Monday 8 March 2010

President Obama

"Even the face value meaning of his actions is missed because it cannot be grasped through the normative terms of American politics."
That's Martin McPhillips on why U.S. conservatives, not excluding those in the "Tea Party" movement, are unable to recognize President Obama as an existential threat in the same basic sense in which the Soviet Union was. The standard retort at this point would be Hanlon's Razor ("never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence"), but, to paraphrase J. Porter Clarke, it is sometimes impossible to tell sufficiently developed incompetence apart from malice.

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