"Obama puts a pretty, intellectual, liberal face on some ugly and decidedly illiberal polices."

[chimpymustgo]

Glen Greenwald explains why the neocons LOVED Obama's Nobel speech. GREAT read.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/...


Friday, Dec 11, 2009 03:12 EST

The strange consensus on Obama's Nobel address
By Glenn Greenwald

Reactions to Obama's Nobel speech yesterday were remarkably consistent across the political spectrum, and there were two points on which virtually everyone seemed to agree: (1) it was the most explicitly pro-war speech ever delivered by anyone while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize; and (2) it was the most comprehensive expression of Obama's foreign policy principles since he became President. I don't think he can be blamed for the first fact; when the Nobel Committee chose him despite his waging two wars and escalating one, it essentially forced on him the bizarre circumstance of using his acceptance speech to defend the wars he's fighting. What else could he do? Ignore the wars? Repent?

I'm more interested in the fact that the set of principles Obama articulated yesterday was such a clear and comprehensive expression of his foreign policy that it's now being referred to as the "Obama Doctrine." About that matter, there are two arguably confounding facts to note: (1) the vast majority of leading conservatives -- from Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich to Peggy Noonan, Sarah Palin, various Kagans and other assorted neocons -- have heaped enthusiastic praise on what Obama said yesterday, i.e., on the Obama Doctrine; and (2) numerous liberals have done exactly the same. That convergence gives rise to a couple of questions:

Why are the Bush-following conservatives who ran the country for the last eight years and whose foreign policy ideas are supposedly so discredited -- including some of the nation's hardest-core neocons -- finding so much to cheer in the so-called Obama Doctrine?

How could liberals and conservatives -- who have long claimed to possess such vehemently divergent and irreconcilable worldviews on foreign policy -- both simultaneously adore the same comprehensive expression of foreign policy?

-edit-

Yesterday's speech and the odd, extremely bipartisan reaction to it underscored one of the real dangers of the Obama presidency: taking what had been ideas previously discredited as Republican or right-wing dogma and transforming them into bipartisan consensus. It's not just Republicans but Democrats that are now vested in -- and eager to justify -- the virtues of war, claims of Grave Danger posed by Islamic radicals and the need to use massive military force to combat them, indefinite detention, military commissions, extreme secrecy, full-scale immunity for government lawbreaking, and so many other doctrines once purportedly despised by Democrats but now defended by them because their leader has embraced them.

-edit-

Most of the neocons celebrating Obama's speech yesterday made exactly that point in one way or another: if even this Democratic President, beloved by liberals, announces to the world that we have the unilateral right to wage war and that doing so creates Peace and crushes Evil, and does so at a Nobel Peace Prize ceremony of all places, doesn't that end the argument for good?

Much of the liberal praise for Obama's speech yesterday focused on how eloquent, sophisticated, nuanced, complex, philosophical, contemplative and intellectual it was. And, looked at a certain way, it was all of those things -- like so many Obama speeches are. After eight years of enduring a President who spoke in simplistic Manichean imperatives and bullying decrees, many liberals are understandably joyous over having a President who uses their language and the rhetorical approach that resonates with them.

But that's the real danger. Obama puts a pretty, intellectual, liberal face on some ugly and decidedly illiberal polices. Just as George Bush's Christian-based moralizing let conservatives feel good about America regardless of what it does, Obama's complex and elegiac rhetoric lets many liberals do the same. To red state Republicans, war and its accompanying instruments (secrecy, executive power, indefinite detention) felt so good and right when justified by swaggering, unapologetic toughness and divinely-mandated purpose; to blue state Democrats, all of that feels just as good when justified by academic meditations on "just war" doctrine and when accompanied by poetic expressions of sorrow and reluctance. When you combine the two rhetorical approaches, what you get is what you saw yesterday: a bipartisan embrace of the same policies and ideologies among people with supposedly irreconcilable views of the world.

-edit-

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/12/11/obama/index.html

[varelse]

1. Recommended

swimming upstream a bit here :P

[bread_and_roses]

10. I'll K AND R. (n/t)

[emulatorloo]

2. "It's weak to take 2 presidents, see them both use the word "evil," and then say they are the same"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=433&topic_id=51574&mesg_id=51574

http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/12/on_obamas_speech.php

Ta-Nehisi Coates

On Obama's Speech

11 Dec 2009 04:00 pm


Listened to it this morning, and as always, I was impressed. So was Sarah Palin:

"Wow, that really sounded familiar," said Palin, a frequent Obama critic. "I talked, too, in my book about the fallen nature of man and why war is necessary at times."

I'd like to pair this with something I'm hearing a lot these day. After an entire campaign season where Obama was dismissed as a far-left radical, the new meme became that he was actually firmly entrenched in the "right wing of the Democratic party."

Now I'm hearing people say that Obama's speech could have been made by Bush, or some such.

There are people who think presidential politics--from a voter's perspective--is about electing someone who will do exactly what you say and enact every single one of your priorities in exactly the same manner as you would.

And then there are people who think presidential politics--from a voter's perspective--is about electing someone who shares many of your priorities, but not all of them, who may not enact them as you would, and yet whose wisdom you trust. That, for me, is the point. Barack Obama is wise. Sarah Palin is not.

In that vein, I didn't object to George Bush because he claimed that there was "evil" in the world. I objected to George Bush because there was so much evil that he didn't see, and he was awful at prosecuting the evil he did see. I objected to George Bush's foreign policy because it married a freshman's view of idealism (Big talk on human rights) with a profane, dishonest take one realism (We don't torture.) It's weak to look two presidents, see them both use the word "evil," and then conclude that they're the same.

I expect Obama to be who he campaigned as. But more than that, I expect him to actually think about the world. I expect him to be curious, deliberative, and cool-headed. That's who he is. I often disagree with him. But I don't regret a thing. I don't understand these people. It's like they thought he'd go to Oslo, hand over the launch codes, and offer twenty Texas virgins in exchange for a pledge from Al'Qaeda to stop being mean to us.

=====

[chimpymustgo]

4. Maybe you could read the article and draw your own conclusions. It's much more complex

- and the danger much more devastating than what you have posted.

[emulatorloo]

8. I've read it. It has been posted on DU several times already. Greenwald is an excellent thinker.

It isn't the only viewpoint though -- for example tabatha posted another interesting piece a few posts down from the Guardian that has some merit.

=====================================

Do conservatives know what they're embracing?

I'm surprised and somewhat amused by the conservative laurels being strewn at Obama's feet over the Nobel lecture. It really makes me wonder what they heard. I think I know.

The speech was classic Niebuhrian liberal internationalism. Fred Kaplan of Slate delivered a thorough take-out on that angle here. If you know anything about the kind of 1940s liberal internationalism with which Neibuhr is associated (and Arthur Schlesinger and George Kennan, say), and if you're familiar with Obama's previous speeches and remarks on these matters, he said very little in Oslo that was new or surprising.

He has always been much closer in his views to 1948 liberal foreign policy principles than 1968 ones, if you know what I mean. The surprise -- the happy surprise among conservatives, and the anger among some on the left -- says less about Obama than it does about the presumptions of listeners in both camps.


<MORE AT LINK> link in tabatha's post

[chimpymustgo]

16. Obama's rhetorical slight of hand: aimed at appeasing the right and reassuring the left. Innocents

still die. Billions wasted.

[Cha]

5. The soundbyters love weak.

[eleny]

6. My jaw dropped when he used that word

I don't believe in "evil" as an entity. I believe that people do bad or evil things. Using the word as W has in the past got me shaking my head.

[Metta]

3. I agree. It's 1984-speak, a Bush/Cheney hallmark.

If it looks like a skunk and acts like a skunk, ....

[tabatha]

7. another point of view

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/michaeltomasky/2009/dec/11/conservatives-obama-nobel-speech

[emulatorloo]

9. interesting article -- "Do conservatives know what they're embracing?"

thanks for posting it.

"And by the same token, Obama said, admittedly more emphatically than previously, what he has always said but what the left has never wanted to hear. On foreign policy, he is not a 1960s or 70s liberal. He's a 1940s liberal.

So he is undertaking here nothing less than a re-centering of American foreign policy theory, forcing the defenestration of the false categories of the Bush years and trying to reintroduce into our discourse that older foreign policy liberalism, which has been largely abandoned within the architecture of both political parties -- the Republicans because they've moved so far to the right; and the Democrats not so much because they've moved so far to the left, but because on the whole Democrats just kind of stopped thinking really seriously about foreign policy after Vietnam.

If neocons want to applaud that in the short term, it's fine by me. But he is not one of them"

[emulatorloo]

11. Reinhold Niebuhr and Obama

Obama's War and Peace
How the president accepted the Nobel while sending more troops to fight in Afghanistan.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Dec. 10, 2009, at 2:56 PM ET

http://www.slate.com/id/2238081/

<SNIP>

Yes, Obama's speech is filled with ambiguities, dilemmas, and contradictions. More to the point, it explicitly grapples with them. If there is a single theme to the speech, it's that a philosopher-statesman of our time (which is what Obama is trying to be) must recognize and grapple with both universal principles and contingent realities, with our ambitions and our limits, with—as Martin Luther King Jr. put it in his Nobel lecture (and which Obama quoted today)—the "is-ness of man's present nature" and the "ought-ness that forever confronts him."

Read in its entirety, Obama's speech seems a faithful reflection of another theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, who, during World War II and the Cold War that followed, sought to reconcile the principles of Christianity with the imperatives of national defense. In his influential 1952 book The Irony of American History, he wrote that American idealism must come to terms "with the limits of all human striving, the fragmentariness of all human wisdom, the precariousness of all historical configurations of power, and the mixture of good and evil in all human virtue."

Obama's speech doesn't mention Niebuhr, but back in April 2007, early on in the presidential campaign, David Brooks asked Obama whether he'd ever read Niebuhr. The candidate replied, "I love him, he's one of my favorite philosophers." Asked what he took away from Niebuhr, Obama answered, "I take away the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world"; that "we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate these things, but we shouldn't use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction"; that "we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naive idealism to bitter realism."

<MORE AT LINK>

[jgraz]

12. Unrec'ers are working pretty hard to keep this off the GP

God forbid someone points out the obvious about Obama's "Give War a Chance" speech.

[emulatorloo]

13. It has been posted several times before, there is probably a version on the greatest page somewhere

but I'll give it a kick and rec

[mrfrapp]

14. Refuse the award

I don't think he can be blamed for the first fact; when the Nobel Committee chose him despite his waging two wars and escalating one, it essentially forced on him the bizarre circumstance of using his acceptance speech to defend the wars he's fighting. What else could he do? Ignore the wars? Repent?

Or, he could have refused to accept the award.

[emulatorloo]

17. Yeah that's what the wingnuts said he should do n/t

[mrfrapp]

19. Thanks for that

on edit: I was adding an option to the author's list of rhetorical questions.

What else could he do? Ignore the wars? Repent?

It's disappointing to me that something so simple could be received so negatively.

[Vidar]

15. Recommended, though my server (Charter) won't let me access the original article.

[mmonk]

18. Recommended.

Being a Democrat in many instances feels like being forced into hypocrisy.

[rollingrock]

20. Obama uses populist/progressive rhetoric only so he can get elected

in reality, he's a blue dog DLCer. he's anything but progressive.