McCain - an old man suffering from dementia and living in world inside his head that is in the far and distant past . Dementia patients are to pitied and cared for in a hospital
I entered a couple of comments at my blog on this matter today, but I'm not over here to publicise that, I'm here to say I knew that I could resort to the Congressional Record for some intractable hysterics from McCain, but I had no sense of the scale of the shame he is willing to heap upon himself, for losing influence, to say nothing of elections. The man has justified his life on a disgusting illusion of resistance to torture, and has preserved it in American tactics while ostentatiously flouting habeas corpus (a false compromise he engineered with Lieberman, to which Obama signed on). He truly tortures himself in public as a mode of exposing his incurable sickness. Now we see, as you say, further evidence of his profound unsuitability in the discussion of public policy, much less in its legislation.
I saved my videotapes of the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings of 1991 (when half our Army wasn't born), in which McCain hysterically and persistently berated a female Army colonel for begging for "acceptance." The term - the concept - infuriated McCain then, and not because he demanded a confession from her, which she rejected as immature. The concept infuriated McCain because he cannot accept himself, and begs to rejoin humanity by denouncing it as being as broken as he was. Well, it's too bad McCain was broken, but the lust for breakage which Milbank exposes so well in this column, has simply got to be ignored at last.
I don't trust the man to do what's right, anymore.
You have to remember that Obama has always gotten along well with both the left and the right. When he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago's law school, famous as a bastion for conservative legal thinking, he was known to be one of the few liberal teachers in the law school's faculty, yet he was thought quite highly of among his conservative colleagues.
He will never be a fire breathing liberal lion in the mold of Ted Kennedy, or Harry Truman, or Franklin Roosevelt, but at the same time when Franklin Roosevelt got the first version of Social Security through the Congress it deliberately excluded some sectors of agricultural workers. Roosevelt did that, selling the descendants of the sharecroppers down the river (because Southern Democratic bigots demanded it as the price of passing the legislation), because in Roosevelt's mind even though it was a dirty deal, it still was better than skipping it altogether because getting the perfect bill passed simply wasn't possible.
Obama works that way, too.
Do I expect him to go to the mat much for gay people? NO.
Is he doing more for gay Americans than any president before him has ever done? YES.
Politics is a fucked up business. It always has been.
I will not believe, JTC, that DADT is gone when it is signed. I know you do not need a civics lesson from anyone, but let's not forget, it's going to be "gone" nowhere except into that equivocating morass of temporising policy fog which The Washington Post, warmonger to the world, embraced so explicitly in its editorial on December 20th; and it's going to be "gone" into a regulatory and administrative slaughterhouse operated by its enemies, only to be implemented by people who built their military careers on profiteering in bigotry. It's going to need all the watchful vigilance of every gay rights organisation which backed the legislative change, and it's going to need lawsuit after lawsuit to become the law we think it is.
Correction - I meant "1993" instead of "1991" above, obviously, in the infamous underlying Senate hearings, chaired by Sam Nunn, Strom Thurmond as Minority leader.
RC offers unassailable context in kind but not, I think, in degree. Roosevelt had more courage, he had more fight, and this is why he increased his majority so enormously. He did not lose by folding, he lost the old-fashioned way, by bleeding. Obama is a waiter for waves, Roosevelt built them. These are material differences; but beneath them, it's well to remember what RC says about Obama's political views and nature.
Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself. - Jean Dubuffet
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. . . Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
-- His Holiness the Dalai Lama . . .
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The Slabber
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If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; build anyway.
~ Mother Theresa
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Special Content
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. A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run. -- Elbert Hubbard .
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.My call for a spiritual revolution is thus not a call for a religious revolution. Nor is it a reference to a way of life that is somehow other-worldly, still less to something magical or mysterious. Rather, it is a call for a radical re-orientation away from our habitual preoccupation with self towards concern for the wider community of beings with whom we are connected, and for conduct which recognizes others' interests alongside our own.
- His Holiness the Dalai Lama
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Great men are they who see that the spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. . . Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters. -- José de Sousa Saramago
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Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold. -- William Shakespeare
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Fighting Against Neglect
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Our problems, both those we experience externally such as wars, crime and violence and those we experience internally as emotional and psychological suffering will not be solved until we address this underlying neglect of our inner dimension. That is why the great movements of the last hundred years and more--democracy, liberalism, socialism, and Communism--have all failed to deliver the universal benefits they were supposed to provide, despite many wonderful ideas. A revolution is called for, certainly, but not a political, an economic, or a technical revolution. We have had enough experience of these during the past century to know that a purely external approach will not suffice. What I propose is a spiritual revolution.
In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance.
I'd gladly share a foxhole with this gay bruiser
ReplyDeleteMcCain - an old man suffering from dementia and living in world inside his head that is in the far and distant past . Dementia patients are to pitied and cared for in a hospital
ReplyDeleteI entered a couple of comments at my blog on this matter today, but I'm not over here to publicise that, I'm here to say I knew that I could resort to the Congressional Record for some intractable hysterics from McCain, but I had no sense of the scale of the shame he is willing to heap upon himself, for losing influence, to say nothing of elections. The man has justified his life on a disgusting illusion of resistance to torture, and has preserved it in American tactics while ostentatiously flouting habeas corpus (a false compromise he engineered with Lieberman, to which Obama signed on). He truly tortures himself in public as a mode of exposing his incurable sickness. Now we see, as you say, further evidence of his profound unsuitability in the discussion of public policy, much less in its legislation.
ReplyDeleteI saved my videotapes of the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings of 1991 (when half our Army wasn't born), in which McCain hysterically and persistently berated a female Army colonel for begging for "acceptance." The term - the concept - infuriated McCain then, and not because he demanded a confession from her, which she rejected as immature. The concept infuriated McCain because he cannot accept himself, and begs to rejoin humanity by denouncing it as being as broken as he was. Well, it's too bad McCain was broken, but the lust for breakage which Milbank exposes so well in this column, has simply got to be ignored at last.
@Anonymous, 9:24AM
ReplyDeleteThanks for the reminder of prior shameful behavior on McCain's part. He really doesn't belong in public life.
Mc Cain has turned wretched
ReplyDeleteI'll believe DADT is gone when Obama actually signs it. I don't trust the man to do what's right, anymore.
ReplyDeleteI don't trust the man to do what's right, anymore.
ReplyDeleteYou have to remember that Obama has always gotten along well with both the left and the right. When he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago's law school, famous as a bastion for conservative legal thinking, he was known to be one of the few liberal teachers in the law school's faculty, yet he was thought quite highly of among his conservative colleagues.
He will never be a fire breathing liberal lion in the mold of Ted Kennedy, or Harry Truman, or Franklin Roosevelt, but at the same time when Franklin Roosevelt got the first version of Social Security through the Congress it deliberately excluded some sectors of agricultural workers. Roosevelt did that, selling the descendants of the sharecroppers down the river (because Southern Democratic bigots demanded it as the price of passing the legislation), because in Roosevelt's mind even though it was a dirty deal, it still was better than skipping it altogether because getting the perfect bill passed simply wasn't possible.
Obama works that way, too.
Do I expect him to go to the mat much for gay people? NO.
Is he doing more for gay Americans than any president before him has ever done? YES.
Politics is a fucked up business. It always has been.
I will not believe, JTC, that DADT is gone when it is signed. I know you do not need a civics lesson from anyone, but let's not forget, it's going to be "gone" nowhere except into that equivocating morass of temporising policy fog which The Washington Post, warmonger to the world, embraced so explicitly in its editorial on December 20th; and it's going to be "gone" into a regulatory and administrative slaughterhouse operated by its enemies, only to be implemented by people who built their military careers on profiteering in bigotry. It's going to need all the watchful vigilance of every gay rights organisation which backed the legislative change, and it's going to need lawsuit after lawsuit to become the law we think it is.
ReplyDeleteCorrection - I meant "1993" instead of "1991" above, obviously, in the infamous underlying Senate hearings, chaired by Sam Nunn, Strom Thurmond as Minority leader.
RC offers unassailable context in kind but not, I think, in degree. Roosevelt had more courage, he had more fight, and this is why he increased his majority so enormously. He did not lose by folding, he lost the old-fashioned way, by bleeding. Obama is a waiter for waves, Roosevelt built them. These are material differences; but beneath them, it's well to remember what RC says about Obama's political views and nature.