Ichabod Pantywaist

By Al Schumann on Friday May 7, 2010 12:24 AM



For all the Obama regime's viciousness, it can't shake the wimp factor. The reaction to the BP oil spill is a perfect example. When any active reaction at all would have been appropriate, they resorted to blustering, procedural dithering and ensured much greater damage. The net effect was hopeless servility and incompetence. They could have done something remotely connected to mitigation or cleanup as soon as the news broke, and they still could have worked out a way to make it profitable for BP. They could, in other words, have remained thoroughly despicable; titillated the dead-ender pwogs with a few photo-ops, some cleaning, etc. and kept the patron class happy. But... they're hopeless pantywaists. Ichabods. Dorks, sedulously taping the "kick me" signs to their own backs and adopting a pointlessly provocative, butt-thrusting waddle that no bully could resist.

In this, they are exactly like their supporters. They evince the same hysterical pomposity as the double-domes who wail about fascist coups every time an illiterate Teabagger has a temper tantrum. It's enough to make a fascist coup welcome.

Comments (18)

FWIW, I don't think that any administration can shake the powerlessness in the face of oil, or FIRE, depredations.

It's structural.

Picture Wishy Washy Romney trying to explain it. Or Algore.

That typed, President Sarah Palin will double pound the pavement, positively celebrating the liberation of oil from the oppression of bigubmint.

op:

we interupt this comment thread with a minor diversion

read confessions
of a second generation kold war liberal

http://www.counterpunch.org/kreisler05062010.html

teaser :

(with)
"the demise of the Soviet Union."

" I expected much more from the United States in the way of a peace dividend. I believe that Russia today is not the former Soviet Union by any means. It’s a much smaller place. I would have expected that as a tradition in the United States, we would have demobilized much more radically. We would have rethought more seriously our role in the world, brought home troops in places like Okinawa. Instead, we did every thing in our power to shore up the Cold War structures in East Asia, in Latin America. The search for new enemies began. That’s the neoconservatives. I was shocked, actually, by this. Did this mean that the Cold War was a cover for something deeper, for an American imperial project that had been in the works since World War II? I began to believe that this is the case."

that is all

Al Schumann:

I would be willing to bet that in the same circumstances President Palin would immediately call the Coast Guard and yell, "DO SOMETHING!". After that the usual tussle between corruption and incompetence would ensue.

I also think part of her appeal is that she's clearly not a dork. She might be a moose-shooting fascist, but she's still unmistakably human. The Ichabods of the Obama regime, now, I'm not so sure. You could sequence their genomes and they would read human, but somewhere in the readout there'd be a "kick me" sign. Cass Sunstein's would have, in addition, a gene that expresses as a nudge.

Maybe it's simply the socialization the male of the corporate species goes through. Their environment rewards high level, patron-serving passive aggression, and punishes decency. But I want extensive testing for them before I'm willing to abandon my theory.

op:

"a pointlessly provocative, butt-thrusting waddle that no bully could resist."


ah now that's my st AL !!!!

given the substance could have been much more cleverly modulated as mr shooooman suggests

one wonders just what about
being a successful and enduring
dem-core operative type
so strongly selects
for this
all but
definingly characteristic
BT waddle

Al Schumann:

Ambitious Dems rise on their ability to cover their asses and provoke colleagues into bare-assed blunders. They're all maximally gluteus, all the time. Once they reach a certain level of power, they adopt the BT waddle to alert potential patrons and to warn off competitors.

There's also a mating aspect. Cass Sunstein and Samantha Power are rumored to have spent weeks waddling around each other. The steps of the display spelled out their pre-nuptial agreement.

Dang, Al. I laughed out loud.

I need some help with the term "double-dome," though. I used to work for a guy who said he was a "Double Domer" and in his lingo, that meant he had 2 degrees from Notre Dame University. But that doesn't seem to apply here. They're not all Notre Dame alums, are they? So it must be something else.

Al Schumann:

In the local lexicon, a "Double Domer" is a Stakhanovite egghead, whose beanie needs at least two extra propellers—otherwise their poor brains overheat. Cass Sunstein looks like a four propeller man to me.

Gracias.

If Cass would stop with the combover, which insulates the cranium and keeps all that heat in, he could cut back on his propellers. But then his baldness would undercut his virility, and he couldn't shag saMANtha powerless.

Al Schumann:

That comb-over is seriously regrettable. And yet, I wouldn't want him to contemplate any other style. There are people who are meant to rock the look, and Cass is definitely one of them.

Casey:

Chalmers Johnson appears to be a slow learner. But at least there was enough human being in there to notice that something was amiss in the imperium after the USSR collapsed. His books may have opened a few other minds to the reeking mess of US foreign policy. I appreciate his recent work even though Chomsky cued me in to the reality a decade or more earlier.

I believe that the spy novelist Le Carre has had a similar awakening. Both Le Carre and Johnson had spy agency connections during the Cold War. Does this suggest that there is something about being inside the belly of the beast that blinds one to the reality? I recall arguing for the justice of the SE Asia effort with an unorthodox colleague when I was in the belly. But within a few months of my release I was reevaluating everything and have not stopped since.

op:

casey

i love sudden converts
it suggests the limits of a brain
any brain
are quite unknown

in fact born again is all i trust ..so long as it lasts

these life time pinks

agin the establishment since kindergarten ...yuck

i was brought up repiblican myself
we liked ike very much indeed
then those freedom riders came along
and i found out my parents weren't "fair"
from there it was a long
lazy slide to red hell

lazy that is till i had a jonathan edwards calabre born again interval in 1974
yup that late

like mao i was more of
a nihilist anarchist before that

my generation came by its anti empire gig easy
uncle tried to draft us to
go jump on a pungeee stick

Save the Oocytes:

I gradually realized that the US was not a force for good in the world after 9/11, having previously ignored the news and trusted that while politics was corrupt, the system was a constant, best forgotten about. I became curious "Why do they hate us?" and discovered the short answer (paraphrasing Arthur Silber) is "Because we won't stop killing them." Reading Johnson's book at that time would have done me a world of good, I think. It took me a few more years to migrate further left, though.

Rose:

Gotta admit I'm kinda looking forward to all the proggie red-faced finger wagging come the 2012 voting season. Heh heh.

I grew up among nice union card holding New Deal Democrats. The Big Dog's NAFTA sent me down the road to bolshie-ville.

My trip would have begun earlier had I not been stuck for 3 years in Ann Arbor.

Michael Hureaux:

Nice comment, Rose. I doubt I ever would have taken up marxist politics if the "democratic" party didn't spend so much time confirming just exactly what Lenin and others always said about the "progressive" wing of the bourgeoisie, and their suck-ups in the "social democratic", or more properly in the United States, "democratic socialist" labor movement. And I've seen nothing from them in all the years since NAFTA first came around that suggests they're going any other direction except towards some new hybrid form of totalitarian nonsense.

op:

senate dems that voted to kill

"break up the TBTF banks "
and
the "industry" self- financed
50 billion resolution trust

Akaka (D-HI)

Baucus (D-MT)

Bayh (D-IN)

Bennet (D-CO)


Carper (D-DE)


Conrad (D-ND)

Dodd (D-CT)

Feinstein (D-CA)

Gillibrand (D-NY)

Hagan (D-NC)

Inouye (D-HI)

Johnson (D-SD)

Kerry (D-MA)

Klobuchar (D-MN)

Kohl (D-WI)

Landrieu (D-LA)

Lautenberg (D-NJ)

Lieberman (ID-CT)

McCaskill (D-MO)


Menendez (D-NJ)

Nelson (D-FL)

Nelson (D-NE)

Reed (D-RI)

Schumer (D-NY)

Shaheen (D-NH)


Tester (D-MT)


Udall (D-CO)


Warner (D-VA)

i'm sure if need be
wally world
could get most of the rest too

op:

key question

how many face the electorate this fall ???

Another sudden awaker is Diane Ravitch, who has admitted that the school reform hoaxes of the past 3 decades are destructive.

BTW, on this oil spill, I'm not sure it gets much more tangled than BP campaign gifts, plus Zerobama's complete and now utterly proven market fetishism.

Tall Darkman:

Method described in your article are a good example of how to implement an efficient quality control in writing an essay. I appreciate your skills in writing and formulating.

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