I was reading Noam Chomsky's thoughts on the Bin Laden assassination — calling it that is jarring, innit? That's why we love old Noam.  Chomsky reminds us— the old bastard is always reminding us — of those inconvenient facts:

In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have.

"Thus," he concludes, "Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that 'we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.'"

Now, Chomsky's no Tea Party wacko.  But he does have an alternate take on the arc of American history.  And a lot on the left feel like his version is closer to the truth than the ones we're getting in, say, the Texas Public School System's history textbooks.  But has old Noam gone too far this time?

After all, we got the bad guy, right?  Or at least a bad guy.  So he may not have been the real mastermind.  He took credit for it.  That's close enough, right?  How often do we get to enjoy a real-life super-villain being taken out by bad-ass Navy Seals like in some Hollywood blockbuster?  We had to wait ten years for the sequel. We deserve this!

And yeah, we want Obama to succeed.  At what cost?  It depends on who's paying for it, I guess.

We want Obama to succeed for many different reasons, some good, some bad.  We still want to believe the "Hope and Change" thing, even two and a half years into an administration that has enthusiastically embraced the Bush Doctrine and made it its own. (Obama even garnered high praise from Donald Rumsfeld for "wisely" choosing to continue Bush anti-terror policy). 

And yet we chose Obama because he was different.  Like, really different.  But he seems to be turning out to be more of the same, more or less.  He's succeeding, it's true, but mostly on the enemies' of "that hopey-changey thing"s terms. 

The other day I was reading the obituary of sociologist Harold Garfinkel, who died last week at the age of 93.  The obit mentions how in his seminal Studies in Ethnomethodology,

He wrote... about an experiment in which school counselors gave random answers to students’ questions, observing that the students resisted the notion that their questions were not being answered responsibly; instead, he found, they manipulated their own logic to allow them to digest the responses as intelligible.

That's basically where Obama-supporters are at right now (never mind the hardcore sycophants — the Boston Phoenix hailed the death of bin Laden as proof "that pragmatic progressivism works," and ululated "Hope at last!" — Pravda couldn't have said it better).

My point is not that the alternative to Obama wouldn't be worse — there was no remotely reasonable (or even rational) alternative to an Obama presidency.  That's not in dispute. But it's also utterly irrelevant two-and-a-half years on.  We are no longer dealing with Obama vis-à-vis McCain, but Obama vis-à-vis "Obama".

Is this really "Hope at last"?  Or are we, like those poor students in old Professor Garfinkel's studies, manipulating our own logic to allow us to digest this nonsense as intelligible? 

Because, honestly, if we say a never-ending war that was an outrage under Bush is OK under Obama, or an incursion into a sovereign nation for what amounts to a mafia hit is "bad-ass" as long as it's Obama that orders it, then we are not better than any people that follow blindly in thrall to a cult of personality.

What is particularly disturbing, I think, is how we have gone from simply projecting our gauzy notions of hope and change onto Obama to now bending our very notions of hope and change themselves to conform to an allegiance to this personality.  In other words we've gone from transmitting to receiving. 

These are not positive developments.  Nor are they, by any stretch of the imagination, progressive ones.  But the good news is, it doesn't matter whether we buy them or not.  In 2012 there will be no reasonable (or even rational) alternative once again. 

It's still true that history is made by the winners.  And Americans are winning.  Unfortunately, it's winning in the Charlie Sheen sense of the word.