Change

Tom Watson has posted a nice linky anthology of recent blog columns dealing with the scales falling off liberal eyes as they realize they have elected a centrist and not a liberal. It seems to be what all the bloggers are talking about these days and in that Watson is not so unique.

I mention his post here because of it’s middle section:

Nowhere did many progressives deceive themselves more than in foreign policy – and on no subject are they more outraged; in some cases, this is simply because of Obama’s recruitment of Clinton as Secretary of State. But it’s also because of a blind spot of longstanding on the left – a bit of self-deception that many Democrats indulge in every four years or so.

As far as I’m concerned, Dennis Perrin has contributed the masterwork in the scholarship on the Democrats’ strange relationship with militarism. Savage Mules: Democrats and Endless War tackles that strange historic dichotomy: a hawkish left that occasionally tries to brand itself as spiritually opposed to war. Savage Mules is a brilliant rant, really – it traffic in hypocrisy and rides the wave of Perrin’s evident anger and stylish writing. If somebody’s pissed off about this, I’m glad it’s Dennis, a gifted weaver of the tale. The book (short and pungent) is filled with episodes we know, from the hateful Andrew Jackson to the the check-in tables at the YearlyKos convention, and neatly threaded with steel prose skewers that penetrate our gauzy images of FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, Bill Clinton and even (especially) the human rights warrior Jimmy Carter, “America’s most underrated imperialist.”

Perrin is that rare liberal of 2008: he opposes Obama, openly. Indeed, the iconography around the President-elect is an opposing polar force, driving Dennis to denounce hypocrisy and false left-wing optimism. I felt the sting a couple of weeks ago when celebrating the appointment of Rahm Emanuel as a no-nonsense chief of staff. “Oh, to be in a Gaza camp today,” commented Dennis. “Imagine their excitement with this appointment!”

In Perrin’s Democratic Party, the still-living myth of a JFK as the peace-loving president whose tragic murder led to a cruel and deeper involvement in Vietnam (the Oliver Stone hagiographic view) has inhabited, in turn, the personal life mythology as two successors: Bill Clinton and his famous snapshot at the White House of Camelot, and Barack Obama as the modern version of a young, handsome, masculine liberal ushering in a new and optimistic era.

I was going to write some stuff around this clip but instead I went over to Dennis Perrin’s blog and watched a bunch of clips from the old brilliant Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. I suggest you do the same.

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