There is a fascinating yet repellent movie called “The Rules of Attraction” that I end up getting sucked into every time I see it on TV. The movie features an entire cast playing against type including Fred Savage shooting heroin into his foot (now he is part of “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia”, so we were probably seeing the REAL Fred, after all).
One part of the movie features the “hero” or a better word is “protagonist” of the film when he visits a local, unhinged drug dealer to whom he owes money. The protagonist tells the dealer that he “needs” him, because he can help move the drugs on campus at a big markup. With this line, the dealer says…
“I Need You Like I Need an A**hole on my Elbow” (you can probably guess this is the still from the movie).
And why is this on Chicago Boyz? Because THIS is an accurate summary of what Obama is going to do to the left wing blog-erati that helped get him elected. He does not NEED them anymore, and he is going to prove it. Many of the left-wing folks are jabbering about the fact that Obama is keeping Gates as defense secretary and appointing a Wall Street lifer as secretary of the Treasury, and seeming to be bi-partisan rather than lashing out at people like Lieberman who seemed to side with the Republicans.
Obama is smart enough (hopefully) to know that those people are useful on the way up, but listening to them now is political suicide. The country is wide in the middle, and shallow on the ends, and where are these people going to go, anyways?
Obama also has the advantage that he isn’t a white male Democrat, not from a union or other known power base. Those people, like Edwards and Kerry, have to keep “proving” how liberal they are from time to time, like a litmus test. For obvious reasons, Obama doesn’t have to “prove” anything to anyone about how liberal he is.
So, in the immortal words of the drug dealer in “The Rules of Attraction”, he needs them like he needs an…
Was that fred savage? I thought it was his brother.
Indeed, him nominating a former REAGAN guy (volcker) to the post of chairman to the recoverty advisory board was pretty much the proof that the Kos’s of the world are shouting into a toilet as far as real world issues are concerned. Thank god he kept Gates – that was a big one for me.
Looks like Obama doesn’t need Rod Blagojevich, either. ;^)
To some extent, Obama represents those who expect to profit at the intersection of business and government. These include people who will parlay a government post into a later private-sector job, also those who are now in the private sector and will use government to gain an advantage over competitors. (The same would be true of any left-liberal administration except for the most extreme.)
Here’s an interesting comment by Buddy Larsen at Roger Simon’s blog:
“what Promoguy is getting at starting at #6 is that the interlocking of corporate & government directorship (a 1920s Italian innovation, the new modernist fascism’s commercial expression) answers the question of beggar-thy-neighbor mercantilism (search Smoot-Hawley) in secret rather than at the ballot box. Not only the freeman right but also the ‘real’ left, the Steinbeck and Dos Passos and Lincoln Brigade kind of left, ought to be horrified, as their straw man –wars and repressions ginned up in secret by international profiteers –is as we speak being hooked up to the machinery in Dr. Frankenstein’s old castle laboratory.”
Now we no longer have to badmouth Obama and so we can turn to the Left and go after them. Alas, Obama, for many of us was never the “socialist” that so many conservatives believe but rather a centrist…Raise your hand if you like him now!!!
Nope. Still don’t like him. I’m finding him to be a bit more pragmatic than I expected, but I still don’t trust him, nor do I believe that he isn’t a socialist.
Ditching them as soon as he gets into power… isnt that the traditional way to treat brownshirts?
This is daydreaming. Nothing has happened yet. BHO is not the President yet. He’s positioning, making deals, consolidating, lining things up.
If we’re lucky, he’ll be another inneffectual leftist ala Jimmy Carter. But I’m starting to see two shadowy images that may presage some difficult times ahead—
One, he’s revelling in this FDR comparison, and talking the kind of big programmatic stuff we haven’t seen since the last FDR imitator launched the Great Society, along with a few other things, both good and bad, that are still reverberating through the culture; and,
Two, the recent revelations about the Governor of Illinois, and the well-known cess poolery of Chicago politics in general, remind me of a contemporary of FDR who also aspired to the presidency.
“All The King’s Men” was on the other day, the original with Broderick Crawford. If you haven’t seen it, or seen it lately, take the time. Somehow, it seems so familiar…
Hell, we might be better off with him moving right than with McCain moving left. (I can’t decide if I’m serious about this or not.)
O’s apparent limited understanding of important aspects of the real world are worrying (I mean, some of the adolescent comments he’s made about the economy….geeze) but this might be offset, to some extent anyway, by an awareness of his weaknesses leading to good or practical personnel choices.
No that isn’t Fred Savage. It is the drug dealer “Rupert” played Clifton Collins who is a big character actor, I guess.
I was waiting for the brown shirts comment… a bit harsh but that’s what I get for posting on politics.
This is the only fun libertarians / conservatives will have… watching him enrage the looney left. All else is downhill.
Well lefties did get their way in one area. Guess who led the temper tantrum.