Obama as "the more effective evil"

Criticism matters if only to correct the record - and that's just what Glen Ford achieves for the most part as Michael Eric Dyson, the new Obama apparatchik at MSNBC, makes an ass of himself on this morning's Democracy Now! (The debate starts at about the 16:30 mark.)



I used to think the difference between the GOP and the Democrats was like the difference between Coke and Pepsi. And there was a difference: one tasted better and was, at least we we were told, less filling. It was pretty much a difference without a distinction between two corrupt, failed, oligarchical parties. The evil of two lessers, in other words. More recently, I had to come to think of the difference between the two parties as kind of like the difference between two corporate-militarist-plutocratic Orwellian factions with different branding strategies: one cast somewhere in between a Benetton advertisement and the dust-covered box set of Will & Grace in your closet - and the other, far more politically incorrect, juvenile, and downright depraved in its antics. Now I think the difference is probably more akin to that existing between a calmer, more rational, and deceptively more "inclusive" Republican party, aka Ford's "more effective evil," which has not just moved to the right of both Nixon and Reagan but every once and a while poses and parades itself as a "Democratic Party" to muster appeal from unsuspecting sycophantic soi disant pwogwessives and their "centrist" collaborators - and,  a party that is simply far more politically incorrect, radical, depraved, and more apocalyptic in its antics. A more strategically "effective evil" does not mean a greater one in absolute terms just a less extreme, more compromised, stealthier one. Both still fail but there is a difference.



* UPDATE  9/9/12*

Watch Glen Ford address the issue again with Paul Jay on The Real News.