Still feeling groovy about Obama? Maybe this a contest between flip-flopper McCain and flip-flopper Obama. Or maybe it’s just proof-positive that no Democrat is ready to be president. I’m sorry, but getting out of Iraq, unequivocally, is a bed rock issue for me and for about 80% of the electorate; this is one thing that shouldn’t be nuanced. Worse, this kind of rhetoric is red meat for the Pugs–even though their boy has reversed himself on every issue. The Pug goal is to turn Obama into Michael Dukakis during the campaign and into Jimmy Carter if he wins. Obama’s certainly moving things right along.

There is a double standard in this country for sure: Democrats are wimpy flip-floppers without principles, no matter who they are. Pugs are steadfast leaders of men, no matter how weasly and hypocritical they might be. I know this and I’m not anywhere close to the campaign. Why doesn’t Obama and his team know this? How can they let him feed the beast?

I’m surprised and encouraged by the early response. Will you vote for me? 

I’ve tried to write this anecdote a couple dozen times and was never happy with how it flowed, but here:

I had a girlfriend who, among other feats, chained herself a hundred feet in the air to virgin forest trees to protest against corporate logging, broke into labs to free cats and dogs, and etc.

She told me she did what she did because there is an equal and opposite group of zealots, and only equally matched zealot opponents can save the world from zealotry. She wasn’t crazy, she said (and she wasn’t), but if being branded a zealot was the necessary fee to balance the true crazies on the Right, so be it.

She made contact w/me a few weeks back; she’s now a lawyer for the ACLU: a “corporate and co-opted Leftist” she calls herself now. We talked election of course. “I’ll be voting against rather than for, as usual,” she said. “I can’t remember the last time, if ever, I voted for someone.”

Which is the problem. Which is the problem with the problem.

*

Stuff, plus a song for your head. Joyous evening.

NEW! For Sasha and you three others, FridayMusicFriday, early three-day week edition, has lotsa good songs plus the best 4th of July song ever!

Not good news for McBush, but I love it. Meanwhile, the message to Obama is don’t push the change thing too hard. Go back to “Yes, we can” and drop “Change You Can Believe In”. Reportedly, Obama favors this emphasis. His other option is to spell out what he means by “change”, and I expect he will, testing it before the convention and then delivering it in his acceptance speech.

In 1964, the Surgeon General issued the first warning about the dangers of cigarette smoking. Now 44 years later, people still smoke and teenagers continue to be the worst offenders. In the 20th Century about 100 million people died from smoking: that number is projected to jump to 1 billion in this century. Facts and research did not (and does not) change behavior. Warnings on cigarette packages did not change behavior. The price of cigarettes, including higher sin taxes, has not stopped smoking. Government banning smoking in bars and restaurants and other public places has only stopped some smoking and saved some lives. Things are finally getting better in some countries in terms of new smokers, but worse in others. (See above link.)

Problem One: There is no difference between our response to cigarette smoking that takes a personal toll and climate change that takes a more abstract collective toll. Climate change is more debatable, on less scientific footing than smoking. Cigarette smoking damages my body, climate change does something elsewhere that I can’t feel or touch. Individuals, governments, and companies have taken the same attitude and approach to both. A lot of government smoking regulations have been enacted, but companies find new ways to market and manufacture cigarettes. Today, the Congressional Black Caucus is seeking a ban on menthal cigarettes that are disproportinately marketed to the black community. The history of climate change regulations tracks much the same way. Most of us don’t recycle because of the merits of recycling, but because laws require us to do so, where there are such laws. If it has taken 44 years to do something about smoking: how long will it take to do something substantive about climate change? 

Problem Two: We don’t behave on the basis of facts or research, but on the basis of experience. As many of you know, it is called cognitive dissonance, and Behavior Change.org has a good summary of this knotty problem that complicates our proposed solutions to smoking and climate change. Dire warnings about the cigarette smoking, using pot, climate change, failure to use seatbelts, fatty diets, driving while talking on cellphones, and on and on does little, if anything to change behavior. The warnings about the North Pole melting by the end of this summer is far, far removed from any experiences that I have had. Until I feel the impact of climate change in personal terms that I experience, I will leave the change to others. That’s the big challenge. That’s the hurdle to change. 

OMFG! July 1, 2008! Only 126 days of daily disillusionment left before obamascendancy!

We call the blackmail our overlords use against us negotiation. We pretend to demand the terms that assuage our guilt over our complicity.

Those kids in Appalachia and the inner cities whose free breakfasts will increase by maybe a couple hundred calories a day if Obama is elected rather than McCain? Little hungry hostages held against my obamapostasy. To the ramparts of self-justification, mofos! Your womb is yours to control as long as it maintains your participation in empire.

Remember, as pissed off as Obama makes you while running for president, the minute he’s elected he begins his re-election campaign for 2012.

There is some shit I will not eat. Theoretically. Chomp.

However, eat some links and more obamaargh. Gaze upon the Official Face of Aargh.

The oil problem is a problem that we have behaved ourselves into. We are the demand side of the equation, and until we change, not what we say, but what we do, the problem will not go away or be fixed. The current spike in gas prices does not mean the end of the automobile, in five years, ten years, or fifty years. Nor will trains come to the rescue. Trains aren’t the problem, the beds they run on are the problem. If we can’t, or don’t want to fix the bridges that cars run on, we are not going to fix the tracks trains run on. 

Here are some old and recent examples that coop-up this argument. The Oakland Bay Bridge used to have trains running on the lower level. Not anymore, because they were side-tracked to make room for more cars with some pressure from tire companies. Mayor Bloomberg could not get state support his congestion driving plan to restrict car use in Manhattan. He lost $345 million in federal grant money. In Mexico City, cars with even and odd numbered plates alternate days driving into the city because of the air pollution, one of the worst in the world. Environmentalist showcase this and other steps Mexico City has taken, but they forgot to factor in bribery and the creativity drivers show by buying a second and third car, and by buying plates on the black market so they can continue to drive the way they want, when they want.

The chicken littles almost got it right in the 1970s, a worse gas problem than what we are witnessing now. We haven’t seen long lines at the pumps or gas stations closing as they did in 1973. But changes in a variety of practices did come about as a result, some good, some bad. And we live with that legacy, and the car thrived. Here is an easy-to-read history for a broader context of this discussion.

What are car companies doing about the gas problem? Chrysler has decided to bundle other consumer products and services with buying a jeep. They have a big ad campaign behind the idea, probably in the vicinity of 80 or million big ones. Here is their website, under the seductive name of join planet jeep. (None of the links worked for me, but there it is.) Of course, if you buy a jeep, your gas worries are over for at least three years: you only pay $2.99 a gallon.

One of America’s biggest inventions is the loophole, and while some of the people are making changes some of the time, most of the people are not making any changes any of the time. We are talking about an problem that we behaved ourselves into: we will not be able to talk our way out of it. One new organization that wants to solve the global climate change is Al Gore’s new group, wecansolveit.org. Of all the suggestions they have, there is NOT ONE mention of driving slower. No one. Car pools and take public transportation, yes. Drive slower, no. There you have it.

Lost in Clark’s upstage yesterday was another strong and compelling and defining speech by Obama, this time on patriotism, ironically defining it much the way Clark did four years ago. Only sound bites and excerpts are available now for the most part. Too bad. But just in time, for those who love good writing and good analysis, here is a fascinating insight into how presidents speak and how Obama has risen above the norm, but may be dragged down as the election goes forward. (You need to scroll down on the link to get to the article.) First of all, it was written by Sam Anderson in New York magazine, who describes is feelings about Obama this way: “a complex cycle of enthusiasm canceled immediately by self-correcting cynical objections, canceled by self-correcting enthusiasm, canceled again by the cynicism, canceld by the enthusiasm.” (Sounds like some of us, does it not?)

Anderson then goes on to analyze presidential speeches and Obama’s speeches with a little help from Elvin T. Lim, author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency. Here are some excerpts: “Since 1913, the length of the average presidential sentence has fallen from 35 words to 22. Between Nixon and the second Bush, the average presidential sound bite shrank from 42 seconds to 7.” And, “Brilliant policy requires brilliant public discourse. If you can think your way through a sentence, then you can think your way through a policy paper.” Finally, this: “Compared with his rivals, Obama’s skill-set seems almost other-worldly. His phrases line up regularly in striking and meaningful patterns; his cliche ratio is, for a politican, admirably low; his stresses and pauses seem dictated less by the usual metronome of generic political speech than by the actual structures of meaning behind his words.”

He calls Obama a “literary phenomenon”, then adds, “Like America itself, he’s addicted to origin myths.” The problem here is that he is open, as a consequence, to the charge of elitism, by functional illiterates in the broadest sense, such as political operatives on the left and right, as well as MSM talking heads. So his challenge is how to connect with a body politic that functions at a fifth or sixth grade reading level, also down since FDR. There is pressure on him to go “more talky” as Bill Clinton used to charge his speech writers. But if he does, he may lose his uniqueness and power. The test, Anderson says will be his acceptance speech. 

The best thing about the Obama campaign so far is that he has seemed to understand that cowering in fear of being attacked is no way to run for president. His airy tossing-off of James Dobson’s loony Bible rant last week was a great example of the way modern campaigning should be done. This week, however, hasn’t been so good. Obama’s disavowal of Wesley Clark’s completely reasonable observation that getting shot down over North Vietnam 40 years ago does not qualify John McCain for command, as Lefty astutely observes below, is going to cost him. Not only does it open the way for Repugs and their media enablers to bring on the swiftboaters, it makes people like me believe Obama hasn’t got the cojones we thought he had, and makes us fear the next capitulation to a Republican talking point.

This morning, here it is: “Obama to expand Bush’s faith based programs.” Seems to me last thing the United States needs, after a generation of being poisoned by politico-religious nonsense and eight years of overtly Jesus-based governing, is anything that doesn’t help redraw the church/state line. Even though that’s the hellbound atheist puke in me talking, I object just as strongly as a liberal Democrat. Franklin D. Roosevelt believed that private charity was unable to meet the social service needs of Americans during the Depression. Not only was the federal government the only entity big enough to meet those needs, it alone possessed the moral authority to meet those needs, as the collectively expressed will of the American people. FDR’s position had everything to do with the civil religion all Americans share, and nothing to do with the sectarian dogmas that divide us. So if Obama were to announce a New Deal-style war on poverty or a Cabinet-level department of social services, I’d be down with it. But spreading dollars to church groups and expecting that they won’t be used to proselytize? No.

So that’s two strikes on Obama this week, and Tuesday’s breakfast isn’t even over. At least with the holiday Friday, it’s a short week.

Obama’s refuting Wes Clark’s candid and accurate assessment of McCain’s military qualifications might have just cost him the election. Here’s why. This is an exact replication of the events sent both Gore and Kerry into their respective slides and sent clear signals to the Pugs that the Dems just weren’t ready to mix it up. Remember in 2000 when Al Gore apologized to George Bush for being “too rough” on him in the first debate? Remember when Kerry and Shrum said in 2004 that George Bush’s character and a debate over his qualifications and performance had no place in the campaign? Pivotal moments. Moments that sent this nation into an 8-year tailspin.

Well sports fans, Obama’s done the same damned thing. Here’s Obama: “(McCain) endured physical torment in service to our country” and “no one should ever devalue that service, especially for the sake of a political campaign, and that goes for supporters on both sides.”

Fine as far as it goes, but that doesn’t entitle McCain to claim expertise and experience he doesn’t have–which was Clark’s point. Unwinding the fearless leader myth of John McCain should be a cornerstone goal of a campaign where Obama’s patriotism and his qualifications are going to be under merciless fire. One thing you can be sure of is that each side is going to play by a different set of rules. Here’s the beginning:

“I was utterly shocked,” Sen. John Warner, R-Va., told the conference call, “… that he would in such a disrespectful way attack one of his fellow career military officers.”

“Beyond comprehension … further erosion of our nation’s political discourse,” said former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., in a written statement.

Attacked a fellow officer? Beyond comprehension? My ass. Clark told the truth, not the politically correct media pablum that makes everyone feel good. It rocked Bob Scheiffer’s world and it should have. It was a moment of glaring honesty. So when Obama runs away from it, he not only undercuts everything we hoped he stood for, he gave the pugs fucking Manna from heaven. Gloves are off because once again the Dems won’t punch back–Rove style politics will carry the day. When are the idiots on the Dem side going to understand that once you have the Pug’s necks under your shoe, you step down hard and don’t let up. Like I said in January, McCain by 5. Take it to the bank.