Andrew Sullivan-- Getting Shit Done

[ginnyinWI]

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/06/getting-shit-done.html

What are the odds that Obama's huge success yesterday in getting BP to pledge a cool $20 billion to recompense the "small people" in the Gulf will get the same attention as his allegedly dismal speech on Tuesday night? If you take Memeorandum as an indicator, it really is no contest. The speech is still being dissected by language experts, but the $20 billion that is the front page news in the NYT today? Barely anywhere on the blogs.

This is just a glimpse into the distortion inherent in our current political and media culture. It's way easier to comment on a speech - his hands were moving too much! - than to note the truly substantive victory, apparently personally nailed down by Obama, in the White House yesterday. If leftwing populism in America were anything like as potent as right-wing populism - Matt Bai has a superb analysis of this in the NYT today - there would be cheering in the streets. But there's nada, but more leftist utopianism and outrage on MSNBC. And since there's no end to this spill without relief wells, this is about as much as Obama can do, short of monitoring clean-up efforts, or rather ongoing management of the ecological nightmare of an unstopped and unstoppable wound in the ocean floor.

I sure understand why people feel powerless and angry about the vast forces that control our lives and over which we seem to have only fitful control - big government and big business. But it seems to me vital to keep our heads and remain focused on what substantively can be done to address real problems, and judge Obama on those terms. When you do, you realize that the left's "disgruntleist" faction needs to take a chill pill.

Take Iran. Everyone - part from still-delusional neocons - accepts that this is a hugely difficult issue. To read the neocon right, you'd think all our problems would be solved by the president declaring the regime "evil" and launching military strikes all over the country. Sound familiar? In the real world, most of us understand that the military option is madness, that the machinery of repression is strong enough for the coup regime to survive - but only just. Since Obama was elected, the legitimacy of the Tehran regime has been shredded - and I'd argue that removing America from the equation helped Iran's opposition, rather than stymying it. Most of us knew, moreover, that Russia and China would oppose any and all sanctions.

[Mimosa]

1. Does he kiss his mother with that mouth?

BTW, I agree with the DUer who wrote that if this president were white we wouldn't be seeing titles like Getting 'Shit' Done.

[Bluenorthwest]

2. On Sully's discernment abilities...

When Sully loudly supported the Invasion of Iraq, he made many claims about 'the left' and about Bush, which later he felt the need to explain and retract. Let's review what Sully had to say in 08, when he was looking about as wrong as a person can look. On why he supported GW Bush:

"I was concerned - ha! - that Gore would spend too much. I was reassured by the experience and intelligence and pedigree of Cheney and Rumsfeld and Powell. Two of them had already fought and won a war in the Gulf. The bitter election battle hardened my loyalty. And once 9/11 happened, my support intensified as I hoped for the best. His early speeches were magnificent."

On his criticism of 'the left' at the time of the war, of particular interest as he is yet again making the same prejudicial characterizations:
"When I heard the usual complaints from the left about how we had no right to intervene, how Bush was the real terrorist, how war was always wrong, my trained ears heard the same cries that I had heard in the 1980s. So I saw the opposition to the war as another example of a faulty Vietnam Syndrome, associated it with the far left, or boomer nostalgia, and was revolted by the anti-war marches I saw in Washington."

I leave you with Sully's clearly temporary admission of failure over several years of Bush support. Look at what he says about himself. Note that he has gone back to his previous tactics after this moment of clarity:
"My misjudgment at the deepest moral level of what Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were capable of - a misjudgment that violated the moral core of the enterprise - was my worst mistake. What the war has done to what is left of Iraq - the lives lost, the families destroyed, the bodies tortured, the civilization trashed - was bad enough. But what was done to America - and the meaning of America - was unforgivable. And for that I will not and should not forgive myself either"

So forgive me if I take this man with a grain of salt. Forgive me if I take Sully's discernment of the 'left' as a prejudiced and previously disproved opinion. He was revolted by anti war marches, he was reassured by Cheney and Rummy. This is the mind you are backing. His words are as he says 'unforgivable'. He claims he can not forgive himself, but lord knows he continues to slander, and to assume, and to cash those checks. He was a cheerleader for a war of aggression. Revolted by peace marches. And you wish to use him as example of wisdom? Really? On what basis? That he is paid to be wrong? To promote war, murder, torture, as he did?
Sully is a Catholic, and I say he has not done penance at all. He continues his previous errors. Slanders, characterizations, and prejudices. Again, he frames the 'left' as wrong. As he did for his war support.
Context, perspective. Know the source. Sully made lots of dough off of Iraq. He kept it all. "I shall never forgive myself-but I'll keep the filthy lucre, thanks." A. Sullivan 2008.