Here is Joan Walsh in a meditation on the Debt Ceiling debate, a roundabout with plenty of stops along the way, to bring as many political actors into this intellectually messy, nearly historically incoherent, and interminable essay. I am grateful that to have finished this 2,212 word monster and learned some interesting things, so that my time wasn’t completely wasted. One such ‘fact’ is that the President believes that the Huffington Post is ‘The Left’ or represents ‘The Left’: Ms. Huffington lost whatever credibility she had with that political faction upon the sale of her site to AOL, and with the subsequent dismissal of all those ‘citizen journalists’ she once praised as the key to an emancipation from the old political paradigm of left and right, that afflicts our political culture. It played out that Ms. Huffington was not really ‘an entrepreneur of ideas’ but just another acolyte of Mr. Milton Friedman looking for a way up in the pecking order of Corporate America. She was shrewd, careful and rather brilliant in annexing the lead under the banner of ‘Progressivism’; neither Left nor Right but transcending both to arrive at the election of Mr. Obama. Ms. Huffington was very effective at helping to shape the politics of 2008.
As to the question of Fredrick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation debate Ms. Walsh has been involved in politics long enough to know that the shaping of public debate, which is simply the practice of effective political propaganda, is the tool of all politicians. The issue is not her revelatory history lesson about what actually happened, but how President Obama was rhetorically able to give an historical frame to his political position as superior, as patriotic, as historically justifiable, even inevitable. To understand it in this context makes it comprehensible in political terms, although Ms. Walsh’s points are well taken, they seem to miss the political point entirely.
Political Observer
StephenKMackSD's Blog 