30 Mar The liberals’ Obama problem

I have not seen it stated more aptly than this:

[T]he symbolic politics of the Obama presidency — the same factors that drive right-wingers crazy — are exactly what liberals and progressives like about it. I mean, what other explanation is there? Here we have an administration conducting a worldwide drone war that has killed unknown numbers of innocents, managing an ultra-secretive surveillance state beyond Dick Cheney’s wildest dreams, paying lip service to the existential crisis of climate change while doing nothing about it, and protecting and nurturing exactly the same cabal of bankers who brought us to the brink of financial apocalypse in 2008.

For a candidate who ran as the populist embodiment of hope and change to wield such unprecedented and shrouded executive power is an irony that should keep historians of the future busy, providing we have historians or a future. But he personally seems like a cultured, funny, sharp-dressed guy who has gay friends and watches “Game of Thrones,” and the semiotics of his White House are awesome. So it’s all good.

That’s Salon movie critic Andrew O’Hehir, in a complicated column about the flap over a recent Stephen’s Colbert skit (ironic or racist, take your pick) poking fun at Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder’s efforts to make amends for his team’s galling name without actually changing it, and over Lena Dunham’s recent controversial fashion shoot.

O’Hehir veers from channeling “the bearded dude in Birkenstocks who goes to the feminist bookstore to pick up chicks” to lamenting the “shifting ideological mine field of hyphenate identities, ever-evolving nomenclature, ‘subject positions’ and ‘intersectionality.’”

Definitely worth a read.