The swirl of speculation, invective and silliness reached truly epic proportions this week, hence my title.

The idea is this: Can President Obama magically instill the fear of a dragon in Republicans bent on destroying the republic, or will a credulous, untutored America, like the Woolly Mammoth that required grasslands when climate change brought forest, lumber into extinction?

The back cover of the September issue of In These Times presents a tale that everyone should read: “The Manchurian President: Chicago’s Commie Liberal Puppet” by Chip Berlet. The title evokes McCarthyism for good reason. As Berlet says for openers: “America is in the midst of a 21st century witch hunt. A loose-knit network of right-wing ideological strategists, Republican Party operatives and media demagogues generate the odious smears. Their goal is to stymie the Obama administration’s policy initiatives, capture Congress in November and unseat President Barack Obama in 2012. This propagandizing echoes the scapegoating of liberals, union and community organizers, peace activists, gay people, Jews and people of color during the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy era.”

Berlet recalls that flyers claiming Martin Luther King Jr. was the dupe of a communist conspiracy were distributed nationwide, depicting liberals as either tools or agents of a plot to build collectivism and global governance. FDR had been labeled a fascist, now Obama is tagged as both Hitler and Stalin. Yet Kennedy, who famously exhorted “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” was never accused of submitting the individual to the state.

A new book entitled: The Manchurian President accuses Obama of ties to communists, socialists “and other anti-American extremists”. According to its right-wing authors, Obama was “groomed for office by a nest of socialists, communists and other dangerous radicals based in Hyde Park, the South Side neighborhood that includes the University of Chicago.”

According to a public relations consultant quoted by Berlet, Obama’s opponents cannot attack him openly on race or on his qualifications, so they “map out ‘who-knows-who’”(known as guilt by association).

In these efforts, the conspirators stumble all over the fateful combination of “socialist” and “democratic”, boastfully condemning the idea of “social democratic organization based on the idea of local autonomy”.

The right-wing version of local autonomy is ‘it’s every man for himself’, while the social-democratic idea favors the basic notion of the solidarity of the group toward the individual. The two political currents criticizing Obama are like two careening bumper cars in a theme park, and we can’t foresee whether the left’s magic dragon will win out over the fate of the right’s woolly mammoth, the danger being that some in the public will confuse the two.

You would have thought Robert Gibbs was referring to card-carrying communists – or at least socialists – when he lashed out at the political class he owes his and his boss’s job to.

How far can knee-jerk professions of innocence go? (“Change? Who said anything about change? Change to what? Canadian health care??”)

How ruthlessly can our president – who showed he could be ruthless in Chicago, thereby reassuring us before we elected him, that he would put those indispensable political skills to good use Washington – throw us off the train instead?

With Gibb’s fatal words, the President metamorphosed into a clone of one of those right-wing homophobes who turn out to be gay. Trans-lation: Obama knows that the forces arrayed against him are invincible, to the extent that his life is on the line if he makes one false move (Fidel Castro is not the only one who fears for his survival). He cannot follow in FDR’s footsteps and submit legislation to Congress while wielding a big stick; he can only survive if he pretends that he wouldn’t consider imple-menting his progressive promises to those who elected him.

The worst of it all is that this is a forty-year-old story. Read Andrew Bacevich’s new book: Washington Rules and you’ll find this, page 32:

“What Americans mistook for politics – the putative rivalry that pitted Democrats against Republicans, the wrangling between Congress and the White House – actually amounted to little more than theater, he implied. Behind the curtain, a consensus forged of ambition, access, money, fevered imagination, and narrow institutional interests determined the nation’s actual priorities. Although Eisenhower was about to surrender his office to a handsome young successor who promised dramatic change – neither the first nor last president to make such a commitment – he knew that John Kennedy’s personal qualities, however attractive, counted for little given the forces arrayed against him. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist,” the outgoing president warned. “We should take nothing for granted.”

Kennedy’s election marked the fatal moment when the left gave in to Washington’s consensus that America should maintain its superpower status through war. Kennedy got sucked in first to the Bay of Pigs, then to the Cuban missile Crisis, and finally to Vietnam. The same forces that manipulated “the most powerful man in the world”, saw to it that the left survived only as a convenient tool of ‘fevered’ imaginings of (always) ‘clear and present dangers’. Now it is probably too late for Americans bereft of their homes and jobs to organize to obtain the rights that were grandiloquently included in the Constitution, a hundred years before the word socialism was invented. The populist but not for the people Tea Party is beating them to it.

There is no “professional left” but there is a professional class of writers and pundits who, in exchange for upper class salaries, occupy a niche reserved for those who do not wish to be called conservatives – or even liberals. most of them do not even wish to be called progressives! Oh, there is a progressive caucus in the congress, and Raul Grijalva does it proud. But without Wellstone, it doesn’t amount to the hill of beans that Robert Redford immortalized in The Milagro Beanfield War.

While European Marxism has renewed itself into an green, decentralized, no-growth movement, our “professional leftists” have been left behind.

Did you get a frantic letter from Senator John Kerry, on behalf of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee? The usual plea for ever more money comes with a separate sheet warning that: “Republicans will do anything to see president Obama fail, and america will pay the price. The headline on the reverse quotes Rush Limbaugh saying: “We need to wipe them out!” Following are quotes from Tea Party darling Rand Paul, and other Republicans Pat Toomey, Roy Blunt and Linda McMahon.

Coincidentally, a former NAACP employee who years ago sent a white farmer to a white lawyer, so he could be “helped by one of his kind” lost her department of agriculture job for doing so after mentioning the incident in a speech. The TV, as CNN says, is ‘all over the story’, and the Tea Party is feeling vindi-cated after the blooper by popular radio host Mark Williams.

Both incidents bring to my mind the Russian Revolution.

“Whhaat?” you’ll say. Not Hitler? “I thought the danger we’re in with the Tea Party and the local militias is fascism!”

True, but I’m referring to how various unde-sirable events, however different they may be, come about. In the early 20th century there was a Russian Social Democratic Party whose majority was referred to as the Bolsheviks (for big) while the minority were called the Men-sheviks, for small, or minority. The latter were more inclined to cooperate with the Liberals at a time when most Russian activists broadly agreed on the need for reform.

BThe Bolsheviks staged a successful revolu-tion in Russia because the Mensheviks failed to stand up to the Liberals.

I’m drawing this picture with a broad stroke, because what’s important here is not the detail – about which some readers will inevitably nitpick – but the gist.

Not so long ago entire populations were cowed by the warning: ‘The Russians are coming!’ Now we’re told: “The terrorists are coming!”

But the Democratic Party’s frantic appeals for help are like closing the barn door after the horse got away: It’s not more money they need, it’s the courage to form a Social Democratic Party that will stand up to the Republicans and deal with terrorism with a cool head.

Before the Tea Party takes over.

But they’re no longer about Cleopatras nose.

If we look at the world from a distance, instead of a series of highly differentiated conflicts, we see one big conflict that pits haves against have-nots, and simultaneously, license against sexual repression.

The buzz today is all about maybe talking to the Taliban. But we do not see the Taliban to, say, the way we saw the Germans during the second world war: essentially people of the same culture who had fallen prey to a national delusion of grandeur. We know the world the Taliban are defending tooth and nail is different in fundamental ways from ours, so how can we talk about leaving the Afghan people to their mercy?

I should say “the Afghan women”. For this is a war about license versus sexual repression. In the West, which is organized for the unlimited growth of capital, everything is a means to that end, and sexuality is tailored accordingly: men and women must constantly be concerned with looking young and if possible beautiful in order to attract a succession of mates. To that end, they purchase beauty products ever improved upon and clothing that will be out of fashion next year. And when women – and men – serve advertising to earn a paycheck, they become full-time sex symbols. The feminists denounced this long ago, but they got nowhere with this aspect of women’s lib because they didn’t realize that we live in a culture whose ultimate purpose is to increase returns on capital. Anything that achieves this is impervious to reform.

This is the nexus between the revolt of the have-nots (the Shiites), against ‘the West’, and the fierce determination of the repressive Sunni Wahabbi, represented by the Taliban, to preserve the sexual slavery of women. The differences between these two groups have us in a state of utter confusion: the greater conflict in the Middle East and Central Asia – which has recently spread to the Horn of Africa – is about the unequal distribution of wealth. In those areas where fundamentalist Sunni Islam holds sway, it is also about maintaining the subjection of women, considered as possessions.

Given that the Taliban fall into this latter category, we could possibly persuade them to abandon the wealth provided by poppies for that which could be extracted from high priced minerals – apparently ’discovered’ in the nick of time, but perhaps in fact the heretofore unavowed reason for the eight-year Afghan war. In that case, the liberation of Afghanistan’s women would have to wait until the influx of wealth from that economic bonanza overwhelms tradition, as is beginning to happen in other Muslim countries.

The fight for equity that is foremost in the Shia dominated areas, (Iran, and recently Iraq, where the long suffering Shia majority are now in power), is not that of equity in the traditional Marxist sense, but as Hezbollah’s leader Nasrallah makes clear, in the sense of the Radical Enlightenment about which Princeton’s Jonathan Israel writes.

And so, in reality, our foreign wars mirror our domestic situation: the United States is increasingly polarized between a growing minority of Christian fundamentalists, whose women are expected to remain in the home, often schooling their children to shield them from the secular education system, while workers, blacks, Latinos, single mothers, and those with special needs begin at last to organize events such as the Second US Social Forum recently held in Detroit, where residents are inventing new forms of urban self-sufficiency instead of waiting for government to solve society’s problems. At the very same time, however, Tea Partyers are pushing back against these initiatives, also in the name of not waiting for government to do so.
Monday night Larry King rebroadcast his recent interview with Bill Maher, who in a rare moment of passion, said what American progressives are thinking on this Independence Day: “There is no Tea Party equivalent for us. We have two parties, but only one politics, and while the Tea Party is pushing the Republicans to the far right, no one is pushing the Democrats to the left.”

While Christian fundamentalist women do not cover their heads, they are expected to remain in the home – and to vote for a politics of inequality based on a consumerism that relies heavily on fashion models and wrestling match sex queens.

Talking to the Taliban and Hezbollah, is only likely to be productive if and when “the West” drops the capital W that implies superiority and accepts the inanity of chasing after oil and gas in order to continue a way of life that besides demeaning one of life’s great pleasures, will render the planet inhospitable to humans.

It took the admission by BP that it may ultimately not be able to plug the leak in the Gulf for President Obama to commit major funding for solar power. Energy Secretary Chu fears that we might be reaching a tipping point on climate change, yet he suggested we could save a lot by adopting tougher energy standards for new buildings, implying that the consumer society these represent could continue in the face of a point of no return for the planet.

Replace Allah and Jehovah with nature and it’s clear that our conflict with Islam is importantly about how we live our individual lives. Before we can hope to see them move toward more personal freedom, we have to reconsider what we do with our own.

During the Vietnam war, American draft resisters found refuge in Canada. Those days are long gone. I’m not con-vinced that it’s just be-cause Canada has a Conservative Prime Minister that the country has emulated so much of our Homeland Security provisions, extending them to cover domestic dissent.

Whatever the reason, this much is certain: Canada is now more than ever an extension of the United States, and while it is probable that the North American Free Trade Agreement has something to do with it, the more deeper reasons are more worrisome. Sooner or later, the conflictive situation with Mexico will make it part of a North American Colossus – a desperate but probably futile effort to meet the challenges of China, India and Brazil.

What should make us take notice is that this is part of a larger conflictive situation: the grass roots of the world (no longer the workers or proletarians of the world), are finally getting it together. As it reports on efforts of the G8 and the G20 in Toronto to save the world economic system, the American media ignores the fact that 15,000 people are camping in tents in the industrial wasteland of Detroit, a predominantly black city that is finding new ways to live with the newly liberated land. Much less are Americans aware of similar experiments going on across their country – and nost others.

Today, in the tight credit market, CNN revealed to its viewers the existence of micro-finance, a concept for which a Bangladeshi, Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank that makes loans to peasants, mainly women, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Only ten years behind, CNN! Bravo! A few weeks ago your founder, Ted Turner, long ago ousted, was given a tour of the Atlanta headquarters after a remake, and when he was asked by your friendliest anchor, Fredricka Whitfield, whether he had any unfulfilled wishes, he said he had always wished that CNN would cover more foreign news. Alas!

The fact that political junkies can turn to the internet hardly makes up for the failure of the Mainstream Media (or MSM as it is known), to bridge the oceans that have for two hundred years complacently separated Americans from the rest of the messy world. Why? Because even the most highly regarded on-line resources such as Huffington Post, Truth-Digg, Common Dreams, to name but a few, are mainly concerned with who said what to whom on the domestic front.

I’m lucky to receive internet newsletters and blogs in other lan-guages that I read, and although many of these, like their American counterparts, are mainly concerned with national issues, there are a growing number of on-line news publications that have an international focus, and some of them make the effort to publish in several languages.

This is not where I meant to go with this blog, so the names of these multi-lingual newsletters will have to wait for my next blog. I want to get back to the idea of a North American colossus, in which Mexican manpower plays a similar role to that of China’s rural population.

The two sides in the immigration debate are irreconcilable as things now stand: But one could imagine the creation of a political entity similar to the European Union, that would link the U.S. with Canada and Mexico in such a way as to get around that problem and create a more competitive economy. One would have to hope that such an entity would not more closely resemble the authoritarian Chinese regime than the European.

Alas, it’s not a fairy tale, but an overwhelming reality that day by day is dismantling the American Fairy Tale of shining progress.

Like the hero of the musical “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, BP’s greed has not kept up with its capabilities, and now it can only run to and fro trying to stop the damage from the forces it has unleashed.

But that’s not all: the mouse BP calls its human employees “little piggies”, applying a cost/benefit analysis to the provision of safe as opposed to hazardous buildings for them to work in, oblivious to the fact that if the pigs decide to get together, they would be able to whip the mice into line.

Smarmy Democratic congressmen are starting to compare the president’s response to the Gulf Oil catastrophe to President Bush’s handling of Katrina. This is so unfair that it’s hard to believe: maybe they’re trying to take the wind out of any sails the Republicans might still have.

Senators who believe the congressional dome imbues them with special wisdom call for “the government” to take over the rescue of the Louisiana and Florida coasts: but as the Coast Guard talking head admitted yesterday, the government is not in possession of the necessary technology. In the words of the lady White House environmental advisor stuck with responding, it can only provide “the best brains”.

Meanwhile, no pundit can afford to state the obvious: we’ve gone from being the slaves of technology to being its victims.

After five decades of assuming that President Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex was mainly about the military, we now awaken to the fact that the industrial complex is perfectly capable of wrecking havoc on the world all on its own.

The Gulf oil disaster gives President Obama yet another sterling (sic) occasion to break with his handlers and chart a new course before it’s too late. Worse than the facts on the ground is the knowledge that this cannot happen. It calls for a wide-ranging discussion on the role of government in our times.

At various times since I began this blog, more than three years ago, I’ve suggested that America’s days as the dominating world power are numbered. Though I may have been one of the first to perceive this, the notion is spreading.

A recent blog on the site , by two Washington insiders, is entitled “Iran, the Post-American World and the Security Council’s Looming Legitimacy Crisis”. Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett note that by offering to refuel Iran’s research reactor, Turkey and Brazil, “two rising economic powers from what we used to call the ‘Third World’ have now asserted decisive political influence on a high-profile international security issue.” Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan is even questioning the Security Council’s credentials for dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue.

When North Caucasus groups send suicide bombers to Moscow at the same time as right-wing militias are arrested for plotting to kill law enforcement officers in the U.S.,

When Juarez, on the U.S. Mexican border, becomes the most violent city on the planet;

When young people in Philadelphia use their communications devices to converge by the hundreds on certain popular streets (without anyone guessing as to why);

When increasingly, elections all over the world are contested, the latest being the Iraqi election;

When the most powerful nation in the world counts a growing minority of citizens who resent having to share a basic right to health care;

When all these things are in the news on any given day, we have to recognize that the entire world is in turmoil, and try to see through an apparent thicket to the trees.

Several factors come immediately to mind (but my readers will suggest others, no doubt): the existence, since 1945, of the atomic threat, which has increased over time with ever more lethal weapons; increased ease of communication between individuals; television and internet bringing reality in distant places to increasing numbers of people;

The growing desire for people rendered powerless by the above to live amongst like-minded Others whether for religious, national or sexual reasons – a powerlessness undiminished by the availability of mind-numbing drugs – causes rebellions against governments and ruling elites who place gain above psychological comfort.

Forcing a compromise in Afghanistan will not solve this problem. If it happens, it will be a dent in the wall of Other refusal – while we continue to send un-manned drones over Pakistan, and the Israeli government continues to defy world opinion and increasingly, the opinion of American taxpayers.

Refusal of Otherness is the umbrella category that encompasses all the elements of a world crisis.

(This blog should have appeared a few days ago. For some reason after I uploaded it, it got lost. Sorry.)

Something is happening to the American political ethos when members start shouting in the hallowed chambers of Congress.

I can remember of visit to the U.S. in 1991 when Congress was debating whether to go to war against Iraq after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I was living in France at the time, used to seeing the French parliament in all its disorderly conduct. The polite yet passionate debate over the war struck me as the epitome of civilized behavior, something the French still had to learn.

Well, all that was very relative, as I have since realiz-ed. The reason why the French (and other) parliaments get into heated arguments is because their members have profound ideological differences. The reason why the American Congress has remained staid and dignified is that its members espouse essentially the same ideology. That ideology goes under the label of non-ideology, but there is no such thing: the liberal ideology is that of free-market capitalism. It has a pedigree just like communism, socialism, or fascism.

By claiming to be non-ideological, our political class implies that ideologies are bad, whatever they are, hence keeping all competing ideologies at bay.

Now something has shifted in the seemingly immutable tectonic plates of our political world: the effort to bring American health care within striking distance of the rest of the developed world – and even some underdeveloped countries – has shattered the carefully constructed myth that politics can be non-ideological. The proof: a Republican member of Congress called the President a liar during his State of the Union Speech, and yesterday, during the final debate on health care, a member of the opposition shouted that Bart Stupak was a “baby killer”.

The President has mentioned several times of late that there are “profound ideological differences” between the Democrats and the Republicans, all the while claiming that he is not an ideologue.

That insurmountable contradiction is due to the President’s conviction has that people can be “nudged” into doing what is right: behavioral politics. The furies unleashed by the right – of which we are seeing only the tip of the iceberg – are proof that the chasm is too wide between those with progressive ideas and those opposed to such ideas for this country to be reformed by nudging.

In politics there has always been and will always be a left and a right, regardless of how these ends of the spectrum are designated with respect to any existing government. (In the Soviet Union under a communist regime, the “left” was the liberal-oriented opposition; in Iran today, the same is true of those who oppose the right-wing mullahs.) Left is generally understood to mean more free-dom from the power apparatus, and in the twenty-first century it also means more solidarity, a recognition that individuals, while valuing freedom, require the support of the larger community to fully benefit from their individual freedom.

In a world of six going on seven billion inhabitants, solidarity can no longer be carried out on a neighborly basis: it has become one of the tasks of government. Those who are determined to deprive America’s less advantaged of health care fail to accept this reality. Their opposition is so visceral that it has broken through the barrier of respectability built up over the decades since Americans had a Progressive Party to counter the power of big business.

If the President learns only one thing from this battle – which is not yet over – it is that he should have taken the bull by the horns and drafted a “government takeover” of the health system, meaning simply that care would not be subject to profit. The battle would hardly have been more virulent than the one he has been through, for what is at best a first step. Because now the myth that we have a non-ideological system has been exposed.