Compromise

Do you remember the comics tagline -- "Howard the Duck, trapped in a world he never made"? That really applies to all of us, not just poor Howard. In many respects the world we have to live in seems ridiculously arranged to me, and I complain of that, but I am forced to deal with it. There is compromise involved simply in leaving the house in the morning.

I think of that when I read the political blogger Glenn Greenwald. I enjoy and appreciate Greenwald's work; he fights the good progressive fight. But to a greater extent than with any other political commentator out there, I have a hard time imagining a real world of which Glenn Greenwald would in any sense approve. Unusually for an attorney, which is his professional background, he demands purity of motive wedded to purity of action. Thus he has been horribly disappointed in Obama (as I have in many ways, too) and is almost harder on him from the progressive side than Limbaugh and his cronies are from the mindless (I don't want to call it "conservative") side.

That this intransigence of Greenwald's has its useful, pressure-applying side, I won't deny; he recently took The New Republic's Jeffrey Rosen to the woodshed about a scurrilous piece that Rosen published on Supreme Court prospect Sonia Sotomayor (and he wasn't alone in that; Rosen and his editor Franklin Foer should take a long vacation, because their journalistic stock isn't coming back for a while).

But Greenwald's insistence on no swerving from the path of righteousness (which, of course, he gets to define) means that he is basically out of sympathy with politics as an enterprise. That does place some limitations on his effective critique of it. Paul Krugman at the New York Times may fall into that trap a little, too; Rahm Emanuel is certainly famously scornful of Krugman's pontificating from an ivory tower ("How many bills has he passed?...my view is that Krugman as an economist is not wrong. But in the art of the possible, of the deal, he is wrong"). The "art of the deal" may turn Krugman's stomach, or Greenwald's, or mine; it's why I've never entered politics (and here in Northeast Wisconsin, I have been approached about that numerous times). But that doesn't mean "the deal" is going away, and although I won't stop criticizing Obama and Emanuel, or expect other wounded idealists to stop either, the fact is that those gentlemen are better at real politics than we could possibly be.

That said, could we please get rid of Timothy Geithner?