Yet still there is some asinine bullshit, if I may paraphrase that great sage and eminent fool Winston Churchill for a moment, up with which I will not put.
Charles Krauthammer wrote recently as follows:
There used to be a cruel joke that said Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be; Obama is the Brazil of today's politicians. He has obviously achieved nothing.
The comparison is apt. Brazil has done, and continues to do, nothing except provide an example of steady, flawed progress in the face of constant triumphal noises from its ideologically hidebound neighbors, authoritarian Colombia and increasingly totalitarian Venezuela (I still love you Hugo, but you are, like Amanda Marcotte, a fabulously wonderful and vital voice about whom your legion of detractors are almost entirely correct.)
Obama is a steady, flawed man. His policies on the bank bailout were mostly wrong, but dogged and consistent in the way that Capablanca used to pursue lost positions, until finally wringing a staid draw from the ragged noose of defeat. His commitment to universal healthcare has proved transient and ephemeral, yet it has (as of this writing) produced a political landscape which appears to offer the promise of progress far beyond what could have been anticipated before his improbable rise to the position of the most powerful executive in the world.
Obama has been, so far, the worst possible president except for all the other available alternatives. He has run the country, with all its contradictions and impossibilities, the way an adult runs the organization in which he has been put in charge. As Ali once said, "Birds fly. Grass grows. Waves pound the sand. I beat people up. It's just a job."
Like Obama, Brazil does its job. In fifty years, will the United States be what it is today? What of Argentina, and its wreckage of a laissez-faire capitalist experiment? Russia? China? India? Qatar?
Perhaps. But Charles Krauthammer will be long dead before the issue is decided. The day Brazil falls apart, I will pour out an ounce of OE on his grave in Nathan's name. He'll have scored one on the both of us. Until then he can rot away alone, above ground or below. Viva Brazil. Viva Lula. And fuck Charles Krauthammer.
