The Myth of 11-Dimensional Chess.

“Obama supporters are eager to depict the White House as nothing more than a helpless victim in all of this — the President so deeply wanted a more progressive bill but was sadly thwarted in his noble efforts by those inhumane, corrupt Congressional ‘centrists.’ Right. The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives. The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start — the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry.“

A day after Senate Democrats kill Byron Dorgan’s non-importation amendment in order to preserve the administration’s back-door deal with Big Pharma, the indispensable Glenn Greenwald takes the Obama administration to task for the final Senate product on health care, which, suffice to say, is looking pretty far afield from the House bill. (And all the while, the bought and paid for Joe Lieberman grins like the Cheshire Cat.)

I was going to wait until year-in-review post week to put this up, but now’s as good a time as any: From civil liberties to this Senate health care fiasco, it’s hard to think of any arena where this administration’s first year hasn’t been a tremendous disappointment. (Regarding the former: I didn’t mention this here earlier, but the brazen audacity of this passage from the president’s war-is-peace Nobel Prize speech made me blanch: “We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor — we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it’s easy, but when it is hard.” Uh, your Justice Department is not upholding them, remember? Is the president even aware of his own civil liberties record?)

Anyway, I keep being reminded of this line from my Obama endorsement of January 2008: “There’s a possibility — maybe even a strong possibility — that he’ll end up a Tommy Carcetti-like president: a well-meaning reformer outmatched and buffeted to and fro by the entrenched forces arrayed against him.” Well, welcome to the Carcetti presidency, y’all. The only surprise so far for many of us is in how little he’s actually even tried to enact meaningful reforms. But I guess once the president surrounded himself with the exact same GOP-lite people we’d spent months trying to defeat in the Democratic primary, the writing should have been on the wall. This will not be change we can believe in. A New Day is not dawning. And the president is not really with us — We’re going to have to do the heavy lifting for reform next year without him.

Dog Woof, Cats Meow, Wags Tweet.

Hey all. As we approach the decade mark next month, the readership around here at GitM continues to dwindle, which is primarily my fault for not updating as much as I’d like. Nonetheless, if and when it gets quiet ’round here, I encourage you to also check out my Twitter feed, which is easier to update in the midst of more frantic weeks like last one. (Memo to myself: Columbus Day, and three-day-weekends in general, will mean a lot of speechifyin’ in Congress’ home districts.)

Yeah, I was skeptical about Twitter earlier in the year, but I’m definitely coming around. Within an hour of news of President Obama’s Nobel prize win, for example, (which I’m neither here nor there about — it seems goofy, yeah, but I was already down on Nobel anyway), there were dozens of wry and amusing quips going around the twitterverse. My favorite two were variations on “Obama, I’mma let you finish but Bono has been working his ass off for this!” and “Uh…did the Nobel committee just miss the fact that Obama bombed the f**king moon?!”

Another good example: the Baucus committee tanking the public option in late September brought on a similar flurry of bon mots: “Senators should be required to make the little cash register ‘ka-ching!” noise when they vote.” “Well the insurance Industry is looking forward to its Baucanalian Orgy.” “75% of Americans support #publicoption, but only 35% of the Senate Finance Cmittee support it.” “Health care industry must pay capital gains on Senate Finance Committee members this year as investment is cashed out.” Etc., etc.

Its immediate posting benefits aside, Twitter has definitely grown on me as a fertile hothouse environment for exactly this sort of choice, top-shelf snark.

Nobel Warming.

So, as you probably know, the Nobel prizes, that century-long boon from a notorious arms manufacturer‘s deathbed pangs of guilt, were announced over the past few days. As the surprise winner of the literature prize, Doris Lessing, best known for The Golden Notebook. (Profoundly ungracious about the news was lit-critic Harold Bloom: “Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable…fourth-rate science fiction.” Snob much, Prof. Bloom?) And, following in the footsteps of such well-regarded peacemongers as Charles Dawes, Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, and, of course, the inventor of dynamite himself, the Nobel Peace Prize goes to Al Gore, for his work in emphasizing the imminent catastrophe threatened by global climate change. “I want this prize to have everyone…every human being, asking what they should do.” Well, congratulations on the win, Mr. Vice-President. Hopefully, this will further encourage America and the world community to get serious about global warming. But please — please — don’t run.