More from the “Truth Will Set Us All Free” dept: What a sad, sad saga this Ted Haggard thing is. Right on the heels of the Prop 8 debacle, the nation gets an object lesson in the destructive poison of being gay, closeted, and Christian. It’s a familiar story to anyone who’s read anything about the experience of gay Christians, but it never gets any easier to watch:

The convolutions, the intrigue, the lies, the lost money, the ruined reputations and careers and hopes, the breathless media exposes — all of that would have never happened if Ted had been free enough to admit at some point, early on, three simple words: “I am gay.” A tragedy.

Charles hates penguins: “Yes, there is no love in me for penguins. The creatures have a life cycle that is utterly stupid and tedious.” Charles also hates dogs and thinks his daughter, age 7, should know whether or not her childhood is successful so far. Poor sad Charles.

Our new President does more for US-Muslim relations in 20 minutes than his predecessor did in 8 years:

Competence. It’s a bit hard to adjust to so suddenly. Obama chose to give his first, highly sought-after, high visibility televised interview as President to Al Arabiya. The interviewer, Hisham Melehm, who I’ve followed and been impressed by on the Diane Rehm Show as a frequent guest, was impressed, and so was Wolf Blitzer:

BLITZER: He can be a pretty charming guy. Is that what you think?

MELHEM: He — absolutely, absolutely. But, you know, you realize, you’re sitting from a man who has a deep, keen intellect, a sharp analytical mind, supple intelligence. And the way he weaves things, the way he frames issues, whether he’s talking about terrorism, talking about different cultures, he has a very sophisticated understanding of the world…

BLITZER: You know these issues and the region as well as anyone. You’ve been covering this story for a long time. Will he succeed?

MELHEM: Look, already he is sending the right vibes, the right tone, there is a different approach, there is a different wind coming from Washington, different discourse. In terms of a radical shift, it’s too early to say.

He is waiting for the Israeli elections, as you well know. He is waiting for the Iranian election, as you well know. He is sending the right signals at this stage. And I think he will — is going to force people in the Middle East to listen to him and take him very seriously and to listen to him carefully.

BLITZER: I think you’re absolutely right. And as someone who also has covered this region for a long time, he spoke with authority and knowledge. He clearly knew what he was talking about…

MELHEM: Absolutely.

As Steve Clemons puts it:

Barack Obama’s first moves have been uttlerly brilliant…

His style matters — just like Bush’s swagger did — and it is this act of humility towards the Muslim world which may animate hope in the nations around the world and in the Middle East specifically.

Everyone will have to adjust now. The Saudis will leave the peace deal on the table. The Israelis have to remake themselves — even if Netanyahu succeeds Olmert. Hamas will have to find a way to become differently postured — if not on Israel, then at least on some level of international acceptability with American partners. Arab stakeholders are going to have to snap out of positions shaped more by status quo thinking and inertia that things will never change and get with the Obama program.

What Obama did has provided a new punctuation point in American foreign policy, and it is not “continuous” foreign policy at all. This is a new game and a very impressive new leader.

President Obama – GOP punching bag or black-belt rope-a-dope master? The President has been getting a lot of flack from his left flank for not using his sky-high popularity (60% approval rating in Alabama… Alabama!) and a decisive Dem majority to muscle through his agenda instead of taking the time to make a charm offensive to the party that landed us in this horrible mess. It’s a valid complaint. After all, it’s clear after 6 years of Republican hegemony that they have little to offer but bad faith and bad ideas, and the public wants a 180-degree switch from the last eight years. So, why all the effort by Obama and his staff on a fool’s errand?

Al Giordano, making more sense than most of the hysterical liberals I’ve been reading, thinks Obama is basically continuing the political tactics that had him sail past the mighty Clintons and McCain in the elections – define the playing field by taking an early crucial lead in rhetoric, planning and actions, reach out with very politically visible (and genuine) offers to work together, lay back when the inevitable attacks begin, and then yank the political rug out from underneath at the most visible moment to come back for the win.

For a new president with such enormous public popularity to set up Congressional Republicans to be perceived as slapping his “outstretched hand” was a chess move that suckered them into the tar pit of being seen as the obstructionists in Washington, and at that, they’re now branded as additionally inactive on “the urgency of the economic situation”…

In other words, Obama’s strategy is to set them up for another rout in the 2010 Congressional elections and to hasten, in the meantime, the process by which they wake up and realize their seats are vulnerable. The President doesn’t need their votes on the Stimulus (therefore, this maneuver is not about the Stimulus, but more akin to a football team calling a running play to set up a later passing play). The truth is that so many Congressional Democrats are so undependable that Obama will need some Republican votes later on other legislative priorities, particularly in the Senate in order to get 60 votes for “cloture” to allow bills to be voted up or down: On the Employee’s Free Choice Act, on Immigration Reform (and now he needs one more to offset the anti-immigrant junior Democratic Senator from New York), on children’s health care and much, much more. To get to that point, he has to make individual Republicans feel vulnerable at the ballot box to Democratic challenge. Today’s events are speeding that process up.

In the end, Obama’s “bipartisanship” is one of the most Machiavellian partisan maneuvers we’ve seen in Washington in a long while, and I use that description in its most admirable context. The Republicans fell right into the trap today. Progressives that urge Obama to be more “partisan” should pay close attention to how the GOP is getting pwned before falling into the same trap themselves.

Here’s Obama in his own words on his political style:

Reason #1072 why I like Esquire – Tom Junod:

And so give this to global warming: It’s another test case. Because over the last eight years — since our president rejected the Kyoto Protocol in March 2001 — what we’ve done with global warming is what we’ve done with the war on terror and the war in Iraq and the authorization and outsourcing of torture and the creation of a security state and the creation of an insecurity state, in terms of the marketplace: We’ve lived with it. We’ve gotten really good at living with things during the Bush Years, at tolerating the intolerable. And while this may sound like another tip of the hat to the incredible resilience of the American people, it’s not: Resilience, after all, is not what’s required in crisis when the crisis is partly of your own making. Responsibility is. We have heard of the Tech Bubble of the Clinton Years, the Housing Bubble of George W. Bush. Well, the bubble that we’re living in now — still — is the bubble that’s all our own. It’s the Moral Bubble, and it will not be pricked until we take responsibility not just for the forty-third president’s actions but for our inaction — for all the agreements we’ve made without awareness, for all the awareness we’ve come to without vigilance, for all the times we’ve touched the easy, insulating button of our assent.

~ from his article “What The Hell Just Happened?” in the Feb 2009 issue of Esquire, italics mine

So, I was going to write a short response to Bob’s comment about my take on Rick Warren’s invocation at the Inauguration, but as usual it spiraled out of control into an almost 700 word behemoth that began to demand it’s own post. So here it is…

Like the other pastors, Warren was given the daunting task of delivering a religious invocation to a huge, vastly diverse audience on such an auspicious occasion, and he did a respectable job. After getting a little distance from the Inauguration Warren’s prayer wore a little better than it did in the moment of delivery. In fact, the transcript reads even better (read it here). But it still didn’t sit well.

For one thing, the delivery bugged me. Obama, who admittedly is a phenomenal public speaker, delivers his lines without excess drama and verbal frippery. His tone is commanding without needing to verbally wheedle or bully. And both Robinson and Lowery also played it straight, with an authenticity and conviction to their verbal phrasing. This isn’t just a style issue – I believe that style has a direct link to the internal cultural attenuation of the speaker.

With that in mind, the practiced, overly nice, melifluous bedside manner of mainstream Evangelical preachers makes me itch because it reflects the church culture they work in – one where they have to verbally work overtime to hide the rough words and rough edges, never ruffle feathers with parishoners or jeopardize their building projects, never cross the denominational leadership on which their careers depend, hide the culturally unacceptable parts of their belief structure and sell the “God is my BFF (best friend forever) type of faith” (as the commenter put it) that makes it easier to attract new attendees. Evangelical preachers feel caught between God’s watchful eye (no compromise on beliefs), their parishoners (who don’t want the boat to be rocked), the world (with whom they have a combined persecution/inferiority complex), and their career in the public spotlight (which demands they always be relevant and interesting). So, they largely adopt this non-strident, uninvasive, undemanding listenable style that has the simultaneous effect of both inducing a warm fuzzy feeling while insuring that their time on stage is instantly forgettable.

Second, for all of Warren’s talk of “failing to treat our fellow human beings…with the respect they deserve”, he, along with many Evangelicals, continue to equate gays and gay marriage with incest and pedophilia and was a vocal supporter of Prop 8 which threatens to dissolve the marriages of tens of thousands of deliriously happy gay folk using the disingenous and untrue reasoning that it threatened the right of churches and pastors to free speech. I believe him when he says that he has gay friends, and people like Melissa Etheridge have spoken of him warmly. But treating people with respect means sticking to the facts, to the truth, and these kinds of overstatements continue to inflame the discourse with their obvious untruths. And it’s made somehow more infuriating by the can’t-we-all-just-get-along style it’s delivered in (see point 1).

Look, I like Evangelicals. I have friends who are Evangelicals. Their charitable giving, hard work and general hand of friendship (especially in the individual vs. church setting) resists the demonization they get from the culture. But I can say from an experienced perspective that their culture and worldview has serious problems that are driving a wedge deeper and deeper between them and the world at large. They’re not dumb – they can feel this happening and I can sense the general pessimism that they feel about it – but they are locked into a theological worldview that makes the deepening separation and resulting irrelevance inevitable.

So, I stand by my comments on Warren being the weakest of the three, and I think the comment I reference in the post captured (in much less bloviation than mine) the essence of why. As for being civil, I’m not personally attacking Warren or casting aspersions on his character. I’m pointing out from my own experience and as authentically as I can what I feel the flaws are in his culture, the culture that I grew up in. I get passionate about it, I mention it, because I still care. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t spend any time on it because I wouldn’t care, y’know?

U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer Bill Mesta replaces an official picture of outgoing President George W. Bush with that of newly-sworn-in U.S. President Barack Obama, in the lobby of the headquarters of the U.S. Naval Base January 20, 2009 in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (Brennan Linsley-Pool/Getty Images)

On Trial: The kind of cheap, popular political cynicism often indulged in by the politically unaware and Ralph Nader that’s usually along the lines of “It doesn’t matter if you vote Democrat or Republican – they’re all corrupt bastards controlled by [insert nameless scary shadowy entity here]“.

The Charges: That Ralph Nader is a wiener for throwing the 2000 election. That those who continue to propagate this idea should be taken every bit as seriously as the “Elvis was abducted by aliens” fan club.

The Evidence: President Obama’s first 48 hours in office.

Exhibit A – Obama Administration, Day 1

Barack Obama will have spent his first several days in office issuing a series of executive orders which, some quibbling and important caveats and reservations aside, meet or actually exceed even the most optimistic expectations of civil libertarians for what he could or would do quickly — everything from ordering the closing of Guantanamo to suspending military commissions to compelling CIA interrogators to adhere to the Army Field Manual to banning CIA “black sites” and, perhaps most encouragingly (in my view): severely restricting his own power and the power of former Presidents to withhold documents and other information on the basis of secrecy, which was the prime corrosive agent, the main enabler, of the Bush era.
~ Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com

1) President Obama freezes salary of senior staff, saying that “families are tightening their belts, and so should Washingon”.

2) President Obama says “this government stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known”. Reversed Bush policy of making it hard to get govt information under the Freedom Of Information Act, reversed Bush order that allowed former presidents and their heirs to claim executive privilege to keep information secret. Requires that the Attorney General and White House Counsel review any claim of executive privilege to make sure it’s warranted.

3) President Obama imposed strict rules on lobbying. Former lobbyists cannot work for their former firms for two years following their service, and have to recuse themselves from working on issues on which they lobbied.

Summary: Extremely improved transparency in being able to track the activities of our government.

Exhibit B – Obama Administration, Day 2

The Bush Administration prisoner, torture and rendition apparatus was effectively dismantled today with four pen strokes.
~ Marc Ambinder, TheAtlantic.com

1) President Obama convenes panel to close Guantanamo Bay detainee prison within one year, halts the current trial process begun under Bush rules, and reaffirms their right to habeas corpus.

2) President Obama orders intelligence gatherers to limit their techniques to those published in the Army Field Manual which prohibits torture techniques such as waterboarding and stress positions.

3) President Obama orders that Red Cross be given immediate access to detainees with the effect that secret detainments are now effectively ended. The broad language covers not just govt facilities, but also contractor facilities.

4) President Obama orders that renditions to countries that are known to torture be stopped, and orders all CIA “black” facilities be closed.

Summary: The return of the rules of handling prisoners with basic decency, attention to their legal rights, and the firm re-establishment of the rule of law.

Verdict: Ralph Nader is hereby sentenced to campaign in a Hot Dog On A Stick uniform, and anyone caught trafficking in ridiculous political cliches is to be pummeled about the head and neck with Cheney’s used underwear.

(For more amazing Inauguration photos, visit this slideshow on the Boston Globe’s The Big Picture website.)

A few more wrap-up thoughts on our national maiden voyage into Obama territory in a moment, but first a few housekeeping things.

To all of you who commented on Spiritual Literacy, thanks so much for your thoughts. I was surprised at how many of you guys are in similar territory. I was assuming that more of you were settled in your spiritual commitments (or lack thereof), so it was kind of reassuring to know that we’re in good, similarly befuddled company, and not just being negligent. I’m thinking on your replies, and will post more on it soon. (Also, thanks in general for commenting! It’s so great to have other opinions to lean into and not just have to listen to my own voice echoing around in here.)

Second, Bob, I saw your comment about “which of the preachers asked for God’s forgiveness?” and I wanted to ask you to expand your question a bit more since it sounds like you have an observation in mind. Feel free to do that in the comments here, and I can start a thread there.

President Barack Obama makes a call from the Oval Office on his first full day on the job.
(Photo Credit: Callie Shell/Aurora for TIME)

Down to it. I found a couple of interesting pieces to highlight on this evening, 24 hours after installing President Obama safely in office.

First, on the speech. In general, I was reading a bit of deflation around the punditsphere. I think the political pros were looking for a bit more historicity to hang their analysis on, and came away disappointed. So I was interested in hearing more detail from those who I ran across who said, “yes, the speech wasn’t soaring oratory for the ages, but it was great because of being so appropriate for this moment” – which is essentially how I felt – to get a sense of why it might have landed well with them.

I found a couple of great responses on Slog. The first, Erica, a woman who was a Hillary supporter and always very skeptical of Obama, had this to say:

I’ve always been a little cold to Obama because I feel he’s never really acknowledged this—never owned his own fallibility, the fact that he will inevitably let his followers down. His speeches have always been too soaring, too capital-H historical, too full of crowd-pleasing flourishes and fillips, for my taste. Unlike the chanting, worshipful crowds, I wasn’t looking for a “climactic moment”; as far as I’m concerned, “plain language”—the type of rhetoric Eli referred to as “middle-brow”—is exactly what yesterday’s occasion called for. The notes Obama struck yesterday—we are a nation humbled, my predecessor has done harm to America but we will not be broken, change requires work and responsibility—were exactly the ones I wanted to hear at this moment in history.

The second, Eli, a reporter for the Stranger who has trailed Obama through his historic run and transition, had this very insightful dissection:

The speech, with its use of what his team warned in advance would be “plain language,” aimed directly for the middle—the political center, the middle-brow, a reception as neither awful nor one-of-a-kind. This is actually not a bad political move for Obama. The more he hugs the center, the more he distances himself from the “aloof and professorial” caricature, the more he talks to the mass audience using familiar language and easy ideas, the more politically powerful he becomes…

Finally: I’ve watched Obama deliver a number of speeches over the last year-and-a-half. He is clearly more than capable of giving an excited crowd the release it wants. Intellectually and oratorically, he is more than capable of besting FDR’s first and coming close to, or exceeding, Lincoln’s second. He didn’t want to, I think. To give the crowd their desired moment of tremendous release would be to create a void that they would then expect to be filled by immediate change, immediate progress, immediate solutions from the man who had, after all, just given them exactly what they wanted, when they wanted it. “More, please?” people would say.

Better, given the current state of the country, to lower expectations—or miss them entirely—and get the mass audience relating to him as a hard-working, clear-headed, plain-speaking, change-minded guy who is on their side, isn’t some sort of Messiah, and won’t be unleashing any instant-transformation lighting bolts.

That, to my ears, is what Obama achieved with his speech yesterday, and it is enough. More than enough.

The takeaway for me is, once again, Obama’s masterful ear for being able to sense and rhetorically address the national zeitgeist in a way that inspires people and draws them into the task at hand, sets their expectations exactly where they need to be for the next stage of action, and allows himself the maximum political framework to make his moves – not in a cynical way, but in the way of a man who sees his job as needing to produce actual results. And the best part is that none of it is manipulative or inauthentic. He’s always careful to invite the listener into a place of partnership, of mutual responsibility. In that sense, the speech was a real accomplishment.

Finally, the new Joe Klein piece in Time Magazine – blandly titled “Barack Obama Promises New Day, Work Begins Today” . For those of you not aware of it, Joe Klein wrote the memoir “Primary Colors” about the Clinton campaign that was made into the film with John Travolta (playing Bill) and Emma Thompson (playing Hillary) and has covered politics for a good long while. So, he’s got some heft when it comes to making pronouncements on the behavior of politicians.

His article is a wonderful peek into what has us Obama fans so excited about the potential of his presidency – his statesman-like dedication to governance without petty belligerence or bellicosity and his unique blend of policy wonk, a teambuilder with deep personnel and organizational intelligence, and, of course, an exceptionally keen sense of political inspiration and consensus. If you want a preview of the tone and legacy of the Obama years, this is a must-read. Seriously.

Here’s a shamelessly massive excerpt of the last part of the article:

Toward the end of the campaign, Michelle Obama asked me if I was going to write a novel about them like Primary Colors, my satiric account of the 1992 presidential race. I was at a loss for words, in part because the thought hadn’t even vaguely crossed my mind. “He can’t write a novel about us,” Barack Obama reassured his wife. “We’re too boring.”

Yes … and no. It’s hard to call the most exciting politician in decades boring. The millions who trekked to Washington for the Inauguration, who cried their eyes out and cheered their lungs raw, are testimony to the man’s sheer inspirational power. Reagan’s movement was called a revolution, but this may be more than that — the beginning of a whole new era of Obama-inspired and Obama-led citizen involvement. During the transition, the Obama website called for supporters to hold community meetings to discuss their health-care priorities. A staggering 10,000 meetings purportedly were held; 5,000 sent written reports — more paper! — to the transition office. This is a new kind of politics, with the potential to be the most powerful citizen army in U.S. history. If so, it will more likely be a force for civility — for “boring” things like good governance, for new ideas about how to control the cost of entitlements (which Obama pointedly mentioned in his speech) — rather than a rabble spamming the offices of recalcitrant Republicans. It will fit neatly into the Obama zeitgeist.

By the tone and style of his move to power, Obama has shown the world — and the people living in Sarah Palin’s small-town America, and even many liberals who had lost hope over time — a new, gloriously unexpected and vibrant face of our country. The sheer fun of the Inauguration, the world-record number of interracial hugs and kisses, augurs a new heterodox cultural energy, a nation — as the man said — of mutts. Already the Obama ethos is slipping into the nation’s cultural bloodstream — not just the interraciality but also the mind-blowing normality of the family: the fact that Michelle Obama brought Laura Bush a going-away present, the fact that Sasha and Malia will make their own beds in the White House, the fact that our President proudly wears a Chicago White Sox baseball cap when he goes to the gym.

Even more important, Obama promises a respite from the nonstop anger of the recent American political wars, the beginning of an era of civility, if not comity. “What the cynics fail to understand,” he said in his speech, “is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.”

It would be nice to think the magnitude of the problems facing the nation would lead to a minimum of puerile contentiousness, but vile still seems to be the default position for some of Obama’s noisier detractors — “Obama Flubs the Oath” was the inaccurate headline greeting the new President on the Drudge Report. Too many of us in the media remain reluctant “to set aside childish things.” Happily, though, our new President seems to have an honest predilection for treating his opponents with respect. He seems intent on hearing their points of view and arguing, decorously, with them — that’s why he accepted a dinner invitation at conservative columnist George Will’s house. This is radical behavior in the village on the Potomac. It could force everyone to argue more carefully, to think twice before casting aspersions, to remember that the goal has to be more than temporal electoral victories — but, in this moment of peril, a better and stronger nation, a less ugly and dangerous world.

Again, it’s hard to believe we got it so right. I’m excited all over again.

I just have to say that blogging is easy when you have this much momentous material to work with. If nothing else, thanks to President (!) Obama on this great day for the awesome source material…

Cheney in a wheel chair: I read an article a day or two ago about Obama’s incredible run of luck. Yes, he’s immensely talented and has put in all the hard work it’s taken to get here, but he’s had a lot of lucky breaks along this path to the Presidency, starting with being picked for the 2004 convention, where he was a complete unknown until after his speech. The primary battles with Hillary were just one good string of luck and carefully seized opportunity after another. And now the inauguration, kicked off by a dramatic and wonderful water rescue of a brave and level-headed pilot that saved hundreds of lives, framed by the Statue Of Liberty in the background, no less. The nation was cheered and reminded in advance of the festivities of the capability of good and decent citizens to do what’s right when the chips are down. The weather was cold, but sunny, clean and clear and the winter sunlight was lovely illumnation for everything. And, Dick Cheney was in a wheelchair. The architect of our shame for the last eight years was symbolically brought low, helpless, as he and his patsy sat listening to our new President’s stern rebuke on the last eight years. There just was no slowing the tsunami of symbolism around lucky Obama this week.

The disgruntled right: Our conservative contacts on Facebook were at it in full force today – critiquing all the “hopey-ness”, deriding Obama’s speech as a “mishmash” and “unintelligible”, and mocking Obama fans for believing in “fairies and unicorns”. On a normal inauguration, I’d have bristled at my team getting pounded. But, today I just felt sorry for them. It’s not just one of those occasions where my guy beat their guy, and we’re all looking forward to the rematch. This wasn’t an ordinary day. Witness the thousands of people singing “na na na na, hey hey hey, good bye” to Bush’s helicopter. The dwindling hardcore conservatives hitched their wagon to Bush, to his philosophy and legacy, to his monumental failures, but the nation just wanted him gone. As Obama said in his inaugural speech, the ground has shifted beneath their feet. It’s not just that their party got beaten. It’s that their party, in its current form – Coulter, Limbaugh, Hannity, Palin – is completely irrelevant. The train of history has pulled out of the station, and left them standing there, grumbling out loud as though someone still cares. Not only is their version of America fading into the distance, they also couldn’t enjoy the pagentry and celebration of this week and this day. No joy, and no real political future. It can’t be fun.

The preachers: Between Bishop Gene Robinson, Rick Warren, and Joseph Lowery, it was no contest on who wins the prize for Least Inspiring. Granted, I’ve sat through countless invocations of the type that Rick Warren gave today – smooth, edgeless, politely nice in that suburban way, delivered with the warm baby food style of white preacher modulations – and so I may have been pre-prepared to not like it. But, evaluated as objectively as I could, it just couldn’t hold a candle to the hard-won, pointed thanks and calls for justice that marked Robinson and Lowery’s speeches. Robinson, the first gay bishop in the Episcopalian denomination, has endured fiery criticism, threats of splits in the church due to his installment, even death threats. Added to the devastation that the church deals daily to the gay community, I know that he’s walked through some darkness. And Lowery wears the years of discrimination and setbacks to civil rights jauntily, proudly, his voice seasoned with that lovely mix of age, hard times, and hope. And Warren? His prayer was a bland nothing, an intermission between events. I don’t know the man, I know that he’s loved by many. But he wasn’t even in the same league as the other two men. He brought no prophecy, no human connection to this event, and it makes me wonder why, what was lacking. Was it a mis-step, or his worldview on display? As one commenter put it:

Stunningly good? I think not. I was struck by how Rev. Warren’s “prayer” completely lacked intellectual, emotional, and spiritual passion. It did, however, accurately reflect the overly casual “God is my BFF” type of faith that is typical of so many, largely white, suburban, middle-class conservagelicals in America.

(In fairness, tho, it was great that he ended on the Lord’s Prayer.)

The quartet: What a beautiful arrangement and performance. I’m usually not into John Williams. His composing style usually reminds me of drowning a fine filet mignon in ketchup. He tends to over-compose, and he needs to lay off the brass. But his arrangement of Simple Gifts was masterful, and the multi-racial superstar quartet brought the spare, robust strains to life in a way that perfectly matched the crisp cold and Obama’s muscular speech.

And what a great speech it was. I’ve been reading critiques of the speech and the responses are all over the place. Some thought it was too muddled, some too militant, some not heady enough, some not specific enough. But my main measures were Janece and I’s reaction, and the reaction of her dad – a lifelong Republican who voted Democrat for the first time this year. Obama, with his keen political ear and masterful writing, picked a perfect path between an embrace of courageous liberalism (upholding the law in times of terrorism, justice for the underprivileged) with a realist’s acknowledgment that justice and duty also means saying to the nasties “this far and no farther”. Janece’s dad told her that the day and Obama’s speech made him proud to be an American. Janece and I were moved and encouraged. Obama wasn’t writing for the pundits and critics, and I believe he wasn’t even writing for history. I think in his practical, let’s get it done style, he was writing for the billions around the world watching the speech, reiterating his intentions, making the change that’s coming explicit and clear. The Republicans have been masterful at this – hammering on the message so repetitively that the public and media unquestionably adopt the framing of their argument. I’m pleased to see Obama and his team do this to move the political ground in a progressive direction, and do it with such skillful and poetic rhetoric. My highlights from the speech:

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness…

The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act – not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions – who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage…

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them – that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works – whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account – to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day – because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government…

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more…

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace…

To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West – know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist…

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends – hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility – a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

This is the source of our confidence – the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed – why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

Speaking of our Writer-In-Chief: Did you know he wrote poetry? Check out “Pop”, a poem he wrote when he was 19.

And speaking of our Commander-in-Chief: During the Inaugural Parade, it was mind-spinning to watch the military brass introduce themselves deferentially to President Obama in his viewing booth, to watch him salute the hundreds of military personnel stepping past – menacingly polished and bristling and rifles and bayonets – and realize for the first time that this army, this vast and powerful network of military muscle, was no longer subject to Bush’s careless posturing and is under Obama’s decent and principled hand. It gave me chills. This is for real now. We have a leader worth leading.

A new face for the White House: www.whitehouse.gov.

And finally, the eye candy. I can’t tell you what a treat it is to see the comfortable, vital sexuality, poise and grace of our President and First Lady together. They have brought a much-needed injection of warmth, humanity and beauty to the White House. It’s going to be a pleasure to see them in the public eye for the next eight years.

Click here to watch in HD. I’m not traditionally a Beyoncé fan, but she really brought it with her performances the last few days.

Martin Luther King gave America a new language, a third way through the racial minefield that has led us purposefully to where we find ourselves today – commemorating today in his honor as a national hero, a man we are proud to pin our history on, and tomorrow, installing a brilliant and capable black man – the best candidate we fielded in our general election who won his hard-fought contests solely on merit, message and skill – as our 44th President. King’s third way of inclusion and the refusal of division as a means to power have had, and will have, a profound influence on our new President’s governance, giving him precedent and legitimacy as he reaches out a hand of inclusion without malice to even his most bitter detractors.

King showed us that the correcting injustice doesn’t have to lead us to retaliation or separation, to a battle for supremacy or raising up impassable barriers. He and his leadership consciously broadened a very justified, historically necessary struggle for black equality into a call for universal civil rights – a world not just everyone “gets theirs”, but a truly integrated world where mutual dignity is exchanged.

And it cost him the most it can cost anyone. I saw this video on Andrew Sullivan’s blog today. I was mesmerized looking into King’s eyes. I don’t know what he’s looking at in the video, but his eyes seem to look through his audience as if he’s already seeing their faces recede, swallowed up by the final Night that awaited him just the next evening at the end of Ray’s gun barrel.

I was also struck with his demeanor. It isn’t that of a man who’s grandstanding for effect or whipping up an emotional response. There’s no hint of the awful vise he was caught in on a daily basis, the defections from his movement, the constant criticisms and opposition, the threat of government censure and arrest. There’s just a calmness there – a great stillness – as he speaks with the air of a man simply laying out an indisputable fact about an unimaginable future not too far ahead. I watched it several times today, and it gave me chills each time – being in the presence of a person who was fully and completely given over to the work that was given him to do.

Dr. King, thank you for surrendering to your mission, for your commitment to a future that includes all of us. Your presence will loom large tomorrow, not just for Americans, but for all the world watching as we attempt to add a new chapter to your vision and, as our new President reminded us yesterday, put all our hands on the arc of history to bend it toward justice for all.

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Ta-Nehisi said something funny today:

When I was kid, I always thought it was weird how much white racism, basically, revolved around keeping white women from having sex with black men. I’d be reading some book on black history, where people would be devoting, say, the right of black people to vote. And, inevitably, some white segregationists would say something like “If we let them vote, they’ll be marrying your daughters!!! And they’ll take over the country!!!” And I think, “Whaaa??” Talk about your non-sequitur.

But then I was talking about this with Kenyatta this morning, and it all suddenly made sense. She nodded to Barack Obama and laughingly noted, “They were right.”

And apparently, the Seal version of “Change Is Gonna Come” I embedded was weak-sauce. As Ta-Nehisi puts it – “Sam Cooke does it better than you“. OK, fine. Here’s the real version, then.

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So, to address the issues that Sky and Stephen raised in my last post about the “over-signification” of Obama:

I think you guys are over-analyzing what’s happening right now a bit. The country’s in the mood for a party. We’re celebrating our own front-row seat on history, the fact that we made history together, the fact that there is a smart and decent public servant at our helm once again – hell, the fact that last eight years are OVER! Of course everybody wants to get in on the action – showing up in DC, wearing the Obama t-shirts, tearing up at freedom songs and what have you. Of course it’s all going to be a little obnoxious and boozy and overly schmaltzy, what with all the cheesy shirts and commemorative plates. That’s just human beings being goofy like we get when something big happens. If anyone had advance notice, I’m sure they would have been selling mugs that said “He’s Back!” at the Resurrection.

I think Ezra Klein put it really well today:

The night Obama became president-elect, he was almost pure idea: The celebrations that took hold on America’s streets were not a joyous affirmation of his statements on entitlement reform. They were an explosion of pride at what America had just done, the barriers it had just broken, the boundaries it had just obliterated. For a few weeks, Obama was hardly even a partisan figure, much less a tawdry politician. He was living history.

The past two months have marked his slow transition from idea into president. What Obama meant is increasingly submerged beneath what Obama does. The fact that we elected a black man says little about how we spend the TARP dollars, or mediate the conflict in Gaza, or stimulate the economy. Tomorrow, our politics will be at its highest point in memory. We will have elected an African-American. We will be inaugurating a president with higher approval ratings than any other incoming executive since the advent of polling. But then politics will quiet, for a little while at least, and governance will take over. Obama will stop representing things and start doing things.

Obama’s next task, then, is harder. To recast governance much as he recast politics. Success would look different, to be sure. Good governance is often more technical than inspiring. It need not feel like history. But nor should governance deject Americans, or disgust them, or appear impervious to their input. The power of Obama’s election is that it felt like the country’s accomplishment. That is easier in an election: The country votes. Such a direct connection may not be possible in governance. But if governance can feel again like it works on behalf of the public, like it takes seriously their concerns and works daily to meet their expectations, then that would be something better than hope. That would be change.

This is reflected in the latest NYT/CBS poll, by the way. The public expects great things from Obama, and they don’t expect it for a couple of years. He’s asked us to give him time to do his best, he’s asked us to stay involved, and that’s exactly what the country is doing. Ezra puts it succinctly once again:

It turns out that when you treat Americans like adults, when you explain the limits of the possible and temper the timeframe of your promises, they respond like adults. Obama’s public approval ratings are among the highest for an American president in modern times. But they are not the simple product of the crisis. They are not high because the public childishly expects that Obama can enter office and vanquish our ills. Rather, they’re high because he seems to be trying. Because he’s appears to be honest about what he can do, and will do, and what it will mean. After the last eight years of aggressive incompetence and cynical obfuscation, that’s enough. That’s change.

And about that train thing, it wasn’t just an ostentatious victory prance. The route took him through some seriously depressed areas – areas that got a bit more visibility because of his route – and along the way, many people (tens of thousands at his whistle stops and along the route) who didn’t have the financial means to pick up and attend the inauguration got to see him.

So, until the man sits down at the desk in the Oval Office and starts signing things, I recommend smoothing your furrowed brows, picking up a stiff drink, and cutting a rug. Let’s party!

PS. I almost forgot – they’re also partying in alternate reality of Bush World. Really, don’t let the door hit you on the way out, folks. Buh-bye!

Janece and I watched the HBO broadcast of the “We Are One” inaugural concert today. I don’t know if it was the massive space between the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where the performers were and the crowd, or the momentousness of the occasion, or maybe the butt-crunching cold, but most of the performers and stars seemed pretty subdued – not very bombastic. The exceptions were a tear-inducing “Change Is Gonna Come” with Betty LaVette and Bon Jovi (!), Jamie Foxx with a shout out to Chi-town and a great impression of Obama, an exuberant Garth Brooks and youth choir (easily the most joyous musical moment), a great folk-punk appearance with Bob Seeger and Bruce Springsteen putting the fightin’ words back in “This Land Is Your Land”, and a visibly moved Beyoncé singing “America The Beautiful”. I joked with Janece when the stars came out to sing with Beyoncé that the Memorial was going to sink under the combined weight of their monumental egos, but really it wasn’t that bad. They all seemed to really be happy to be sharing the moment with the crowd and with each other.

And what a crowd! Maybe close to 400K by some counts, all crowded in so tight that outsiders literally could not even wriggle their way in. And the faces were beautiful – black, white, brown, red, features of all types – cheerfully packed into layers of warm clothes, singing, dancing, waving their arms, celebrating our latest American miracle together. We’ve spent the last eight years hearing about how some of us aren’t sufficiently patriotic or natural-born or whatever else, and together we stood up and said “goodbye to all that – we have something else in mind”. It’s a new thing, and we’re still not good at it, but I really feel that America is beginning, for the first time in a long time, to embrace ourselves as the mixed-up, improbable and dynamic community of people that we are. I feel that because we’ve elected an improbable, mixed-up and dynamic man to lead us into our next chapter.

I like looking at Barack and his family. Of course they’re good looking, but it’s more than that. It’s the stories that their features and faces carry with them. As BagNewsNotes points out, not only is Obama’s face a visual relief after eight long years of staring at W’s adolescent smirk, but it also carries all the intriguing flavors of our American and global realities – the big ears from his white grandfather, the chocolate swirl in his skin of his Kenyan father and white mother, the eyes that have seen Indonesian schools and African huts and Hawaiian beaches and Chicago winters, the easy smile and friendly (yet reserved) demeanor that I recognize as a person who also spent a lot of formative years moving from place to place, culture to culture. His face, his family, his story are nourishing – a healthy, complex and exciting mirror of how we as a nation can be together.

My friend Sky grumbled on FaceBook that “the oversignification of Obama diminishes (or obscures) the moment”. I disagree. Obama is a self-made man – someone who used what was within himself to take his Arabic-African name and dark skin and humble means and megawatt smile and intellect to Harvard, Chicago, the Senate and now the Presidency. I think Obamamania is just another expression of Americans wanting to celebrate one of our best rising to the top against the odds. We see our possibility in his story, in the success of meritocracy over dynasty, and in his personal decency. The mood out there isn’t hero-worship – it’s mutual celebration of our potential, fulfilled in a real man with a good family, and elected with our aid to our highest office to make a positive impact on the world. He’s not the object of our worship – he’s a lens for our desire to project the best of who we are.

In the most literal Horatio Alger-esque sense, Obama has carved a new road directly from the bustle and hum of ordinary American life in one of our most muscular American cities past the ossified East Coast and Beltway establishments directly to the center of American global power. He wants to keep the communication flowing and keep the road open, which is why he’s fighting to keep his Blackberry and phone to keep in touch with his Chicago friends outside the loop, why he’s developing tools like Change.gov, USAService.org, and Organizing for America to keep citizens involved, why he and Michelle want to attend a neighborhood church, why they both want to hold lotteries for regular citizens to spend time in the White House. Here’s hoping that his time in office is as great as its promise, and his rise and his road permanently alter for the better the way that our future leaders take and wield their place in the halls of power.

After hearing the songs today, after seeing the beautiful faces and listening to Obama talk about the living monuments he saw today on the Mall – us, the American people – I got this stuck in my head:

It’s been a long time comin’, but I know – change gonna come…

PS. Yeah yeah, I’m a starry-eyed Koolaid drinker or whatever. I’ll just let Andrew Sullivan back me up on this one. On meeting with Obama:

Lots of emails from readers asking about the chat with the president-elect this morning. It was totally off the record and I’m a stickler for those rules. I can say, however, the following: it’s hard to express the relief I feel that this man will be the president soon. I realize that’s what I feel above all else: relief… As I’ve said repeatedly for the last two years, we’re lucky to have him.

And on trying to understand Obama:

Obama acts like a kind of antacid to the American stomach. He has walked through the churn of racial and cultural and religious polarisation and somehow calmed everyone down… There is something about Obama’s willingness to give others credit, to approach so many issues with such dispassionate pragmatism, and to shift by symbols and speeches the mood and tenor of an entire country that gives one a modest form of optimism. Even now, as the outlook seems so dark, and as the inheritance seems so insuperable, three words linger in the mind.

Yes, he can.

And two words echo back at me.

Can we?

Completely off-topic, here’s a bold assertion. Two Forbes economists think that the worst of the recession is already behind us and that any government stimulus is probably just window-dressing on the recovery to let politicians take credit for it. Really? That’s a prediction to keep an eye-ball on…

Junior and senior staffers have turned in their card keys, clearances, Blackberries. The long weekend attached the the MLK national holiday has started, which means that they – and senior administration staff – are gone. For all intents and purposes, the Bush administration has left the building. The White House is empty. The stench remains.

Via Coates, Vanity Fair has a 14 page article on online detailing the remarkable, criminal incompetence of the Bush administration – not from the second term, not from the Iraq war, but from day 1. The attempt by the willfully ignorant and a GOP in complete collapse to rehabilitate the Bush years as some kind of success and whitewash away the trainwreck that we’ve all watched for 8 agonizing years has begun. Just yestereday, Janece forwarded me Twitter from a conservative we knew from back in our college days:

“I really love President Bush. A great man with wisdom and vision. I respect him so much and think he dignified and repaired the office.”

The Vanity Fair article is made up of quotes from senior Bush advisors, senators and generals in the know about the horrifyingly bad decision-making processes in the White House from the very beginning of Bush’s term. I urge all of you guys to PLEASE READ the article and forward it around to your politically opinionated friends and contacts. It’s imperative that the American public be reminded of the absolute failure of Bush, his administration and their ideology in the face of the coming attempts to revise our history.

A couple of things stood out for me.

First, it’s extremely clear that for all intents and purposes, the fears were entirely founded about Cheney being the master puppeter. He emerges as our shadow President, the man who firmly established himself and his coterie as the gatekeepers to Bush – a man whose personal likeability, obvious lack of curiosity, and easily triggered hot buttons (being a cowboy, avoiding introspection, hubris, impulsiveness) made him the perfect patsy for Cheney’s political agenda. I wish I could say that’s just conspiracy theory talk, but as you’ll see below, the interviewees basically come right out and say as much.

Second, it’s clear that the Bush team were consummate power manipulators – both in terms of political savvy and bureaucratic ability. They knew exactly how to milk every last political advantage out of the events of the last eight years, how to play Congress and the opposition against itself, how to play on the fears of our leaders and citizens, how to burrow down into the labyrinthine depths of our government to co-opt the workings of the state to forward their political agenda. And for all that savvy, they could not realize one simple truth – Americans elect leaders to govern, not to play politics. They literally concentrated all their efforts on exerting complete political control over the United States government, and in doing so were completely unprepared to actually govern, to meet the challenges of history, our allies, our enemies, nature.

Third, I feel sad for those Evangelical and religious friends and family who voted for Bush’s administration based on his “Christianity”. It’s clear from the evidence that they were used – manipulated by their identification with Bush’s story to vote for administration that loathed them, that the religious wing of the GOP as useful idiots, cannon fodder for campaigns, a constituency to be pandered to on the trail and completely ridiculed and ignored when in office. It’s true that Evangelicals and their leaders should have never sold their souls to the cynical power plays of the political arena, but I’m still sad that after eight years, otherwise good people like that Twitter contact of ours are further marginalized in the public eye, a laughingstock; that their church’s image has been irreparably damaged, and that, incredibly, they are still making excuses for the man responsible for America’s mess (more than that, even voting for Palin – that even more ridiculous Bush knock-off!).

Here’s a rogues gallery from the article.

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The Puppet President

June 1, 2002: Preparations for war with Iraq are not yet publicly acknowledged, but earlier in the spring, as Condoleezza Rice discusses diplomatic initiatives involving Iraq with several senators, Bush pokes his head into the room and says, “Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out.”

July 9th, 2008: The annual summit of the G-8 nations, held in Japan, concludes with a tepid pledge to cut greenhouse gases by 50 percent by the year 2050. It is the last G-8 summit that Bush attends. He bids farewell to the other heads of state with the words “Good-bye from the world’s greatest polluter.”

December 6, 2006: The independent Iraq Study Group, chaired by former secretary of state James Baker and former congressman Lee Hamilton, issues a report setting out 79 recommendations for the future conduct of the Iraq war. The report is brushed aside by the president. Lawrence Eagleburger, one of the group’s members, says of Bush after the report is delivered, “I don’t recall, seriously, that he asked any questions.”

“He always gets asked, Have you changed?, and he instinctively recoils at that kind of question.”
~ Dan Bartlett, White House communications director

The Puppeteer

“As my boss [Colin Powell] once said, Bush had a lot of .45-caliber instincts, cowboy instincts. Cheney knew exactly how to polish him and rub him. He knew exactly when to give him a memo or when to do this or when to do that and exactly the word choice to use to get him really excited… He became vice president well before George Bush picked him. And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush—personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum… The Cheney team had, for example, technological supremacy over the National Security Council staff. That is to say, they could read their e-mails… I think the clearest indication I got that Rich [Armitage] and he both had finally awakened to the dimensions of the problem was when Rich began—I mean, I’ll be very candid—began to use language to describe the vice president’s office with me as the Gestapo, as the Nazis, and would sometimes late in the evening, when we were having a drink—would sometimes go off rather aggressively on particular characters in the vice president’s office.”
~ Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Sec. Of State Colin Powell

February 7, 2002: Bush issues an executive order denying any protections of the Geneva Conventions to Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees. The order comes after an intense behind-the-scenes battle pitting the State Department against the Justice Department, the Defense Department, and the Office of the Vice President.

“I really think it came as a surprise when the February memo was put out. And that memo, of course, was constructed by Addington, and I’m told it was blessed by one or two people in O.L.C. [Office of Legal Counsel]. And then it was given to Cheney, and Cheney gave it to the president. The president signed it.”
~ Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Sec. Of State Colin Powell

“The second difference, and what made their [Cheney and Addington] assertion of executive power extraordinary, is: it was almost as if they were interested in expanding executive power for its own sake.”
~ Jack Goldsmith, head of the Justice Dept’s Office Of Legal Counsel

The Architect Of Our Iraq Disaster

September 15, 2002: In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the assistant to the president for economic policy, Lawrence Lindsey, estimates the cost of a war with Iraq to be in the neighborhood of $100 billion to $200 billion. Mitch Daniels, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, quickly revises the figure downward to $50 billion to $60 billion, and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld calls Lindsey’s estimate “baloney.” Lindsey is fired in December. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill is dismissed the same day. Years later, an analysis by Nobel-laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes will estimate the cost of the Iraq war to be $3 trillion.

December 2, 2002: Donald Rumsfeld signs off on a memo from the Defense Department’s legal counsel, Jim Haynes, permitting the use of aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantánamo, including stress positions, isolation, and sleep deprivation. Rumsfeld writes on the memo, “I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?” The memo is eventually rescinded, after strenuous objections from the general counsel of the Navy, Alberto Mora, among others, but policies and practices continue to be influenced by the philosophy outlined in the earlier Bybee-Yoo “torture memo.”

“That night, on 9/11, Rumsfeld came over and the others, and the president finally got back, and we had a meeting. And Rumsfeld said, You know, we’ve got to do Iraq, and everyone looked at him—at least I looked at him and Powell looked at him—like, What the hell are you talking about? And he said—I’ll never forget this—There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something else to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks. And I made the point certainly that night, and I think Powell acknowledged it, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. That didn’t seem to faze Rumsfeld in the least. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. It really didn’t, because from the first weeks of the administration they were talking about Iraq. I just found it a little disgusting that they were talking about it while the bodies were still burning in the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center.”
~ Richard Clarke, special advisor to Bush in the US National Security Council

“When Shinseki said, Hey, it’s going to take 300,000 or 400,000 soldiers, they crucified him. They called me up the day after that, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. They called me the next day and they said, Did you see what Shinseki said? And I said yes. And they said, Well, that can’t be possible. And I said, Well, let me give you the only piece of empirical data I have. In 1991, I owned 5 percent of the real estate in Iraq, and I had 22,000 trigger pullers. And on any day I never had enough. So you can take 5 percent—you can take 22,000 and multiply that by 20. Hey, here’s probably the ballpark, and I didn’t have Baghdad. And they said, Thank you very much. So I got up and left.”
~ Jay Garner, retired general and first overseer of the reconstruction in Iraq

“So he says, It might be best if you got off the Defense Policy Board. You’re very negative. I said, I am negative, Don. You’re absolutely right. I’m not negative about our friendship. But I think your decisions have been abysmal when it really counted… I said, Do you realize what the looting did to us? It legitimized the idea that liberation comes with chaos rather than with freedom and a better life. And it demystified the potency of American forces… I said, There was no order to stop the looting. And he says, There was an order. I said, Well, did you give the order? He says, I didn’t give the order, but someone around here gave the order. I said, Who gave the order?”
~ Kenneth Adelman, member of Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board

“When Abu Ghraib happened, I was like, We’ve got to fire Rumsfeld. Like if we’re the “accountability president,” we haven’t really done this. We don’t veto any bills. We don’t fire anybody. I was like, Well, this is a disaster, and we’re going to hold some National Guard colonel responsible? This guy’s got to get fired.”
~ Matthew Dowd, Bush campaign strategist

Turdblossom
(Bush’s nickname for Karl Rove)

November 4, 2008: Barack Obama is elected president in an electoral-college landslide. The Republicans lose at least seven seats in the Senate and a score in the House, dashing Karl Rove’s hopes of a permanent Republican majority. As the administration prepares to leave office, it promulgates a raft of “midnight” orders to weaken environmental, health-care, and product-safety regulations.

“Karl came from a perspective of: you defeat people in politics by calling one side bad and one side good…”
~ Matthew Dowd, Bush campaign strategist

“After the 2004 election they cut the White House faith-based staff by 30 percent, 40 percent, because it became clear that it had served its purpose. There’s this idea that the Bush White House was dominated by religious conservatives and catered to the needs of religious conservatives. But what people miss is that religious conservatives and the Republican Party have always had a very uneasy relationship. The reality in the White House is—if you look at the most senior staff—you’re seeing people who aren’t personally religious and have no particular affection for people who are religious-right leaders. Now, at the end of the day, that’s easy to understand, because most of the people who are religious-right leaders are not easy to like. It’s that old Gandhi thing, right? I might actually be a Christian myself, except for the action of Christians. And so in the political-affairs shop in particular, you saw a lot of people who just rolled their eyes at everyone from Rich Cizik, who is one of the heads of the National Association of Evangelicals, to James Dobson, to basically every religious-right leader that was out there, because they just found them annoying and insufferable. These guys were pains in the butt who had to be accommodated.”
~ David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives

The Bumbling Enabler

July 22, 2004: The bipartisan 9/11 commission—whose creation was fiercely opposed by the administration—issues its report. It provides a detailed reconstruction of events leading up to the attacks, and of the attacks themselves; an earlier staff report found “no credible evidence” of a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. The final report also determines that many warning signs of an impending attack were ignored.

“John [Bellinger] and I had to work on the 9/11-commission testimony of Condi. Condi was not gonna do it, not gonna do it, not gonna do it, and then all of a sudden she realized she better do it. That was an appalling enterprise. We would cherry-pick things to make it look like the president had been actually concerned about al-Qaeda. We cherry-picked things to make it look as if the vice president and others, Secretary Rumsfeld and all, had been. They didn’t give a shit about al-Qaeda. They had priorities. The priorities were lower taxes, ballistic missiles, and the defense thereof.”
~ Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Sec. Of State Colin Powell

“In reality, a great deal of what Secretary Rice did seems to have been based as much on a search for visibility as any expectation of real progress.”
~ Anthony Cordesman, national security strategist

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So long, Bush administration. It’s hard to describe my relief at watching you go. The only way we want to see you again is in front of a microphone of a truth and reconciliation commission or a special prosecutor’s investigation for war crimes.

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

(Photos by Annie Liebovitz. Quoted content and photos courtesy of Vanity Fair Magazine. All rights reserved.)

My friend Sky has sent a couple of emails recently with little vignettes from his daughter, Ave (who’s about 6 months older than Amira). The most recent goes like this:

Ave, Isai and I were in the car last night, waiting for Anita to come out of Safeway. It was dark, rainy, and Ave was quite for a long time. And then Ave said:

“Daddy… is God playing us?”

“What do you mean, Lovebird?”

Ave starts moving her hands around in the air and says, “is God ‘playing us’, like in a game when you play?”

“Uh… uh… that’s a very interesting question, Lovebird…”

“He’s moving us like we’re pieces, with His hands… I think that’s how it is.”

Silence.

“Daddy, God can do anything because He has power. But His power is love.”

Sky’s family is Orthodox Christian, and I think they attend church a couple of times during a week. Sky is also a very well-read man and has a knack for intuiting and translating complex spiritual concepts. It’s clear that Ave is developing robust 4-year-old language for God and the way the spiritual world works.

In contrast, we talk almost never in our little family about God, except for mealtime and bedtime prayers where we thank Jesus for food and the days activities respectively. Amira for the first time this year watching “The Little Drummer Boy” Christmas video and looking at our Nativity heard “Jesus” in context with “little baby Jesus”, although that was the extent. She really has no context for the prayers we do together beyond it being a family ritual, and she has no concept of a spiritual world that is different than pretend, different than what you can see with your eyes. She has no real spiritual literacy.

I’m torn about this.

On one hand, I feel pretty spiritually disconnected. It’s been several years since I attended a church, and although I emerged with some dear friends, my experience with it was decidedly mixed. When I first started blogging again this year, I felt gung-ho about being a worship leader of some kind. Now, not so much. Just this past week we’ve had eight people in our immediate circle tell us how badly they were, and are still, being battered and wounded by the church and Christians to the point that they’ve completely withdrawn, and that’s not counting many others over the last few years. The foundations of my belief, such as they are, feel adolescent, flimsy, illogical, scientifically wobbly. I feel like without being immersed in activities with like-minded religious folk to shore up my emotional surety, I can’t feel emphatic about what I believe. The things I would die for don’t include my religion.

On the other hand, I’ve lost none of my hunger and enthusiasm for spiritual talk and learning. It’s as much a part of my makeup as ever. I remain convinced of God, even as I have absolutely no idea what to do with that information. In a conversation with my brother a few nights ago, I didn’t feel at all vibey with the kind of Universal Consciousness religious synthesis he has come to and found myself still arguing in favor of more specific religious practice (the paradoxes of Jesus in particular), even while feeling a complete lack of religious commitment. I believe in the spiritual world, and right now I feel like I know less about it than I ever have.

I think Janece shares a lot of that ambivalence. One of her good friends from when they were in Christian high school together, who’s now come out as gay and got a drubbing from her family and the church, has been in spiritual recovery at a Unitarian church and has been liking it. I think her experience resonates with Janece.

So, lacking strong conviction about what we believe, we’ve ended up not saying much at all to Amira. We continue our practice with her of giving thanks for food and life, because we believe that gratitude is vital. She has some great books about caring for our world and caring for others as a way to express God’s love. And… well, that’s it.

I don’t want Amira growing up in a typical evangelical environment, and other forms of Christianity have their own problems. I feel it’s vital to give her a spiritual structure, but not one she’s going to have to deal with later as a negative like Janece and I have. Janece and I still have some exploring and searching to do to build a solid conviction about what we believe and in the meantime, I don’t want Amira’s spiritual literacy to suffer. I believe in belief, in the power of having spiritual vocabulary and distinctions, to put the sensory world and culture into right perspective.

So, a little help. If you have kids, what did you teach them? Do you feel like your church (if you attend) gives them everything they need, or do you find yourself modifying/qualifying what they learn? If you don’t subscribe to a religion, do you teach them about spirituality, and if so, how? What should Janece and I be reading on this subject that could help guide us?

Hey y’all. I didn’t forget you or my duty as a blogger. Just working to get the rest of the phlegm out of my throat and some jobs out the door. I have some thoughts on spiritual literacy I’ve been rolling around and some questions I’d like to get feedback on.

In the meantime, how about that Joe The Plumber – now Joe The War Correspondent?! I can’t say I’m sad to watch the GOP sprint full-tilt into political irrelevance, but I’m kind of embarrassed for them that they’re still tying their party’s banner to people like Palin and Joe and Ann Coulter without any opposition from the few grownups left in their leadership and rank-and-file. They’re like the obnoxious drunk girl at the party that doesn’t know she’s stopped being funny or interesting an hour ago and is going to see pictures of herself on Facebook in a few hours vomiting on the guy she was trying to impress. It’s not pretty.

Yes, it was actually 2009. Thanks to my dear sister for pointing that out. I get caught by that every Jan after the new year…

Thanks for your support, guys. Especially for the extra concerned posts, Natalie. Totally sweet of you. I’m happy to report that everything went much better than I expected.

Yes, I had to lose my tooth. It was too abscessed and corroded away to be saved. However, the good news is that what the dentist had first quoted as a “surgical extraction” (ie. involved, laborious and painful) turned out to be a “simple extraction” (ie. just yanking the sucker out). That dropped the final price of the bill, and then I got 5% off for paying in cash, and then on top of that I got a $100 – $50 for both Janece and I – for her referring me to the doctor. Total bill: a mere $135. What’s more, the way my jaw curves and the generous girth of my cheeks means that you can’t really see the hole at all when I smile.

Now, there’s definitely more to come. I’ve got a big hole in my jaw that needs to be filled with something or the bone will shrink. Apparently they have these bio-structure grafts now that will fill the hole so the bone grows back at normal density and the body just absorbs the graft. But, that would cost about half of what it would take to just get an implant. So, I decided just to go for the implant. The gotcha? If I go for an implant, it’s a do-or-die kinda thing. I have to come up with the $1800 in six weeks for the implant base. If I can’t, I’ll be past the point for a bone graft, and the bone density would start to be lost. And after that, there’s another $2k or so for the rest of the tooth – the post and the cap.

But, if I can pull it all off (in cash, no insurance), I’ll have a super tooth – capable of crushing rebar, stopping a speeding locomotive, and receiving transmissions from the Mars Rover. Totally worth it.

So, happy first chapter. The gum is already almost healed with barely any soreness, I’m feeling fine, and I’ve got extra space in my mouth for my spy camera. Extra bonus – both Janece and I are feeling about 99% healed from the Techno-Typhoid we contracted over Christmas, and Amira is well enough to feed sugar to again, so we’re all getting to some kind of normalcy. Extra extra bonus – we had enough cheddar to get Chaya’s cherry-eye removed and get her fixed, and it came in under the quote, too.

So, thanks again for the lovely support, y’all. I’ll post more on this stuff down the line.

This is for anyone needing dental care living near or in Edmonds, WA. I HIGHLY recommend Dr. Michael Hrankowski, DDS. He has been very good to us – concerned, accommodating and professional. Well worth the drive.

That’s “Dental Day 2008″. Tomorrow morning at 10:30a, I find out how bad it is. Best case, I have a nasty little infection that can be cleared up and the tooth can be root canaled and capped. Worst case, abscess and tooth comes out. I’ll post an update tomorrow night. ‘Til then, don’t forget to floss after every meal, kids!

I’m too shagged out to post, so here’s some stuff I found lying around my favorite sites.

First, the serious stuff. Israel, Palestine and Gaza form a snake-eating-its-tail scenario so difficult that even well-seasoned experts don’t know where to begin:

The more complicated answer was provided by Marc Ambinder, who analyzed my personal situation correctly: Gaza has overdetermined me into paralysis… My paralysis isn’t an analytical paralysis. It’s the paralysis that comes from thinking that maybe there’s no way out. Not out of Gaza, out of the whole thing.

I found this in a good analysis by Eyal Press on Ta-Nehisi’s blog:

As the Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab noted in the Washington Post, a survey conducted in November found that a mere 16.6 percent of Palestinians backed Hamas, due largely to the group’s intransigence and unwillingness to forge a national-unity government.

I’ve can understand the political pressure on national leaders to deal with terrorists or, like Hamas, fringe, hostile, barely-governments with no real desire or clue how to really govern. But at some point with steady restrained pressure, you’d think these entities would wither and die the slow death of public opinion. Why inflame and strengthen their meager claims to credibility with ham-fisted declarations like “the war on terror” or full-scale invasions? A little restraint and protective containment could starve these people out. Unless, as I’ve read recently, Israel wanted to get one more lick in under the ultra-permissive Bush administration before Obama took office…

Now, on to the stupid stuff.

I should be too old for this to make me laugh, but it does:

A new food blog from some of my favorite political bloggers.

Obama’s new tank limousine.

Amelie as a child (this kid is really actually this cute – see more here):

File under “unclear on when to just leave well enough alone”:

Something beautiful:

Finally, some great stuff from TV On The Radio:

I have a dentist appointment on Thursday to look at an aching tooth in my upper jaw. It’s the same tooth in the same place that Janece lost hers, and I think I’m going to lose it, too. Being freelance with no health insurance hasn’t been very fun. You put off what you can with fingers crossed behind the back and a whisper for luck, but I think the time’s come to pay the piper and lose a piece of myself permanently.

In politics: On Fox and over at Coates’ joint, “Barack the Magic Negro” and the Blago pick of Burris and the naked race appeal by Bobby Rush has the race talk bubbling. At HuffPost, Kathleen Reardon says Obama is so bright that he may be overestimating the American public’s ability to think at his level, with the kind of openness and complexity he’s capable of. Personally, I think his campaign proved he’s stunningly adept at realpolitik when the occasion requires, and he has an uncanny knack of reading and vocalizing the public mood. Remember how well it worked out when Clinton and McCain mocked him as a lightweight, Barbie Doll celebrity intellectual? Meanwhile, conservatives are obligatorily squawking about some of Obama’s advisors being too liberal (they always call it “radical” – nevermind Freedom Fries and torture) as though anyone gives a rat fart what they think since Obama is stunningly popular, as much as a wartime president (ie. Bush after 9/11), with a CNN poll revealing that 76% of Americans say he’s a “strong and decisive leader”. (That doesn’t even count the amount of popular media oxygen he sucked up when the shots of his pecs hit the stands.) A stunningly popular, intelligent, politically savvy, bi-racial, young President with rock-hard pecs and abs that looks badass in sunglasses has got to be giving the GOP some serious gas. They started that game by trying to turn George Bush into Tom Cruise, and they now they’re dealing with the PR nightmare of Obama as 007 .

On politics and culture: I keep coming back to this, but it’s my blog so I get to be obsessive. The era of the rule of the expert, the CEO as rock star, the talking heads, the free market, and the endless good times free ride is over. We are a nation looking for new icons, new leaders and figureheads, a new mythology of who we are, trying to find our mojo again. On Jan 20, the Obamas will step into this void in the most visible political office of the land – an office that has culturally symbolic power as well as political power – bringing with them the culture of Chicago and the Midwest, the city and the racial minority, the progressive and the intellectual, the 21st century and the world-conscious citizen. Think about how radically our culture has been affected since 2000 by Bush and Cheney’s world – the maudllin ballads of patriotic country music, the Crawford ranch and the wealthy playing cowboy, the East Coast dynastic succession of endless Bushes with their endless political connections and intrigues, the oil man, the “these colors don’t run” bumper stickers, Freedom Fries, Top Gun flight suits, frat boy style jokes and fumbles with foreign dignitaries, incorrect grammar, James Dobson and Pat Robertson. We’re about to watch a President that used a Jay-Z shout-out in a campaign speech take office. I say again – I don’t think Americans really get the 180-degree head snapping cultural earthquake that we’re all about to experience.

On Israel in Gaza: Hamas and the Israeli government are locked in yin-yang Escher’s loop of endless antipathy, seemingly unable to escape, carelessly passing on the hate and bloody consequences to their own people. Hamas needs Israel’s retaliation to divert attention from its lack of a true governing philosophy. Israel seems unable to control it’s own trouble-making settlers or do anything except respond in force, which any child can see can only strengthen Hamas and inflame Arab support. Hate has no generating force behind it. It survives on revenge and reprisals. Without them, hate can only wither and vanish. But the last Israeli leader with the courage to attempt to end the cycle was assassinated, and in the 13 years since no one else has arisen to make a new attempt. TPM says that there’s some hint of an international force in Gaza to bring some objectiveness into the situation. Maybe some outside influence could do some good.

On movies: As Shakespeare said, “O brave new world, that hath such animators in it!” (Note: Slightly modified to fit this blurb…)

On my personal fortunes: According to my cookie tonight – “Don’t be hasty; prosperity will knock on your door soon.” To which I harrumph, “Yeah, and then run away leaving a flaming bag of poop on the doorstep.”

On being a pun geek: Frayed Knot. Heh heh. Good one. Did I ever tell you the one about the Orthodox-Jew-eating dragon?

I’m finally back from vacation in the “unpacked and ready” sense. We brought back an unwelcome visitor courtesy of the cousins – some kind of nasty flu bug that’s been kicking us all in the pants. We don’t get out much, so our contact with the outside world and its endless buffet of tasty viruses has been limited. I feel like one of the aliens from War Of The Worlds – limp, pale, disgusting, slimy, and half dead. I spent last night in a slow-motion haze of lying down on the couch, slipping into a fretful sleep, feeling my lungs fill with toxic waste grade phlegm, stumbling to the bathroom to cough it up as quietly as possible to not wake anyone, laying down on the couch again, rinse, repeat. Tonight looks to be no exception, sadly. I’ve fallen prey to … The Man Cold!!!!

A few obligatory end-of-year musings:

First, thanks to all of you for caring enough to visit and comment this last year. As I’ve said before, in a period of my life where I’ve felt very removed from the rest of life, you’ve been a great source of continued conversation and thought-provoking responses. I appreciate all of you, and I’m committed to continuing my endless sideline commentaries on stuff that smarter people have already commented on…

Second, we saw the Will Smith movie “The Pursuit Of Happyness” tonight. I won’t bore you with a rehash since you’ve probably seen it, but here’s a link to the movie site in case you haven’t. There were a couple of qualities that impressed me about Chris Gardner, the man whose biography inspired the movie. He was absolutely relentless in every step – holding on to his dreams, getting his foot in the door of where he wanted to be, not letting despair or defeat rob him of his energy and determination to try one more time. The other quality was his unwavering commitment to not let the circumstances or how he was feeling get in the way of his human connection with his son – not the poverty, not the homeless shelters and endless lines, not his internship or important study, not the responsibility of being a single dad.

I’ve got a lot of ground I can make up on both those accounts. I’ve never held any goal with that kind of single-minded determination, and it’s much easier than it should be for me to disengage with Amira and those I love simply because I don’t feel like it or am distracted (like today, when I was dragging my feet to play with her because I was irritable from being sick).

Tonight I’m feeling that an important word for me this year is “pursuit”. I don’t want to give up that energy, that sense of being unwilling to stay unhappy and in stasis when I see someplace else I want to be. This last year has been about withdrawal, being fallow, floating. I don’t regret it, but I’m feeling the momentum building under me again to forge ahead, make some new trails in the well-worn ground of my life.

More love, more justice, more growth, more connection. Happy 2009!