Finally

My frustration and general downward feelings really haven't abated in terms of the political landscape in this country. In commenting in some of the posts below and over at TSM, I've sadly come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as reality anymore. Even instances like my friend Jill, who told me last Tuesday that she is becoming a Democrat because she sees direct evidence in her life of improvement as a result of President Obama's policies, do little, if anything, to assuage my frustration.

I can see it now....I would tell my friends on the right her story and they would laugh and say she's been brainwashed. Even though there is definable proof that nearly everything the Cult has told her has been wrong, it wouldn't matter. There would be howls of derision, personal attacks, and the insistence that my eyes are wrong.

I've also been giving careful consideration to jettisoning the "Cult" meme from the capsule but now apparently that's caught on as I have heard several Minnesota state legislators saying it over the past week or so in regards to the New Right's approach to the economy and government. It is what it is. I'm not the one behaving that way. When they are ready to return to the honest and fair conservatism of Ronald Reagan, I'll stop calling them a Cult. Until then, they can fall asleep listening to their Glenn and Rush podcasts. But even this line of thought doesn't get me anywhere. For the last few weeks, I've been searching for someone who sees things for what they are...as unbiased as possible in our highly bi polar culture...someone who actually lives in reality.

While I'm not exactly dancing a jig, I think I have found that someone. And his name is David Brooks.

Brooks writes a column for the New York Times. He is considered a right wing tool by the left and a RINO by the right. Ironic, as his latest column pretty much says the same thing...about President Obama.

He starts off with a very important comparison of the criticism of President Obama. In a nutshell, this is it.

For the left, President Obama is

• Indecisive
• Overly Intellectual
• A Weak Fighter
• Letting the Cult dominate the debate
• Too Compromising

For the right, President Obama is

• A Big Government Liberal
• Ruthless, Chicago style politics
• Arrogant
• Condescending
• Adolph Hitler

Brooks goes on to say that both of these views are nauseatingly predictable and each hold a belief that "if only we had better messaging" that the public would be with them.

And finally, you’ll notice that both views distort reality. They tell you more about the information cocoons that partisans live in these days than about Obama himself.

Thank the Lord. Someone has finally got the balls to say it. Make no mistake about it. This is true of ALL of them-left and right-and even of yours truly at times. Perhaps part of my frustration is that I am finally breaking out of my cocoon.

This is exactly why my gym friend Nancy's mind will "never be changed." She lives in an information cocoon that distorts reality and tells her what she wants to here. This is why my friend Ralph now thinks that Barack Obama is a stooge of the banks and Goldman Sachs. He lives in the information cocoon that is the seriously flawed site, The Democratic Underground.

Brooks goes on.

The fact is, Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer. Every time he tries to articulate a grand philosophy — from his book “The Audacity of Hope” to his joint-session health care speech last September — he always describes a moderately activist government restrained by a sense of trade-offs. He always uses the same on-the-one-hand-on-the-other sentence structure. Government should address problems without interfering with the dynamism of the market.

Exactly. Fucking. Right. And true of myself as well. I'm constantly painted as a "perfect example of the Left" by nearly everyone at TSM despite my various writings to the contrary. I am vilified by the left as a war monger because of my support for the effort in AfPak as well as my views on Israel. I've been taken to the mat a half a dozen times in the last few weeks by the "No Nukes" crowd as I have voiced my support for President Obama's fledgling nuclear program. Worse still, my official "leftist" party card has been now thoroughly burned by the fervents for my recent remarks regarding Ronald Reagan and innovation (courtesy of the Manzi article).

Continuing with Brooks.

Liberals are wrong to call him weak and indecisive. He’s just not always pursuing their aims. Conservatives are wrong to call him a big-government liberal. That’s just not a fair reading of his agenda.

Here is where we are going to start interfering with the comfortable cocoons. Sorry, caterpillars!

Take health care. He has pushed a program that expands coverage, creates exchanges and moderately tinkers with the status quo — too moderately to restrain costs. To call this an orthodox liberal plan is an absurdity. It more closely resembles the center-left deals cut by Tom Daschle and Bob Dole, or Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney. Obama has pushed this program with a tenacity unmatched in modern political history; with more tenacity than Bill Clinton pushed his health care plan or George W. Bush pushed Social Security reform

He's right...again. Everyone in the Cult thinks that it's a government take over of health care. They are wrong. It's simply an increase in much needed regulation. I spent last night talking with my brother in law after a family dinner. He works in the insurance industry. I asked him if his company was worried about losing money. "Nope," he said. "Why?" I asked. "Because all this bill does is increase our customer base to the point where any rates that are adjusted due to regulation will be made up for by an increase in customers," he answered. "But what about all those people that say that the government will drive insurance companies out of business and/or drive up costs?" I asked.

"They're wrong," he answered. Oh, and he's a Republican, btw, who has thankfully left his cocoon.

Take education. Obama has taken on a Democratic constituency, the teachers’ unions, with a courage not seen since George W. Bush took on the anti-immigration forces in his own party. In a remarkable speech on March 1, he went straight at the guardians of the status quo by calling for the removal of failing teachers in failing schools. Obama has been the most determined education reformer in the modern presidency.

I applauded these remarks. Things are going to change even more and it's going to be great. Stay tuned!

Take foreign policy. To the consternation of many on the left, Obama has continued about 80 percent of the policies of the second Bush term. Obama conducted a long review of the Afghan policy and was genuinely moved by the evidence. He has emerged as a liberal hawk, pursuing victory in Iraq and adopting an Afghan surge that has already utterly transformed the momentum in that war. The Taliban is now in retreat and its leaders are being assassinated or captured at a steady rate.

The silence on this issue on both sides is deafening. Where's our sense of patriotism and rallying behind the president in this time of conflict? The left is just pissed off that he is over there at all and the right can't stand the fact that they can't paint him as weak.

Take finance. Obama and Tim Geithner are vilified on the left as craven to Wall Street and on the right as clueless bureaucrats who know nothing about how markets function. But they have tried with halting success to find a center-left set of restraints to provide some stability to market operations.

This would be the only part on which I disagree. Just because Geithner is one of the few people who knows what's going on in the financial industry, doesn't mean he gets a free pass for his fuck ups.

In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.

We DON'T live in that country. So, I guess my frustration is going to be seemingly never ending. Of course, none of what Brooks is saying here is going to make a bit of difference. After all he's a right wing tool. Or a RINO...depending on the cocoon in which you reside.

At least I take comfort in the fact that there is at least one other person out there who lives in reality.