Yesterday, I wrote, Postmodern Politics and the End of Truth. In it, I bemoaned the fact that politicians aren’t held accountable — largely because the media has a postmodern attitude toward the truth — and that this is a great help to the Republican Party. On Tuesday, Josh Marshall provided an excellent example of how this works on the personal level, Just Shake Your Head.

It tells the truly heartbreaking story of an ignorant Republican. Luis Lang is a “self-employed handyman” in South Carolina. He never had insurance — preferring to pay out of pocket. As everyone knows, that’s a dangerous decision. That is especially the case because Lang has diabetes. In February, he had a series of mini-stokes. As a result, he’s going blind, which greatly limits the amount he can work. If he’s going to save his sight and his livelihood, he needs expensive surgery — which he can’t afford.

So in desperation, he turned to Obamacare. But there was a problem. He’s in the healthcare no man’s land: in that great Republican state government created hole where he makes too much for Medicaid and too little for the exchange subsidies. If South Carolina had accepted the Medicaid expansion, Lang would be covered. Instead, he’s going blind.

And who is to blame for all this? “He and his wife blame President Obama and Congressional Democrats for passing a complex and flawed bill.” But it wasn’t the Democrats who left it up to the states as to whether they took the free money to cover people like Lang; it was the conservatives (Republicans) on the Supreme Court. It wasn’t the Democrats who decided not to expand Medicaid in South Carolina; it was the South Carolina legislature that has a Republican super-majority in both houses.

Marshall sums up the situation:

It isn’t my intention to put down Mr Lang. We all do reckless things. I truly hope that he manages to get to the care that he deserves. But he is an archetype of the Republican voter who can’t see that it is his own party that is responsible for his hardships. I agree with him: Obamacare is “complex and flawed.” But that’s because Republicans like the pre-ill Lang were absolutely against the simpler and more effective single payer system — the one that would have covered Lang all along so that he wouldn’t have had to spend all his savings just to get to this point.

I suspect that Luis Lang will die cursing Obama and the Democrats for his fate. And until then, he will continue to vote for Republicans who have done and will continue to do everything they can to kill him.

It’s been interesting these last couple of weeks, watching Obama going around acting like a petulant child about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). It makes a real progressive like me angry. The president doesn’t act this way when the Republicans disagree with him. But when people in his own party disagree with him, they don’t deserve respect. He described Elizabeth Warren, one of the most earnest politicians I’ve ever seen, as “a politician, like everybody else.” No Mr President, you are a politician just like the rest of the rabble that are destroying this country. You are a politician just like the rest of the craven hordes begging for cash from the billionaire class. No Mr President, it is not Elizabeth Warren who is playing politics by asking that the details of the TPP be made public; it is you who are playing politics with your “Trust me!” act.

Well, yesterday the loyal but not authoritarian followers (which is apparently what Obama wants) struck back. I find the details of all this a bit confusing. But the basic story is that fast-track authority only got out of committee because Ron Wyden made a deal with Orrin Hatch to attach three other bills to it. But Hatch is a Republican and thus not to be trusted. Instead of packaging the three bills with fast-track authority, he made the bills separate. That made the deal pretty much meaningless. And that became clear when Hatch started making noises about pulling two of the three bills.

Behind the scenes, the Obama administration was putting on a full court press. Despite this, Sherrod Brown convinced the rest of the Democratic caucus to only approve fast track if the three bills were included in the same package. And he was successful. Only one Democratic Senator voted to allow a vote on fast-track authority. It’s a stunning rebuke of President Obama — and one that he richly deserves. I’m beginning to see what Republicans mean when they talk about him in terms of an “imperial presidency” — of course, those same Republicans don’t mind it when it is a Republican doing the same thing.

The fight is not over. In fact Sherrod Brown doesn’t think that he and the other Democrats will be able to kill fast-track authority in the Senate. He is simply trying to delay and improve the bill. But there is a good chance that the House — which is never as keen on “trade” deals as the Senate — will kill it. We can hope.

As we wait (in between calling and writing our members of Congress), David Dayen wrote a very informative article, The 10 Biggest Lies You’ve Been Told About the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And you know who’s telling those lies, right? That great truth teller in the White House and his minions. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s the rundown:

1. 40% — The TPP covers 40% of world’s economic activity. Well, sure; the US alone accounts for 22%. Big (deceptive) deal.
2. Job Creation — Need I say more? See what Sherrod Brown has to say about that nonsense.
3. Exports Only — This is something Dean Baker talks about all the time. It doesn’t matter what happens to our exports if our imports increase even more. And they will.
4. Most Progressive — Have you heard Obama saying that the TPP is the most progressive trade deal in history? It turns out that Bill Clinton said the same thing about NAFTA. Also, Obama’s certainly wrong about this claim. And “most progressive trade deal” is like “least humiliating national sex scandal.”
5. Changing Laws — We are told that the TPP will not interfere with our laws. Well, John Oliver has a few things to say about that.
6. Never Lost — This relates to the last lie: we’ve never lost an Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) case. Dayen has his own reasons regarding this, but I think agreements shouldn’t just be judged from our perspective. ISDS is already being used to harm weaker countries. This isn’t right.
7. Weakening Dodd-Frank — I’ve already dealt with this issue. Obama claims he was the big force behind Dodd-Frank. He wasn’t.
8. Stopping China — This is the idea that we can beat China to the punch with this deal. Again, Dean Baker takes this on all the time. The idea is to eventually have China sign on to this deal. Nothing we do here is going to make China any less of a powerhouse.
9. Secret Deal — It’s not a secret deal! People will have 60 days to look at it! Right after he’s given fast-track authority. After that, no changes can be made to it.
10. Just a politician — Well, I discussed this above. The implication is that Warren is a politician, but not Obama! He’s just doing what’s best for the country. As Dayen put it, “His interest in building a legacy, when practically nothing else has the potential to pass Congress the next two years, is a political interest. His possible interest in rewarding campaign contributors who would benefit from TPP is also political, or his desire to earn the respect of the Very Serious People who always support trade deals.”

I don’t expect perfection from anyone. I’ve even been willing to give Obama a pass on his drone program. But the TPP debate kind of sums up his whole presidency. Obama doesn’t get along with the Republicans, but he seems to have a special animus for the true progressives in the Democratic Party. This goes back at least to when Rahm Emanuel called us “fucking retarded.” That was Obama’s Chief of Staff. That’s Obama’s kind of Democrat.

What do creepy pseudo-sexual torture and Micky Mouse have in common? They are both results of the creative American mind! Those two sides of America came together in the case of Omar Khadr. He is Canadian, but his father took him to Afghanistan where he made the boy a soldier for al-Qaeda when he was just 15 years old. At 16, he was captured by US special forces. He was eventually sent to Guantanamo where he was sadistically tortured — apparently because the 16 year old boy was one of the “bad guys,” rather than a victim of war. If you want to know the gory details of the sick American mind that we have institutionalized, read Jeff Tietz’s Rolling Stone article, The Unending Torture of Omar Khadr. But you don’t want to know.

Max Fisher at Vox provides the relatively good recent news, The US Tortured a Child Soldier at Gitmo for Years. On Thursday, He Won His Freedom. But before getting to that, let me highlight one bit of torture that backfired:

I think it is really interesting that our official American torturer thought that giving Khadr a Disney comic book would be an insult. The torturer had apparently so dehumanized Khadr in his own mind that he couldn’t see that he was dealing with a boy — a child — someone who would delight in the playful antics of Mickey Mouse and Goofy. You cannot dehumanize other people; you can only dehumanize yourself; we have done so much to dehumanize ourselves in our efforts to dehumanize “the evildoers.”

Eventually, Khadr pleaded guilty to something that he apparently didn’t do so that the United States government could save face and so Khadr could be transferred to the Canadian government. As an American, that makes me feel so ashamed. I’ve been arguing about this for years, but it still stabs at me. As a child, I was taught that one of the reasons that America was great was that we, unlike other countries, didn’t torture people. I’m sure that wasn’t even true then. Regardless, now we know: (1) that we do torture; (2) that we do it in ways that show we have sick sexual fetishes; and (3) that we do it to children.

Omar Khadr is currently out on bail in Canada — living with his lawyer and his wife. He is currently appealing his guilty plea with the United States. We’ll see what happens to that. Clearly, the plea was coerced. But I doubt that the United States will ever admit to that. As it is, media outlets like NPR still won’t refer to the things that were done to Khadr, and so many others, as “torture.” No, we must continue the charade that only the bad guys torture. And since the United States is by definition not the bad guys, nothing it ever does qualifies as torture — especially when it is done to 16 year old boys.

President Obama is acting more and more like a drunk friend who is embarrassing himself in public. I want to put an arm around him and get him safely home before he can hurt anyone or embarrass himself any more. Most recently, he was talking to Matt Bai, Why Obama Is Happy to Fight Elizabeth Warren on the Trade Deal. Bai said, “Senator Warren said this week this pact could be used to roll back Dodd-Frank, which is closed to your heart…” The president interrupted him before he could finish, saying, “She’s totally wrong.” He went on to say, “The notion that I had this massive fight with Wall Street to make sure that we don’t repeat what happened in 2007, 2008. And then I sign a provision that would unravel it? I’d have to be pretty stupid”

Massive fight with Wall Street? I don’t remember that. About the worst thing that I remember Obama doing against Wall Street was saying that some of them were “fat cats.” We could start by noting that Dodd-Frank itself, while an improvement, is still pretty weak tea. But I can’t remembering two things about Obama and Wall Street. The first is that Wall Street was among his biggest backers in 2008. The second is that he bailed out Wall Street while allowing home owners to just dangle. As Roger Hodge put it in The Mendacity of Hope, “TARP participants were asked to fill out a simple two-page form, several orders of magnitude less complex and less onerous than an application for unemployment insurance or food stamps.” So “Obama: Wall Street Slayer” is at best the figment of his imagination, or just a pretty story that he thinks he can get over on the rest of us.

Dean Baker has a deeper memory than I do, In Arguing for TPP President Obama Gets Carried Away in Resting on His Credentials as a Foe of Wall Street. He adds six specific examples:

I’m starting to get a really bad taste in my mouth regarding Obama’s recent TPP tour. He’s begun to sound just like the caricature of conservative lore. He’s the smart guy who knows what’s going on and all the little people just need to follow along. It isn’t necessary to see the see what’s going on with the man behind the curtain: just focus on the Great and Powerful Obama.

Right now, I don’t so much want to take Obama home as punch him in the stomach. Anything to shut him up. When any politician tells you to trust them while not allowing you to see what they are doing, the Scarecrow’s reaction is the right one, “You humbug!”

The Devil went down to Beaverton. Or to put more clearly, President Obama went over to Nike to snipe at those of us who don’t agree with him about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). I was especially interested in this quote that seemed to appear everywhere that his speech was covered, “There have been a bunch of critics about trade deals generally and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And what’s interesting is typically they’re my friends coming from my party. And they’re my fellow travelers on minimum wage and on job training and on clean energy and on every progressive issue, they’re right there with me. And then on this, they’re like whupping on me.” Let me take a moment to say something personal to Obama.

Mr President, based upon my experience of watching you from a distance these last eleven years, you seem to be an okay guy. But I don’t just follow along with everything you are in favor of. In terms of the TPP, I think you are just another neoliberal idiot who is so blinded by the ways that it is going to help out all of your rich friends, that you can’t see clearly that this is not a progressive deal. I’m not going to be for this trade deal just because we both agree that the minimum wage ought to be increased.

Sherrod Brown is one of those pesky non-authoritarians who doesn’t just get in line because he happens to be in the same political party as the president. He has actual facts that counter Obama’s argument that consists entirely of, “Trust me! I wouldn’t do anything to hurt the American worker!” Brown noted that we’ve been conned before. And we don’t have to go all the way back to NAFTA:

But that’s not all, “Mr Obama insisted that ‘this is the most progressive trade deal in history’ and he scorned critics who say it would undermine American laws and regulations on food safety, worker rights, and even financial regulations…” Well, Dean Baker had a problem with that claim, President Obama Is Badly Confused About the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He noted:

So Obama is not just asking us to trust him (because he thinks a modest increase in the minimum wage is in order), he’s asking us to trust every president who comes after us. Let me just end with another personal note to Obama.

Mr President, I am a liberal. As a result, I’m not an authoritarian. I know that conservatives are mostly a bunch of authoritarians who fall in line whenever the command is given. But I don’t accept arguments based upon someone telling me that they know best. That’s especially true when they’ve shown that they do not know best. So make your case and if I think it’s a good idea, I’ll go along with it. A good start would be to make the text of the TPP publicly available. But I don’t see that happening. Because I don’t think it’s a good deal. And the more scrutiny it gets the less I’m going to like it. And the more you try to ram it through, the less I like you.

See also: The Bad Side of Obama’s SOTU Address.

Tribalism is so important to humans that we almost never think in terms of it. I, of course, am obsessed with the idea. During my lifetime, I’ve seen tribalism get so diced up to the point where opportunity is just not a thing anymore. There was a time — barring a Great Depression — when anyone could have a job if they wanted it. Now, that’s just not true. The rich take care of their own. The middle class is just struggling to survive. And the poor are in the same state that they’ve always been, with the exception that the voices denouncing them are louder and more respected than ever.

The way that I usually frame the issue is as “the right kind of people” versus of “the wrong kind of people.” I wrote about this recently with regard to national security, Petraeus and Sterling: Different Kinds of Leakers. David Petraeus, of course, is the right kind of leaker who released top secret information for the purpose of bedding a younger woman and his own self-aggrandizement. As a result, he gets no jail time. Jeffrey Sterling, on the other hand, is the wrong kind of leaker. He leaked information about wrongdoing in the Bush administration. He’s looking at decades in prison.

Over at The Daily Dot, SE Smith brought my attention to a similar tribal divide, If Homeless People Can’t Sleep Outside, Apple Customers Shouldn’t Either. I’ve never actually given much thought to this because I don’t know any people silly enough to think they have to be the first to get a new phone — or anything else. But I am aware that this sort of thing goes on. I believe people do the same thing for concert tickets and new video games. Smith noted that there is nothing fundamentally different between these people and the people who simply have nowhere else to go.

But from a cultural standpoint, there is a difference. The local business establishments wants those idiots who have $650 in their pockets to blow on a phone. They are nicely dressed. They are shaved and they don’t stink. Of course, if we cared about the homeless people, we could provide them with rooms and clothes and showers — and the mental healthcare that so many of them need. But we decided long ago that don’t care. They are not our tribe. They might as well be a different species — but not one of the cute species that we care about.

It reminds me of the way banks work: if you need a loan, you can’t have one; if you don’t need a loan, they’ve come to your door pleading with you to take one. Of course, banks are private businesses. We don’t expect them to work for the public good. But the Apple Store is too. And all the businesses that don’t want homeless people sleeping out in front of them are too. But they get the government to do their dirty work. They get cities to pass ordinances that make it illegal to sleep on the street — as long as you aren’t one of the right kind of people who are just resting until you can buy an overpriced phone.

If you are the wrong kind of person, there is no job for you. There is no room for you to sleep in. There are no showers or clothes or regular meals. There are just laws criminalizing your very existence. And if you are the right kind of person, well, set up a tent in front of the Apple Store, have a pizza delivered, maybe get a manicure while you wait. If you’re the right kind of person, it’s all good.