Con science

A common error among English speakers is to confuse the words "conscious" and "conscience". Allan Hunt Badiner attempts not mere confusion, but complete indoctrination of the unconscious, on AlterNet (AlterNet: Can Barack Obama Become President?), in supporting Obama, a man who has excelled more at making a science out of conning, than exhibited a conscience. Writes Badiner:

With the campaign's starting gun only just fired, Obama is already perceived as a powerful threat to Hillary Clinton's well-funded political juggernaut and John Edwards' carefully planned strategies, and has emerged as the presumptive speaker for the conscience of the country in the 2008 presidential sweepstakes.



Many are excited just to be passionate again about a presidential campaign, even if it turns out be the classic brief dance of an underdog.

While Obama employs his silvery tongue to con the masses, Badiner resorts to the simpler right-wing tactic of brazen assertion: offer a falsehood boldly without attempting substantiation, in the hope that it will then be perceived as patently true. So we have Edwards' using a "planned strategy" while Obama speaks from the heart and to the conscience. Thus a leap of truth is accomplished over the trivial facts of Obama's recent pandering to the AIPAC, his vapid "bipartisan" rhetoric (why be partisans of truth and progress?). And if you bought that bit and continued, then surely you will be able to ingest, without choking, the notion that Obama (or his campaign) is an underdog. The underdog who, according to Badiner raised $1.3 million, not from the grassroots but:

Even sitting presidents can't always raise the $1.3 million taken in by the Obama campaign during a single fundraising event in Los Angeles on Feb. 20 sponsored by Hollywood moguls Steven Spielberg, Jeff Katzenberg and David Geffen.

And if one right-wing technique works, why not try another highly successful one? Racist and class stereotypes:

For many, Sen. Obama represents a modern and positive image of blackness. He is a worldly, well-educated man married to a well-educated professional black woman.

A masterstroke of a simultaneous insult to black and poor people, and yet another simple outrageous claim: that the non-representative Obama is the best representative of his group; and if they do not do well in a match-up against him, well it's their "image" that is to blame. We suppose. And as the use of right-wing technique might intimate, the climax, the final attack, that all this is preparing the reader for is an attack not on conservatives and religious nuts (the latter criticism could apply to Obama after all), but "intractable liberals":

A sizable percentage of the progressive sector may not be happy with any candidate who does not agree with them on every issue. They have already shown a surprising lack of concern for the political and practical consequences of their inflexibility. The following that Dennis Kucinich, and Ralph Nader enjoyed are cases in point. Intractable liberal voters are like window shoppers who feel most comfortable going home empty-handed and later whining that they couldn't find something they liked. They may have been as responsible for reelecting Bush as his hard-core conservative base.

Has America under George W. Bush dropped into an abyss of moral and economic bankruptcy? Sadly, this is what our nation now represents to the rest of the world. Perhaps the most groundbreaking aspect of an Obama presidency would be the message it sends globally: The post-Bush era of American governance has arrived.

For someone interested purely in effect issues (e.g: Iraq War) it might be unintelligible that a sizable percentage of progressives may not be happy with a candidate who does not agree with fundamental progressive principles. So it is these "intractable liberals", who support Nader and Kucinich, who are to blame for the poor showing of Gore and Kerry. This despite the lack of a Nader "threat" in 2004 and the simple fact that Kucinich is a candidate for the Democratic primaries, not the presidential election.

The "intractable liberals", that Badiner whines about, that support Nader and Kucinich are anything but "window-shoppers" or "whiners". Both leaders and a large part of their supporters have worked hard and without egregious compromises to create and sustain an unlikely and impossible movement. They were in the front-lines of the protest against the Iraq war (as a matter of principle) while the "tractable" liberals where deriding such protest or actively supporting the war. They (principled leftists) are aware of the difficulties of furthering their agenda, and that even the smallest successes are hard won. Those are the lessons learned from the history of left activism. They are in it for the long run, not "to win it" as Badiner and his kind are. If Badiner is looking for examples of "whining", he needs no more than a mirror -- as the passage above demonstrates: "Wah-wah ... intractable liberals are so inflexible. They won't let my posterboy win".

Badiner also adopts the fine tradition of the American right in considering the rest of the world a bunch of fools, or perhaps he presumes that they are no smarter than he is, and might choose to drink the Obama Kool Aid. Surely Palestinians will celebrate the coming humanism of American action after Obama's coronation, based on his stirring speech at the AIPAC?