What’s particularly bothersome about yesterday’s attacks is the premise that it’s improper, unpatriotic and even Terrorist-mimicking to do anything but cheer — have a “national celebration” — when Obama is awarded the Nobel Prize. Whether Obama is actually pursuing policies of peace happens to be an extremely legitimate topic of debate. The same is true for whether he’s done anything meaningful yet to merit the award.

[T]o insist that it’s the patriotic obligation of every American to stand and cheer — and that those who don’t are “casting their lot with the Terrorists” [or the Republicans -- lambert] — is creepy and repugnant. It’s also a very dangerous game to play.

The difference between 2003 and now, of course, is that Democrats are in power and thus benefit from the rule that it’s unpatriotic and Terrorist-embracing to do anything but praise the President like some sort of college cheerleader. But that isn’t always going to be true. And there are many times when it is progressives who are making arguments similar to The Terrorists and Other Bad People; after all, there are only so many sides of an issue, and that is inevitable. Calling people unpatriotic and comparing them to Terrorists for failing to fulfill their solemn duty to praise the President on his Special Day and mindlessly support his accolades isn’t clever or tough politics. It’s weak, counter-productive, unprincipled, dumb and dangerous.

Yep.

to create a political party that has two organizational forms, one within the Democratic party and one outside the Democratic party, and using them ruthlessly against sell-out Dems as necessary.

Precedent for success? Say, in the 1850s-60s?

I’m not asking anyone to “fall in line” with Obama and the corporate Dems. I was trying to communicate the larger historical vision, the Peace Prize award to Obama is a tiny bit of added momentum to the decades-long momentum of various overlapping categories of the social, cultural and political “leftists” (of all degrees from just past centrism to far beyond Marx, Bakunin, Ghandi or anyone else).

Let’s keep that momentum building, not get hung up with today’s insult on Obama’s failure to meet our ideals. All things considered, I say that even for uncompromising far-leftists it’s better that Obama is sitting in that chair than McCain or Palin (after he’s deceased).

I understand your criticism of the small-voting-elite vs. the non-voting larger mass of contributors in the standard non-profit model, it is a problem. However, after trying to work within the framework of the Green political party from 1990-2004, I’m also very frustrated with their iterations of the pure democracy model. It really gets bogged down even at the best of times, and it creates its own “worst of times” out an excess of well-meant motives, when after every election defeat people wish to “go back to basics” and get into an new endless round of committee meetings to create a new “visioning” process that ends up with another jumbo-sized statement of principles that tries to appeal to all factions of the left with idealistic goals, yet in my opinion actually marginalizes the Party further (as people who may agree with some of the specific statements may have problems with some other specific ideals, as the ideals themselves grow detached from reality in the search for political correctness, and by providing opportunities for further disruption of the volunteers acting on practical problems later, as some new idealistic volunteer comes in and says ‘hey, what about my cherished ideals X and Y’ when the committee was trying to work on Z.)

So it’s all very much a problem, IF WE HAVE TO HAVE EVERYTHING AGREED IN ADVANCE before anyone will join or get to work. I don’t know what the answer is. The main thing I was thinking of this morning was a series of essays/diaries trying to get across the point of a modern, democratic-pragmatist critique of “left-wing-infantilism” or less insultingly, “left-wing-perfectionism.” We are all working for that perfect ideal society where all dreams come true and there are ponies and rainbows everywhere. But there is no blueprint, we all understand that we have slightly different versions of the truth, and we can work together as adults knowing that this earthly plane is not a place to seek perfection.

Let me copy four long paragraphs here that get at where I’d like to see us going, that I wrote as a personal letter to another activist back in August. The first paragraph goes over the concerns I tried to express above, the next three get into the model of political organization I’d love to see. My wife and I have some pleasant errands this afternoon, I don’t pretend to have all the answers. Yet I’d love to get the conversation going. If I thought there was a real enthusiasm, I’ve got a couple of thousand to invest as seed money (if I think it will lead to a new job for me in the future) and I am a master of building organization on a shoe-string budget), a couple of tech-types to do the dirty work of making and placing web ads and we could get a start on it. Sorry about all these incredibly long run-on sentences here, but I’ve been grappling with these problems for years and have a lot of thoughts to convey.

Copying from my letter of August: So I’ve had my fill of earnest-but-useless committee-meetings of tiny activist groups with no budget, and I am fairly determined that I want to avoid that in any new group that gets built. Yes, of course, we have to be democratic, yes, yes it is even more important to get the benefits of what grassroots efforts people can make … but the Green Party model of absolute grass-roots democracy with every chapter having to approve every tactic with endless meetings, is, in my firm opinion, a participation and energy-killer that needs to be avoided. Somehow there has to be an effective model that energizes the grass-roots to do what they can do best, yet also does not hobble the leadership cadres who do have more experience and often have better vision, from providing more creative leadership.

The thing that I’d like to get into, which I guess is really a long-term education project as much as it’s a political project, is an analysis of the typical Democratic Party politician as a version of a corporate PR spokesman, whose apparent liberalism is only a cover for greedy personal ambition. They know the proper liberal things to say to get approval from our grassroots, yet their real focus is on their own career, and getting enough lobbyist/corporate donations to run corporate-type top-down campaigns, relying to totally false and misleading TV ads. The media and conventional wisdom has accepted this model of political behavior as the norm, thus the media is surprised and skeptical of any attempt to oppose it; yet the popular cynicism that does affect 40-60% of the public-at-large, I believe shows a basic understanding of the same issues that I’m trying to focus on, giving us a huge base to build on if we could communicate it effectively. Short version: Most Dem politicians are lying weenies, and we can prove it. If it seems like they belong to a privileged class, well, it’s because they belong to a privileged class. So maybe it’s a media education project, to get them to deal with the cynical truth that the public knows in its gut.

And then there’s the second part of the problem of trying to get useless establishment Dem. politicians out of the way, without giving the country over to Republicans who are demonstrably worse: the logic of the two-party system and the plurality-winner-takes-all voting system allows the establishment Dems to sit on liberals and radicals all through each biennial fall campaign, saying over and over again, “you gotta go with our guy because the other guy is probably worse.” This is what kills the Greens over and over, and after being with the Greens and seeing how fiercely the organized parties and their friends in the media defend the two-party model, they know they’re doing it precisely to kill any third parties. The Greens have mostly responded to this with earnest, no-budget attempts to get better voting systems such as the ranked choice or “instant Runoff” model, which go over nicely … to the 2% of the population the Greens are already reaching.

My nervous energy is demanding a much more serious response to this problem. The best thing I can come up with a cadre-education effort to create a political party that has two organizational forms, one within the Democratic party and one outside the Democratic party, and using them ruthlessly against sell-out Dems as necessary. They get opposed by the group within the party (whose official candidate will of course take the conventional pledge to support the nominee, but his base won’t), and if they can beat us in the primary, we’ll use the second group (and we’ll have our voters switching registrations tactically as often as their state’s laws will allow) to go after them in the general. Where they will again use the argument that 3rd parties never get anywhere, and if we “split the vote” the Republican will win. Which we will counter by having a very cold-blooded calculation to be announced a few days before the election: where we will fight to the end, risking that Republican victory, and where we will tactically withdraw in favor of casting enough ballots for the establishment Dem to allow them to win — yet not doing it with friendship, but with a full final blast our messaging power to both the Establishment Dem, and to the media, saying how unhappy and dis-satisfied we are and how we will continue doing everything we can to either push the Dem to the left, or replace him/her soonest.

… so steeped in reactive Obama hatred that we won’t give the man credit when it’s due …

Look, on this one, I’m 100% in agreement with the apparently steeped-in-self-hate Obama, who said:

To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honoured by this prize.

And refreshingly, there are a great many on the left, right, and in the center who agree! It looks like the partisan bickering is coming to an end!

Moreover, we have this to be thankful for: Nobody’s been saying “reactive racist Obama hatred” (leaving aside the right, here).

Baby steps toward civility, that all can applaud!

Are you saying that you have unconditional love for a President?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVDWYAikpYo

As for Mr. Fuckno, don’t worry, I don’t take your opinion of my pedantic pomposity personally in the least. You’re just a silly name on a screen.

Sorry I jarred you, however.