Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Less Spocky, More Rocky
As soon as I started covering Barack Obama, I knew he was going to be trouble.
Not Global Trouble, like W. and Dick Cheney. Or Hanky-Panky Trouble, like Bill Clinton and John Edwards. Or Tedious Trouble, like John Kerry and Michael Dukakis.
He was going to be the kind of guy who whipped you up and then, when you were all excited, left you flat, and then, when you were deflated and exasperated and time was running out, ensorcelled you again with some sparkly fairy dust.
It's an irritating pattern. Not as puerile as Bill Clinton's pattern of wasting time and plunging into personal chaos, or as horrifying as Dick Cheney's routine of bullying and cutting paper dolls out of the Constitution.
But not as reliably uplifting as Jed Bartlet either.
After keeping his great powers of persuasion and elucidation under wraps all summer, the president at long last comes forward to explain his health care plan to an utterly confused and increasingly skeptical and wary public.
He should have done this speech back in June and conjured up a better glossary. You can't combat a scintillating term like "death panels" with a somnambulant one like "public option."
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."
Even Steve Hildebrand, the strategist who helped shape Obama's historic win in the Iowa caucuses, complains that his former hero "needs to be more bold in his leadership." Disenchanted at Obama's disengaged approach on health care and gay rights, Hildebrand told Politico's Ben Smith that he was "losing patience."
It was one thing for Obama to delegate freely when he was on the Harvard Law Review, but it's madness to go play golf and delegate freely to Congress, letting Nancy Pelosi make your case. After signaling that there was nothing he'd fall on his sword for on health care; after dropping Van Jones at the first objection from Glenn Beck - a demagoon who called Obama a "racist" - the president is getting to be seen as an easy mark.
If Obama didn't have a knife-thrower like Rahmbo in the Oval, Democrats would be totally convinced that the president would fold in a heartbeat.
In the absence of more vivid presidential leadership, the Democrats have reverted to their old DNA - self-destructive scrapping and spending. And the Republicans are sticking to theirs - being mean-spirited and shameless, attacking big government spending while taking no blame for their own.
Just as he let Hillary breathe new life into her faltering campaign in New Hampshire, Obama let the moribund Republicans revivify themselves in the slashing image of Limbaugh and Palin. Administration officials have been chortling that Republicans overreached in criticizing the president for giving a speech urging kids to study hard, write their own destiny and wash their hands.
It's true that Republicans who objected looked risible. On MSNBC, Joe Watkins, a G.O.P. strategist, explained the perils of letting "one of the most gifted speakers that the world has ever seen" speak to impressionable children.
What if next time, he asked, the president made a strong argument to kids about the Defense of Marriage Act? "What if," he wondered, "kids come back home and say to their mom and dad, when the president who they like and who they agree with, tells them marriage is not necessarily between a man and a woman?"
But if such Republicans seem loco, and the far left looks easily outmaneuvered, the president seems lame, too, for letting the crazies and uglies get on offense all summer, showcased by a superficial media beast. Laura Bush had to ride to Obama's rescue and explain that he wasn't a brain-washing alien, that it was a good thing for a president to inspire kids.
It shouldn't take a superhuman effort by the Democrats, with an assist from a Republican former first lady, to beat back the most obviously nutty, stupid things that Republicans say.
The president told students on Tuesday that "being successful is hard" and "you won't necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try."
He should take his own words to heart. He can live long and prosper by being less Spocky and more Rocky.
- Posted in
23 Comments so far
Show AllMr. Obamba has proven himself to be a lier. No wars ended, no health care, bail outs for the rich. He is not the man for the times that we are facing.. We need someone to throw the money changers out of the temple. The black swans are coming we do not need an appeaser we need a fighter to handle the problems that are coming on us like a tidle wave.
He makes the mistake of trying to prop up failed systems that never worked and crashed this last year. What sane person would want to try it again and hope for a better outcome. Insanity!!
Pity the children..
I take it that you recognized the weakness of your post and that's why you felt you had to repeat it?
Mr. Obamba has proven himself to be a lier. No wars ended, no health care, bail outs for the rich. He is not the man for the times that we are facing.. We need someone to throw the money changers out of the temple. The black swans are coming we do not need an appeaser we need a fighter to handle the problems that are coming on us like a tidle wave.
He makes the mistake of trying to prop up failed systems that never worked and crashed this last year. What sane person would want to try it again and hope for a better outcome. Insanity!!
Pity the children..
interesting that the lovely ms. dowd uses popular tv and film characters to flesh out her analogy, as the very political arena upon which she purports to report is nothing but theater, also...
might as well write 'serious' articles about these guys, as about repubs and dems:
http://www.wwe.com/
writing about the fact that the entire governmental system under which we live out our days is corrupted to the core, and that both parties are implicit in such, well, that would truly be avant-garde work for one in the MSM...
Ms. Dowd is on the ball again, as usual.
I love the word 'ensorcelled.' Why is it not in my GI official Microsoft Encarta dictionary?
This comes from fantasy books. It means bewitched in a literal sense; the root is sorcery.
Aha, now it makes sense. The last scifi I read was Dune, I think.
Thanks.
Fred
More of less... The word comes directly from the French word: 'ensorceler' (to bewitch, cast a spell on or over). The French word for wizard is 'sorcier', and witch is 'sorciere' (with and obtuse accent on the 1st 'e').
I like Maureen but she has an annoying wannabe Francaise pretention. Ensorcelled is not an English word, according to the Oxford. The English language has very good words for what she was trying to say.
Another high profile writer making this same point. I hope someone tells Obama.
I'm afraid he's just another nice guy who thinks the best way to win over your enemies is by having your enemies convince themselves you're not such a bad guy after all. Might happen in normal circumstances, but not with racists like the Republicans.
We all want Obama to be strong and to fight the good fight. And when rowdy drunks come into the house we would appreciate it if he didn't allow them all to pee on the sofa. Or to burn down the backyard - which is what we have seen so far this summer.
Well, let's hope the speech tonight accomplishes something, and moves us forward. But to constantly reiterate that he has been too silent over this silly season demonstrates someone has not been awake, or listening. For he has actually made what he wants in the way of healthcare quite clear.
Obama is a slow worker, a man who, as we have seen, stays cool when everyone around him is going crazy. Obama presents a threat to the right, one they genuinely hate and fear and they have whipped themselves up into an hysterical frenzy. Where else could such blatant absurd nonsense such the rhetoric of the birthers and deathers come from? They portray him as a "socialist," or "fascist," because they can't think of words which would hurt more. They stamp their feet like children. Nor are they "astroturf." They genuinely hate and fear the world they imagine this Harvard educated black man from Chicago is bringing them. He is totally foreign to them. He can not be faulted for that. Nor can he be faulted for his intelligence and basic decency.
Can it be possible that he is keeping his head when all those about him are losing theirs, and blaming it on him? To paraphrase Kipling. We need more fight out of Obama now, siure enough. But maybe the time for clear headedness and some calm has also come?
Obama led us on, but he didn't lie about his position on war. He was clear he wanted to scale down war against Iraq, and step up the war against Afghanistan. He has done so.
I've never thought much of Dowd's columns. They often merely ramble without any real content, clearly stated. I'll agree with her on Obama's stirring up expectations with a meaningless Hope theme, only to let people down. But Obama is Global Trouble just like Bush, although some details are different. He just didn't need to arrange a Pearl Harbor (like FDR did) because his Republican predecessors took care of that for him.
FDR? Pearl Harbor?
What lurid nonsense. Did Roosevelt know there would be war? Every cognizant person of his time did. Would he have been foolhardy and reckless enough to destroy the Pacific fleet (minus the carriers) and open up the undefended westcoast to a possible Japanese invasion?
Well, FDR liked to play cards with his select cronies, to relax. He gambled a lot. It may have reduced the pressure on him and, along with a drink or two, and his ever present cigarette, may have helped relax him. But playing by such rules on the international stage? Hardly.
But if he had known the Japanese would cooperate? Ah, yes, then Pearl Harbor would have made sense. A huge defeat on our westcoast may have violently woken the American people up from an isolationist slumber. But the Japanese and Nazis were most cooperative in that way. They didn't need be invited to stir things up.
And now, I expect you will tell us Truman dropped the bomb only to scare the Soviets? Well, maybe, maybe not. But in 1945 - a very different times from ours, before "the bomb" became "the bomb" - there were many other compelling reasons to. Any one of which, among the larger choices, would have been enough.
You're right, Quinty September 9th, 2009 7:29 pm, as the son of a WWII veteran who was in the Pacific Theater, and knowing many such vets in the past, those of us 'Baby Boomers' don't realize what a relief it was back then that we didn't have to invade Japan. Three things are true, in this case:
1. Truman was told that invading Japan would cost a million American lives.
2. Japan, suffering under the Code of Bushido, had no intention of surrendering, nor ceasing to build their war machine, should we stop bombing them. We might have been able to starve them out with an embargo, but that would have taken years and Japan was developing advanced weaponry such as jet aircraft and submarines capable of attacking the US west coast with technology acquired from Nazi Germany. And there was also the issue of thousands of Allied prisoners in Japanese POW camps -- they would all be dead by the time an embargo worked. (The Japanese were also working on their own A-bomb, but probably never could have completed it.) Until the atomic bombs were dropped, the Japanese public was being prepared to fight to the death and kill as many foreigners as they could in the process. Only when the Japanese high command and Emperor Hirohito realized that with atomic weaponry we could wipe Japan from the face of the earth without suffering massive casualties in return did they surrender.
3. No one in 1945 recognized the true impact of the use of atomic weapons. Knowledge of the full long-term effects of fallout, for instance, were not well known at the end of the war. As horrible as the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, in fact Truman spared the lives of both Americans and Japanese by his decision to use the bomb.
One final note: If FDR was planning to employ a suprise attack on Pearl Harbor to get us into a war with Germany, why was a 'war warning' issued on November 22, 1941, to every US outpost in the Pacific? That the various American and British commanders in the Pacific, including Admiral Kimmel and General Short in Hawaii, were convinced that the Japanese would first attack the Philippines, Singapore and the Malay Peninsula was no fault of Roosevelt's. It was Kimmel's decision to keep the battleships in Pearl where they made easy targets; it was Short's decision to park his aircraft close together to make them easier to guard against sabotage -- those devastatingly bad choices didn't come from the White House. The idea that FDR knew of Japan's surprise attack in advance is nothing more than a ludicrous right-wing Republican smear of a popular liberal Democratic president.
You should be ashamed of yourself for spouting such ridiculous propaganda.
DWIGHT EISENHOWER
"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."
- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380
In a Newsweek interview, Eisenhower again recalled the meeting with Stimson:
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63
~~~ADMIRAL WILLIAM D. LEAHY
(Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman)
"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
"The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."
- William Leahy, I Was There, pg. 441.
~~~HERBERT HOOVER
On May 28, 1945, Hoover visited President Truman and suggested a way to end the Pacific war quickly: "I am convinced that if you, as President, will make a shortwave broadcast to the people of Japan - tell them they can have their Emperor if they surrender, that it will not mean unconditional surrender except for the militarists - you'll get a peace in Japan - you'll have both wars over."
Richard Norton Smith, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover, pg. 347.
On August 8, 1945, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Hoover wrote to Army and Navy Journal publisher Colonel John Callan O'Laughlin, "The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul."
quoted from Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, pg. 635.
"...the Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February 1945...up to and before the time the atomic bombs were dropped; ...if such leads had been followed up, there would have been no occasion to drop the [atomic] bombs."
- quoted by Barton Bernstein in Philip Nobile, ed., Judgment at the Smithsonian, pg. 142
Hoover biographer Richard Norton Smith has written: "Use of the bomb had besmirched America's reputation, he [Hoover] told friends. It ought to have been described in graphic terms before being flung out into the sky over Japan."
Richard Norton Smith, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover, pg. 349-350.
In early May of 1946 Hoover met with General Douglas MacArthur. Hoover recorded in his diary, "I told MacArthur of my memorandum of mid-May 1945 to Truman, that peace could be had with Japan by which our major objectives would be accomplished. MacArthur said that was correct and that we would have avoided all of the losses, the Atomic bomb, and the entry of Russia into Manchuria."
Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, pg. 350-351.
~~~GENERAL DOUGLAS MacARTHUR
MacArthur biographer William Manchester has described MacArthur's reaction to the issuance by the Allies of the Potsdam Proclamation to Japan: "...the Potsdam declaration in July, demand[ed] that Japan surrender unconditionally or face 'prompt and utter destruction.' MacArthur was appalled. He knew that the Japanese would never renounce their emperor, and that without him an orderly transition to peace would be impossible anyhow, because his people would never submit to Allied occupation unless he ordered it. Ironically, when the surrender did come, it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of the imperial reign. Had the General's advice been followed, the resort to atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary."
William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, pg. 512.
Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with MacArthur, "MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed." He continues, "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."
Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71.
@ getreal September 10th, 2009 1:50 pm -- you should get real. Gen. Eisenhower was in Europe at the time and not apprised of the full situation in the Pacific.
Herbert Hoover was FDR's conservative Republican opponent in 1932 and adhered to his conservative pro-business viewpoint for the rest of life, contrary to the Great Depression directly resulting from them on his watch. He was no friend of FDR nor Truman and certainly not objective.
Gen. Dougals MacArthur was fired by Harry Truman during the Korean War for not following orders, contemplated running for president as a Republican, and I don't recall reading that he made any statements opposing the dropping of the A-bomb when he was accepting the surrender of the Japanese aboard the USS Missouri in 1945.
Your quoting of three Republican opinions, one not fully-informed and two with a level of enmity, only serves to prove my point: This was a politically-charged smear campaign against FDR, Truman and the Democrats, both on the Pearl Harbor conspiracy nonsense and the dropping of the atomic bomb.
Trying to put myself in the Americans' place at that time it is not hard to visualize using the bomb. It offered a quck knock out blow which would have immediately ended the war. And, of course, did. Isn't that consideration in itself sufficient to understand why it may have been used?
The US had been working for years, spending billions (no small change then) to develop the bomb. Once having it, with the prospect of losing many more American lives in a full scale invasion of Japan (following the horrors of Okinawa) not using it would have appeared irresponsible. The Americans, by then, were not willing to wait for the Japanese leadership to decide whether to fight on or not (there being some confusion): not when victory was immediately possible. Not after Okinawa and the apparent arming of the mainland. Not after the hatred which had developed over time during a very hard fought and horrible war.
And let's not forget, with the exception of a small minority, scientists like Oppenheimer, the full meaning and horror of atomic weaponry was not fully understood yet. The bomb had not become "the bomb" as yet. The meaning of atomic war was not yet widely understood. In the summer of 1945 the A bomb was merely a super weapon which the US had obtained first, ahead of its rivals in Germany and Japan, which it could immediately use to win the war. By then the hate and desperation to immediately deliver a knock out blow to end the war was all that really mattered.
I suspect that a modern consciousness of the full horror and meaning of atomic warfare is what actually may drive much this revisionist theory. Such a consciousness did not exist in 1945. In fact, the fire bombing of other Japanese cities created far more horror and destruction than the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But these more destructive fire bombings don't create the same intense modern scrutiny that the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki do.
History is not neat and tidy. There are thoughts Truman had with his head lying on his pillow at night which we will never know. The same is true of all the other characters in this drama. Today, in our modern world, we should attempt to put ourselves, if we can, in the place of Truman and his military and civilian advisers without ever condoning the use of nuclear weapons. Is there a contradiction there? No. What with thousands of nuclear weapons easily deliverable to any place in the world today we should understand the meaning of nuclear war. And how totally unacceptable it is.
All war is unacceptable. There is no such thing as "a good war." But in 1945 there was a need to win one, and to win it fast. While there may have been other considerations related to the use of the bomb, we should at least attempt to remember why total victory was so appealing then. And why millions of Americans celebrated after the bombs were used.
Silly.
I agree -- you can't judge people outside of the context of their times. There is also a school of thought that says the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki prevented their use in future conflicts. Once the true horror of atomic weaponry was known, every country possessing this power was loathe to use it, knowing of its devastating effects, and mindful of the complete ruination that would be caused by a counter-attack. Rulers, even despots, like to have something to rule -- atomic devastation would have removed most of what they had power over.
The article had dozens of similar opinions and I cut it off to fit the 1000-word for CD. I paid no attention to the party line of the people quoted. There is an incredible amount of proof that the Japanese were willing to give up way before the bomb, but because some idiots on our side insisted on them giving up everything, including their emperor, they couldn't do that.
The bomb was absolutely unnecessary, and it's only a weak attempt at justifying such a horrific act that people try to claim that the other alternative was 1 million dead US soldiers. Baloney.
And that people didn't know what the bomb was really like is less than highschool-level sophistry.
We dropped the bomb to test it and show the Russians our mettle. Period.
@ getreal September 11th, 2009 4:34 pm:
Point 1: I have not read of this 'incredible amount of proof' that the Japanese were ready to surrender, just that some, with an axe to grind, have made that claim years after the war ended. There is an at least equal amount of proof that the Japanese Empire had no intentions of surrendering. (They certainly didn't cease combat -- kamikaze planes were still flying into our ships even after the a-bombs were dropped.) Aside from that, what assurances did the Allies have that the Japanese would actually surrender? As Quinty mentioned, following the massive loss of American life at Okinawa and Iwo Jima, and the persistence of starving Japanese soldiers, knowing they were defeated and surrounded, continuing to fight to the death on those two islands, by what means would the Allies be sure that 'surrender talks' were not simply a trick to give the Japanese time to rebuild their war machine?
Point 2: The claim that 1 million American soldiers would die was made by the Pentagon in 1944-45. Should Truman have ignored his top commanders and instead trusted the questionable talk of surrender from the Japanese? To you, from the comfortable hindsight of 60-some years in the future, the bombings may seem unnecessary but, as I've pointed out previously, to men like my father and others who fought in the Pacific Theater, and would have been part of any invasion of the Japanese homeland, they were anything but unnecessary. It would, indeed, have been irresponsible, if not insane, of Truman to not use any weapon that would end the war as quickly as possible with the loss of the fewest number of American lives. Truman, in his later years, regretted some things he did during his presidency, such as signing the CIA into existence, but he never regretted ordering the dropping of those two atomic bombs -- he believed their use ultimately saved lives, as horrible as the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were.
Point 3: Your 'high school sophistry' comment notwithstanding, no, most average people and politicians had no idea of the power of an atomic blast in 1945 or the effects of fallout. Even films and reports of the test and its aftermath did not do it justice. Only those few scientists and military personnel who actually witnessed the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico had a realistic conception of its massive destructive power. Read some books on the subject such as "Day One" by Peter Wyden and "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. BTW, while Gen. Eisenhower may have advised Truman not to use the bomb, it was the analysts on his staff who came up with the 1 million Americans dead figure.
Point 4: A part of the reason Truman dropped the bombs was, of course, to show Stalin our power, should he have designs on occupying Southeast Asia or keeping the Korean Peninsula for himself, but that aspect of the decision has been vastly overstated by Truman's critics. The primary reason Truman approved using the bomb was to save American lives.
Finally, paying no attention to the 'party line' or background of the people you're quoting would seem to me to be the ultimate in sophistry: building an argument based on opinion without regard to the biases of the source -- would you believe, say, Rush Limbaugh's opinion of Ralph Nader, without taking into account who Limbaugh is and his political leanings? That would seem to me to be pretty naive and hardly the basis for a reasonable rejection of Truman's decision.
You only have to be an asshole once.
Would that we HAD Jed Bartlet.
I think she nailed it overall. The Dems have been sitting on the Health care bill, not explaining it, not out selling it, and the right wing nuts come out and spread lies and it sticks. What does the White House do? Nothing. So we take 2 steps back on Health care because the Dems can't get together to explain comprehensive Health Care reform, and now are trying to explain that "no the government isn't going to kill off granny", and "no we are not forming a cult to indoctrinate your kids". Play some offense for once in a while Dems.