The shorter summary for tonight would be this: I’m a Yank. Just am. Don’t have the thought process of ‘an enigma inside a … whatever it was Churchill said’. I just don’t.

I live in a culture that for far too long has been shaped by corporatist soundbite info. But I realize that other cultures (especially Japanese) are far, far more contextual.

I’ve long suspected that Cheney and the neocons, thinking they run the world, are more suspectible to getting punk’d by Iran, Russia, Pakistan, you-name-it than someone more humble, more curious, or more empathetic and curious.

And I strongly suspect that they, and therefore we, have been played for tools.

If I sat on any Senate Committees involved in national security, I’d outlaw sound bites. They’d be gone. Outlawed.

Because they lack nuance, they heighten a sense of certainty and achievement that is not really earned. In that sense they make us more vulnerable to others whose thinking is more contextual, nuanced, calmer.

Going into the future, our survival rests on the ability to keep a nuanced thought in our heads.

Sound bites allowed GWBush to claim political power, every bit as much as corruption, Rove’s illegal servers, and other factors did.

We have an information disaster on our hands.
We have to think different.
To do that, we need to have conversations.

Thanks to EW and bmaz for tolerance. (Yet again.)

this has been so helpful, and yes, it was that nytimes piece on reid that told that story of reid’s outrage. i remember being mighty impressed by the whole picture of him, and it has informed my estimate of his positions and decisions ever since.

i could not agree with you more on every point you make. first, that reid’s background is even far more impressive than obama’s in terms of what he faced and had to overcome. and i think i made the point earlier that his NV background must certainly have learned some poker face skills. i think also he shares this trait with obama, which is something i truly admire. namely, this capacity to scope out all the players, their cards and their skills and their faces, and just catalog it all and keep it all in mind for future reference.

something that you touched on is this tendency of progressives to expose a hyper-ideological bent that can be utterly non-productive, even counter-productive. in fact, i find myself often making comparisons between the entitled attitudes and demanding rhetoric of the far left and right, as if their elected official ‘owes’ it to THEM to do their bidding. something that gets very lost in this particular shuffle is that this really goes directly against the grain of a true democracy. anyone taking that attitude is bordering way close to the edge of tyranny, as we saw with the rightwingnut religious fanatics. it’s unbecoming, at best.

but most importantly, it is absolutely NOT democratic. i think reid and obama fully recognize this, along with many others, but almost totally (now, at least) the democrats. that’s one of the biggest reasons i continue to support the party. kinda like will rogers’ reason, not a member of any organized political party. herding cats and all that jazz.

the failure to see the importance of this sensitivity, this “we’re all in this together, and we’ll get more done if we try our best to attend to as many folks as we can” thang. it’s very fdr and grapes of wrath and apple pie and american way schmaltzy, but that’s where i am.

now, i’m not trying to say that compromising morality should be a matter of course for this sentiment. in fact, one should strive to never compromise integrity. however, it is also immensely important to keep in mind that holding to integrity in one situation may force you to compromise a larger form of integrity in another, more comprehensive situation with larger and more dangerous implications for more people.

what i think a lot of extreme progressives fail to recognize, and again in the same way rightwingnuts fail, is that at the level of a democratic congress, these decisions are not always clear or easy. compromises must be made; that is simply inherent in a democracy. one person’s absolute moral may not even enter into another’s equation. people can disagree in entirely opposite ways (e.g., abortion) for entirely the same reasons (e.g., religious). the spectrum is enormous and vast, and often one position must be compromised in order to obtain a bigger prize later on. so it goes.

i’m not trying to wax too idealistic here, nor do i want to paint to glib a picture. i just wanted to emphasize this way in which we seem to agree on how much more complex the roles of our reps on the hill really are. and that too many progressives, to my mind, fall prey to the tyrannical and demanding positions of the extreme progressives.

reid i think recognizes this full well. and sure, nextstopchicago does make a good point, but reid just does not strike me as terribly tainted. the way i look at it, if there were viable goods on reid, the gopers would have wrung it to death by now. it just drives them nuts to have to deal with a reasonably clean dem. that’s when they just start making things up. kerry and the swift boaties the easiest case in point.

a decent man, kerry, as is reid. and to think that he might be a suck up also might miss the point wrt reid. no doubt he learned early on which side of his bread the butter is on, and anyone is wise to tend to such information. can’t fault anyone for that. but the LAST descriptive i’d put to reid is a suckup.

at that level of power, and responsibility, one must have a very broad scope and make each decision carefully with a keen eye to the larger objectives. this is a point i’ve tried to emphasize elsewhere (ahem) in the past, with remarkably nasty responses from our supposedly progressive brethren. but another point on which we agree fully is that many (not all, i admit) of the compromises the dems have had to make during this nightmare called the bush years were to a great extent unavoidable. i find it extremely difficult to imagine what it would be like to be put in the unprecedented and absolutely surreal circumstances of post 9/11. in fact, i’d have been rendered unsteady with the 12/10/00 supremes decision; what could it possibly have meant for democrats of integrity. i mean, not even jeffords was able to stomach what was going on, and nothing had even happened yet!

and it just got more bizarre. and, i submit, dangerous. as i mentioned in a comment on ew’s antrhax post, i simply would not put anything past what cheney was willing to do at that time, knowing that wellstone reported he’s threatened him and his behavior toward leahy, then leahy gets the envelope, as does daschle. etc. you know, you find yourself in a position like that, and all the stakes shift. these suckers were beyond unreasonable, they were dangerous. deadly dangerous. i mean, christ, they were willing – eager, even – to torture, torch the constitution, let soldiers die and citizens drown. this was not your normal civil discourse they were dealing with, and i can well imagine the leadership had many closed door sessions where they spent full minutes just dumbfounded speechless before they could even begin to formulate anything resembling a strategy. i mean, what would that look like? none of the rules applied. it was all about loopholes, like those slimy lawyers the mob hires. how do you try to deal with that?

my suspicion is that the leadership determined to just lie low, try to hold as closely to as many small victories as they could, and hope that the real evildoers would eventually screw up and the tide would turn. in the meantime, i recall clearly the atmosphere at the time. bush’s approval ratings were in the 80s, and the echo chamber was deafening and vicious. all of us stood to lose if we raised our heads too high. there was no telling at that point how bad it would get. i was reminded just how hypervigilant i’d become after this 11/4 and the weight was lifted; the relief! utter relief!

i have no delusions that obama is the messiah or even capable of correcting even half the damage bush and his cronies have done. but neither bush nor obama are the point, ultimately; it’s us. and we’re pulling on a very strong wave that stands to hold for at least another generation, giving the polling of kids as young as 15; liberal is the new cool.

but we at some point soon need to really review just how bad it was, and i think to cut all those dems in congress some slack for what they had to face. feingold was able to stand tall because his constituency has long been behind him. same for kennedy and leahy. but the repug machinery was exceedingly treacherous; i just don’t think folks realize this. and they also don’t realize that there remain – by design and sinister plan – deep and extensive vestiges of this treachery. it will not just require participation for the citizenry to recover from this assault on our democracy; it will require a heightened and diligent persistence of all of us.

and we’ll need to hold all our reps’ feets to the fires, no doubt. i don’t want to dismiss the individual wheelin&dealin factor that inevitably goes on and undoubtedly interferes with ethical behavior. but i don’t think reid or feingold or kerry or kennedy or any number of others typically fall into that category. what they felt they had to do during this bleak period called the bush administration is another matter.

all this speaks to the impeachment issues, as well. for the longest i felt strongly we were being failed by congress because they did not take up impeachment. but i’ve come to recognize the hesitation was out of extreme but prudent caution. had the 110th taken this up would have been an enormous risk. bush had made it clear they would not cooperate or share documents or talk or anything like what would normally be expected of the process. they gave contempt of congress the full monty of meaning, they did. i therefore have come to see the wisdom in leaving this for the courts, and under the banner of an entirely new, democratic administration.

so now i’ve seen your soapbox and raised you about a dozen. apologies. i have little doubt that this has become a dialogue between us by now, and even doubt that you’re still checking in. but thanks for the inspiration and the concurring thoughts.

oh, and finally, on reid. yes, i do agree, and not just as a psychologist. one reason i am a psychologist is that i am fascinated and curious about people, as you describe yourself. i find reid entirely credible. he is low key, calm, tough, and smart. i would not want to get on his bad side, but i also see abundant capacity for his working across the aisle. i also see a great deal of warmth in him, which is the first thing i look for in anyone. i have not seen a republican with an ounce of warmth since before jeffords crossed over the aisle.

and to make the punctuating point on reid, and to speak to palli’s important points above, i find reid’s response to gregory’s queries about the accusations that his conversations with blago stemmed from racism far more credible than anything blago might let leak, even from his tail pipe.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…..55080.html

methinks it would behoove all of us to consider just what blago is up to with all this. he’s hell bent on doing as much damage as he can because he knows he’s going down. he’ll leak anything at this point, so we need to be careful not to fall for his crap. but he’s clearly hoping one of his targets will yell uncle and pull him outa his hell hole before he has to see jail time. that seems to be his way of life.

oh, and on that point (chuckle; this soapbox is damn hard to get off of when you’ve been on it a while!!), i spoke with a pal from chicago today, someone who had been to a party last week and met a reporter who’s been on blago’s case for several years. the reporter said blago is just bad to the core, not smart but cunning like a fox, and obama never had anything to do with him beyond what was required politely and politically. there is most likely a good bit of the reverse-elitist resentment coming out of the blago camp, much like what we saw from palin and her ilk. which is again why i’ve been saying that we need to keep in mind that fitz has listened to all those conversations, so the fact that he has openly stated that obama is not involved should tell us something.

listen to reid’s confidence here; it reminds me of a subdued version of what his indignant wrath must have looked like with the abscam situation. and yeah, there is no ego there and no need to grandstand. he seems content to state the case and make his record clear. and just like blago to toss the racism card at him without doing his homework.

mormon he may be, but not a racist.

reader, thanks again very much for your insightful thoughts. fascinating to consider his background through the eyes of someone with your ‘dry western’ background, though more for your incisive take on it all.

the rest of you, if you’ve lasted this long, forgive me.

I appreciate it.
Particularly at a time when the larger news of the world (and wars) is so terribly difficult and painful.

I hope your day brings a spot of brightness and peace that your comment has given me this Sunday morning.

But remember, the possible candidates for this Senatorial appointment all have their own rounded lives also. One of my despairs is that the viseral self knowledge of being African American has cultural triggers that pierce deeply into an individual and en masse to the whole body of Black brown yellow red and white peoples. To ignore this is a blindness not insignificant to progress.

Having grown up through some difficulty does not automatically make one the-best-of-all-possible-leaders of-Democrats.

Good point. Where good leaders come from remains a mystery, and it would certainly be nice to be able to spot them more easily.

I didn’t ask you to be ‘convinced’ by my speculation.
lllphd is a sometimes commenter here, and IIRC a psychologist, and we have in the past exchanged views about individuals and their conduct.
It’s complete speculation; I have no inside scoop.
(Shrug.)
But I hope that what I do possess on a good day is a reasonable curiosity about people, and about their abilities to create positive change in the world.

Whether I look at what I’m told about Harry Reid through the eyes of educational research, or software usability, he appears to be an exceptional person. There are many exceptional people in the US today, and heaven only knows that we need many more of them working in the public sector.

It’s my view that Reid is exceptional in ways that many people miss.
IMHO, lllphd would have an interesting perspective on that topic.
I don’t expect anyone to agree with me; that hasn’t yet stopped me from voicing my views.

Um, a willingness to suck up to those who were more powerful? A keen attention to the whims of the powerful, honed as a weak child of mercurial alcoholic parents? Or toughness and determination? Or luck in attracting a valuable mentor outside the family who had access to some financial resources? Or maybe decent intelligence, a few good teachers, and public financing of post-secondary education at a time when it was possible to find decent jobs out west to put yourself through school if you weren’t indian?

Or some combination of one, two or even three of those?

No, I don’t actually know. But I’m not particularly convinced by your speculation either. There are lots of potential ways to make it. Having grown up through some difficulty does not automatically make one the-best-of-all-possible-leaders of-Democrats.

(if yer not lucky, somebody might owe somebody breakfast)

Okay, off my soapbox now.

It’s so embarrassing when I make such hypocritical remarks. Alas.
It’s tough, being human…

That, to my mind, is a phenomenal achievement.
Add in the fact that he and his wife had young children when he was in law school, and he must be incredibly self-disciplined, organized, driven, and determined.

I’ve seen kids who have never been taken to a restaurant; they’re embarressed at how to order from a menu. To them, McDonalds is like a piece of heaven or a dream. A dental visit is a luxury they can’t imagine. Their clothes come from the church, or from an older sibling. They cannot imagine a brand new dress all their own. And I have a hunch that Harry Reid must have had to pick up all those kinds of social experiences, and social skills — that, to me, is really incredibly impressive.

McConnell and Corker and those GOP weenies — if any one of them had been born in Searchlight, NV to alcoholic parents, they sure wouldn’t be in the US Senate.

When I ‘pray’, or ‘meditate’, or whatever it is that I do, I send some good thoughts Harry Reid’s way. It may put me completely at odds with many on the lefty blogs, but I’ve got a powerful hunch that I probably have a better sense of how impressive a person Reid must be to have achieved what he has.

And I can’t imagine a better person to ‘manage’ and outthink GWB, a dry drunk, than a man who would probably know a whole lot more about addictive behavior than most of us would ever care to know.

Reid, IMHO, is hugely underestimated.
And that is one key to his success (as it is to Cheney’s).
His lack of evident ego is a national gift, when everyone’s bashing him for a weenie, I just want to say, “Have you ever driven through some of those dusty little mining towns?! Do you realize what it must have taken for Harry Reid to get to college, let alone law school?! And you curse this man for a fool??”

Sometimes, I think the left needs to take off a few blinders.
Of all the people in the Senate, arguable Reid is one who has overcome the most, in terms of personal achievement.
Yet the entire left wants to whine about him?
Makes me just sigh and shake my head.