Browsing PBH By Articles

Dear Jon Huntsman, We Don’t Deserve You

This past week, citizens of the granite state of New Hampshire did a great job in reinforcing the state’s nickname: in a blockheaded, nose-picking Cro-Magnon fashion, nearly 40% of New Hampshirites traveled en masse to their polling stations and voted for Mitt Romney. In a distant second place was Ron Paul, resident libertarian crank whose absurd vision of the future rivals that of a Dali painting. And in a typically meek manner, Jon Huntsman finally poked his silvery head of hair in the upper echelon of GOP candidates with 17% of the New Hampshire vote.

In Huntsman’s subsequent speech, he vowed that his campaign would “go south” from New Hampshire. While he may have meant South Carolina, the next stop on the conservative candidates’ tour de force, another—and more accurate—interpretation would be that he was referring to the direction of his future support in the polls.

What modest “momentum” Huntsman gained—if it can even be called that—in the already fiercely independent state of New Hampshire was not nearly enough to catapult him into the frontrunner status he will need in order to successfully navigate the waters of the snake handling, reason loathing, and science shunning states of South Carolina and Florida that await next in the GOP primaries.

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The Week In Blogs, January 2012

From Business Insider, Reddit co-Founder Alexis Ohanian talks about the potential devastation SOPA will inflict on the technology and internet industry. For those of you unaware, SOPA is bill in the House of Representatives pushed by the major media companies that will potentially make linking to copyrighted material illegal.

Rob Boston at AlterNet has a great article on five of America’s founding fathers whose skepticism about religion and Christianity would make them unelectable today. Who knew that George Washington and John Adams were so against the use of religion in public and political spheres?

Quick hits: At Daily Kos, Kaili Joy Gray writes about her ridiculous experience with Bank of America that continues over 2 years after her husband passed away. Rude Pundit takes on 10 years of Gitmo, Balloon Juice has it’s own 10 year anniversary, and Politics USA talks about how the GOP has put the Bible ahead of country and constitution. And of course, stick to your New Years resolutions and lose weight naturally with BuiltLean!

Obama’s Challenge For 2012: Can A ‘Messiah’ Win Twice?

The Article: Obama: Can A Messiah Win Twice? by E.J. Dionne Jr. in The Washington Post.

The Text: Four years ago this week, a young and inspirational senator who promised to turn history’s page swept the Iowa caucuses and began his irresistible rise to the White House.

Barack Obama was unlike any candidate the country had seen before. More than a mere politician, he became a cultural icon, “the biggest celebrity in the world,” as a John McCain ad accurately, if mischievously, described him. He was the object of near adoration among the young, launching what often felt like a religious revival. Artists poured out musical compositions devoted to his victory in a rich variety of forms, from reggae and hip-hop to the Celtic folk song. (My personal favorite: “There’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama.”) Electoral contests rarely hold out the possibility of making all things new, but Obama’s supporters in large numbers fervently believed that 2008 was exactly such a campaign.

As the attention of the politically minded has focused on the rather more down-to-earth contests in Iowa and New Hampshire that will help determine which Republican will face Obama in November, let us ponder what the coming year will bring for someone who must now seek reelection as a mere mortal.

Obama’s largest problem is not the daunting list of difficulties that have left the country understandably dispirited: the continuing sluggishness of the economy, the broken political culture of Washington, the anxiety over America’s future power and prosperity.

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The Red Herrings That Will Shape 2012

The Article: The Biggest 2012 Political Red Herrings by Steve Kornacki in Salon

The Text: There are all sorts of uncertainties about how the political world will evolve in 2012, but we can say with confidence that an awful lot of the media’s oxygen will be sucked up by red herrings – seemingly big and exciting stories that are rooted in possibilities that have virtually no chance of coming to fruition. Here are the five biggest red herrings to watch out for in the year ahead:

1. The Hillary/Biden switch

The idea: Hillary Clinton will replace Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket in 2012 in an effort to motivate the party’s base. The move would also be a way to anoint Hillary as Obama’s successor for 2016.

Why we’ll hear about it: Because it’s an easy and irresistible, personality-based story for the media, which kicks the speculation into overdrive every time an even remotely credible political figure advances the idea.

Why it won’t happen: The reasons are many. Start with the reality that Biden hasn’t committed any fireable offenses as vice president and isn’t an electoral drag in any way. We’re not talking about Spiro Agnew or Dan Quayle here.

There’s also the fact that vice-presidential candidates, even when they’re popular and generate lots of buzz, don’t move voters in November. Just remember: The biggest V.P. mismatch of all time, between Lloyd Bentsen and Quayle in 1988, ended up being worth nothing to Michael Dukakis.

Plus, if Obama did make the switch, wouldn’t the media portray it as a desperate move – an embattled president panicking at meager poll numbers? That would only reinforce Republican efforts to caricature the Obama White House as a flailing, chaotic operation. And why would Hillary even want the job? It wouldn’t improve her positioning for 2016, if that’s what she’s interested in; she’s already the Democratic Party’s biggest star not named Obama. But if she did take Biden’s place, the general election would (unfairly) be portrayed as a referendum on her popularity. A defeat would be blamed on her and would hurt her positioning for ’16.

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Does The US Really Support Arab Democracy?

The Article: End of the Pro-Democracy Pretense by Glenn Greenwood in Salon.

The Text: Media coverage of the Arab Spring somehow depicted the U.S. as sympathetic to and supportive of the democratic protesters notwithstanding the nation’s decades-long financial and military support for most of the targeted despots. That’s because a central staple of American domestic propaganda about its foreign policy is that the nation is “pro-democracy” — that’s the banner under which Americans wars are typically prettified — even though “democracy” in this regard really means “a government which serves American interests regardless of how their power is acquired,” while “despot” means “a government which defies American orders even if they’re democratically elected.”

It’s always preferable when pretenses of this sort are dropped — the ugly truth is better than pretty lies — and the events in the Arab world have forced the explicit relinquishment of this pro-democracy conceit. That’s because one of the prime aims of America’s support for Arab dictators has been to ensure that the actual views and beliefs of those nations’ populations remain suppressed, because those views are often so antithetical to the perceived national interests of the U.S. government. The last thing the U.S. government has wanted (or wants now) is actual democracy in the Arab world, in large part because democracy will enable the populations’ beliefs — driven by high levels of anti-American sentiment and opposition to Israeli actions – to be empowered rather than ignored.

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