I’m exploring not one but two personal firsts with this effort, so please bear with me. I will do my best to respond to any serious critiques/criticisms/etc if not this morning, then sometime over the weekend.

First, I am crossposting this at The Seminal at FDL. The original post is at Daily Kos. [I recently signed up for an account here, and this marks my first post. There is some discussion specific to particular conversation on Daily Kos. However, I feel like the underlying issues involved are universal enough to be worth sharing more broadly. You all are of course free to give feedback to the contrary!]

More materially, I am directly and openly calling out blackwaterdog’s efforts on the Rec-listed diary Boycotting *This* president? What a disgrace. What a shame.

I happen to think that diary is what is misguided and counterproductive, and I’m going to present that case below.

Being the anal retentive over-achiever I can be from time to time, I actually went back and re-read Kos’ guidelines on writing diaries. They’re good. There’s a reason we have rules (and by reason, I mean, beyond the fact that Kos Media, LLC, owns dailykos.com and thus Markos can do whatever he wants). My gut instinct, to put the callout in the diary title (#18 on the list), isn’t conducive to substantive, constructive criticism. If the site rules didn’t specifically mention that, I probably would have done it, and this effort wouldn’t have been as fruitful.

I say all that because in order for us to dialogue with each other, there has to be an understanding of the level of passion and urgency attached to the issues of our day. Those of us who disagree with Democratic leaders on certain, specific issues are not trying to undermine them or personalize the situation. We are actually trying desperately to keep the focus on the issues, to not personalize the situation. If you want to know some more thoughts along those lines from me, read my post last year, Our Disagreements aren’t about Obama.

Effectively, blackwaterdog’s framing tries to shift policy differences onto the field of personal attacks, employing emotional appeals rather than rational ones (pathos versus logos, if you want to make your English teachers proud), and adding pictures that say nothing about the policies. I don’t know if that effort is intentional or incidental; what is relevant is the outcome. We were basically called disgraceful and shameful. I have three words for blackwaterdog. Before you detail policy areas like those in the diary:

Know Your Shit

You see, I’m actually sympathetic to some concerns about the boycott on the DNC and Obama campaign. I think Jeffrey Feldman has a good take on this from his perspective. GLBTQ issues are not on my list of the top five or ten issues confronting our nation. We’ve got people being imprisoned, being killed, going hungry and homeless, etc. And that’s easy for me to say; I’m a comfortably straight male. Every state in the country recognizes my right to marry the woman of my dreams (as long, of course, as she’s not my sister or there are multiple women of my dreams).

But that also allows me a bit of emotional detachment, because gay rights activists have a point. In fact, it’s a point very similar to womens’ rights activists. And those advocating for the poor and the homeless and the imprisoned and all the forgotten, disposable groups whose combined sum is the margin of victory of the Democratic Party come election day. Those of us (relatively) comfortable, middle class white male folks have the luxury of time. What amazes me is how we can suppress our capacity for empathy so easily for Americans who don’t have that luxury. Sometimes this makes me sad.

Sometimes, it ticks me off.

Our side has to take the moral high ground. We have to employ reality-based assessments, not simply wait for the powers that be to tell us what to think, how to talk, and when to do it all. Otherwise, we might as well just be the GOP. I mean, the Bush Administration just finished up one of the most successful Presidencies in the history of the country. More wealth was redistributed, more wars started, more corporate bailouts handed out, more power concentrated, more democratic institutions undermined, than perhaps, ever in our nation’s history. W will go down as one of the worst Presidents in American history not because he was incompetent or stupid but due to all that his Administration accomplished, despite widespread public opposition and Democratic control of the House and/or Senate for some parts of his Presidency.

So, on to the issues.

Let’s see if i got it right: You’re boycotting this 10 MONTHS president, who inherited the greatest shitstorm since the days of FDR?

This captures two important, intermingled misconceptions about the length of time since inauguration being the relevant date and Obama not being responsible for anything that happened during the Bush Administration. First, Obama has been the de facto leader of the country for more than ten months. If you simply look at the time from June 2008, his effective acceptance of the Democratic nomination, to inauguration day in January 2009, that’s over seven months his advisers had to sketch out broad plans for how to approach the various issues of the day. 2008 was a landslide; and even if it wasn’t, even if the election was a squeaker, any responsible politician would have been contemplating the future policy options as well as the present campaigning. Furthermore, there were present responsibilities of governing as a Senator, already one of the most powerful positions in the country.

This statement is particularly perplexing because Senator Obama went out of his way to support the two major pieces of legislation in 2008 that exemplified everything wrong about the aforementioned greatest shitstorm since FDR. I am referring of course to FISAAA and EESA, comprising such approaches as retroactive immunity for corporate lawbreaking, unconstitutional warrentless wiretaps, and bailouts for incompetent and fraudulent management teams. That’s a glimpse into precisely why we’re in the mess we’re in. It’s hard to pick two pieces of legislation that better describe our mess, and Senator Obama provided key support for them in the height of a presidential campaign that followed a primary environment in which Obama talked specifically about retroactive immunity and financial reform. Or take another issue. Senator Obama didn’t talk about Afghanistan being a dumb war. He talked about escalating the war in the Af-Pak region. He didn’t call for removing economic sanctions against Iran. He wrote in Foreign Affairs about the need for sanctions.

Bush, and the GOP leaders in Congress in conjunction with the top officials in the Federal Reserve system, is ultimately responsible for our present situation. In fact, one of my more favorite phrases for our time is the Republican Recession. But the more complex, reality-based assessment is that on a broad array of issues, Obama wasn’t offering a countering voice. Rather, he was supporting the actual legislative actions, individual actors, and/or DC mindset that were so egregious. The President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is now the Secretary of the Treasury. Lawrence Summers and Gary Gensler, for some bizarre reason, have jobs in the Obama Administration. Even the Secretary of Defense is a Bush appointee. When the Administration is filled with people involved in creating, overlooking, and/or covering up the shitstorm, you don’t get blanket immunity simply by stating that the previous guy is responsible. Particularly when a key rhetorical component of your whole campaign was about change.

In addition, the more strictly one holds the previous guy responsible because he was the President at the time, the more responsibility one must symmetrically apply to the current President to change course since he now wields this same powerful office.

This president who’s multi-tasking between dozens of crazy issues?

Sure, people multitask. Presidents in particular. That’s why we give Presidents a huge benefit of the doubt. You can’t do everything at once. But you can do a lot of things. A lot of things have been done. It’s absurd to say that prioritization of issues and actions taken on issues can’t be criticized on the grounds that there are lots of issues. In fact, this benefit of the doubt is really important. Many of us were calling for the impeachment of President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for policies carried out precisely by the likes of those currently running the Fed, Treasury, and Defense Department. This act you’re so up-in-arms about is simply withholding money from the DNC for a period of time when money, quite frankly, isn’t really that important anyway.

This president who spent his entire political capital fighting for health care reform that no one could achieve in decades?

Have you heard about the financial bailouts that transferred trillions of dollars to the very thieves and incompetents who wrecked our system? The multi-tiered justice system the Administration is developing with regard to detainees? Are you aware that Obama is infinitely more popular than Bush?

This president who completely transformed US image in the world in less than 10 months?

See, good things can happen! How does this indict people agitating for the President to do more good things?

This president who actually prevented a real economic catastrophe?

I’m not sure if this meant something different from the first comment. This is wildly off the mark. The Obama Administration has virtually identical policies to the Bush Administration when it comes to our ‘economic catastrophe’. Even some of the same people are literally involved. In a strict sense, the immediate catastrophe (collapse of investment banking/credit markets in September/October 2008) was averted by forking over trillions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street, ie, ‘socializing losses’ so that stability would ‘trickle down’ from the rich to the rest of us. That policy was designed by Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, Hank Paulson, and Loyd Blankfein, to name some key actors. It’s a stop gap measure, a band-aid, to kick the can down the road.

What actions do you have in mind that Obama did either as a Senator or as President? The government engaged in direct theft, of the worst kind, theft from the We the People to the elites. Obama was not the primary driver of such theft. Rather, he went along, and has now appointed multiple advisers to top spots who are responsible for creating our mess, overlooking our mess, and/or covering up our mess.

This president who see his face with Hitler mustache every day?

Yeah, it’s pretty disgusting. Some of us wish the President would listen to those of us who don’t aide and abet the Hitler mustache crowd (ie, the corporate interests who want the Administration to fail, not succeed).

This president who gets more death threats than any president in history?

Again, this is a very sad fact of our country. We have spent years demonizing and dehumanizing the brown peoples of the planet. We bomb them, we kidnap them, we imprison them, we torture them; we even do that to their children. And on top of that, we transfer law enforcement away from legitimate crimes, like domestic terrorism and fraud, to go on these wild goose chases interrogating and imprisoning lots of evil nonwhite foreigners. We let our society devolve to the point where even country singers from Texas get death threats. The Secret Service and FBI and other relevant agencies should make decisions about the President’s safety without having to worry about the cost.

But if we want to analyze the deeper problems, we’ve got to deal with the fact that we allowed the simmering and festering of a culture where it’s acceptable at the highest levels of government, media, business, entertainment, and academia to openly berate and dehumanize nonwhites. What did we think was going to happen to a nonwhite Democrat? That the people saying we don’t need to worry about imprisoning Iraqis or Afghanis would all of a sudden see Obama as one of them?

This president who is so brave, that despite all the threats and the hate, he gives 9/11 terrorists a civil trial – something all you righteous were crying for since his first day in office – but the diary about it can hardly make the saint rec list.

This is a great development if it applied universally. Indeed, the President would enjoy widespread, enthusiastic support if we announced that all people currently detained would enjoy their rights to a speedy trial in a public court. And if we released their children from imprisonment so we couldn’t threaten to kill their children if they don’t cooperate. This episode should be one of the most bone-chilling, soul crushing, world-upending stories you’ve ever run across. We abduct children to be tortured and possibly killed as leverage against their parents.

Again, Obama didn’t create these policies. Rather, the Administration is continuing these policies and covering them up. It is impossible to emphasize how anti-American a multi-tiered justice system is; it is the antithesis of equality, of the rule of law, of American leadership in the world. The Administration has a clear and direct line of culpability on this issue. It is the Administration itself that is driving discussions about ‘preventive detention’ and cherry picking which detainees will be tried under what circumstances.

This president, who inherited two fucked-up wars, who’s quietly leaving Iraq and is tortured looking for some kind of a reasonable end in Afghanistan?

Again, inherited is a strong word. Obama has been in Congress for the majority of the Iraq and Afghan wars. Obama forced an ‘emergency’ appropriations bill through Congress earlier this year to spend yet more money on these wars. How many troops have we withdrawn from Iraq? And we’ve sent more troops to Afghanistan, while expanding the theater to now be ‘Af-Pak’. The military budget next year will be larger than during the Bush years. Contractor abuses continue and we’ve yet to see any audits of the military sector of the government.

I can go on and on, but honestly, i’m too disgusted.

That’s a difficult sentiment to follow. We can disagree, respectfully (or, not respectfully), about appropriate policies. We can say that TARP is good or bad, that we should or should not deploy more troops to Afghanistan, that preventive detention is a power Presidents should possess or should not possess, that change of failed officials is healthy or disruptive, and so on and so forth.

But don’t act like the Administration isn’t involved in these issues, like Obama is some newbie to Washington, like there is no power in the bully pulpit, like the Rahm Emanuels of the world can’t handle a little criticism.

This isn’t personal. This isn’t about Barry or Barack or BO. This is about implementing the best policies, the best policies for our country and the best policies for energizing Democratic constituents to continue voting for Democrats.

Groups that feel like they’re being ignored have every right to use (nonviolent) tactics that get attention. In that vain, I am speaking out today directly and passionately in support of those involved in this action. They’re not trying to undermine or disrespect the President.

They’re fighting for their rights. We should celebrate that.

How childish and spoiled and selfish can you be?

Or, I guess, call people childish, spoiled, and selfish. There’s that approach, too. Who is that going to convince?