Back

What a contrast:

New York: intellectually stimulating panels and discussion groups on psychoanalysis, renewing friendships from across the country, a production of "A Little Night Music" with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury, and a marvelous Metropolitan Opera production of "Der Rosenkavalier" with Renee Fleming and Susan Graham.

And on TV: heartbreaking and appalling pictures of the devastation in Haiti.

Meanwhile, on the political front, the unthinkable possibility that Ted Kennedy's senate seat may go to a Republican, and not even a very strong candidate under ordinary circumstances.

A New York Times Magazine article from Sunday puts the Obama presidency and its daunting tasks in perspective. We progressives are understandably in various degrees disappointed and angry that we didn't get what we had expected. But consider this, as pointed out in Peter Baker's "Obama's War On/Over Terror:"

On the day prior to the inauguration -- before he was even officially president, and none of his cabinet had been sworn into office except DoD's Gates, who was a holdover from the Bush administration -- there was mounting, strong evidence of a terrorist bomb attack planned to go off somewhere on the Mall during the inauguration. It turned out to be a false alarm, planted by a rival terrorist group.

But in the interim, a decision had to be made: What if, in the middle of his inaugural speech, a bomb went off? As Hillary Clinton posed the question in a hasty meeting of the principles: "Is the Secret Service going to whisk him off the podium so the American people see their incoming president disappear in the middle of the inaugural address?
I don't think so," she said.

And Peter Baker continues:

Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first president to take office in the Age of Terrorism. He inherited two struggles -- one with Al Qaeda and its ideological allies, and another that divides his own country over issues like torture, prosecutions, security and what it means to be an American. The first has proved to be complicated and daunting. The second makes the first look easy.

And, at the same time, he has to deal with the worst economic situation since the 1930s, a nearly impossible attempt to achieve health care reform that has eluded presidents since Harry Truman, a viciously vindictive Republican opposition whose stated purpose is to defeat anything he tries to do, and an increasingly disgruntled base in his own party.

I'm not happy with a lot of things and wished for better. But this article's perspective renewed my willingness to look at the larger picture and realize what an almost impossible job he has.

Ralph

But before I go . . . one more

So there !!! all you critics of President Obama !!!

In his first year in office, President Obama did better even than legendary arm-twister Lyndon Johnson in winning congressional votes on issues where he took a position, a Congressional Quarterly study finds.

The new CQ study gives Obama a higher mark than any other president since it began scoring presidential success rates in Congress more than five decades ago. And that was in a year where Obama tackled how to deal with Afghanistan, Iraq, an expanding terrorist threat, the economic crisis and battles over health care.

I think the Republican critics are beginning to trip themselves up, because they have become so predictable. Everything, literally everything, elicits a knee-jerk bashing. The latest good example was Liz Cheney on This Week yesterday, whining in her grating nasal voice about Harry Reid's "racism."

None other than conservative George Will swatted her down, saying something to the effect that that is ridiculous, and then he visibly scoffed at her attempted rebuttal. And Robert Reich kindly, perhaps even a bit condescdendingly, explained to her that race was talked about a lot during the campaign but that didn't make everybody a racist.

Maybe we need to take a clue from Ronald Reagen and dismiss them with "There you go again."

Ralph

Hiatus

I will be in New York for the American Psychoanalytic Association meetings and will not have computer access until next week.

Ralph

Much Ado about Reid's 'racism'

Game Change, Mark Halperin's and John Heilemann's new book about inside stories from campaign 2008, quotes a private conversation from back then by Harry Reid:

He was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a “light-skinned” African American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” as he later put it privately.

Now Republicans and the hysterical media are slobbering all over this and calling it "racist."

Well, of course it is -- as is anything that characterizes someone according to his race. But is Harry Reid a racist, in the sense of hostile demeaning of someone because of his race? That is ridiculous. First of all, Reid was one of the first people in the Senate who urged Obama to run for president, and he has been a loyal ally ever since.

Second, what he said is entirely true. America embraced Obama for his very real qualities and excellent mind, but it would have not likely done so as readily (and it was far from universal as it was) if his skin color had been very dark and his diction less elevated.

That is a simple fact. Even among African-Americans themselves, there is often a hierarchy of acceptance based on skin color. That is probably declining now, but it's still there.

Robert Reich said it well yesterday on This Week: Race was talked about in the campaign; but that didn't make everyone who referred to it a racist -- despite Liz Cheney's attempt to smear "liberals" who ignore other liberals' "racist" remarks. One can talk about race without being "racist."

So, come one, people of the press and Republicans: there are more important issues that need your attention.

Ralph

The underwear bomber failed

An article in Time Magazine by Peter Beinart is worth taking note of:

Here's a fact about the underwear attack that you might have missed in the media shoutfest: it failed. It failed, first of all, because Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was just one terrorist. Once upon a time, al-Qaeda's modus operandi was to launch multiple, simultaneous attacks. . . .

Second, the underwear attack failed because Abdulmutallab wasn't particularly well trained. The 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were personally selected by Osama bin Laden . . . [and] got extensive training on the design of airplanes and the behavior of aircraft crews, even before they enrolled in U.S. flight schools. . . . Abdulmutallab, by contrast, reportedly used a syringe to try to detonate a notoriously hard-to-detonate explosive called PETN. "To make this stuff work," says Van Romero, an explosives expert at New Mexico Tech, "you have to know what you're doing." Abdulmutallab, it appears, did not. . . .

A 2007 study by Canada's Simon Fraser University found the global death toll from terrorist attacks has substantially decreased since 2001. While al-Qaeda plots do sometimes succeed--like the double-agent operation that killed seven CIA officers in Afghanistan last month--they have become, Rand terrorism expert Brian Jenkins points out, less frequent and less potent. . . .

All this means that even in places like Pakistan and Yemen where al-Qaeda or its affiliates retain some organizational presence, it is much harder to train lots of would-be terrorists for complex, mass-casualty attacks. In response, al-Qaeda seems to be relying more on solo operators . . . These lone wolves are harder to catch, but they're also less likely to do massive damage. Al-Qaeda's new motto, according to New York City police commissioner Raymond Kelly, seems to be "If you can't do the big attacks, do the small attacks." Not exactly cause for celebration, but certainly not cause for the hysteria that has gripped Washington since Christmas Day.

To say that al-Qaeda can't do what it once did is not much comfort when actual damage is done and people are killed. But this perspective is a needed balance from the media hype and the Republicans' glee at pointing out the security failure on Obama's watch.

It's time to sit back, take a deep breath, and realize that we cannot have a perfectly safe country. No one wants to accept even one attack; but hysteria and political posturing do not help. We need to learn from what works for the Israelis: more eyeball scrutiny and more talking to people as they come through checkpoints, looking for behavioral clues and relying on well trained, skilled screeners and selective body searches. And, most of all, for-god's-sake we need to get our act together in the sharing and synthesizing of intelligence information. Stop the inter-agency turf battles and the inefficiency. Make it work.

Ralph

Gay marriage update

The New Jersey Senate joined legislatures in Maine and New York, along with voters in California and about 30 other states, in rejecting a bill that would have permitted same-sex couples to marry. The New Jersey courts had mandated that gays have the same rights as marriage and left it to the legislature to implement it. They opted for civil unions. This bill was a response, declaring that civil unions still leave same-sex couples without all of the rights of marriage. Now it is back to the courts.

California's Supreme Court upheld Prop8 and overturned their gay marriage provision. Now that is being challenged in the Federal courts as an unconstitutional infringement on rights for equal treatment under the law. Hearings in federal court are for next week. It's proponents plan to carry it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, today, the Parliament in Portugal voted in gay marriage, and the President is expected to sign it into law. Thus a predominately Catholic country joins Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, South Africa -- and in the U.S., Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa, and District of Columbia -- in including gays and lesbians in its marriage laws.

Ralph

Lies, lies, and more lies

Come on, you gutless TV stenographers and megaphones, who simply pass on and amplify any old lie Republicans want to spout. It's time to start saying: "Oh, really? What about . . . ?"

First it was Dana Perino, then Mary Matalin (mouthpiece for Dick Cheney). I believe even first XVP daughter and mouthpiece Liz Cheney said it too:

Now it's Rudy Giuliani himself -- remember him? the Mayor of New York City on 9/11/01 when the twin towers were toppled by terrorist hijackers -- spouting the same lie:

"We had no domestic attacks under Bush; we've had one under Obama."

Incredible, bald-faced lies. And George Stephanopolis, who conducted the interview on Good Morning America, repeated the quote on his blog without questioning the truth of it.

Even if all these folks meant to say no attacks after 9/11 on Bush's watch, what about the shoe bomber and the anthrax terrorist attempts? In another interview the day before, Guiliani even claimed that the shoe bomber incident occurred before 9/11, which it did not. It was after.

And just for the record: what about Bush's responsibility for lack of action on the intelligence that could have prevented the big one itself on 9/11? That certainly did occur during Bush's term. Even they can't deny that -- they just hope we'll overlook that little detail.

Come on -- they're reviving this slippery lie just to try to make political hay out of the fact that we have now had an attempted terrorist attack during Obama's presidency. These are the patriots who put their country first?

You can't really expect better from these partisan hacks. And apparently it's only a dream to expect more from supposed journalists and pundits. What's happened to George Steph? Being popular enough to land the GMA job went to his head?

Ralph