Building and Repairing Bridges is Liberal?

If you put up with me all the way to the asterisks in the last post, kudos to you.

I am ready to believe that this bundle of thumbs approach to Republican argument is a strategy meant to further move a corporatist state agenda. (Here comes my unique cuckoo.) Tying Obama to a leftist agenda and describing his policies as socialist obscures what is actually left.

Subsidizing insurance companies and calling that healthcare reform is not socialism. Indefinitely occupying Iraq with tens of thousands of whatever-euphemism-is-used military forces is not leftist liberalism. Escalating the war in Afghanistan is not socialist. Taking our money and giving it to banks in the hope they lend it back to us is certainly not socialism (though that policy began under a "conservative" president). Continuing Bush administration secrecy is not being a good pinko. I don't write this as a disillusioned Obama supporter, I write this as a person who values leftist politics.

Obama's not a leftist. Or, if he is, he's a leftist in the same way President Jesus was a conservative. And just like dum-dum support of President Jesus pushed thoughtful, genuine conservatism off the table, calling Obama's overarching ideologies socialist confuses what is socialist. That's fine if that's what you're after- in fact, it seems strategically brilliant if that's what you're after, but it seems like you would only be after that if you were The Man and if you're reading this you are very likely not The Man.

Calling Obama's agenda socialist makes sense if a.) you're a dummy or b.) you're trying, for whatever reasons, to co-opt the label to limit the possibility for leftist reforms. Wether that's good or bad to you consider this, the President Jesus years saw so many "conservatives" hop on a band-wagon loaded with such glaringly non-conservative baggage that Ron Paul could seem presidential.* Real advocates of a small government, fiscal tight-fistedness, and anti-imperial foreign policy could only stand by with their hats in their hands while being a conservative came to be a matter of clobbering homosekshuls with the KBR version of the Bible. That may be a lot of things- stupid, shallow, plutocratic, anti-Chrsitian, what have you- but it is not conservative. So while conservatism was hobbled we had a country that could pursue an imperial vision, unchecked executive power, illegal spying on its own citizens, torture, kidnapping, TARP, etc. That is some coup.

So where will we be if we have a similarly confused notion of what is socialism or what is liberal? Will politics largely be a matter of aesthetic choices? We'll allow Obama to continue with the above but everyone will know we're liberals because of our Shepard Fairey-ized pictures. Blah blah blah, point being, I'm the kind of paranoid/crazy that could believe entrenched corporate interests only benefit from Joe The Plumber conservatives on one side and Apple® liberals on the other (as if it were a matter of sides).

Maybe the upshot of this is Dennis Kucinich will someday seem presidential.

* At this, you should shudder like Sideshow Bob getting whacked in the face with a rake handle.