Yo Doc, without knowing the context of the conversation (I assume that it may have been about Obama), it appears to me that Bro. Baraka is expressing a defeatist attitude.
What’s the purpose of winning if your victories give your enemies new weapons to use against you? May as well be content with losing and the old weapons of familiarity.
It's something that I wish my friends on the radical left would consider when they call Obama weak or a puppet. – Sub
I think what you and Baraka are really saying is that the (Black) radical left should not criticize the POTUS at all. But the radical left did not give Obama’s enemies or his friends the idea that he is weak.
Obama gave them that perception himself. Some of it has to do with inexperience; some has to do with his non-confrontational style; some has to do with tactical errors.
“The man who has run nothing more demanding than the Harvard Law Review is beginning to look out of his depth in the world's top job. His credibility is seeping away, and it will require concrete achievements rather than more soaring oratory to recover it.”—Edward Lewis UK Telegraph
An article in the Jerusalem Post by Amir Mizroch, written before the Olympic bust, was titled “Why Everyone Is Saying 'No' to Obama.”
[Everybody is saying no to the American president these days. And it's not just that they're saying no, it's also the way they're saying no.
So why is everyone saying no to Obama?
It's the economy, stupid.
Everyone has worked it out by now: The great secret is out. America's economy has made Obama a weak president, and he will likely remain weak throughout his first term.]
As for tactical errors, check out the Israeli settlement freeze demand.
[No point denying it: in the first round of the match between Barack Obama and Binyamin Netanyahu, Obama was beaten.
But Netanyahu has won, and in a big way. Not only did he survive, not only has he shown that he is no “sucker”, he has proven to his people – and to the public at large – that there is nothing to fear: Obama is nothing but a paper tiger. The settlements can go on expanding without hindrance. Any negotiations that start, if they start at all, can go on until the coming of the Messiah. Nothing will come out of them.
It is difficult to understand how Obama allowed himself to get into this embarrassing situation.
Machiavelli taught that one should not challenge a lion unless one is able to kill him. And Netanyahu is not even a lion, just a fox.
Why did Obama insist on the settlement freeze – in itself a very reasonable demand – if he was unable to stand his ground? Or, in other words, if he was unable to impose it on Netanyahu?
Logic would say that Obama, before entering the fray, should have decided which instruments of pressure to employ. The arsenal is inexhaustible – from a threat by the US not to shield the Israeli government with its veto in the Security Council, to delaying the next shipment of arms. In 1992 James Baker, George Bush Sr’s Secretary of State, threatened to withhold American guarantees for Israel’s loans abroad. That was enough to drag even Yitzhak Shamir to the Madrid conference.
THE INESCAPABLE conclusion is that Obama’s defeat is the outcome of a faulty assessment of the situation. His advisors, who are considered seasoned politicians, were wrong about the forces involved.] – Uri Avnery
You can blame the radical left if you like, but we neither created this mess, nor are we going to ignore it.
Pardon my delay. There is nothing defeatist about it. Just a recognition of the Sisyphean dynamic that is man's fate. The earliest human traditions from Gilgamesh to the Iliad to Beowulf and beyond celebrate as hero the individual who wanders beyond safe corridors to meet the challenge. That's why I take the radical left so seriously and admire your courage. It is the radical left who map the frontiers of social existence.
Of course Obama should be criticized. But just as you correctly observe that the radical left did not create the problem neither did this president. And constantly inveighing against him does little to advance your social agenda.
The more substantive task for the radical left is to coordinate its movements and create the conditions to make its vision a reality. The radical left needs to emulate its early Twentieth Century forebears and treat the present as a Wilsonian moment redux. As described by Erez Manela what Koreans, Chinese, Egyptians, Indians, and Black Americans did was seize the rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson about equality and self-determination for purposes far more radical than was ever intended. The Change mantra can be used likewise.
However, despite all that practical realities should never be discounted. Narrow openings should be exploited as vehicles for principled compromise of the type seen recently with Cuba.
Certainly in healthcare and Israeli-Palestinian conflict there is tactical ineptitude. But let's be clear. As Carter painfully learned there is little domestic reward for negotiating an Arab-Isreali peace settlement. And the course the nation is on has forty years of momentum behind it and is impossible to undo in one election.
Furthermore, I would caution the use of the term weak. It's selectively applied. Nixon isn't called weak when he visits China, Reagan when he orders departure of American troops from Beirut, or George W. Bush when he holds hands(!) with an Arab suzerain, but renegotiation of the Panama Canal or Obama's engaging Iran is.
Finally, I think this President can learn. That's why I posted thevideo. JFK went from a Cold Warrior who was good friends with Joe McCarthy and campaigned on a platform that the US wasn't doing enough to stop communism and narrow a nonexistent missile gap to seeking a test ban treaty with the USSR. The man who was elected was different from the one killed in office.
Doc, despite all of my criticisms, I would like nothing more than to see this president become a profile of courage. I just don’t see the JFK in him, but he has reached a fork in the road (Af-Pak), where there is no fence for him to straddle. He could surprise me and stand down McChrystal, but I seriously doubt it.
And constantly inveighing against him does little to advance your social agenda. -- Sub
The success of The Left is always based on raising the consciousness of people by exposing the contradictions in society. Obama makes the contradictions in American society extremely nebulous. There is value is exposing his hypocrisy, although we know the balance of forces is overwhelmingly stacked against us, as Dr. Boyce Watkins and the National Journal point out.
http://www.thegrio.com/2009/10/
b...afghanistan.php
http://
healthtopic.nationaljourn...orts.php#084895
Makheru I'm surprised by the low esteem in which Dr. Watkins holds black people. I hope your opinion doesn't mirror his. It's a racist depiction of black people as irrational and unthinking. It reminds me of Denmark Vesey's ahistorical construction of the Plantation Negro.
Candidate Obama campaigned to the right of Bush, McCain, and Clinton on the subject of Afghanistan. He urged a marked and rapid increase of U.S. military resources in Afghanistan.
As president he has urged deliberation and reassessment of goals. This is a real shift which recently caused the theater commander to break protocol and publicly challenge the president. You and some critics just don't seem to appreciate this. The man is literally alone in the valley of death that is the national security state.
I wish that you would take the time to read Jim Douglass's book. You would see the tremendous pressures on Kennedy with World War II icons like Curtis LeMay literally calling the president an appeaser to his face and Kennedy declining to take the bait. JFK never overtly went against the Cold War establishment even after he became an apostate.
Commenting by HaloScan
