he, Glenn Greenwald, is threatened by that fact
The impression I get is that he wants to lead a cult like movement against central authority, and me and you and ABL, among others are harshing his demagogue buzz,, to bigger and more important things, in his own mind.
So he attacks, and gets more and more untethered from reality from record levels of dems like and support this PBO. And there isn’t a damn thing he can do about it, but come up with nun rape metaphors, and the like.
Thanks. I’ve been trying to figure this guy out, and what kept occuring to me was that he didn’t have “and therefore” part.
Isn’t Adler great? Not only are his points insightful and easy to follow, but they’re presented in his delightful prose:
“Here, in contrast, is a detail, a dot, that broadens to a wide swath across the canvass: in 1972, Nixon appointed William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court. Rehnquist served for thirty-three years, nineteen of them as the third-longest serving Chief Justice in history.
“Rehnquist was still on the court in 2000 and was part of the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority that gave the 2000 election victory to Bush over Gore. One Puritopian deliverance of the presidency to the GOP played a role thirty-two years later in another.”
Good catch, ABL. Thanks for the link.
The common feature among puritopians that distinguishes them from the rest of the Left is the primacy they give to their need for retribution. Have you noticed that? They needed President Obama to prioritize punishing all of the evil done during periods of rightwing power over all else. Now, since they feel President Obama betrayed them by not prioritizing their need for retribution, they will punish President Obama (and ALL Democrats) — ugly consequences be damned — because there must be retribution. I don’t know what the pathology of this behavior is, but its history (as Adler and others who are knowledgeable in U.S. political history have demonstrated) reveals a predictability of behavior that we could try to counteract, if we could better understand what drives the irrationality of it. I don’t know. Am I being too optimistic?
UPDATE: And now that I’m doing some reading on it, I realize retribution isn’t the appropriate word to characterize what the “puritopians” are seeking. Vengeance might be a better word, since it implies a passion underlying it that would cause a person to pursue it, even if the pursuit is ultimately self-destructive.
yes. “vengeance” is precisely the correct term.
jay’s a fantastic writer. if you haven’t read his piece on greenwald and hitchens, it’s well worth reading.
“The common feature among puritopians that distinguishes them from the rest of the Left is the primacy they give to their need for retribution.”
Which, ironically (or not?), is exactly parallel to the course to which the Conservatopians committed after Nixon’s forced resignation. They have found there star- let’s hope they never learn to build the tall ship.
“…theIr star…”, of course….
What kills me is that the Puritopians never can acknowledge that the radical right gained all their power WITHIN the GOP, not by creating some pie-in-the-sky “protest” party or “punishing” the GOP by staying home. And they continued to support them even when, year after year, prized items on the rightwing agenda (Human Life Amendment, Balanced Budget Amendment) never got off the ground. Yet there are a lot of lefties who somehow think that they should be rewarded for their fickleness with the Dems by having everything they want handed to them RIGHT THE FUCK NOW!!! BABY WANTS A RIGHTEOUSGASM OF JUSTICE!!!! as soon as a Dem becomes president.
And even when said Dem signs landmark legislation (make no mistake, the ACA is about as monumental an agenda item for Dems as the HLA would be for the right), it’s not enough for the Special Snowflakes of Puritopia.
I think Allan mentioned in a comment elsewhere that he likes to ask Paulites just what they think Ron Paul as president could do to achieve his goals. I’ve taken to asking the same thing about those who grow tumescent over the prospect of a President Sanders or Nader or Kucinich. (Once I finish pointing out the many, many ways in which they don’t live up to Puritopian ideals — Sanders, for instance, voting against closing Gitmo.) Just what do they think these guys could do with the same Congress that President Obama has that would yield a different outcome?
Generally, it comes down to some monumentally stupid crap about “bully pulpits!” Because to the Puritopian, all that matters is that they get to hear things that make them FEEL good. Like spoiled children, their fee-fees are the only yardstick that measures, and screw anybody else who might benefit from the inevitable compromises that governing in Grown-Up Land entail.
I agree wholeheartedly. But then again, these guys don’t understand the right wing at all. They don’t understand how the American right thinks nonetheless how certain factions within it rose to dominance.
It’s really hopeless. They have very little grasp of how things actually get done. Either they have their heads too far in the clouds to provide anything useless or they are on the make – delibrately trying to discourage the left into taking effective action on the behalf of the right.
This. A thousand times, this.
Because they’re whining, emo babies with black mascara cutting themselves in the bathroom over the latest poutrage.
We’re not like the right, we like to get constructive shit done, sue us, god dammit
Those of us who have a basic understanding of Civics 101 knows this shit
i feel like smoking a cigarette every time i read one of your comments. and then you throw in words like “tumescent” and i want to make you my wife.
I don’t know that there is a whole lot to understand from Greenwald and the firebaggers. It’s just old fashioned rat fuckery and they can do it in their sleep. They don’t have a reason other than ” there is a rat and I am a fucker of rodents”.
Oh, Angry Black Lady, I do so agree. I do not read Mr. Greenwald and haven’t done so in years because I don’t really need him to piss in my cornflakes. Or in the President’s cornflakes either, more importantly. I’d love to see any of the denizens of Puritopia do better than President Obama on just about any point. It’s easy to hold out for perfection when it’s all just in your own head.
A very aggravated white lady.
So now that The Purity Left’s favorite wacko vanity candidates has been ‘exposed’ as a bigot**. , the losers will have to find some other magic unicorn to glob on to in their misguided attempt to destroy Obama because having a corporate raider and emotional cypher like Romney or a corrupt, money grubbing, womanizing megalomaniac with fascist tendencies like Gingrich is so much better at advance liberal causes than that ‘evil moderate sell out’ Obama.
The problem is that most of the gripes have turned out duds. Manning wasn’t a freedom fighter, he was an angry confused kid lashing out at the government the way my brother lashes out at my parents. Ron Paul isn’t a champion of freedom, he’s weird redneck who lives in the Ozarks sitting on the front porch with a shotgun waiting for Negroes, Jews, government agents or salesmen to come a knocking so he can get in target practice. Obama doesn’t support the poison pill in NDAA and didn’t sign over the oil pipe lines.
The Professional Left are in a political tailspin as they are getting closed to being irrelevant. Well, more irrelevant than usual.
** and by exposed it means, “Glenn Greenwald, Robert Shear and other vanity Lefties can’t float ‘ Ron Paul isn’t really racist, because he’s a misunderstood libertarian being crushed by the corporate-political duopoly.” with a straight face SMH
The way I see it, Greenwald thinks that the biggest issue in politics is that the central government might bust down your door in the middle of the night. He discovered this fixation when Bush was president, so he thought he was a liberal, because he was worried about Bush’s power. He has continued this fixation while Obama has been president, so he thinks he’s more liberal than Obama. And that’s where his fans put him on the spectrum. But really he’s a VERY dogmatic small-r republican hung up on “liberty.” If you asked him how to reconcile the tension between a business’s right to serve only the customers they choose and a customer’s right not to be discriminated against — the Rand Paul and the Civil Rights Act question — I don’t know what he’d say. Probably deflect and say that anyone criticizing him is an ignorant cultist.