I posted a warning on Booman’s New Predictions piece yesterday regarding the left repeating the same mistake that it has committed over and over again during the BushCo years
The mistake of over-reaction, of over-enthusiasm when some hint of good news appears after 8 to 10 years of total disaster.
Like Obama’s win in Iowa.
I wrote:
Beware the knee-jerk leftiness self-deceit, Boo.
The desperate wish for something good to happen after all of this bad shit.
You write:Obama will beat McCain. Obama will destroy Huckabee.
We have seen too many Fitzmasses past that FitzFizzled out.
All the lefty “sure things” that have tanked over the last 4 years.
And then there is always Dean’s fate to remember.
It’s a long road to the convention, and a longer, harder road to the Presidency. Obama is fighting seasoned pros who do not give up.
The Clinton machine, the RatPublican machine with all of its Swift Boaters…
Good first round is all.
Probably a good second round in New Hampshire as well. It comes too quickly for the Clintonistas to regroup.
But regroup they will.
Bet on it.
Obama is STILL an outsider, and the media is still controlled by insiders.
Right now he is good story…a GREAT story, a feel-good story. And the media are covering it as such. Why? It sells pharmaceuticals and toilet paper.
When the first blush of victory wears off…can he make the long haul?
I would be happy if he could, actually. But let’s not break out the champagne too quickly.
It has gone flat too many times in the past.
And Booman responded:
The ghost of Sirhan Sirhan lurks…but we’ve never had as good of a backup as John Edwards. You worry too much. Allow yourself to dream, Arthur. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.
Read on for my reaction.
I AM a dreamer, Booman.
I am just not into self-deception.
Peeder over on pff!!! pins it today.
I Hate Huckabees on Friday
Frankly I think that was a non-result for the Dems: Obama won a neighboring state by an unconvincing margin; the Dem side won’t be decided until Super Tuesday, and maybe not even then.
Huckabee eats squirrels; Romney may win his neighboring New Hapshire, and the major result is that Giuliani and McCain are toast. The other result is that the Repubs don’t have much of a chance if this is all they’ve got.
Middul Amurka said that they were uncertain about selling Hills to the hills; they all pound beers watching skinny black guys run around; so Obama they thought was saleable. John Edwards is purdyer then them so they ain’t sure. Huckabee is a natrul.
On to New Hamps as sewage cascades. I spent many a summer in New Hampshure and schooled on the border. But it’s just another plebian plebiscite and this ain’t over till the short lady concedes.
Yup.
It ain’t over ’til the short lady concedes.
Bet on it.
And even THEN it’s just beginning.
As Martin Luther King Jr. said, the arc of history is indeed long, and it indeed bends towards justice.
But this Iowa thing is just a jot and a jiggle of that arc. A segment of it. And when MLK Jr. used the word “long”, he knew PRECISELY what he meant.
As in up close and personal.
As in being himself 4 or 5 or more generations removed from one of the most evil human movements that the world has ever seen, American slavery of African people.
As in he himself staring down the barrel of a gun that I am convinced he knew would kill him before he was through trying to do what he set out to do.
As in seeing generations FURTHER down that road.
As in having the faith that one way or another, “justice” will and always has been served.
Is Obama the culmination of that arc that started in Africa in the 1600s?
Could be.
But a few thousand Iowans do not a pot of gold make.
Not by a LONG shot.
And the self-satisfied crowing of a desperate-for-reassurance, soft, moody left is if anything a drawback to the success of the course of that arc, in my opinion.
That movement towards the end of the deadly poison of racism that has so crippled this country over the course of its history.
I actually saw something on TV last night that more reassured me in that direction than ANYTHING that has happened on the political front.
A SHOTIMES documentary about the preparation of a very good young Brooklyn Italian welterweight fighter named Paulie Malignaggi for his bout last summer against Miguel Cotto.
Now…I lived in some Brooklyn Italian neighborhoods in the ’70s (Red Hook, Carroll Gardens), WAY before gentrification; I have hung some with working class Italian wiseguy types now and again over the years as well and I married into a family that had roots in Italian Brooklyn. Believe me…I know the style, at least the ’90s and before version thereof. I kind of expected this kid…a real talker, a classic Brooklyn wiseguy type himself…to be a racist, baseball bat-carrying punk. And I expected his entourage to be the same.
OH boy, was I wrong!!!
He lives an almost totally integrated life.
Sure, he jokes about “a buncha good looking guineas” being named Grand Marshals of the Puerto Rican Day Parade after he beats Cotto. (Which he did not do, although he fought one hell of a fight.) BUT…he reads Spanish; he speaks the multi-racial dialect of the streets; his entourage is totally mixed racially and culturally, and he shows not a WHIT of the old-line urban Italian-American anti-black and hispanic racism.
Things they ARE ‘a changin’!!!
And not just on the news shows from Iowa.
I got yer “dreaming”.
Right HERE!!!
It’s happening on the streets.
Iowa is just a pale reflection of that dream.
And politics is ALWAYS any NUMBER of steps behind the vanguard of reality.
I got yer dream.
Right HERE!!!
Later…
AG
