Today - and a brief look at the GOP, 2010

Greetings. Early this afternoon I'm heading out to Seattle. My daughter found a price I couldn't pass up. I return 8 Oct., but will be posting while I'm there. Today may be a little light. I kinda thought maybe I should ... oh I don't know, pack?

As you can see in this morning's posts below, I cheated a bit, no a lot, by lifting material from others, given that I'm in something of a rush. I was about to cheat again by stealing from myself. In 2010 I penned a guest article for CNN, which I just went to retrieve for re-posting. Alas, it is no more; I guess 14 years of cyber-memory was too much for the network. I tried to outflank the "Uh-oh! It could be you, or it could be us, but there's no page here" by using a spiffy archives search a friend recently recommended. No luck.   

In my search I did run across a post from 2010 that encapsulated some of what I wrote. It's from Chris Savage, of "Ectlecta Blog News and Commentary." I swear I'm not posting this because it's favorable; it's simply the only reference I could find. 

As you will quickly appreciate from the relevant portions of these clips, there has been but one real "enhancement" of the right since 2010 — and its name is Trump. Its embodiment picked up on the increasingly malign zeitgeist of the Republican Party; five years later, the even more malign doppelgänger decided to exploit it.   

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Historian and syndicated columnist P.M. Carpenter has a new op-ed piece out on CNN’s website called Why right and left won’t cheer Obama“. In it, he attempts to explain the chasm between how President Obama is perceived by those on the left, the right & middle and reality.

Here’s how describes how President Obama is seen by those he describes as the “pseudoconservatives” (using that term since he feels that genuine conservatives were long ago killed off by right-wing zealots):

The pseudoconservatives’ perception is that Obama’s success is a sprinting, despotic socialism enforced by jackbooted bureaucrats of anti-constitutional intensity.

Having spent some time on the Tea Party Nation’s mailing list, I can confirm that this is quite accurate and may even be sugar coating it.

In his piece, Carpenter accurately describes the pseudoconservatives as having adopted a mindset free of nuance or shades of grey:

More and more these pseudoconservatives cloak themselves in the anti-intellectual rags of what the magnificent political historian Richard Hofstadter once so aptly called the “paranoid style.” To the radical right, Hofstadter observed, “The enemy is clearly delineated: He is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman — sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving.” That is, Barack Obama.

At some vague point in our nation’s history, pseudoconservatives adopted a blanket mindset against all not with them: the grays of the opposition vanished, “the enemy” plotted and schemed from some unholy abyss of wholly un-American motives, and the whites of their own hats began sparkling with a virtuous superiority.

He then talks about the left who he says “now meekly call themselves ‘progressives'” due to the “pseudoconservatives’ ruthless campaign of label intimidation”.

On opposite ground, today’s progressive activists (known in some unmentioned circles as the “professional left”) perceive Obama’s success as a tragic, alienating failure simply because that success has been less than 100 percent. Their ideological purity is a brutal taskmaster; it accepts no compromise with political realities.

It wants and demands a society approaching Utopia — and that Utopia lies, it seems, only inches away from a snarling, presidential ideologue. They’ll deny that, but their own snarling, in my mind, tends to outweigh their pleas of innocence.

The “traditional liberalism’s rank and file”, however, according to Carpenter, have few problems with the President. They understand, he says, that “American’s utopian future still likely remains at least a few years down the road.

He describes those in the “nonideological middle” as “pinball victims of messaging wars” and believes that they may become far more supportive “given a vastly improved White House communications operation”.

The reality about President Obama’s first half-term in office he says is this:

[E]xtraordinary success within a mere half-term… — a stimulus package that prevented the Great Depression II; health care reform that achieves the decades-long goal of near universality; financial reform that reimposes some grown-up supervision of Wall Street .

P.M. Carpenter has framed this perfectly, in my opinion. Those on the right paint in broad strokes and cartoon characters.

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See you tomorrow, later than usual. I'll be on West Coast time. 

Cheers! —PM  

Comments

[Anne J]

Enjoy your trip! You are always welcome on the left coast side of the country.

[John]

https://web.archive.org/web/20230529153806/http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/12/20/carpenter.obama.political.credit/index.html

[PM]

Thank you, John! I used another archive search function that had worked otherwise. I'll keep this one in mind too. Much appreciated.