Coakley: The Aftermath

The bottom line for now is that we get the chance to see Democrats fail miserably with 59 seats, instead of seeing them failing miserably with 60 like they've been doing for the last few months. The only difference we'll see here may be from some changes in individual failure strategies, interesting permutations of the failure equations which have governed their rule in Washington since they ousted the Republicans way back when. I'm excited to hear if the Democratic leadership is going to revert back to blaming legislative defeats on being one seat short again- "Oh, if we just had 60, then we'd be able to do at least one or two of the things we promised! Damn that 41st vote!"

Obama is already talking about making more compromises, which is great because if he makes one or two more he gets to officially change the letter next to his name from a D to an R. Presumably the White House and Senate leadership are already scrambling to find more ways to compromise the health-care reform bill, like instituting annual ceremonies in which human sacrifices are pushed into a live volcano to sate the hunger of the mighty Insurance Executive Gods, or making it legal to shoot people with preexisting conditions out of a cannon for the purposes of entertainment. Luckily the chances of us escaping with worthwhile reform were already approaching zero even before Brown won, so we don't have to get too hung up on that.

Extremely shallow Dem turnout was a key factor in Brown's victory, which seems to have validated the Obama Plan of shitting on his base every time the chance is offered. Apparently you have to throw your supporters a bone or two every now and then if you want them to vote for you again?! We'll see if the leadership realizes that their attempt to solely please Republicans is pleasing exactly no one, or if they take this as a sign that they should tack to the right, hard. Anyone want to wager on which one seems more likely?

"This Is The Opposition?" Afghanistan Edition

JJ wrote an excellent post yesterday about the decision to escalate the Vie- er, Afghanistan war. The only upside is that there's now a definitive date for when Americans start to leave Afghanistan, as long as Obama doesn't pull an Obama and weasel out of the 18 month limit. Like JJ noted, Obama never said he would end our Afghan debacle immediately.

If the left is unhappy about this, the right must be ecstatic, right? More sacrifices for their blood god, more opportunities for military contractors to rake it in, more time to continue the "Support Our Troops!" car magnet contest. Oh wait:





Conservative pundits on FOX complained that he didn't sound sufficiently enthusiastic about throwing more Americans into the meat grinder, Limbaugh wailed about how Obama "surrendered" Afghanistan, and O'Reilly said some more dumb stuff.

Conservatives aren't unhappy about seeing more Americans put in harms way in a war their president left to rot for 8 years- they're mad because 18 months from now the war is going to end. They're beyond parody. If anyone has ever jokingly used a bit of exaggeration and referred to the Republicans as the party of endless war, well, your joke just became obsolete. For these guys, Americans needlessly killing and being killed by various foreigners across the world isn't a side effect of foreign policy- it's the goal.

The Dalai Lama Wants to Dance, Obama Just Wants to Shuffle

Last week I mentioned my confusion regarding the way Obama is doing his job- he seems determined to mix in a little bit of bad news with every good item, and vice versa. His love of compromise apparently extends into compromising on issues literally no one wants to see compromised. The Dalai Lama visit seems to be a timely example.

Instead of meeting with the Dalai Lama during his visit to Washington, as the last three presidents have done, Obama has lightly snubbed him by choosing to meet in Dharamsala instead after a November trip to Beijing. The justification being given for this is that Obama doesn’t want to anger the Chinese before this November visit. If keeping the Communist Party of China happy is the name of the game, why is Obama meeting with the Dalai Lama at all? Chinese commentators and officials will bloviate just as furiously about the post-Beijing photo-op as they would have at one done today, and after that they'll get on with their lives. Indeed, the only thing we know with any certainty from history is that the Chinese government is evidently unwilling to forsake so much as one yuan of trade over a meeting with the mostly powerless Lama. Did China start a mutually-destructive trade Armageddon over his meeting with Bush, or Clinton, or the other Bush?

The Post article mentions that Gibbs provided a more detailed explanation: a happier China is, in their view, more likely to willingly discuss Tibetan issues with the US. Perhaps they’re right; but I don’t see one semi-spurned meeting overturning decades of curt, meaningless replies from Beijing on the subject. In the meantime Obama has opened himself to criticism from both the left and the right, with legitimately distressed human rights groups partnered with Republicans who know an opportunity for taking potshots when they see it.

While I was reading some of the reactions to the Dalai Lama’s visit this morning I found this report about the 2008 Tibetan Riots on the International Campaign for Tibet website. The report documents the initial events in Lhasa, and then details the myriad protests and fights that followed across the ethnically Tibetan regions of China. It was somewhat hard to tell where they were talking about because they use mostly Tibetan place names instead of the Chinese renditions I had seen on my trip through Amdo, the northeastern edge of Tibet. Things got weird when I saw this picture of monks, nomads, and townspeople gathering outside a religious school that was the center of one dispute between Tibetans and government forces in one small town during the riots:

I had to take a look through the pictures from my trip to make sure- I have a picture of myself taken in front of the same (now closed) school during my visit to Langmusi, a small village with two Tibetan monasteries that is easily the most remote place I’ve ever been:


Before I left Wuhan to travel through Amdo I had already seen that Labrang, a much larger monastery town I stayed in for a few days, had played a huge part in the 2008 protests. Parts of this video were shot just a few feet away from the door to my hostel, one of the relatively few which had reopened by the time I came by in December 2008. It’s actually pretty unnerving to think that even tiny Langmusi, a tranquil high-altitude place in the absolute middle of nowhere, was a witness to police brutality and midnight “disappearances.”

Maybe Obama has it right: maybe all China wants is a little respect and then they’ll begin honest negotiations with Tibetan nationalists. I have a hard time convincing myself that moving an appointment from October back to November will really placate a government that’s willing to abduct monks and spend thirty years torturing them, but maybe Hu “earned his fame by cracking down on Tibetans during his term as Party Chief of Tibet” Jintao (yes, it’s a pretty unwieldy nickname) will surprise us all. That would be… well, surprising.

The Obama Administration Really Confuses Me

Ever since he took office Obama has been playing a strange game: one step forward, three quarters of a step back. 4/5 of a step forward, 1/3 of a step back. A step and a half forward, 1.75 steps back. The entire thing has gotten so hard to keep track of, with a mixture of fractions and decimals and constant moves forward and backward, that it’s hard to tell how much progress has been made- if any. Take today, for example:

The Obama administration will announce a new
policy Wednesday making it much more difficult
for the government to claim that it is
protecting state secrets when it hides details
of sensitive national security strategies such
as rendition and warrantless eavesdropping,
according to two senior Justice Department
officials.

Hooray! Doing terrible things and then protecting yourself behind claims of state secrets has been a beloved tactic in Washington for decades, but those days might be over. This all depends on this rule surviving the next Republican president, of course, but at least it’s a step in the right direction. Which means… oh no… here comes a step back!

“This October, on a scheduled visit to the United
States, the Dalai Lama will not be welcomed at the
White House. Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett was
recently dispatched to Dharamsala -- the Dalai Lama's
place of exile in northern India -- to gently deliver
the message. The Tibetans took the news, as usual,
nonviolently. "A lot of nations are adopting a policy
of appeasement" toward China, observed Samdhong
Rinpoche, prime minister of Tibet's government in
exile. "I understand why Obama is not meeting with
the Dalai Lama before his Chinese trip. It is
common sense. Obama should not irritate the Chinese leadership.”

What, was this going to be the meeting with the Dalai Lama that finally threw the Chinese government over the edge?! We have a fifty year tradition of shaking his hand and not doing much else to help him, has the handshake gotten too strenuous?

Of course compared to the steady torrent of crap that defined the Bush administration, this isn’t too bad. And I’m still sure that Obama is doing a better job than McCain would have. But Obama’s job isn’t to be a better president than McCain or Bush; his job is to be a good president. I’m not sure if we can call him that until he snaps out of the Obama Shuffle and starts delivering good news without a side of crap.