"We Harpooned Every Whale in the Sea.."*

* "and even some minnows". Alan Simpson, co-chair of the Catfood Commission

Alan Simpson said he wanted to be in the Government Witness Protection program after he and Erskine Bowles unveiled their recommendations yesterday. Wildly denounced,Bloomberg news writes this morning that the Deficit Commission's recommendations would cut $3.8 trillion from the national debt. But they added that politically their advice will not be taken.

Give them credit, Bowles and Simpson floated some trial balloons before the final recommendations due December 1. They are least were serious about their mission.Even their fellow board members are rebelling and it's doubtful whether they will rustle up 14 votes for their recommendations. What's curious is that we haven't heard any responses from the Republicans.

Do you get the impression that whenever President Obama is out of the country all hell breaks loose? Huffington Post broadcast that the Obama Administration has caved on tax cuts for the wealthy because of remarks yesterday by David Axelrod, who says the Administration has to deal with the political reality after the election. Almost immediately, the administration walked back the report.

Maybe it's just as well that Americans remain so self-centered. Otherwise, we would be seeing wall-to-wall stories that the young Obama's caregiver was a gay male, who now is a member of a leading transvestite group in Indonesia. Fox News floated the notion that Michelle Obama was going to meet with sex workers when she was in India. She did not. Or what about the huge scandal of Obama addressing the University of Indonesia and speaking Indonesian with some fluency. And the students were in rapture, not the heavenly kind.

It's strange that Pew published a poll on international trade while the President was out of the country. To summarize, Americans want more trade with Canada and the European countries but not South Korea or China. In short,more trade with white people.

The new teabagger congresscritters greeted Hispanic members of Congress with catcalls of "Go Back to Mexico!". Class bunch. Col. West's new chief of staff, who is a right-wing radio host, said on the first day of her new job that Nancy Pelosi was "garbage" and that illegals who commit crimes 'should be hung." It's going to be a long session.

The teabaggers are now turning on Rand Paul because he's reneging on his stance against earmarks. Jim Inhofe claims that the Left has brainwashed people about earmarks just as they have about global warming. What is in the water in Oklahoma? The war within the GOP has broken out and is likely to escalate in the next twelve months.

If you want to know how we have gotten to where we are today, rent the DVD "Casino Jack", which is a documentary on the conservative revolutionaries who gamed the system to win millions of dollars in lobbying contracts. Grover Norquist is shown emulating Lenin, who really is one of his political idols. Ralph Reed shows up with his Christian Coalition and then agitates for a gambling ban in Texas at the behest of Jack Abramoff's Indian casinos in Louisiana. Thomas Franks shows up to describe the origins of this so-called 'conservative revolution" and narrates how Tom Delay and Abramoff managed to manipulate Congress in covering up sweatshop conditions in the Marianas Islands as some showcase for free market economics. The film is a powerful indictment of the system in Washington. It ends with the Citizens United case which the filmmakers take as the ultimate triumph of these characters. One fun section is how a life guard from Reheboth was named the head of a think tank, which received millions of laundered money from Abramoff's clients. Abramoff today works in a Pizza Place in Baltimore after he served time in jail.

Gore Vidal said something that still hangs in the air," Barack Obama's problem is that he is too smart for the people he leads." James T. Kloppenberg, an American History professor at Harvard, just published "Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope and the American Political Tradition". This book is the antidote to Dinesh DeSouza's book on the anti-colonial Obama. Kloppenberg writes an intellectual history of Barack Obama by examining his writings, his graduate school papers, his teaching and his educational reading. Listening to President Obama's speeches, Kloppenberg examines Obama's willingness to be conciliatory and moderate in tone. Kloppenberg believes Obama is one of the first intellectual Presidents in a long time and he represents a long distinguished American tradition of political thought. Instead of locating Obama in the world of Franz Fanon as DeSouza does, Kloppenberg links Obama to philosophical pragmatism and its strongest proponents--William James and John Dewey. Now I know why I like him. However, Kloppenberg, who is a liberal, warns that Barack Obama's style and thinking may not be effective in a poisoned atmosphere with such polarization in the country.

Kloppenberg does an excellent job of unwinding the process Obama went through in rejecting identity politics. This always struck me when the Right mentions the list of radical characters Obama knew or was acquainted with. What the Right purposely never admits is that Obama rejected almost all these people's advice and went a different way. One of the personalities the Right identifies with Obama is a friend of his grandfather, a black member of the American Communist Party, who had been expelled. This friend told Obama not to work with white people, don't play their games and do not go to college. I guess that advice was ignored.

"Reading Obama" doesn't encourage progressives to think Obama is one of their own. Instead, he is as I've written a radical moderate. This becomes clear with each policy proposal put forth. It's simply the contrast with the very Radical Right agenda of the GOP that he appears leftish. What Koppenberg makes clear is that Obama is not a political pragmatist, a compromiser for the sake of it, but a philosophical pragmatist, who is skeptical of the assertions of any one group as possessing the right answers. In some ways, it would preferable if Obama was more in the progressive camp given our dire circumstances.

But such subtleties don't bother us with George W., who failed to repeat his defense of the Muslim people when asked about all the Islamophobia by Matt Lauer. Dubya did defend the TARP program on Rush and said facing a Great Depression he chose FDR over Herbert Hoover. Unfortunately, the results weren't the same.

"Decision Points" triggered an uncomfortable realization. George W. Bush, Al Gore, John Kerry--same education, same wealth, same class. Why do we think any one of them would not produce what we have today? As Robert Scheer has pointed out in his most recent book, The Clinton people and the Bush people colluded in the economic downfall of the United States. Why would we think the Democratic candidates would have produced anything different? After all, Democrats allowed the Patriot Act to be passed, knew about the torture program and basically got rolled by Bush and Cheney.

So far in my reading of Decision Points I have not come across anything to explain Dubya's studied lack of curiosity about the world at large. Also, he tries to pump up his Midlands upbringing but it doesn't explain years at Andover, Yale and Harvard. There is a lack of forthrightness about this period of his life as if he want to convey the image of the guy you must want to have a beer with. I've only gotten as far as his run for the Presidency but so far I get any new sense of gravitas or depth to Dubya.