It’s quite a week when the entire MSM suddenly gets sufficient oxygen into its hairspray-addled brain to be shocked, shocked, I tell you, at the fact that the Obama administration has been, well, behaving like Loyal Bushies on meth for the last four years. Mainly, because team Obama was just a tiny bit nicer about how they icily disdained several parts of the Bill of Rights, not least that first one, the punitive prosecutions could continue. the wiretapping comfortably privatized, and the illegality and cronyism of the Bush era would be magically transformed into cuddly bipartisan consensus.

Trouble is, that sort of thing only works until it doesn’t.

Bipartisanship in Washington is a rare thing these days. However, no beltway battle in recent memory has been quite as partisan as the one over sequestration and its $85 billion in across-the-board government spending cuts. Yet, for all the rancor between Democrats and Republicans over that so-called meat ax or poison pill, there has been one point of unity, one response that everyone in Washington can seemingly get behind: hyperbole.

The Department of Defense has, of course, spent more than a decade fighting ruinous wars and hasn’t convincingly won a conflict over a significant foe (sorry, Grenada; sorry, Panama) since World War II. Yet the mere possibility that it would have to put its civilian employees on 22 days of unpaid leave drove Pentagon chief Leon Panetta to hit the panic button, channel Chicken Little, and declare the sequestration future “the most significant military readiness crisis in more than a decade.”

Back in the 90′s, I spent a summer in Seattle working on a project with a former Boeing engineer, and I remember being astonished (and a little alarmed) when he told me about working on the 747 line. “That plane’s been in production for over twenty years, and there are still hundreds of parts that don’t fit together,” he told me, “The guys on the line know exactly where you have to re-drill a hole or just bang the thing together with a mallet.”  We were remodeling a house at the time, so I could sympathize, but with a key difference: houses don’t have to fly through the air with hundreds of passengers (and screaming babies) on board.

This media spin on the “drop” in defense spending is bogus. And it reveals how most “reporters” don’t look beyond the press release they are handed.

In any normal country, there would be no particular reason to expect 2013 to be an awful year. The right-wing Presidential candidate, who preached austerity, family values, and military adventurism, was soundly defeated by the center-left candidate, who favored, well, austerity-lite, personal freedom, and a fiscally convenient “peace dividend.” Overconfident and overfunded Republicans were similarly trounced in the House and Senate, losing seats in both despite stunning structural advantages.

It seemed that the Right’s perennial hobby horses, from favoring the wealthiest above all others and demonizing minorities of every type, to demanding that every non-military expenditure be slashed to the bone, had clearly been sent to the glue factory by the electorate. Alas, things are never what they seem in Washington.

President Obama’s reelection has sparked an onslaught of analysis attempting to define the agenda for his second term. Will it reflect the vision of restoring liberty and security on which the president ran in 2008, or the disappointing passivity towards the national security state that characterized his first term?

More to the point, will President Obama’s legacy include emerging American authoritarianism, or instead the recovery of constitutional freedoms lost over the past decade?

What is the future of progressive politics? What is the world that we are trying to build? In some ways these are the wrong questions. There’s so much in terms of low-hanging fruit that needs to be accomplished. From mass unemployment, to climate change, to immigration reform, to slowing the power of the military-industrial complex, to shepherding and building on complicated financial and health care packages, there’s no lack of things that need to get accomplished.

But, as Gar Alperovitz’s America Beyond Capitalism notes, the means of politics by which left-liberal reform happens is breaking down, and it can only be rebuilt by changing the long-horizon vision of what justice will look like on the left.

By any objective measure, Republican dominance in either state or local government ends in failure. Deficits, cronyism, declining services and economic malaise are always the result, conveniently leaving in their wake increased public cynicism about the value of government at all. But that leaves out the curious paradox that it precisely when government is so thoroughly trashed, rich people are more eager than ever to buy it. Why? For the same reason they love to buy “troubled” companies and fixer-uppers; somewhere, someone has left money on the table, and they’ve got to get their paws on it.

In 1961, President Eisenhower delivered his now famous farewell address, in which he warned the American people of the dangerous rise of a powerful “military industrial complex” in this country.

Last year, for the 50th anniversary of this prophetic speech, many of the leading thinkers and activists on U.S. militarism and war-making came together for a conference to take stock of how this complex has evolved and what can be done to reign it in. For those who weren’t able to attend, author and activist David Swanson has just published The Military Industrial Complex at 50, an edited collection of the insightful and inspiring remarks that were delivered at this timely event, in addition to several other complimentary essays.

There are two resources you should keep your eye on in interpreting the current positions of the defenders of large military budgets.

The first is the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College and the other is the Project for National Security Reform (PNSR).

Since 2005, both of these organizations have done a series of studies on what they call “national security reform”, studies that look to redefine the mission and structure of the US national security institutions on as sweeping a scale as was done in 1947 — but to do it in order to preserve high levels of defense funding.