Dennis Perrin: O, Bomb It On the Mountain. One more little thing on the author of Savage Mules: The Democrats and Endless War. He mentioned this in the Greenwald interview, but more in passing:

I've repeatedly said that I want Obama to be elected so that liberals can show their true colors, and we can dispense with their supposed "antiwar" personas. That still holds. A McCain presidency will only delay what needs to opened and dealt with, to the degree that it can be dealt with. But watching Obama last night gave me another thought, that of driving American reactionaries even crazier, which will happen should the president be of color and have that last name. Obama in the White House will seriously fuck with their fat heads. Good. I can definitely live with that.

I don't buy this argument. I, too, worry about Obama's postures toward Iran and (especially) Pakistan, and I don't trust him to get out of Iraq, let alone Afghanistan, as gracefully as he should. And let's not get started in Israel/Palestine. And then there's the crises we don't know about yet, the ones that have been smoldering over the last 8, 16, 60 years that haven't engulfed us in flames yet: how's he going to react to those, given his political sense, the foibles of his hundreds of advisors, and the state aparatus he'll inherit from Bush's deliberate politicization of everything. All these things considered, it's certainly possible that Obama's administration will be bellicose and reckless enough to fill out another chapter in the second edition of Perrin's book. I hope that's not the case, and I can think of some good reasons why it may not be the case, but right now you got to grant the possibility.

On the other hand, where Perrin's argument falls flat is in his naïve idea that Obama's belligerence will be so aggressive and so dysfunctional that it will finally drive Americans to an antiwar stance so firm that it rejects the Democratic as well as Republican parties. Short of nuclear war I don't see that reaction. No matter how belligerent Obama becomes, the Republicans will demand more, because that's their brand identity; and the Democrats will split, with the hawks shaming the doves into knuckling under otherwise it will be their fault if the Republicans get back in. We already had a dry run for this with Clinton. Nor did the argument that by outdoing their wettest dreams Clinton would fuck with Republicans heads amount to much: by then the Republicans were so divorced from reality and wrapped up in their own rhetoric that they scarcely noticed when Clinton did their bidding. Indeed, hardly anyone noticed, except for the Naderite fringe.

The reason for supporting Obama and the Democrats in 2008 is the old sad one: they represent the lesser evil, and confused as they were they are still far less culpable for the last eight years than the Republicans. Actually, I'm a bit less pessimistic than that. I see a few things in Obama's political approach that I like, plus I see an intellectually flexible realism that gives me some hope that Obama will try to respond to new problems in ways that actually address them, rather than kick them into an ideologically cocked hat. Where I am pessimistic is that I think many of our problems, if not exacerbated at least neglected for 8 (or 16, or 28) years may be approaching catastrophic shifts, that will prove too much for anyone acclimated to our political culture.