(Thanks to Ricky Martin’s song, “She Bangs,” for inspiring this post’s title.)

A few days ago I watched the online video of last Thursday’s (July 29) ABC daytime talk show, “The View,” during which President Barack Obama chatted up the “little people”—Obama’s clueless reference to the female occupants of the seemingly uncomfortable couch he was forced to sit on during his visit—in a seeming attempt to ratchet up his slumping poll numbers and fend off some of the nastier hits he and his administration have been taking during recent weeks regarding the BP oil debacle, a struggling economy, the Wikileaks scandal, and the bungled response to the Andrew Breitbart’s twisted condemnation of Shirley Sherrod’s talk to NAACP members. Continue reading →

I have written before on my blog site about President Barack Obama’s tepid leadership, fearful and delayed administrative action, even clueless constitutional idealism. In making these arguments I (unfortunately) might seem to share rhetorical space with conservatives (“conservative” is a prehistoric misnomer now applied to knee-jerk, anti-ideological reactionaries simply defending existing institutions and practices of racial, economic, and cultural privilege) who just don’t like Obama for any multitude of trumped-up ideological sins and, implicitly, but above all, his racial identity and liberals/leftists (like conservative, a “leftist” anymore is an institutionalized academic or corporatized or purely rhetorical intellectual [kind of like me] who’s too compromised—it’s impossible to actually commit selflessly and totally to the fight against social, racial, and economic injustice if one’s pension and benefits and the progress toward tenure or institutional legitimacy might be negatively affected—to be an ideological avant garde) who are ticked, like me, that Obama has not lived up to the liberal promise we projected imaginatively onto him. Continue reading →

It’s become official: pragmatically, reasonably, thoughtfully, cautiously, carefully, open-minded, with consensus and coalition-building and mature foresight apparent above all, our former candidate, now president, of hope and fundamental change of the way things are done in Washington and the way America is imagined has nominated for the Supreme Court of the United States an intellectual, political, bureaucratic kindred spirit.

This nominee is someone who embodies the intelligence and craftiness not to have ever developed a clear ideological position, always and apparently playing it close to the vest, rarely passionately making oral or written commitments on issues that matter most to people regardless of ideological position. How best to encapsulate Obama and his pick, Elena Kagan, to replace Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens who retires at the end of the court’s summer session this year? Continue reading →