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MUST READ: Obama's moral cowardice: "The best lack all conviction"
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MUST READ: Obama's moral cowardice: "The best lack all conviction"
Reading this Slate piece reminded me of a line from the W.B. Yeats poem "The Second Coming":
The best lack all conviction/ while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
You see this in the vociferous demonstrations against that Islamic community center in lower Manhattan; in the inchoate and often incoherent rage of the Tea Party groups and Glenn Beck acolytes; in the denunciations of âsocialismâ and dire warnings of some fascist government takeover during last year's health care reform debate — the right, and particularly, its fringe, reactionary, conspiracist and stunningly vacuous, uninformed and anti-intellectual base, has been whipped up into a frenzy these last 18 months and is poised to make big gains in November. The 112th Congress, if the polls bear out and this current crop of Republican extremists takes control — Rand Paul, Joe Miller, John Boehner, Jim DeMint, Darrell Issa, and, yes, Pat Toomey, among too many others to name — we're almost certain to see two years dominated by hyperventilating ideologues, government shutdowns and the sort of endless bullshit "investigations" into nonexistent improprieties that marked the Gingrich "revolution" of the 1990s. Probably worse, because unlike that class of Republicans, these fools have no absolutely no appetite for actual governance, nor any type of discernable agenda beyond cutting taxes for billionaires and bulldozing the small, but important, progress we've made on health care. (On that note, check this out: Were Republicans still in charge, we'd have higher deficits and unemployment than we do now.)
The problem is, while the worst of us — the Glenn Becks and Sarah Palins and so forth — are frothing over with âpassionate intensity,â as Yeats would say, âThe best lack all conviction.â And that brings us to today's Must Read, from Slate's Jacob Weisberg:
Barack Obama's redecoration of the Oval Office includes a nice personal touch: a carpet ringed with favorite quotations from Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, both Presidents Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King Jr. The King quote, in particular, has become a kind of emblem for him: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." For all the carping about his every move, the only big problem with the Obama Presidency is the gap between what's written on his rug, and what's buried under it—the distance between the President's veneration of moral leadership past and his failure, so far, to exhibit much of it himself.
Obama has had numerous occasions to assert leadership on values issues this summer: Arizona's crude anti-immigrant law, the battle over Prop 8 and gay marriage, and the backlash against what Fox News persists in calling the "Ground Zero mosque." These battles raise fundamental questions of national identity, liberty, and individual rights. When Lindsey Graham argues for rewriting the Constitution to eliminate the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, or Newt Gingrich proposes a Saudi standard for the free exercise of religion, they're taking positions at odds with America's basic ideals. But Obama's instinctive caution has steered him away from casting these questions as moral or civil rights issues. On none of them has he shown anything resembling courage.
The whole piece is worth a read, but one particular passage struck me:
With the Proposition 8 fight, Obama has fallen short in a different way, by his reluctance to join an emerging social consensus. Obama had previously criticized California's Proposition 8, the ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage, as "divisive." But his official position—which no one believes he actually holds—is that he is against legalizing gay marriage. Americans are changing their views on this issue with inspiring rapidity. Judge Vaughn Walker's moving opinion provided an occasion for Obama to move to embrace the extension of equal rights to gay people. Instead, he slunk mumbling in the other direction. How dismal that America's first black president will be remembered as shirking the last great civil rights struggle (emphasis added).
The best lack conviction. As I noted last year (at my previous employ), prominent Democrats too often take the right positions when they don't matter. In power, they're cowed by the worst's âpassionate intensity.â And though it shouldn't really matter, there is a political aspect to this: Passionate intensity gets voters to the polls, especially in midterm elections (see âthe enthusiasm gapâ). The president's unwillingness to channel his inner MLK or Truman or LBJ — who passed through the Civil Rights Act famously knowing that it would cost Democrats the South for generations, and it did — and do the goddamned right thing because it's the goddamned right thing will be part of the reason the Dems will take a lashing in November.
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I'm offended by Mr. Billman's use of profanity...it's unclassy and unnecessary.
Greta, what did you think of the content of what Mr. Billman had to say?
Sorry, I don't need to be anonymous.
[...] MUST READ: Obama's moral cowardice: âThe best lack all conviction … [...]
[...] MUST READ: Obama's moral cowardice: âThe best lack all conviction … [...]
[...] MUST READ: Obama's moral cowardice: âThe best lack all conviction … [...]
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