I guess someone’s criticism of Obama got under his skin yet again, because the esteemed Mr. Cole went off on a tear again about how nobody gives President Obama any ‘credit’:

And when you point that out, you are hippie-punching or just an O-bot and not a critical thinker. And he managed to do all this without ANY help from the Republicans and minimal help from the Blue Dogs, all while dealing with a childish media (Is he smoking? Does he hate the womyn folks because he won’t shoot hoops with them? Is he angry enough?) and a left-flank that thinks teaming up with Grover Norquist and echoing Republican talking points is moving the fucking Overton Window.

You point out the fact that this is the most successful Democratic Presidency in my lifetime and all you hear is but, but but… He didn’t get single payer!

This after Cole posted a lengthy comment about all the supposed achievements of the Obama administration, getting the health care fiasco passed, the stimulus bill, his Fierce Advocacy on gay rights or on behalf of BP victims, etc. Why, oh why, the Obama-bots ask, won’t we give him any credit for these enormous legislative achievements?

Answer: because, and I’m truly sick of saying this to Obama supporters, LIFE DOES NOT GRADE ON A CURVE.

Let’s just take one example from the list, the stimulus bill, and thus evaluate Obama’s overall work on the economy.

Why don’t I give Obama credit for the stimulus bill? Because it didn’t work. It didn’t work, his own advisors knew it wouldn’t work, prominent economists like Paul Krugman said it wouldn’t work, and he pursued it anyway, knowing it was too small, because he thought it was good politics.

Did it do some good? Yes, in the same way that pouring a single bucket of ice water on the fire consuming your home does good. Did it come anywhere remotely close to solving the problem? No. Absolutely not.

Here are some handy facts about life post-stimulus, sports fans:

–Long-term unemployment is at record levels, with over 4.7 million Americans looking for work for over a year.
–An astonishing 22% of children in the United States will live in poverty this year. That’s right; 22%.
–Since the start of the Second Great Depression, Americans’ personal income has declined by a shocking 500 billion dollars, even as exports and corporate profits soar.
–In 2009, Fortune 500 profits tripled to 391 billion. That’s right, 391 BILLION dollars. Profit. Simultaneously, they fired 800 thousand people.
–Gross Domestic Product is off by approximately 1.3 trillion, that’s trillion with a ‘t’, dollars. That’s counting the much-vaunted stimulus bill, and gives you a good idea how inadequate it was.
–Unemployment is now forecast to rise to 9.9% in early 2011, by the esteemed, and thoroughly bailed out, Masters of the Universe at Goldman Sachs.

So let’s recap: according to Obama supporters, we should give him lots of credit for a stimulus bill that prevented the recession from getting worse… only it’s apocalyptically bad, and in fact, projected to get worse yet. Almost five million Americans have been looking for a job for a year with no luck, and the unemployment rate overall is at the astronomical level of 9.7%. Worse, it’s projected to go up another .2%. Things aren’t getting better; they’re getting… worse.

Meanwhile, corporate profits are through the roof and hey, the banks got bailed out at 100%, including Goldman.

This, right here, is the root cause of my greatest frustration with Obama supporters. They think that they’re arguing with us when they go on about how successful he is, when in fact, they’re arguing with the cold and indifferent universe itself, and that’s an argument you just cannot win. No matter how many times you say black is white, it doesn’t become true, and no matter how many times you claim otherwise, the stimulus bill DID NOT WORK.

And Obama knew it wouldn’t. He knew, and pursued a failed policy anyway, with bold speeches and fierce advocacy.

Over and over throughout the Obama presidency I go back to a post by Ian Welsh about what he calls the ‘American Death Wish’, which also aptly sums up Obama’s repeated pursuit of inadequate half-measures, from the wars to the economy to health care, climate change and financial reform. The choicest bit:

Sometimes the world doesn’t grade us on a curve. You need to jump a fence, and you can’t. You need to climb a rock face, and you aren’t good enough. You’re running away from a bear, and you don’t run fast enough. And now you’re dead. You wanted to get into a good grad school, but you don’t have the grades or test scores. You’re in a fight, and the other guy wins, and you wind up on the ground and he puts the boots to you and you’re crippled for life. You tried “your best”, but you lost and you’re going to pay the price for losing for the rest of your life. Maybe you lost because he fought dirty, and you’d rather take a chance of being crippled for life than kick someone in the balls. Maybe you lost because he trained harder than you, and you’d rather go have a drink with your friends.

Or maybe you needed to pay for health care, and you didn’t have the money, and someone you loved died. And they died because you didn’t have the money, and because your country didn’t have universal health care. And maybe you always worked as hard as you could, and you campaigned for health care with all your heart. It doesn’t matter, your child, your wife, your husband—they’re still dead. Your best wasn’t good enough.

I don’t give Obama undue credit, or praise for half-measures, because if this is his best, his best isn’t good enough. He’s the President of the gods-damned United States; if his best isn’t good enough, then nobody’s is. We’re not getting better as a nation until more people stop praising the perpetual mediocrity machine that is the Obama Administration, endlessly pursuing legislative compromise with the Republicans while struggling to make the universe conform to its wishy-washy corporatist centrism.

Up isn’t down. Black isn’t white. Obama’s efforts to change the world to suit his views have failed. Recognize that fact and move on.

So I’ve read a number of pieces on the emerging Sestak job-offer controversy and I think everyone’s missing the point. No, offering Sestak a job wasn’t illegal. Good to know. Yes, however, it is a real scandal. (Sorry, Digby)

It’s just not a scandal about Sestak. I mean, seriously. Since when is it a bad thing to be offered a job? (Especially in this economy)

The problem here concerns the other end of this conversation, our wishy-washy President Obama. Once again: no, it isn’t the obvious thing, that he offered a Senatorial candidate a job to try and usher him out of the race. Yes, that is standard-issue, sleazy political horsetrading.

The scandal is that Obama did this to protect a slimy, self-important egotistical political opportunist like Arlen ‘Which Way is the Wind Blowing’ Specter. Protect him from a primary, in which he was heading for defeat by, and get this — an ACTUAL Democrat. (It turns out, actual Democrats are more popular with Democratic voters. Who knew?)

Put more succinctly, the scandal here is not that it was illegal, or even that the way we conduct politics in this country reeks like an overflowing cesspool, but that the head of the Democratic party has so little respect for his own party’s voters and process that he’d swoop in to try and coax a real Democrat like Sestak out of a race against a freshly minted turncoat like Specter. That’s the scandal; that he thinks so very, very little of Democratic voters and their ideals, and proves it almost every single day.

Congratulations are in order for Pennsylvania Democrats; they demanded better in their candidate, and for once, they got it.

In spite of President Obama.

In checking Prof. Juan Cole’s blog this morning, I noticed he had a post up from a couple of days ago about Draw Muhammad Day. Prof. Cole essentially concludes that the event was reckless (in that it repeats behavior that has in the past inspired violence) and rude, and ponders the extent to which anti-Islamic bias is masquerading as support for free speech.

The juvenile “draw Muhammad” day has generally been avoided by professional editorial cartoonists. One Islamophobic theme apparent in the writing on it is that Muslims are peculiar in their thin-skinned responses to such assaults on their religious sensibilities and that members of other religions never riot or protest. This assertion is not only bigoted but it is silly. So here are some other needlessly offensive cartoon-drawing days that could be adopted by the jerks bothering Muslims today, just to show that they are jerks toward other communities as well. All these subjects have produced vigorous protests or rioting and violence among members of other religious traditions. Me, I think when you know people have died in violence over some piece of thoughtlessness, it is the height of irresponsibility to repeat it for no good reason.

I don’t doubt for a moment that there are various Muslim-bashers who jumped on the bandwagon for DMD, but I think the necessity of engaging in such behavior is demonstrated by the same events that lead Prof. Cole to conclude it’s irresponsible; namely, that religious fanatics often respond to dissenting views with violence. Since these whackjobs seek to suppress the rights of others, they need to be opposed, period. There’s no other justification required. It’s further incumbent, I think, upon citizens of the world’s remaining superpower, an ostensibly secular state, to carry out peaceful protest and opposition to these violent idiots, since we can do so in relative safety.

If it’s become irresponsible to challenge backwards fanatics, haven’t they already won? Don’t we lose our rights when we refuse to exercise them out of fear of illegal, violent retaliation?

Professor Cole then outlines a list of other drawing-based protests he came up with to show that, as he put it, you can be a jerk to a wide variety of people, not just Muslims. I disagree with the contention that DMD was targeted at Muslims as a whole, but I’m perfectly willing to extend the idea to challenge other groups of zealots who’ve trampled on the right to free expression. That, for me, was the whole point of DMD.

Thus, I completed his challenge, with some minor variations and two omissions for cause:

Proposed Comics #9, 6, and 1 concern the same Ultra-Orthodox extremists in Jerusalem, hating on, respectively, secular government social services, gay people and parking lots being open on Saturday. I compressed this into one comic to save time.

Proposed Comic #7 is about reaction to the performance of a play which concerns, at least in part, rape and violence in a Sikh temple. I completely support the right of a theatrical company to present such a play, but rape is, morally and legally, an offensive act in and of itself, so I won’t risk trivializing it with stick figure art. Thus, the cartoon concerns a stick figure PERFORMANCE of the same play that inspired violence.

Proposed Comic #5 concerns the idea of depicting the violent murder of a Hindu teacher in India, an event that set off a firestorm of retaliatory violence on both sides of a mixed Christian-Hindu community in India. The actual, real life murder of a teacher and his students is not equivalent to the performance of play, or the drawing of a semi-mythological figure from religion. It’s a crime, and a brutal offense. People being upset by it is perfectly rational and understandable, and while violent response to violence is often unproductive, it can’t be condemned in the same way as violence over a cartoon or a doodle. If someone shot up your school, you too might take up arms and commit retaliatory violence. A cartoon on the other hand never killed anyone. For this reason, I’ve omitted #5 entirely; it’s false equivalence to compare these events to violently responding to a form of personal expression.

Proposed Comic #2 concerns a Burger King advertisement in Spain that I think is utterly hilarious. It was also found to be offensive by members of the global Hindu community, and they responded by complaining to the corporation, which pulled the ad. The article mentions no violence or threats of any kind, simply public condemnation. This is how things are SUPPOSED to work in a civilized society; dialogue and conversation with, or at, people who upset you, not oppression or violent censorship. I think this is another false equivalence; you have every right to be offended by speech. Just don’t throw a brick through a window or plant a bomb or set someone’s house on fire. I see no reason to poke fun at a religious community that apparently chose an honorable and reasonable, above all CIVIL response to something that they found offensive.

(Burger King also ran an add that offended Mexican governmental officials, and that was pulled without violence. They really should get a better handle on their PR campaigns.)

So, with two exceptions and some modifications, I’ve taken up the challenge Prof. Cole outlined. While I am a jerk, I hope this goes some way to demonstrating that I’m not specifically being a jerk to Muslims. Rather, I want to annoy anyone who’d threaten or employ violence to silence criticism or commentary on their various mythological beliefs. I think it was that way for many people participating in Draw Muhammad Day.

Without further adieu, here are the truly awful drawings in question, including the original for DMD.

Muhammad Riding a Dinosaur

Naked Hindu Goddesses Riding a Plesiosaur

Various Offensive Things for Ultra Orthodox Zealots with Pteranodon

Stick Figure Production of Play Bezhti (with T-Rex in Audience)

Pool Party with Bikini Girls and Buddha Statue (with Velociraptors)

Orangemen Parade in Northern Ireland (with Pachycephalosaurus)

Soccer Player Using Witchcraft During Game in Kinshasa, with Stegosaurus. (Note: This drawing does not indicate in any way that I believe actual witchcraft occurred)

The entire set can be viewed on a subset of my Flickr page.