Victoria Brownworth » torture

What Is Really Scary Isn’t Palin

victoria — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 20:35:01 +0000

I have been busy starting an independent publishing house for kid’s books and trying not to go crazy over what’s happening in the Gulf and what’s not happening in Washington. Then this morning I get an email in which a friend asks:

Did you see the cover of Newsweek this week? “St. Sarah” (Palin). Scary as all get out.

I let out the same sigh I let out every time I get an over-wrought email or read an over-wrought post about Palin somewhere. But this one does prompt me to respond and to think about the comment which came, as the “Oh no!!!!!! Sarah Palin–run for your lives!!!!” comments always do, from someone who has center left politics. (And please don’t tell me there’s a left in America. There isn’t. There’s a center left, there’s a center, there’s a center right, there’s a right and there’s an extreme right. Alas, no extreme left. That handful of octogenerian Commies in Greenwich Village still arguing Trotsky v. Stalin does not count. Seriously. When we get a left here like we had in the 1960s or like much of Europe still has, then we can talk leftists. Until then it’s center left definition for you.)

Here’s what I think about Sarah Palin. I don’t care about her. She’s pretty, she’s charismatic, she has great skin, she wears clothes beautifully. But I do not care about her or whether Inside Edition thinks she had a boob job because they can’t tell the difference between a form-fitting t-shirt and a suit jacket. I do not care who she supports or what she says about the Gulf. She’s marginal. She’s relevant only in as much as she is the prop to keep Obama from completely gutting his presidency. Without Sarah Palin, what would Obama do? He’d have to go back to hating Hillary. He’d have to find a new deflection from his own massive mis-steps.

That’s what I think about Palin.

I just don’t have the Palin Paranoia. I can’t muster it.That syndrome comes largely from Obama supporters who can’t let go of the fact that he’s turned out to be everything the Hillary supporters said he was during the primary. I think Palin Paranoia is all about deflecting our attention from the real problem, which is our actual elected officials, starting with the President. Palin’s not an elected official. She didn’t win. She left her elected office in Alaska before her term was up. It doesn’t even matter what the reasons were–she left, which was the kiss of death for any other run for public office. But she doesn’t want to be in public office. Why should she when she has so much personal power–and money–without any of the sturm und drang and actual hard work that goes with being a public servant? She can go here and there–or not–and say whatever and be loved or hated and then go to sleep at night with no worries. No state to run, no country to run. Her biggest problem right now is that her daughter Bristol has allegedly reconcilled with the despicable cad who is the father of her baby.

No one can hold Palin accountable for anything she says because really, she only answers to her fan base, which is large but also largely marginal, and the press which can’t decide if it loves or hates her but does know it likes her on magazine covers because she sells. Well.

So why the center left’s obsession with her? Sure a lot of people like her–she’s incredibly charismatic. but she has no real power. Why has anyone forgotten that? To paraphrase Gwen Stephani, she’s just a girl in the world. Obama is president. He has he power. Doesn’t use it for squat, but he does have it.

Here’s the question–or rather questions–I want to ask everyone who quakes over Palin. Is she the person perpetrating torture in your name? No. That’s Obama.

Is she the person running three wars? (Yes, three, since Pakistan is a separate country. Oh and we bombed Yemen this morning, but it’s a Saturday and everyone ignores the news on a Saturday, so does that count?) No, the person running the three wars and bombing Yemen is Obama.

Is Palin the person who screwed up in the Gulf? No, still Obama.

Is Palin the person who has let the nation languish at ten percent unemployment while trying to appease the Republicans? No, that’s Obama.

Is Palin the person making deals behind closed doors with Big Oil and Big Coal? Again–Obama.

Is Palin the person who made us endless promises for a transparent government with no lobbyists and then proceeded to put lobbyists in half of his cabinet? Still–Obama.

Is Palin the person who moved the U.S. Supreme Court to the right when we all thought he would move it to the left by nominating two center-right justices to replace two liberal justices? Sadly, inevitably, and for decades to come, that too is Obama.

So when I think about Palin, I think the focus on her from the center-left Obama supporters like moveon and the DSCC and Code Pink and people who laud themselves as progressives is all about getting our attention off Obama and saying, “No—look over there! THAT’S what’s scary.”

Nope, what’s scary is that we elected Obama. All of us who voted for him, myself included. So we can’t complain like we could about Bush. We didn’t vote for Bush so we could sigh and point and show disdain for eight long years. We could talk about what would happen when a Democrat was in the White House again.

Okay, well, now the Democrat is in. Has been in. And look at where we are. It was Obama who allowed Palin to hijack the health care reform conversation and turn it into a conversation about death panels. It was Obama who gutted the public option. It was Obama who spent months wooing Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, the joint Republican swine senators of Maine, for their puny votes as Republicans for health care reform (because Maine isn’t going under with poor people who don’t have health care, no it isn’t) and totally ignored the fact that he was losing votes from his own party until it was too late.

We had to put up with eight years of “The Decider” and now we have two more years to go with the “Unable to Decide-er.”

Much as we might want to blame Palin for what’s wrong in America, she’s just barely even a symptom. Whereas Obama has become the actual complaint. If you can look at nothing else, look at the Gulf. That is Obama’s Katrina. And it didn’t have to be.

Those of us struggling to retain some measure of progressivism in the face of the current centrist presidency that we voted in need to remember that Palin is Obama’s best friend right now. He needs her more desperately than John McCain ever did. She’s the person Obama’s devotees hold up as a caution: ”This is why we have to support Obama!” As if the only choices left to us as American voters are Obama or Palin.

Wrong.

It’s not Palin v. Obama. It never was. Palin isn’t running for president. And even her staunchest supporters aren’t sure that’s what they want for/from her. Palin is a king maker. And, apparently, an un-king maker. Seven of the ten candidates she supported and put her arms around won in their respective primaries. She wants that role and it’s a good role for her. She also points fingers at Obama regularly. Which, if Obama were doing the job he said he would do, wouldn’t matter one whit.

And yet it does. Which is always the problem when the Emperor has no clothes. It doesn’t really matter who points it out. It’s the fact that matters.

Still, come 2012 Obama is going to be running not against the perky gal from Alaska, but against some stalwart of the new Republican vanguard. Someone who will point to the failures of the Obama Administration much as Obama pointed to the failures of the Bush Administration and ask that inevitable question Bill Clinton posed nearly two decades ago: Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

Obama isn’t going to ever be running against Sarah Palin. He’s going to be running against his own record. We voted him in with no experience because we were against experience. Our experience made us distrust experience. Experience looked like John McCain and that wasn’t the kind of experience we wanted.

And I do not regret my vote against McCain. I don’t even regret my vote for Obama. I regret Obama’s inability to lead, to be decisive, to do anything at all without a quorum or committee holding his hand and without looking at the Republicans first for their permission.

In the Palin v. Obama debate the facts are clear: neither deserves to be president. Alas, Obama is president. And that’s what’s causing the problems we are having. Did Obama make all the mess that needs cleaning up? Hardly, which is something both the Republicans and Democrats need to remember. But he hasn’t been a good clean-up guy, either, as the Gulf oil spill has made abundantly, tragically, endlessly clear.

Palin isn’t interested in being president. She never was. She’s said it a gazillion times. She likes being where she is–making a lot of money, making a lot of press and with the Democrats intent on keeping her solidly in the limelight for as long as they need her to take the heat off Obama, which will be right up until the November 2012 election, if things keep going the way they have been.

So do I find Sarah Palin scary? Hardly. Obama–the guy I voted for–doing nothing about anything—now that’s scary. Because we have real things to be scared about–the unending wars, a shattered economy where some people will never get their jobs back, unending torture, Elaine Kagan as a shoe-in for the Supreme Court, housing foreclosures as high as ever, a Gulf oil spill no one seems able to fix.

In the panoply of things to be scared of, Sarah Palin doesn’t even register on the political Richter Scale. And anyone who thinks she does, really isn’t paying attention.

We’ve got real problems in America. The question we need to be posing is, Who do we get to fix them? since the guy who said he was going to do just that seems to have abdicated much like Sarah Palin did her governorship. The only thing is, Obama hasn’t left his office, He’s just not really in it.— VAB

how is this change?

victoria — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:45:07 +0000

I spent the morning answering a plethora of emails from people about political issues ranging from health care reform to the wars to Bishop Tobin’s refusing Sen. Patrick Kennedy communion. It was unbelievably depressing. Much like every day during the Bush Administration. Only worse, because there is now no prospective Democratic president to hope for.

I acknowledge being a strident optimist. I don’t know how cynics get by in life and don’t especially want to know. That said, I’m increasingly cynical about the current administration and its apologists.

Remember when we progressives were against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan? Remember when we thought the refutation of the rule of law under the Bush Administration was tantamount to if not an outright war crime? Remember when the Abu Ghraib photos first appeared in The New Yorker and how shocked we were?

Cut to election night and the throngs in Grant Park and the tears and the cheering and the not having to wait for three days or three months to find out who was going to be the next president. Even if you weren’t a big fan of Barack Obama (I was a stalwart Hillary Clinton supporter, but voted for Obama in the general), you had to feel relief.

The enthusiasm and yes, hope, of that night is long gone. Now we are sitting right where we were a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, eight years ago—listening to excuses for things that are inexcusable, listening to the Democrats explain yet again why they have no spine (not all of them, but certainly well more than a quorum), listening to a President explain how a troop surge (what else do you call 35,000 more troops to Afghanistan?) will “finish the job,” listening to what we found loathesome under George W. Bush and making excuses for why it is okay under Barack H. Obama.

It’s not okay. It’s so not okay. Anyone who twists their integrity and logic around to excuse these inexcusable crimes—war, torture, recision of the rule of law, indefinite detenti0n—is simply lying: to themselves, to the country, to the world.

This is not change. This is the status quo we have been listening to for nearly a decade. It’s what we spent years defending against under Bush.

I voted for change. I didn’t expect all the change that was promised. But I did expect some modicum of difference. I did expect that I would be able to discern at least a subtle if not tectonic shift in the political status quo. But instead I have been seeing a Democrat in Republican clothing where a progressive was supposed to have been elected. And almost everything I read in the left-leaning blogosphere keeps saying it’s all the Republicans’ fault.

How? Since they’re not in power, I mean?

I have come to disbelieve that this President wants change. He keeps saying change is hard. But how would he know? He hasn’t effected any. Listening to this mantra of Obama’s that change is hard just sounds so very…Bush.

I don’t want another president deluded by his own power into believing that he is the answer. Obama isn’t the answer in Afghanistan. You can ask “how many Afghanis does it take to change a lightbulb?” again and again but the answer will be the same–the Afghanis have to really want to change the lightbulb and move from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the present. 35,000 more American troops will not force that change. Cannot force that change. We need to leave. We need to let these people fail or rise on their own. We can’t give them a pill to end corruption, we can’t change their deep desire to entrust their futures to war lords and corruption and repressive religious theocratic dictatorships. We can’t force democracy. We can’t even force it in our own Congress.

I feel we are back to the shell-game politics of the Bush Administration: look over here! No–look over here! First it was health care reform, then a jobs summit, now Afghanistan. No one is saying these aren’t all pressing issues. They are. Nevertheless, it seems as if there is just an endless stop/start routine between the President and the Democrats in Congress that stymies any and all actual progress.

It’s depressing. It’s not hopeful. And it’s definitely not the change most of us who voted for Obama were expecting. Stasis is not change. Someone as smart as Obama has to know that. And if he doesn’t, someone smart who is close to him should tell him. Before it’s too late and his one-term presidency is sealed.—VAB