Mere Anarchy Is Loosed Upon the World

This shit is good:

And perhaps most tellingly, despite their disagreements, Greenwald and vanden Heuvel both supported Obama's practice of going out of his way to attack black poor people, most recently in his scurrilous Father's Day speech and again before the NAACP. (And, by the way, he grew up without a father and is running for president, no?) To Greenwald, this is the "Obama we want to see more of," the one who takes positions that are "unorthodox" and "not politically safe." Since when has it been unorthodox or unsafe politically to malign black poor people in public? Who the fuck has been doing anything else for at least twenty years? Public sacrifice of black poor people has been pro forma Democratic presidential strategy since Clinton ran on the pledge to "end welfare as we know it" and made a burnt offering of Rickey Ray Rector, and victim-blaming based on just-so stories about supposed "behavioral pathology" has been the only frame for public discussion of poverty for at least as long. To vanden Heuvel, Obama's contretemps with Jesse Jackson, who, ironically, has his own history of making such attacks, around this issue reflects a "generational division" among black people, with Obama representing a younger generation that values "personal responsibility." She also, for good measure, asserted that Obama has been "nailed unfairly" for his cozying up to the evangelicals and promising to give them more federal social service money. In explaining that he comes out of a "community organizing" tradition based in churches in Chicago, she didn't quite say that the coloreds love their churches. But she didn't really have to say it out loud, did she?

This is what passes for a left now in this country. It is a left that can insist, apparently, that Obama's FISA vote, going out of his way (after all, he could simply have followed the model of Eisenhower on the Brown decision and said that the Court has ruled; therefore it's the law, and his job as president would be to enforce the law) to align himself--twice, or three times--with the Scalia-Thomas-Roberts-Alito wing of the Supreme Court, his declaring that social problems, unlike foreign policy adventurism, are "too big for government" and pledging to turn over more of HHS and HUD's budgets to the Holy Rollers are both tactically necessary and consistent with his convictions. So, if those are his convictions, or for that matter what he feels he must do opportunistically to get elected, why the fuck should we vote for him?

Answer: You shouldn't! Anyway, read the whole thing.

I suspect that Professor Reed and I have radically different notions of what ideally would spring from the aftermath of an implosion of the current American imperium. Me, I favor a vast guignol of gas-thievery, petty cruelty, dusty leather costumes, and aviator goggles, all enacted on a sprawling desert. And zombies. Several of our regular commenters appear to doubt that my political convictions could possibly extend beyond the reestablisment (sic - as if it ever obtained) of something called the "rule of law." In this conception, the enaction of arbitrary statutes by governing bodies is preferable to extra-statutory arbitrary action by those same bodies. This having worked out so well. In fact I hope in my lifetime to see the United States dissolve into microregions and city-states surrounded by tilled fields. I am thinking of calling this philosophy anarcho-feudalism, or some such. Manor life without the lords and ladies. We'll have just enough electricity for lights and the internet. We'll farm with draft animals. We'll travel by foot and by bicycle, and folks'll have to learn how to bake their own damn bread.