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Islam uber alles is their code, and it might well be ours

by Mojambo ( 63 Comments › )
Filed under Afghanistan, Dhimmitude, Islamic Terrorism, Islamists, Jihad, Koran, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, September 11, Taliban at February 28th, 2012 - 8:30 am

The Knish points out that The cowardice of our leaders has elevated the Koran and its demented author above freedom of speech, above the rights of Americans and the lives of American soldiers. The goal of Islam is supremacy, there is no reasoning or compromising with an aggressive, sadistic, cult.  We can either resist or submit.

by Daniel Greenfield

The first law of human affairs is force. Before all other laws, the ballot box and appeals to reason is that primal law that enforces submission through violence. Islam is a religion built on that first law, forcing everyone to choose whether they will be the oppressors or the oppressed, whether they will be a Muslim or a Dhimmi.

The organizing force of Islam can be seen in urban gangs which react in much the same way to being ‘disrespected’.

When your religion is little more than an entitlement to be a thug, to elevate your way of life over that of everyone else, violent outrage over even the most minute sign of disrespect is to be expected.

And when your beliefs are little more than an excuse to hate, rioting over a slight is the sacrament of your faith.

Islam did not expand through the persuasiveness of its illiterate child abusing founder, at least not beyond the initial persuasion that allowed him to gather bandit troops to raid, murder and enslave the multicultural peoples of the desert until there was nothing left but Muslims and their slaves. It expanded by force and it has gone on expanding by force. Faced with advanced civilizations, it has reacted with the violent petulant fury that is its spiritual heritage.

The first law is the only true law of Islam. That is the law being practiced by the Afghan rioters and murderers outraged over the burnings of already defaced Korans, as their counterparts have gone on similar rampages over cartoons of Mohammed, the Satanic Verses, Facebook postings and anything else which triggered their rage. This violence has the same goal of all Islamic terror, to maintain the privileged status of Muslims and enforce the submission of non-Muslims.

There is nothing that serves the first law so well as opponents who compromise or offer gestures of appeasement. Despite their numerical advantages, the society of the sword is too backward and lacking in organizational and technological skills to win a direct confrontation. It is only capable of treachery, of exploiting the humanitarian weaknesses of its enemies, of dressing up as dead men and chanting about their utter disregard for human life, of hiding among civilians, attacking in the dark and running to celebrate even the slightest victory as proof of Allah’s endorsement of their cause. And none of this would do them the least bit of good if they faced civilizations willing to slap them down.

The cowardice of our leaders has elevated the Koran and its demented author above freedom of speech, above the rights of Americans and the lives of American soldiers. When Muslims kill, the wounded society hurriedly searches for scapegoats that might have provoked them to the act. Was there an offensive cartoon, was a Koran flushed or singed, did they experience discrimination, are they upset about American foreign policy?

We have become a nation of psychiatrists rushing from international ward to ward trying to calm the lunatics before they go on a killing spree and then again after they have already gone on a killing spree. As a civilization, we live in constant fear of a religion that our leaders constantly assure us is wholly peaceful. But if that were truly so, why do we have so much security in airports, why do we grovel so much before Muslim clerics and why do we have so many troops in Muslim countries?

Complaining that Islam is violent, that it it abusive, totalitarian, and rejects co-existence on equal terms is as much good as complaining that the rain is wet

The trouble is not that Islam has been violent, it has always been violent. It has a consistent record of violence that goes back over a thousand years. If history is any guide it will go on being violent a thousand years from now, if the world continues to be plagued by its savage barbarism for that long. Complaining that Islam is violent, that it it abusive, totalitarian, and rejects co-existence on equal terms is as much good as complaining that the rain is wet.

[…….]

It is frightfully easy to intimidate someone else into doing what you want. Even the weak are capable of doing it. So much so the strong. Even the society we have built, for all its moral underpinnings, is quick to punish disobedience with a resort to the first law. But it has become equally quick to retreat in the face of the First Law, and that is the trouble.

If a nation is good for nothing else, it is good for repelling invaders, burning their longboats and nailing their heads to a pike as a lesson to any who would follow in their path. Unfortunately we are not a nation, nor are we quite an empire, instead we are some sort of postmodern construct that is part human rights empire and part mercantile league of nations, but most of all an inspiration for the global civilization that is sure to follow as soon as we have enough international laws to make for a world government.

First World nations no longer properly represent national interests, they represent the Future of Man, in all capital letters. Invaders aren’t sent packing with the business end of a spear, they are welcomed in to be integrated into a wonderfully diverse Republic of Man. Overseas invaders are pacified with tribute aid and democracy programs so that they will mature enough to join our world government and cooperate with us on such issues as global warming, birth control access and sustainable development.

The Muslim world is frightfully clear about its agenda. Islam Uber Alles

We have the World Government. They have the Caliphate, which many of our leaders have decided is just a regional name for world government. And if we have to make a few compromises to get them on board, so be it. The Dar Al Islam has played this game before. Most of Mohammed’s victims did not make a brave last stand, for the most part they were divided and conquered with illusory agreements and coalitions that proved absolutely worthless.

The Muslim world is frightfully clear about its agenda. Islam Uber Alles. They can be subtle about it, but quite often they take the direct route through the First Law.

The point that the rioters in Afghanistan are making is that the Koran is worth more than any bible and any human life. Once again we have proven their point for them. Just as the media proved their point when they censored the Mohammed cartoons without a single act of violence against CBS, CNN or any of their corporate behemoth cousins. Just as we proved their point when in response to the mass murder of Americans, we sent thousands of our young men and women to rebuild their countries and welcome them into the brotherhood of man.

The First Law is working quite well, both directly and indirectly. Direct violence terrorizes the authorities into cracking down on us. On our freedoms, our independence and our worldview. And indirectly it drives them to meet with “moderate” Muslims who offer to mediate and lay out their demands, which happen to be an incremental version of the same thing. Islam Uber Alles.

[…….]

The only way to neutralize the First Law is with the First Law. It’s an ugly business but it eventually gets the point across. Yes it will make us hated, but there is no option to be loved. We have a choice between being hated like the Christian Copts of Egypt or any other degraded and persecuted minority in the Muslim world, or we have the choice of being hated like Israel or the Franks. That means a choice between being hated as a despised underclass, as pigs and dogs, by people who have the ability to harm us on a regular basis, or being hated as the cruel persecutors who kept the faithful from extending the Dar Al Islam by people who have to try very hard to be able to hurt us.

[…….]

The flag of Islam Uber Alles is flying over our cities, our governments and our foreign policy

The flag of Islam Uber Alles is flying over our cities, our governments and our foreign policy. Every time we submit, retreat and eagerly show the invaders how well we can cooperate with their demands, another flag flies in place of our own.

[…….]

As a religion, Islam is the faith of those impoverished in spirit, deprived of any aspiration but power over others. It is a slave’s copy of Judaism, Christianity and the existing religions of the region, turned into a religion of slaves whose goal is the enslavement of mankind. Jihad is the only vital element of Islam because it is the only thing that gives it meaning. It is the means of its reproduction and the incarnation of its mission.

Islam Uber Alles is their code and as we meet force with apologies and terror with nation building, it becomes our code as well.

Read the rest – Islam uber alles

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Posted in Afghanistan, Dhimmitude, Islamic Terrorism, Islamists, Jihad, Koran, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, September 11, Taliban | 63 Comments »

The liberals exploitation of race

by Mojambo ( 146 Comments › )
Filed under Democratic Party at February 15th, 2012 - 3:00 pm

The Knish gives us a good history of the historic racism of the Democratic Party. Up until the 1950’s the Democrats pandered to white racists and  segregationists (Lester Maddox, George Wallace, Orval Faubus, Robert Byrd). However,  starting in the late 1960’s, seeing the potential to win over a huge bloc of voters (90-98% in every national election) the Democrats (doing a  Charles Johnson circa January 2009)  decided to ditch their old allies and  to enable several unsavory black racists (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton) and to favor black preferences over working class whites.  Also recall the special vitriol directed against Blacks such as Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell and yes even Mr. 9 9 9 (Herman Cain)  – folks who dare to think for themselves.  However, the inherent cynicism of Democratic liberals is still something to marvel at.

by Daniel Greenfield

Racism is about many things, but it isn’t about race. To understand the uses of race in American liberalism requires understanding its place in the political culture. When American liberals speak of race, they aren’t speaking in the genetic sense; what they are doing is clumsily piggybacking class onto race and adding one dubious construct to another.

The placement of racial politics at the center of liberal advocacy coincided with a growing national prosperity that seemed to be on the way to making class warfare of the old kind irrelevant. Previous liberal civil rights activity had been a subset of class, but class now became a subset of race. And both were a means of liberal self-definition as the people concerned with the plight of the downtrodden.

Class warfare was not really about the poor, it was about using a permanent social problem as a means of recreating the social order and gaining permanent political power. Race is just class dressed up in the same old class warfare clothes so that there is nearly no distinction between the two. Reformers gain power by attacking the failures of the system and positioning a social problem as an open sore that must be healed. But it isn’t healing that they have in mind.

When your power is a product of social problems, then the failure to locate social problems that are an open sore on society, a cry of conscience and a grievous crime that must be faced, leaves you powerless and irrelevant. Once you start running out of legitimate social problems to tackle, then you have no choice but to start creating them or exaggerating them. Whether the problems you are dealing with are real or unreal, your challenge is to find ways to make them worse in order to retain your power and the social relevance of your movement.

Race has very little to do with racial politics which rely on the older methodologies of radicalizing slums and using subsidies to elevate community leaders who will support the reformers, all tactics that date back centuries, and long predate the politicization of race.

When the Democratic Party had its change of heart on race, all it did was take the same methods it used on German, Irish, Jewish and Italian immigrants and shift them to urban African-Americans who had come north and were living in the same neighborhoods formerly occupied by the immigrants. And so the party that during the Civil War orchestrated urban anti-draft riots by white immigrants targeting African-Americans was using the same methods to orchestrate African-American riots aimed at the second and third generation of working class immigrants that it had once fostered. What most people thought of as racial politics was just the Democratic Party doing what it had been doing all along.

[……]

Muslims are not a race, but they have been classified as an oppressed group. Socialism is not a race, but they are the official representatives of all oppressed peoples. To insult either one is to be “racist” because racism refers to majority oppression, and nothing else. To be a racist is to oppose or denigrate the moral worldview of the reformers without reference to the skin color of any of the parties. Therefore, African-American opponents of President Clinton were racists because the terminology of race had nothing to do with the preexisting racial construct. The idea of race, as it had existed in the United States, no longer applied. Words like racism were part of the Newspeak grammar which insisted on appropriating the moral force of the old meanings, but without actually employing those meanings.

Their new definitions are those that serve the purposes of the ideology that commands them.

This liberal lexicon is the Newspeak that is all around us. It relies on the moral power of words while first subtly and then grossly changing their definitions until they no longer have anything to do with the old meaning. The process begins with politicized terminology and ends when the core terminology of a free country like “rights”, “freedom” and “democracy” no longer have anything in common with their formal definitions. Their new definitions are those that serve the purposes of the ideology that commands them.

Regardless of what they are supposed to mean, progressivism, racial tolerance and social justice all mean the same thing. And so in the inverse, racism, conservatism and small government also add up to variations of the same idea in the liberal lexicon. Which might not be so much of a problem if it were not also the lexicon being used by the media, academics, politicians, judges and the entertainment industry to name a few groups who are invested in the altered meanings because they are also invested in the ideology that those meanings support.

Ideologies define a worldview where for compelling moral reasons the ideologues are the only ones who can be safely allowed to rule. Imposing this worldview on the people as often as possible and through every possible venue, from news reporting to novels, and from music to the educational system as allows for the perpetual power of the ideologues. So long as the cause is just, then no possible overreach of power or abuse can ever justify removing the ideologues from their petty thrones.

Their first goal, once in power, is to worsen whatever crisis brought them to power without appearing to do so.

The purpose of any ideology is power. To gain power, the ideology must impose its notion of a crisis and its view of a solution as the right and natural one. Once the proponents of the ideology are empowered to impose a solution, then they gain factional and personal power that allows them to remake the system in ways that will prevent them from being dislodged. Their first goal, once in power, is to worsen whatever crisis brought them to power without appearing to do so. Their solutions deepen the crisis while appearing to devote every resource to resolving it.

The growing prosperity of working classes in the West weakened the crisis of class warfare that had led the left to trumpet that the only alternative to their political reforms was a bloody civil war between the workers and the owners. That was when the left turned to race as their central crisis. Over time, the left has broadened race back to cover the immigration exploitation that they had been engaged in during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As most of the new immigrants were now non-white, the left rolled their old new crisis into their new old crisis and continued to call the whole thing racism, even when, as with Muslims, they were conflating religion with race.

Crisis is king. Crisis justifies a war on poverty and a war on racism which are actually wars on anything that is an obstacle to the absolute power of the ideology that exploits the crisis. That is why we are now forced to show photo ID’s in order to buy cough medicine when we come down with the flu, but any talk of showing photo ID’s at the voting booth is shouted down as racism. Why is it racism? Because the working definition of racism is anything that interferes with the progressive power structure. Questioning the existence of the crisis is the worst form of racism of them all.

Well over a century after the Civil War and Reconstruction, and half a century after the civil rights movement, do we really need the Federal government looking over the shoulder of states to stop them from controlling their own electoral systems? Is it really in the name of equality that the Federal government steps in and ban non-partisan elections in the city of Kinston for fear that African-Americans won’t know whom to vote for?

Racial justice is the tail of the dog, and the dog is a Democratic Party hound

Protecting African-American voting rights has become code for protecting the Election Day turnout for the Democratic Party. Preventing the wrong kind of redistricting is about maintaining the gerrymandered minority districts which are code for safe Democratic Party seats. Racial justice is the tail of the dog, and the dog is a Democratic Party hound, and it has nothing to do with the old fashioned kind of racism.

The Democratic Party has switched from suppressing minority voters to giving added weight to minority votes, both in violation of the law. The common denominator in both cases is that it does what serves its own interests and calls it defending the rights of the people. The distance between the Red Shirts and the New Black Panther Party, or the Redeemers and the Diversifiers is shorter than most Democrats would like to admit. The bottom line goal in all case was the power of the party.

Ideology is a vehicle for political power, and all the Machiavellian outfits draped around the naked emperor of power do not change that. Western political parties in America, Europe and around the world have traded in the “Labor” ideology that banked on the dissatisfaction of the native working class for a “Diversity” ideology banking on the dissatisfaction of minorities. Such a transition would not have occurred, no matter how much the changing ideas of the left pushed it, if it did not serve the interests of the political machines driving them.

[……]

Read the rest – The Liberal Uses of Race

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Posted in Democratic Party | 146 Comments »

Two wars – a cautionary tale

by Mojambo ( 61 Comments › )
Filed under Ahmadinejad, Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Egypt, Iran, Islamic Terrorism, Islamists, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Syria at February 14th, 2012 - 8:30 am

Syria is the war the administration  prefers to fight, Iran is the war (the necessary war) that   it wants to avoid at all costs.  I have to disagree though with the Knish – breaking up the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah axis would definitely be a good  thing.

by Daniel Greenfield

There are two possible conflicts on the table in Washington. One is with Iran and the other with Syria. The Iran conflict is the one that Washington doesn’t want. Its most likely trigger at this stage is an Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear program. Like most of the wars centering around Israel, this one is existential and of no interest to the philosopher kings in D.C. who wage wars with the grand purpose of making the world a better place.

Washington does not particularly care whether Iran gets nukes or doesn’t get nukes. It cares about History. With a capital H. Libya got bombed because it was on the wrong side of history. Syria is about to get bombed because it’s on the wrong side of history. There are people in the administration like Samantha Power who would like to bomb Israel for being on the wrong side of history, but they don’t think that even J Street and Peter Beinart could spin that as a pro-Israel move.

Being on the right or wrong side of history is one of those topics that primarily interests Islamists and nation builders on the right and the left who subscribe to a progressive version of history. Things don’t just happen, they happen because a country and a people are riding the history escalator up or down, to the top floor of the mall of the world where the cultivated stores like Starbucks, Nordstrom and the now defunct Sharper Image are located, or the bottom where K-Mart, Payless and Gap take up space.

The Arab Spring was on the right side of history because of its transformative qualities. Supporters of it were on the right side of history. Opponents of it needed to be bombed if they were Arab dictators or disinvited from the right cocktail parties if they were merely columnists and analysts. And at the end of it all through the sublime majesty of democracy and people power, the Middle East would look exactly like Europe, but with a more exotic cuisine.

Israel has always been the hedgehog in the soup of Arab democracy, agitating them, empowering their rulers and causing them to distrust Western benevolence. Now Israeli jets threaten to spill the soup of the Arab Spring by bombing Iran, which may reinforce support for Syria, which will hold up the Arab Spring and halt the progressive escalator of history.

Washington needs the Syrian war to happen, and it needs to keep a conflict with Iran from happening. The great diplomatic problem of Israel has always been that its leader insist on viewing conflicts in practical terms. Israel does not fight wars to make the world safe for democracy, it fights wars because there’s someone shooting missiles as it. This is an unacceptable reason for a war in a postmodern world where wars are fought to preserve the international order, protect civilization, make the world safe for democracy and prove that human rights violations will be punished by the duly constituted body of international jurisprudence.

Self-interest is Israel’s original sin. It was the sin that countless titans of the left from H.G. Wells to Lenin berated the Zionists for. Instead of contributing to the welfare of mankind and participating in the international brotherhood of workers, they went off to rebuild a country that existed only in their holy books and stirred up all kinds of trouble doing it. And since they have kept on stirring up trouble, not in the name of some grand idea, but out of their tawdry interest in defending themselves.

With angry Muslims boiling in European cities, Koran touting terrorists blowing up the modern infrastructure of the world’s capitals and turmoil roiling the hundreds of millions of Muslims who still haven’t managed to get refugee status in the UK or the US, the progressive vision is in big trouble and the only solution is to somehow stabilize the situation. Democracy is the only panacea that the progressive prescription plan covers.

Israel’s insistence on a purely existential view is dismissed as selfish and narrow-minded when the Middle East is headed toward a brave new world where nukes no longer matter because no one is angry anymore because there are no more dictators and democracy is everywhere. While the Israelis see the Middle East as basically static, the progressives see the Middle East as constantly on the verge of a great leap forward to a new more enlightened age.

As a result any affinity between the neoconservatives and Israeli leaders was always going to be limited. The neoconservatives were impressed by Israel’s modernism, but they assumed that it could be copied over to their neighbors and came to resent Israel as an obstacle for not playing a more meaningful role in their grand theory of history. While outwardly the progressives see Israel as very modern, they reject it for not possessing the most vital element of modernism. Transnationalism.

While Israel has more than its share of leftists, its animating philosophy is an ethnic nationalism that is repugnant to the transnationalist. They can find no meaningful globally applicable philosophy that defines its success. Like Japan, Israel is a self-contained wonder. It is a nation, not a philosophy. Its identity is rooted in an infuriating recent and ancient history. It is modern in defiance of the progressive understanding of history– which is why its technology, its human rights and its basic decency are dismissed.

[…..]

The progressive philosopher-kings aren’t stupid, their knowledge of history is. They believe that their wonderful system was not the product of a civilization, but of political protesters demanding change. If the political protesters demanding change are similarly empowered in the Muslim world, then they will end up with the same results.

To the left a theory of history in which a humanitarian society is created through the overthrow of the status quo makes perfect sense. To the American liberal right, a similar theory favoring democracy as the key element has almost as much appeal. Both agree on the notion that if their native process is exported, then the results will be the same.

There’s a certain kind of technocratic sensibility to it, that if you build the same machines and use the same recipe, then anyone can make Coca Cola. Which is true, except that people in different parts of the world prefer versions of Coca Cola that taste differently. Exporting the process of democracy does not export the outcome of democracy. It only helps the local create the sort of government they really want. Egypt and Tunisia have already shown us what kind of government that is.

Washington is not interested in Israel’s selfish need to be nuked. It isn’t in this for existential reasons and it doesn’t see why Israel should be either. If the United States can sacrifice thousands of lives for the greater good to promote peace, tolerance and respect for international law, then why can’t Israel risk a few million lives, especially when there are foreign policy experts who will explain slowly and distinctly to the dunces in Jerusalem why it is very unlikely that Iran will actually detonate a nuclear bomb.

Israeli leaders have a diminishing interest in grand theories of history arising from DC or Brussels. Small nations can’t afford grand theories of history. They make do with keeping the rain from leaking through the roof. The Israelis aren’t interested in another war, which is exactly why they want to launch a preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear program. In response Iran’s terrorist proxies will do their part by shelling Israeli towns and villages, but that’s part of life. Not the good part, but the part about living in a region overrun by terrorist militias that anyone can sponsor for a dollar.

They are often stupid, but they are rarely stupid in the way that American and European leaders are stupid. Israel can’t afford its own version of Blair, Sarkozy or Obama. The closest thing to them, Shimon Peres, was quickly voted out despite wearing the cloak of martyrdom and has been relegated to a ceremonial office which allows him to explain his vision of the New Middle East dominated by nanotechnology and free trade zones to foreign visitors who are impressed by this visionary.

[……]

Read the rest –  A tale of two wars

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Posted in Ahmadinejad, Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Egypt, Iran, Islamic Terrorism, Islamists, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Syria | 61 Comments »

Reagan’s “Morning in America ” twenty-eight years later is now “Halftime for Obama”

by Mojambo ( 113 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Economy, Elections 2012, Socialism, unemployment, Unions at February 8th, 2012 - 3:00 pm

Of course we all caught that absurd Super Bowl commercial starring Clint Eastwood  touting “Halftime in America” and the revitalization of Detroit (of course the commercial was not filmed in Detroit but in Los Angeles,  Dirty Harry would never walk by himself along 8 Mile Road in Motor City). The whole thing reminded me of a Leni Riefenstahl propaganda piece form the 1930’s.  Obama’s America is starting the 4th quarter already down by  17 points.

by Daniel Greenfield

“Halftime in America” is a punchier version of Wag the Dog’s reelection slogan, “Don’t Change Horses in Midstream”. They might have tried, “The Best is Yet to Come”, but Bloomberg already took that one.

It’s one of those wonderful side benefits of socialism that the gap between corporate advertising and a campaign commercial blurs. What’s good for GM is good for America and what’s good for Chrysler is good for Obama. We may not have the pipeline, but we’re still pipelining taxpayer money to a few precious union jobs with car companies that look a lot like the UK’s car companies did in the seventies.

You can’t really blame Chrysler for trying to preserve its Motor City brand, even if it’s with a commercial that wasn’t actually filmed in Detroit. It’s much easier to put together some inspiring scenes of a Detroit recovery if you shoot it in Los Angeles, a place that has its problems, but which is much more likely to have cheerful couples waking up in apartments that seem to be entirely made of glass.

The Motor City brand is one of those things that doesn’t mean a whole lot anymore, but still stirs up sentimentality, like the immigrant experience or freedom of speech. That Detroit is as real today as the Chicago depicted in Sandburg’s poem which served as the hog butcher, tool maker and wheat stacker to the world. Today Sandburg might have called it a food stamp scanner, scammer and welfare taker instead.

American industry is a ghost of that former vigor, its hog butchering, tool making and wheat stacking done in by the progressive vision of a post-industrial society. Today it’s Shanghai that might qualify for a Sandburg poem and it’s also the only place to find that kind of aggressive industrial growth, but Halftime in Shanghai doesn’t sound the same even if Shanghaiing American industry is the name of the game.

Chevy, another government bailout recipient, eschewed the phony clip show patriotism and cut right to showing that their truck could survive an apocalypse. Unlike Halftime in America, that ad could have been filmed in Detroit, which has major apocalypse potential. If you have to choose between trying to convince Americans that Motor City is back or convincing them that the end of the world is near but that the right truck can help them make it out alive, go with the second one.

But Chrysler needs the Motor City brand, because it doesn’t exist anymore. After a brief two year period of being an American company again after its sale by Daimler-Benz, it is now owned by Fiat, which is as All-American as its CEO, Sergio Marchionne, who does not sound very much like Clint Eastwood. It needs that image of American industry, even if it’s an Italian company still employing some American workers and an American brand.

Everyone needs their myths, even if it’s the myth of a booming Motor City created in Los Angeles, starring a California movie star by a company headquartered in Turin, Italy. It beats the tawdry reality of Detroit. It’s not as if anyone confuses myths with reality, or commercials with substance.

Some of Eastwood’s most famous Westerns were actually filmed by Italian directors in Italy. If Sergio Leone could give us Eastwood staging six gun duels in the Apennine Mountains off the Adriatic Sea, then why can’t Sergio Marchionne give us Clint Eastwood pacing around an LA stage and breathily pontificating on how hard it is to keep the people and car companies of Detroit down.

We needed the Westerns at a time when the frontier was closing, and if toward the end they were ugly vicious little tableaux of unredeeming violence being filmed in Spanish ghost towns, no one really cared anymore. As the American car company goes the way of the Wild West, we have spaghetti car commercials instead of spaghetti Westerns reassuring us that we are still the same people we used to be. Strong, resilient and capable of recovering from anything with enough bailout money.

Halftime in America didn’t explicitly set out to promote Obama, but it didn’t need to. Its theme was hope. Its purpose was a defense of widely unpopular policies. It didn’t need to mention him by name, any incumbent would have done. Its come on is the same one used in every casino and by every street corner three-card monte dealer. “Don’t stop now. Sure you may be behind, but if you throw it all in, you’ll double your money.”

Halftime in America depends on the metaphor of halftime to convince us to discount the past and embrace hope and change all over again. Forget how badly we fumbled the ball and believe that this time we’ll make the touchdown.

But the right metaphor isn’t a closely fought game where the lovable underdogs are behind and they just need one golden moment to make it all worthwhile. It’s a game where the quarterback has spent most of the game playing golf a 100 miles away, where the players are angry people who can’t play football but sued their way onto the team, and the coaching staff only knows how to incite the home crowd to assault the opposing fans, but has no idea how the game is played and thinks rules are for suckers.

The coach has been reading Alinsky’s Rules for Radical Players which teaches that the only way to win the Super Bowl is by completely changing the rules of the game on an ad hoc basis and that the only way to accomplish this is by taking over the NFL from within. No touchdowns have actually been scored, but the fawning coverage assures us that we are living in a post-touchdown world where the pigskin doesn’t matter, it’s all about the value of the brand.

Cheering for a comeback for that isn’t for halftime, it’s for halfwits. There are baseball and football teams who can never win, but still command passionate followings because they keep losing. The more they lose, the more passionate their fans are about them someday winning. But there’s nothing of the lovable underdog spirit about the people who ran this country into the ground. Instead of projecting the humility of those who tried and failed, they project the arrogance of winners even as they show off a track record that even losers should be ashamed of.

[…….]

The gap between Halftime in America and the reality of Motor City is positively narrow compared to the chasm that stretches between the actual economic situation of the United States and the one set out by Obama in his own halftime in America speeches. We are not recovering, things are not getting better, they are on the verge of getting worse. Rather than making adult decisions, the administration has been as greedy, vicious and corrupt as the former indicted mayor of Detroit.

But Eastwood’s rasping narration was right about one thing. Detroit is showing us how it can be done. Not through gumption, hard work, determination and a little spit– but through government handouts that can’t keep the city together, but can help pay for commercials to encourage us to do it all over again.

Instead of fully compensating America for the nearly 2 billion in losses that we took on the Chrysler bailout, the company has spent the money on Super Bowl commercials touting its comeback. This is like the crook who gets out of jail and instead of compensating his victims, spends the money to take out an ad that boasts of how well he’s doing now. The average cost of a Super Bowl spot is 3.5 million for 30 seconds and with a 2 minute running time, that comes out to 14 million dollars. And that’s not counting Clint Eastwood’s fee.

Sure that’s less than 1 percent of the money we’re out for the cost of salvaging Chrysler and turning it over to Fiat, but it might have been nice if instead of spending all that money on an LA ad about how hard the people of Detroit are fighting for a recovery, it had gone to the people who lost their jobs to cover the higher taxes that fund bailouts like these.

[…….]

Halftime in America has that same empty optimism, a working class ethos as can only be imagined by a poet from Portland, who wrote the text, and the director of Your Highness. It isn’t patriotic, it invokes the working class romanticism that you can still see in Social Realism art or North Korean posters on behalf of a billion dollar corporation. It champions some vague struggle for progress, without defining what that might be. It tries to connect the plight of Detroit to America, but if that’s so then we’re already doomed.

Like period Communist propaganda, it treats work as a struggle and success as collective heroism, rather than a process. This nationalistic mythmaking disguised the basic reasons for the failures that made all that struggle necessary. Every aspect of Soviet or Communist Chinese industry was such a desperate struggle because the entire system was hopelessly broken. And so there was always a battle on to maintain a steel industry or bring in the harvest. And there always had to be villains who were in the way.

When your enterprises are desperately struggling to survive, then you can either try to romanticize the struggle or ask what is really wrong with them. The same goes for a government that can’t fix the economy, but can issue forty press releases a day attaching the blame to someone else. Halftime for Chrysler is also Halftime for Detroit and Halftime for Obama. None of them actually want people to ask what is really wrong, instead they want us to emotionally and financially invest in their struggle. And if we do that, then we lose the game.

Read the rest: Halftime for Obama

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Posted in Barack Obama, Economy, Elections 2012, Socialism, unemployment, Unions | 113 Comments »

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