Such a Day I’ve Had

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First off, if anyone does wander here from The Guardian, please visit my Buddhism site at About.com. Thanks!

Now for the rest o’ y’all: I had an invitation in my inbox this morning to write an essay about the Dalai Lama for the Guardian “comment is free” site, and here it is. Written in a rush this morning. I’m afraid to read it. At least, I wish they hadn’t picked up that awful photo from About.com. If they’d asked, I would have sent them another one. Like maybe somebody else’s.

This has truly been Dalai Lama day, as this morning I also finished another essay about him for About.com, more of a bio. Today is the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the sequence of events that led to the Dalai Lama’s exile from Tibet (see Kundun). Like anything else Tibetan, writing about it requires stringing together at least five prepositional phrases. Oh, well.

Crazy Day

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I’m sorry to leave this site hanging. I’m having a crazy day, with things getting published and unpublished. I may have more to say later.

I will only comment briefly on Steve Benen’s post on the Right’s outraged surprise at President Obama’s stem cell decision. The Right is acting as if Obama had promised not to mess with Bush’s stem cell policy, but as Steve says, Obama clearly said during the campaign that he would change it just as he did change it.

I don’t think they are really surprised. I think it’s just part of their feigned outrage shtick. Utterly phony.

Update: I’ve written in the past about why I think embryonic stem cell research is moral and stopping it out of some rigid absolutist position is immoral. But if you want to see what is self-evidently wrong with it, see “Vetoing Henry” by Laurie Strongin in the July 23, 2006 Washington Post.

“The absolute position, when isolated, omits human details completely. Doctrines, including Buddhism, are meant to be used. Beware of them taking life of their own, for then they use us.” — Robert Aitken Roshi, The Mind of Clover

B.

Frank Schaeffer Roars

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Start your week off right, by watching this powerful interview of Frank Shaeffer, as he plugs his memoir, Crazy for God. Schaeffer’s parents, Francis and Edith, were well-known evangelicals during the 70s and 80s, and helped architect the religious right. Franky, as he was known back then, went along, but eventually he turned his back on what the religious right became. I found this interview on Huffington Post, where Schaeffer has an Open Letter to the Republican Traitors (from a former Republican) – it’s pretty scorching, and is excerpted below. I have rarely heard anyone speak so powerfully to the kinds of things we’ve been talking about on this site for ages:

You Republicans are the arsonists who burned down our national home. You combined the failed ideologies of the Religious Right, so-called free market deregulation and the Neoconservative love of war to light a fire that has consumed America. Now you have the nerve to criticize the "architect" America just hired — President Obama — to rebuild from the ashes. You do nothing constructive, just try to hinder the one person willing and able to fix the mess you created….

As the father of a Marine who served in George W. Bush’s misbegotten wars let me say this: if President Obama’s strategy to repair our economy, infrastructure and healthcare fails that will put our troops at far greater risk because the world will become a far more dangerous place. So for all you flag-waving Republicans who are trying to undermine the President at home — if you succeed more of our troops will be killed abroad.

When your new leader Rush Limbaugh calls for President Obama to fail he’s calling for more flag-draped coffins. Limbaugh is the new "Hanoi Jane."

For the party that created our crises of misbegotten war, mismanaged economy, the lack of regulation of our banking industry, handing our country to rich crooks… to obstruct the one person who is trying to repair the damage is obscene.

Just imagine where America would be today if the 14 to 20 million voters — "the rube base" who slavishly follow the likes of Limbaugh — had not voted as a block year after year thus empowering the Republican fiasco. We would have a regulated banking industry and would have avoided our current financial crisis; some 4000 of our killed military men and women would be alive; over to 35,000 wounded Americans would be whole; we would have been leaders in the environmental movement; we would be in the middle of a green technology boom fueling a huge expansion of our economy and stopping our dependence on foreign oil, and our health-care system would be reformed….

The worsening economic situation is your fault and your fault alone. The Republicans created this mess through 8 years of backing the worst president in our history and now, because you put partisan ideology ahead of the good of our country, you have blown your last chance to redeem yourselves. You deserve banishment to the political wilderness

The Health Care Rant

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I haven’t done this for awhile, but I decided to post the health-care rant I’ve been working on at Alternet PEEK. Go give it some love. I will probably cross-post it here and a couple of other places tomorrow. I’m not hearing anyone else plainly say how radical and untested the “conservatives'” cockamamie “consumer-driven” idea really is, so I’m trying to get the word out.

Shifting Ground?

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At Tapscott’s Copy Desk, DC Examiner, we find “Obama is in trouble.”

Did you feel it? The political ground shifting beneath President Barack Obama since his speech last week to Congress? It’s been downhill since and I’m not referring mainly to the Dow Jones record-setting dive. The pivot point of the shift was the speech, or rather what the speech did to the evolving public narrative of Obama.

The “evolving public narrative,” one learns, is going on entirely on right-wing public radio and Faux Nooz. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are on fire, apparently. Further, “a potentially devastating conservative case against Obama is coming together rapidly.” Wow! This could be troublesome. But yes, two columns “tell the tale.” They are:

Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal:

The Republicans have been handed on a tarnished silver platter the chance to offer the American people an alternative vision of how their economy works — and grows.

They should take political ownership of the 75% of the U.S. economy that the Democrats have abandoned — the private economy.

Hello?

Over the past four decades and the decline of private-sector industrial unions, professional Democrats — politicians, intellectuals like Robert & Robert, campaign professionals, unions and satellite groups — have severed their emotional and intellectual connection with private production.

Wow, that’s so — nonsensical. OK, so what’s the other column? Why, it’s Charles Krauthammer! The same column I cited in my last post! Let’s look at Tapscott’s synopsis Krauthhammer:

Obama’s mastery of public speaking has heretofore served to deflect attention away from the details of what he is actually proposing. And there is in those details, according to Krauthammer, a fundamental deception: Obama summons visions of catastrophe that are the result of too little government regulation of the financial markets and he offers as a solution vastly more government regulation of …. health care, energy and education.

Krauthhammer and Tapscott are saying that Obama is deceiving the public by claiming the financial meltdown is the result of deregulation of financial markets and offering as the solution more regulation of health care, energy and education. Tapscott continues,

In other words, Krauthammer said, Obama tries to have it both ways, with the alleged errors of deregulation being compounded into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression by America’s failure to nationalize health care, shift our economy to alternative energy sources and give everybody a free pass to college. Obama is trying to make the cause and the cure synonymous. “Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core,” Krauthammer said.

I read this three times to try to see where Obama’s dishonesty lies, and it eludes me. Of course, like most righties Tapscott and Krauthammer cannot so much as breathe without being intellectually dishonest about it. For example, they are being intellectually dishonest when they say Obama’s solution is more regulation of health care, energy and education. Some regulation is needed, but even more important is more investment in health care, energy and education.

And what’s with the “free pass to college”? Exactly where do they get this stuff?

Anyway, like most right-wing arguments, it is based on ideology that is utterly unconnected to anything happening in the real world. People who are already convinced that President Obama is a radical socialist terrorist fist bumper will take this argument to their hearts and repeat it like parrots without knowing what any of it really means. Everyone else will say, “huh?”

Michael Hirsch writes at Newsweek about the shifting ground:

Despite the tumbling economy, Barack Obama continues to enjoy a honeymoon with the American public in the face of the most trying crisis any newly inaugurated president has encountered since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The GOP, meanwhile, is viewed by a majority of Americans as the party of “no,” without a plan of its own to fix the economy, and even rank-and-file Republicans are concerned about the party’s direction, according to the first NEWSWEEK Poll taken since Obama assumed office. …

… Overall, 58 percent of Americans surveyed approve of the job Obama is doing, while 26 percent disapprove and one in six (16 percent) has no opinion. Although his approval ratings are down from levels seen a few weeks ago in other polls, 72 percent of Americans still say they have a favorable opinion of Obama—a higher rating than he received in NEWSWEEK Polls during the presidential campaign last year. The president’s rating in this poll is consistent with estimates provided by other national media polls in the last week.

Many on the Right also are claiming that Obama owns the nation’s faltering economy, since he’s been POTUS for less than seven weeks and hasn’t fixed it yet. In particular, the Right is seizing the falling stock market as proof that Obama’s economic policies are already failing. Robert Reich explains why this is nonsense. See also Tom Petruno at the Los Angeles Times.

Of course, going back many years we see that righties always claim good economies as theirs and bad economies as belonging to Democrats. In rightie world, the “Reagan Recession” of 1981-1982, which began after St. Ronald of Blessed Memory took office, was Jimmy Carter’s fault. On the other hand, the strong economy of Bill Clinton’s second term was, of course, Saint Ronald’s doing, even though Reagan had been out of office for a decade.

Time has a way of strangely compressing and expanding in the rightie brain.

Who’s Being Radical?

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Some articles that highlight Our Present Insanity — Michael Lind in Salon and Paul Krugman in the New York Times both complain that President Obama is being way too cautious and timid and “centrist.” Lind is especially harsh, saying that Obama is falling into the neoliberal pattern of buying into the Right’s “market friendly” fetish.

You might have thought that the Crash of 2008 would have led Democrats to reconsider this neoliberal approach to providing public goods by private means. But to judge from President Obama’s budget, the White House is still living back in the neoliberal era, when the diminutive Milton Friedman cast a giant shadow.

I think Lind is overstating things a bit, but I agree that the Obama Administration is making more concessions to “conservative” (note quotes for irony) ideas than I would like.

But on the other end of the scale, Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post complains that Obama “intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.” Oh, and Obama’s health care proposals? “Socialized medicine.” The usual blah blah blah.

I’ve been working on a long rant on health care, which is partly why I didn’t post much yesterday. It’s not finished, but the major theme is that “conservative” health care proposals are untried and radical — nowhere on the planet is 21st century medical care being delivered via a “market-driven” health care system — whereas Obama’s proposals are genuinely conservative, in the common dictionary sense of the word, compared to the way health care is funded and delivered in all the other industrialized democracies.

You see this in everything the Right does. You want “the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime”? Look at the results of Reaganism. (America, are you better off now than you were thirty years ago? I don’t think so.)

It’s time to speak loudly and clearly that the “conservative” agenda is not conservative at all, but dangerously radical. The results of this radicalism are plain to see, in the form of a once-healthy economy that is now crumbling around our feet. The ur-talking point we liberals need to adopt is that “movement conservatism” is and always was a crazy, radical, extremist pile of nonsense that was only packaged as conservatism.