Atrios, ever alert to any follies on the political landscape that might be worthy of one of his Instapunditish snippets, names Laura Rozen as his “Twit of the Day.” (A lesser punishment, one supposes, than being labelled his “Wanker of the Day” or, dread fate, being placed in the fearsome stocks of his “Worst Person in the World” sobriquet). Rozen’s crime, apparently, is voicing mild approval of the idea of appointing Joe Lieberman as the new head of the sinister bureaucratic boondoggle known as the Department of Homeland Security.
Rozen’s comment came — of course — via Twitter. Our entire political discourse — at least in the rarefied climes of media-world — now seems to take place almost solely through this remarkable medium, where the instantaneous, scarcely masticated outpourings of third- and fourth-rate brains are offered up in dumbed-down tidbits, which appear as momentary blips in a long string of juvenile, even infantile formulations. As a prime example, see Rozen’s own tweet, which, in making a case for Lieberman’s nomination, says it would involve “easy confirmation, he’s in charge when uhohs”
I actually went into the cacophony of baby talk and invective on Twitter to see if perhaps Rozen had inadvertently broken her tweet in half or mangled it somehow. But no, she really did mean to end with the idea of Lieberman being in charge “when uhohs.” I assume the infantile rubric “uh ohs” is meant to represent domestic terror attacks — death, destruction, maiming, disembowelment and all the other contingencies that the lard-dispensing, crony-fluffing DHS is ostensibly set up to deal with. All of this is reduced to “uhohs.” And thus the Tellytubbyization of our political debate continues apace.
But Atrios — and “Steve M.” at No More Mister Nice Blog, whose blog post provides the substance of Atrios’ brief snarkish link — are not voicing objections to Rozen’s goo-goo/ga-ga version of public communication. No, what really steams them, as “Steve M.” makes clear, is the fact that a Lieberman nomination to this ludicrous, place-holding sinecure would — wait for it — alienate Obama’s political base. No really, that’s what bothers them. As “Steve M.” notes:
And though it’s a small step in the scale of things, it could also be the final straw, the act that finishes the job of alienating the liberal base that worked to elect Barack Obama twice. So we could just kick back and binge-watch SharkNado: The Series in 2014, secure in the knowledge that there’s no need to pay attention to the midterms, because nobody’s going to show up to vote Dem and Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell can start arranging their office swap now. Better to see that coming early, I suppose….
Man, is this bitter, savvy cynicism, or what? Watching ‘SharkNado’ instead of working the phones to bolster Barack? Get back, dude, that’s some really heavy anarcho-bolshevik shit you got going on there.
But what is really being said here by our guardians of progressivism? They are saying that Obama’s “liberal base” will swallow death squads, drone wars, Orwellian-level level illegal spying, prosecution for whistleblowers on torture but protection and promotion for the torturers themselves, etc. etc., etc. — but they will finally balk at …. Joe Lieberman??? That’s what will alienate them?
There are a multitude of responses one could make to this idea, but if we may riot in temperance, restraint and understatement, let us say simply that this feared “alienation” of Obama’s “liberal base” is highly unlikely to happen — even if Obama appoints Dick Cheney as head of the DHS. A “liberal base” that would countenance and champion a president who every week decides to kill people all over the world — including their fellow citizens — without trial, without charges, without judicial process, without defense — as well as all the other manifest crimes being continued and expanded by this murderous militarist state, will not, in the end, be unduly put off by the appointment of this or that figure who once, long ago, fell outside the purview of respectable progressive opinion.