Skip to main content

Obama, the new Israel

I still don't understand why the right is giving O any public praise for this. I would've expected the right to quietly toast and gloat, but continue its public criticism of of O and the Oslo speech on whatever trivial or manufactured grounds it could come up with.
I don't see what the right gains tactically from publicly praising a Dem prez for a war speech, when the Repubs have gotten so much mileage for decades on asserting ownership of national security.
Someone 'splain, please? (ironwood, response to post, “The strange consensus on Obama’s Nobel address, Glenn Greenwald, 11 Dec. 2009)

Left vs. right is in a process of re-sorting into war-craving, sacrifice desiring, and the genuinely peaceful. The war-craving understand that Obama is the right cover to legitimize sadism on a scale that Bush could never accomplish, owing to his whole aesthetic seeming about 20 years out of date. For many Republicans, Obama is the new Israel, in a way; and the left that just cannot believe that the greatest threat, the most insidious traitors, in this America with a black democratic president, will increasingly turn out to the THEM, will be the Palestinians, routed from their homes for suspicious conduct.
Cheney et al. love for people to think of them as conniving, of motive -- they need to think they're Cartesian, mind in charge. But in reality they're the most prone to lose themselves to the sacrifice dance. Republican party is full of people like that; but, to a lesser extent, there's plenty on the other side too. Watch carefully: even Jon Stewart and Colbert will at some point start banging drums. I'll be curious to see what happens here at Salon. Hopefully we'll all help each other stay sane and good.

Link: The strange consensus on Obama’s Nobel address
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Discussion over the fate of Jolenta, at the Gene Wolfe facebook appreciation site

Patrick McEvoy-Halston November 28 at 10:36 AM Why does Severian make almost no effort to develop sustained empathy for Jolenta -- no interest in her roots, what made her who she was -- even as she features so much in the first part of the narrative? Her fate at the end is one sustained gross happenstance after another... Severian has repeated sex with her while she lay half drugged, an act he argues later he imagines she wanted -- even as he admits it could appear to some, bald "rape" -- but which certainly followed his  discussion of her as someone whom he could hate so much it invited his desire to destroy her; Severian abandons her to Dr. Talus, who had threatened to kill her if she insisted on clinging to him; Baldanders robs her of her money; she's sucked at by blood bats, and, finally, left at death revealed discombobulated of all beauty... a hunk of junk, like that the Saltus citizens keep heaped away from their village for it ruining their preferred sense ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Salon discussion of "Almost Famous" gang-rape scene

Patrick McEvoy-Halston: The "Almost Famous'" gang-rape scene? Isn't this the film that features the deflowering of a virgin -- out of boredom -- by a pack of predator-vixons, who otherwise thought so little of him they were quite willing to pee in his near vicinity? Maybe we'll come to conclude that "[t]he scene only works because people were stupid about [boy by girl] [. . .] rape at the time" (Amy Benfer). Sawmonkey: Lucky boy Pull that stick a few more inches out of your chute, Patrick. This was one of the best flicks of the decade. (sawmonkey, response to post, “Films of the decade: ‘Amost Famous’, R.J. Culter, Salon, 13 Dec. 2009) Patrick McEvoy-Halston: @sawmonkey It made an impression on me too. Great charm. Great friends. But it is one of the things you (or at least I) notice on the review, there is the SUGGESTION, with him being so (rightly) upset with the girls feeling so free to pee right before him, that sex with him is just further presump...
3 comments
Read more

The Conjuring

The Conjuring 
I don't know if contemporary filmmakers are aware of it, but if they decide to set their films in the '70s, some of the affordments of that time are going to make them have to work harder to simply get a good scare from us. Who would you expect to have a more tenacious hold on that house, for example? The ghosts from Salem, or us from 2013, who've just been shown a New England home just a notch or two downscaled from being a Jeffersonian estate, that a single-income truck driver with some savings can afford? Seriously, though it's easy to credit that the father — Roger Perron—would get his family out of that house as fast as he could when trouble really stirs, we'd be more apt to still be wagering our losses—one dead dog, a wife accumulating bruises, some good scares to our kids—against what we might yet have full claim to. The losses will get their nursing—even the heavy traumas, maybe—if out of this we've still got a house—really,...
2 comments
Read more