I am currently attempting to eat my own weight in skittles.

Of all the explanations for Barack Obama's Nobel peace prize, the one that rang truest came from Nicolas Sarkozy. "It sets the seal on America's return to the heart of all the world's peoples." In other words, this was Europe's way of saying to America, "We love you again", like those weird renewal-of-vows ceremonies couples have after a rough patch.

Now Europe and the US are officially reunited, it seems appropriate to consider whether this is necessarily a good thing. The Nobel committee, which awarded the prize for Obama's embrace of "multilateral diplomacy", is evidently convinced that US engagement on the world stage is a triumph for peace and justice. I'm not so sure. After nine months in office, Obama has a clear track record as a global player. Again and again, US negotiators have chosen not to strengthen international laws and protocols but to weaken them, often leading other rich countries in a race to the bottom.

Klein goes on to highlight a rapid-fire list of examples: from global warming, to racism, to human rights, to international financial regulation. Put them all together, and it's a damning picture of a center-right policy agenda that's precisely what one might have expected from the elder Bush. And I seriously doubt if one Obama supporter in a hundred had this in mind when they voted for "change we can believe in." Problem is, with our total failure media, I seriously doubt if one Obama supporter i a hundred even knows that this policy record exists.

Sauce

“You know, I’m amused. I can’t tell you how many foreign leaders who are heads of center-right governments say to me, I don’t understand why people would call you socialist, in my country, you’d be considered a conservative.”
-- President Obama

Shit, I've been saying it for months.

Preface: I actually enjoy the film Red Dawn for what it is: cheap cinema fare. I don't take any wider social message from it, nor do I view it as a cautionary tale. It was never realistic, and I didn't realize until quite recently that morans actually view this movie as a (once?) realistic possibility. Don't drink the Kool-Aid.

Call me a godless, gunless, pussified liberal, but I'll never be able to comprehend the lingering appeal of a film based in part on the notion that scores of Soviet armored divisions might somehow invade North America via the ALCAN Highway. On second thought, that's likely among the more plausible details from Red Dawn. At any rate, here's Lance Mannion, in the midst of a wider meditation on the implausibility of seeing the film as vital either to the era or to Patrick Swayze's career:

Red Dawn may have been an enjoyable popcorn movie . . . but taking it seriously either as a work of art or a political cautionary tale or even as a shoot-em-up on par with the best westerns or war movies is like saying that your favorite Star Wars movie was Return of the Jedi because of the Ewoks.

Brilliant. Though to make use of a cliched formulation, this is a bit unfair to the Ewoks, since it's hard to imagine that their supporters -- whom I'm sure exist somewhere -- would be so unselfconscious as to name Iraq War missions after them. Then again, the film itself is a fabulously shitty expression of unselfconscious appropriation; as Devid Denby noted in his great and fittingly brutal review at the time, the film borrows from the actual legends and history of partisan -- and frequently communist -- resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II. I won't speculate on how a film like that could have evolved into a cult classic within a military as dominant as that of the post-cold war US, but Red Dawn has always seemed more relevant as a prosthetic device for -- you know -- morons who have convinced themselves of late that by protesting Keynesian economics, they've approached moral equivalence with the Committees of Correspondence.
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"Once upon a time, there was a President named Bill Clinton, who was, by most historical standards, a typical Centrist Republican, although by a fluke of geography and circumstances he ran for public office with a "(D)" after his name. Under his Administration, many Conservative ideas which had long gathered dust on the shelf -- ideas such as welfare reform, a balanced budget, debt reduction, a strict 'Pay as You Go' fiscal regime, a boom in technology jobs, budget surpluses, NAFTA, GATT, official bans on gay marriage, etc. -- were finally realized. And for all of his good work on behalf of their ideology, Conservatives spent eight, long years treating Bill Clinton -- a Southern, White, Christian man -- as if he were a case of flesh eating nuclear syphilis. Because he did not run for office with an "(R)" after his name."
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Hanuman edition