Oedipus Rex
I’ve been coughing so hard and so much these past four days, I suspect I’ll soon have an aneurysm. I just spent the past couple days at my mom’s, trying to recover.
Through that time, I went to see Oliver Stone’s W., and listened to Colin Powell deliver his endorsement of Barack Obama on Meet the Press.
Maybe it’s the cough medicine talking, but I felt think the critics have been a bit too harsh on W. There’s no question about Oliver Stone’s biases, but overall I think it was a fairly straightforward and even sympathetic biopic. Yes, it assumes that you believe as Stone does — that George W. Bush has oedipal issues, that he was out of his depth as President, and that he is incurious and incompetent. Provided you’re on board with that premise, you may — as I do — view the film as a tragedy about a man who has spent his life both living up to and challenging his father, a relationship which brings him to make some very bad decisions.
It’s certainly not Stone’s greatest work, but it’s not at travesty, either. In the end, Stone made me feel sorry for Bush — it’s a point missing from the reviews and the trailers that suggest the film is a comedy. I also felt angry at him for pursuing and achieving the presidency and for listening to cranks like Dick Cheney. We may never figure out just what we feel collectively about George W. Bush and what he did, but this was a decent attempt at starting the discussion.
Colin Powell is painted as the failed voice of reason in W. — a tragic figure in his own right — and there is no greater example of that than in his endorsement today for Barack Obama. A career military man and lifelong conservative (and anyone who would like to dispute this fact, should really go back and look at what he’s said on record before blathering on about how this isn’t true), it clearly wasn’t easy for Powell to make his decision. But like Christopher Buckley and others, it seems that all the smart people have been run out of the Republican party by the guys with pitchforks and torches. This doesn’t make them Democrats, but we’re more than happy to welcome them into our Big Tent.
I’m not sure if it will change anyone’s minds at this point, but it may make moderates in the Republican party who question the overall tone and tactics of the McCain campaign (as well as McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin) feel a little better about voting for Obama on Nov. 4.
A part of me would like to see Powell get a second shot at the State Department to fix the things he couldn’t fix in the first Bush term. I know this won’t happen, but I love nothing better than a good redemption story.
By James DiBenedetto, October 20, 2008 @ 7:40 am
I’m disappointed in Powell. I’m disgusted by the crocodile tears (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly) that “conservatives” are shedidng over the “evil” tactics” of the McCain campaign and his “reckless” selection of Sarah Palin.
It’s one thing to feel that the Republican Party has lost its way, but it’s simply impossible for me to see how anyone who honestly believes in and desires conservative policies could support Barack Obama over JOhn McCain. Because there is nothing conservative in any respect about Obama or his views or his proposed policies, or his advisors, or the vast majority of his supporters.
What I think it is, is people who want to LOOK smart, and want to appear “respectable” to their liberal coworkers and friends and want to be on a bandwagon. People like Chris Buckley and Kathleen Parker aren’t worthy of respect, and, should Obama win and begin to govern in a way that they don’t agree with, and they voice that view, they’ll be shocked how fast their respectability disappears, and how quickly they’re shunned and ignored by the people whose favor they’re currently currying.
I am beyond disgusted with the unhinged attacks on Palin, and on McCain, and on anyone who dares to challenge the ascencion of Obama (why is it that we know more dirt in a couple of days about “Joe the Plumber” than we do in two years on Barack Obama?).
We will all be sorry if Obama wins and he governs with a Harry Reid-led supermajority in the Senate and an unassailable Nancy Pelosi-led majority in the House.
You will be sorry, when this triumverate closes the door on any new domestic energy exploration or reintroduction of nuclear energy, and it turns out that we can’t run the whole country on wind farms, and when, within six months, the price of gasoline is $5 a gallon or more, and YOUR grocery bill doubles.
You will be sorry when a callow Obama is challenged by foreign adversaries, and we are either forced into escalated conflicts or backed don in surrender.
You will be sorry when a new “Fairness Doctrine” is imposed, by legislation or by an Obama-appointed FCC, and any criticism of Obama is shouted down as “racism”, and dissent is marginalized if not actually criminalized in a way that the Bush White House never even dreamed of.
Bitter? You’re damn right. I’m sorry to be ranting on here, but please take it as a sign of respect; you are a very rare progressive who actually listens and looks for common ground. I live with a progressive who considers me a “Nazi” for not voting Democratic, in a community that’s going to vote 80% Obama and prides itself on being oh-so-tolerant, but took to the streets to fight low-income housing so that the poor they care so f**king much for might actually be able to live somewhere decent. I am forced by the lack of alternatives to watch and read news that openly cheerleads for Obama and displays nothing but contempt for anyone and anything Republican, which has abandoned any pretense of honesty or objectivity or even basic human decency.
You’ve written on here that the last eight years were a “nightmare”. Well, the next four are going to make them look like a walk in the park, and I just hope we have a country left by the end of them, but I don’t have a whole lot of hope for that.
By Derksen, October 20, 2008 @ 4:17 pm
I have always wondered whether it will be this election cycle or the next that finally splinters the Republican alliance between the fiscal conservatives and the social conservatives. That particular iceberg has been lurking off the port bow for decades, and it has always amazed me how the Republicans really have been able to rally together as a single party around a few common issues in order to defeat what they see as their common foe in the “Democratic” gestalt.
Perhaps the repeated failures and embarrassments of the last eight years will finally sunder the Republican party into its component parts, at which point the healing can begin until they are again a party whose membership can claim a common goal.
I would also hope that the Democrats have learned some important lessons from the Republicans’ (mostly successful) effort to create a “conservative majority”. I hope that the leadership does not allow the power to go to their collective heads, and that the first thing that they do is hand the keys to investigative and ethics bodies over to the opposition. Today’s Republicans would be much stronger as a whole party if not for the rampant cronyism (“heckuva job, Brownie!”) and hypocrisy (Foley, “wide-stance”) that crept in. It really is a shame. Some competent officers (whose political views I sometimes oppose, but whose ability I respect) went down on that ship (Powell, Rice, even Sith-Lord Cheney).
Last and not least, I hope that the coming Democratic majority really listens to the opposition. I do not believe that the Dems will command a statistically significant majority after the November, and to claim a mandate from a plurality would be ludicrous. Say what you may about the Republicans, but they are still Americans, and at the end of the day both parties really can find common ground for a shared ideal we all believe in and hope will prosper.
By Derksen, October 20, 2008 @ 4:58 pm
As a follow-up comment for the first commenter (Mr. DiBenedetto) upon this post: you sound like a moderate Republican who must be living in a heavily liberal-Democrat area. I suggest that you try being a moderate Democrat living in Texas for a few years in order to understand the same sense of persecution from a different perspective. As stated above, it helps to remember that the Democrats want the same thing that you do: a strong America that is admired by its allies and respected by its opponents. They just have a different approach to doing things.
You’d be surprised by how many of those approaches are similar to your own. Multilateralism is nothing new to liberals; it began under Reagan, and truly flourished under Bush I after the end of the Cold War. The Neoconservative movement truly was a novel approach mandating American supremacy as the only superpower; a schizophrenic return to the long-gone and deceptively comforting bipolar world of the Cold War.
As for deficit spending? This approach may have been decried by the Republicans of the Goldwater era and earlier, but it appears to have been fully embraced by later conservatives. We may finally have overreached ourselves with debt, and one can only hope that a truly bipartisan movement will emerge from the polity in response to this crisis brought about by mismanagement from both parties.
As for domestic energy exploration? I grew up in the petroleum industry, and it amazes me to see folks think that we can “drill our way out of an energy crisis”. At the get-go, competition for blocks in play by corporations can run you a year or two – and the inevitable legal battles can drag on throughout the rest of the process. The average timetable for exploration before tentative test-wells are even drilled can be as short as three years. Environmental impact assessments, capitalization, and finally rig construction can add another year or two to the preliminary total. Assuming that you don’t hit a dry well, and that it is cost-effective to bring your hydrocarbons up at that point without drilling another well somewhere else within your block, it might take you another year to get up to full production. And then you have to hope that refinery capacity (already behind, and a significant contributor to the current price of fuel) has expanded in pace with consumption. And kindly recall that if it were cost-effective for multinational oil companies to expand domestic exploration within the continental United States, they would already have done so. There is a reason that most modern petroleum exploration focuses on underplayed blocks elsewhere instead of picking at the bones of carcasses long scavenged.
Just think: political unrest in Africa and South and Central America have “protected” increasingly valuable petroleum resources for the modern multinational petrochem to fight over, now that those states are beginning to show the vestiges of political stability and a nascent support infrastructure.
By James DiBenedetto, October 21, 2008 @ 2:48 pm
Derksen said:
“As stated above, it helps to remember that the Democrats want the same thing that you do: a strong America that is admired by its allies and respected by its opponents. They just have a different approach to doing things.”
In all honesty, I can’t agree with this. I don’t believe that most Democrats (certainly the ones running for President and Vice President) really want a stronger America, or one that is respected by opponents. Or, at best, what they consider strength is not by any measure what I’d consider strength.
I think that what Barack Obama really wants is an America that is just one nation among many, with just one voice among many, which submits itself to the judgements and policies of bureaucrats at the UN and in NGOs that do not have the best interests of America at heart, or anywhere really in their calculations.
I think that Obama wants an America that is LIKED rather than one that is respected, and that is a recipe for disaster.
I think that Democrats see massive crowds in anti-American rallies and anti-war rallies in Europe and see that as evidence that our policies are wrong; you mention Reagan, who saw rallies with hundreds of thousands protesting his policies towards the USSR and saw them as people who only had the abilitiy to hold such rallies because they lived under the protection Americans paid for and sometimes died for.
Yes, I know how that sounds.
But it’s what I believe. I think that we’re the best game in town, with an economic system (flaws and all) that has brought more prosperity to more people than any other system in human history. I tihnk that our foreign policy (warts and all) has brought more freedom and peace to more people than any other in history. I think that our sins are outweighed a thousand to one by our good deeds. And I think that there is not anotther government on Earth that I would trust with our power or in our position.
I want us to be on top as the sole superpower because there is no one else in the world who can be trusted to take that place, and history has shown, over and over, that if there isn’t someone in charge, there will be bloody warfare to claim that place.
I don’t believe that the Democrats generally, or Obama/Biden specifically, believe anything remotely like that, and I don’t think anyone who doesn’t believe that is qualified to lead this country.
As far as domestic energy, I agree 100% that we cannot simply drill our way out. But drilling for the energy that we do have can and should be a PART of an overall solution, that should also include nuclear (never happen with Harry Reid in chage of the Senate, sadly), coal, renewables, increased efficency, and conservation (something the “stupid” Sarah Palin made clear in her convention speech and in many other appearances, not that the press bothered to make any mention of it in favor of chasing after her daughter and whether or not she’s got a tanning bed in her house). Openly saying that
we are going to refuse to tap the available resources we do control can only serve to increase prices internationally and hurt us.