Alternet/Jim Sleeper: Why Obama's Beltway Apologists are Letting Us Down

[markpkessinger]

AlterNet / By Jim Sleeper

Why Obama's Beltway Apologists are Letting Us Down

< . . . >

(Drew) Westen's game-changing essay, "What Happened to Obama?," landed in The New York Times' "Sunday Review" section on August 7 like "a rhetorical nuke dropped on ground zero in the liberal heartland," according to the blogger Andrew Sprung in a post titled, none too gently, "A Lover of Fairy Tales Casts Obama as Villain in Chief."

< . . . >

One thing that all these uncomfortable defenders of Obama share, besides their alarm about Westen, is disdain for "liberal" politics and policies. Some even use the L-word openly as an anathema hitherto employed only by conservatives (and, awhile back, Communists!)

< . . . >

But who set up this hall of mirrors in the first place? Who, trapped in their own ire and elitism, convinced that the world is a place too hard for liberalism and its civic-republican bulwarks, has wound up serving the global wrecking ball? Isn't it time these scribblers stopped peddling the line that people who want to challenge it need to grow up? Isn't it time we started reading Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World, which recounts how movements based on cooperative power, from the one aroused by Tom Paine to others in India, South Africa, Eastern Europe, and even in the American South, have reconfigured vast, national security states without making compromises like those we've left Obama to make?

Isn't it long past time to accept the consequences of acknowledging that while George W. Bush abused the body politic and a productive economy, only Barack Obama has dampened the civic-republican hopes he aroused, and only he has declined to rescue capital from itself on behalf of a commonwealth? Won't a new republic have to emerge from better premises and precedents than those offered by Drew Westen's critics?

Read full article at: http://www.alternet.org/story/152297/why_obama%27s_beltway_apologists_are_letting_us_down/?page=entire


http://www.alternet.org/story/152297/why_obama%27s_beltway_apologists_are_letting_us_down/?page=entire

[emilyg]

1. k