Month: December 2010

Imagine a guy walking into a used car dealership. He feels that the key to getting a good deal is to be kind and negotiate in good faith with the salesman, because obviously both parties involved want the same thing.
buy temovate online jersey-hemp.com/wp-content/languages/new/online/temovate.html no prescription

The salesman wants to move a car and the buyer wants a car at a good price. He tells the salesman, "Just be honest with me. If you level with me and point me toward a car that isn't a lemon, I'll buy it without trying to bust your balls on the price." In other words, I'll give you what you want – the money – if I get one thing that interest me in return. My good-faith gesture establishes trust, and treating you like an honest person who will follow through on an agreement increases the odds that you will act like one.

99% of the time this guy is driving away with the biggest lemon on the lot, the car that the salesman can't pawn off on anyone else. The car that the dealership thought they'd never find a sucker to take. Why? Because the salesman doesn't give a shit about the buyer. All he wants is the money. He's a shark. Every fish in the ocean knows that if they have to deal with him, they can't trust him. The ones that do don't live long enough to learn from their mistake.

Anyone naive enough to trust a used car salesman probably shouldn't be entrusted with the task of buying a used car. The only way to deal with the situation is to walk into the dealership with the explicit understanding that the salesman is going to try to screw you and he can't be trusted any farther than he can be thrown. But let's say you're an optimistic soul and you decide to let your sunny view of human nature prevail. You try to negotiate with him in good faith and end up with a lemon. You certainly wouldn't make the same mistake a second time, would you? How big of a fool would you have to be to do that?

Take that fool, let him repeat the mistake 15 or 20 times, and you'd be Barack Obama.

As John Cole implies, watching the President play this "If I reach out in a sufficiently bipartisany manner, surely the GOP will work with me in good faith" game is beyond old. It's getting embarrassing to watch him play Charlie Brown in the Lucy and the Football skit. Obama organizes feel-good meeting and kisses John Boehner / Mitch McConnell's ass. Obama promises concessions in return for GOP cooperation. GOP takes concession and then refuses to cooperate anyway. Rinse, repeat. And repeat. And repeat. It's humiliating enough to watch him trade 0 billion in upper class tax cuts for a billion extension in unemployment benefits.
buy bactroban online jersey-hemp.com/wp-content/languages/new/online/bactroban.html no prescription

I lack the adjective to describe watching him fail to get even the meager concession.

When is it going to sink in with this guy? These people hate you. You cannot "work with" them because they do not care about you. They are not interested in playing nice with you. They want to do bad things to you. They are not to be trusted, because they have no reservations about lying to you. They will promise you something in good faith and then laugh at you for being stupid enough to trust them.
online pharmacy elavil best drugstore for you

This is all very obvious. And he's just. not. getting it. All of the playing nice in the world isn't going to matter. Every reaching-out ends the same way: with the GOP holding a gun to his agenda, saying "Give us what we want if you want to see it live," and then putting a bullet through it anyway.

And then they go on TV and tell people he won't work with them. Followed by him going on TV like a whipped puppy and apologizes for not trying hard enough to please them.

Sometimes the best negotiator in the world is going to get screwed.
online pharmacy premarin best drugstore for you

If you have no bargaining power, there really isn't much you can do. If you're Japan at the end of World War II, you can hardly be criticized for a failure to get concessions out of the Allies. I mean, you just don't have any leverage. You have to take whatever you can get. That's exactly the same position that a bad negotiator is in all the time, because if he has any bargaining power he won't be smart enough to realize it. Or he'll trip over himself giving it away. He'll piss it away on trusting someone no reasonable person would trust. He'll start making concessions immediately because he's not smart enough to realize he doesn't have to.

Then he'll do it again, most likely because he's an idiot.

I started typing up a lengthy introduction full of anecdotes and metaphors but it makes more sense to cut directly to the chase on this one.

Wikileaks. Big controversy. Short version of my take: I fuckin' love it. Anonymous information dumps into cyberspace might be, I say with a hint of melodrama, our last, best chance to halt some fraction of the abuses of power that impact our lives.

My rationale is simple. First, the organization has barely scratched the surface of its capacity for taking down white-collar criminals.

To this point nearly all of the attention has been focused on diplomatic and governmental documents. But just try to tell me you're not salivating at the thought of seeing a "megaleak" document dump on a "major U.S. bank" in the near future. Americans are so comfortable believing (and sacrificing to advance the interests of) their political, social, and economic elites that, with an assist from the corporate media, nearly any story can be swept under the rug unless the public is bashed over the head with evidence so voluminous and incontrovertible that our justice system is embarrassed into taking action.

Second, the Cold War, and particularly the American misadventure in Vietnam, irrevocably altered the paradigm for government secrecy. "Classified" documents are supposed to be, according to the government's own definition, information which would damage national security if released. Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret are merely ways of categorizing the extent to which the release of information would damage national security. Somewhere along the line, however, "national security" became synonymous with "stuff that embarrasses the government." What were the Pentagon Papers, after all, except evidence that the military and government were lying on a massive scale – to Congress, the public, and themselves – about American involvement and the conditions on the ground in Vietnam? Information proving that our elected and unelected leaders are lying to us is not, on that basis alone, a matter of national security. They are a matter of political security. Maintaining state secrets has become an expedient way of protecting the government, not the nation.

Nuclear codes are a matter of national security. This crap isn't. The "secrets" betrayed by this diplomatic cable dump range from the gossipy ("Prime Minister so-and-so has too much plastic surgery and a drinking problem!") to the "Are you kidding? Everyone already knows that!" variety. The Russian mafia is intertwined with the government? My word! That is simply shocking. The effect of the most recent information dump is not, as Obama and Hillary have so idiotically warned, that "lives will be lost.

" This isn't blowing the cover of any double agents in the Kremlin. This is just making the government look stupid.
buy Bactroban generic buy Bactroban online over the counter

If you think "We don't want to be embarrassed" is a sufficient reason for the government to withhold information about its activities from the public, you have a very curious understanding of how this country is supposed to work.

Yes, the state will continue to punish people who leak classified material, and I understand why. The law is the law, after all. But I'm also glad that the information gets out, and if someone finds that information he or she has every right to disseminate it and make the public aware of what is done in its name. Again, these are not "state secrets." They are government secrets, and eliminating that distinction only serves the rhetorical purposes of Palinites who want to see Wikileaks personnel hunted down like terrorists.

Imagine if Wikileaks had been able to engineer a massive, coordinated information dump in 2002 laying bare all of the information revealing the lies used to prop up the case for war in Iraq. The system of classifying information exists for a valid purpose, but who among us is comfortable with the power to define what we can and cannot know about the activities of government belonging solely to the government itself?

"People will die if these secrets are revealed!" is not only a bald-faced lie in most instances but also the argument of last resort among people who believe that state power should be absolute and unaccountable. Even if the statement is true, it is a poor argument for blindly accepting the government or corporate judgment on what information we are allowed to see. Why are we so susceptible to the argument that revealing secrets costs lives yet blind to the fact that keeping secrets costs even more? Ask Iraq or Vietnam whether secrecy or an absence thereof carries the greater human cost.

And so in an era in which people get their real news from a comedian and their comedy from the real news, a non-state actor like Wikileaks represents our best hope for a more democratic state.