I think booman is correct in suggesting that in the struggle between Obama and House Republicans, Reagan will beat Glen Beck on relative merits. That’s good enough for booman to continue supporting the president. Of course, that is looking through an objective that can only resolve issues at the cellular level and range of center-right to right wing nut: one neuron is darkly stained with cresyl-crazy, whereas the one next to it took up less stain. One would need to zoom out with a much broader, less powerful lens to know whether these neurons were in the left or right hemisphere of the brain, to know which half of the brain stained most heavily for crazy overall.
For example, the very unstable situation in the Middle East is only likely to worsen over time, which was empirically predictable many decades ago, and predictable in principle from any arbitrarily selected moment in history after Malthus. Either prediction suffices to suggest that there is nothing “routine” about “managing” the Middle East, and demands very different policies to manage the transcendent problems, in any kind of adult-like, proactive fashion. In booman’s usage, “child’s play” is a relativistic term: Obama is like a cognitive nine-year-old to Boehner’s five-year-old. If one can call continuing decades of failed right wing policy for all the wrong reasons “statesman-like,” then maybe the right wing is correct in trashing the entire idea of governance.
Glen Ford rightly rips progressives supporting Obama’s center-right/right wing grand unification, and John Caruso presses him a tick further, but neither goes nearly far enough in their relatively tepid denunciations of statesmen and their supporters promulgating more right wing, empirically-failed solutions.
I’ll admit that on the concurrent schedules of permanent global economic collapse, peak oil, climate change, and the sixth great extinction event, it is difficult to imagine what a real statesperson might look like, but I doubt it’s the kind of person with a hankering for further high stakes military and financial gambling, who pines away for the support of the haves over the have-nots, and is therefore eager to take a blowtorch to governmental regulation, including safeguards against inequality and financial and ecological catastrophe, and who has proven utterly incapable of executing accountability, all in the name of personal or short-term gains.
