Obamination (the all Obama-slagging Isles)

[matthew]

Also,

SDEROT (Israel), July 23: Barack Obama called Israel a “miracle” as he courted Jewish voters back home on Wednesday and left Palestinians with the impression he would plunge into peacemaking if he makes it to the White House.

“You have been deeply involved in this miracle that has blossomed and we are extraordinarily grateful not just as Americans but as world citizens for your outstanding service to your country,” Obama told [Shimon] Peres.


Yes, obviously the US is the country to "plunge" Israel-Palestine into peacemaking when it funds and supplies with arms one side while protecting it diplomatically and from any sort of prosecution under international law or having to face any sort of resolutions at the United Nations which might hamper it regular, brutal and violent tactics and overt ethnic cleansing... while classifying all political parties of the opposition as terrorist groups.

[matthew]

Try and imagine any other nation being allowed, for decades upon decades, to carry out regular violent attacks on its neighbours, occupying several of them; placing large numbers of a specific ethnic groups in the largest open air prisons on the planet; and carrying out ethnic cleansing using several tactics which would be considered genocidal if committed by official enemies (the Serbs, for example), without the backing of the most powerful nation of the world, who also happens to be a permanent member of the UNSC. 

It would not happen.

[matthew]

.
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/wlz09h9RwPQ" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/wlz09h9RwPQ</a>

[matthew]

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/N9fgf0u0uaE" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/N9fgf0u0uaE</a>.

[matthew]

..
 

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/aPo5CWSPLdQ" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/aPo5CWSPLdQ</a>

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/5MtVia5sdnY" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/5MtVia5sdnY</a>

[matthew]

Are they really going to try and sink their boat with the same HORRIBLE tactics* as last time? The Democrats are really, really, really terrible at handling...well, just about everything. All this griping about "racism" and the evil "rich white men" of the GOP and no reflection whatsoever of the fact that Obama is a terrible candidate and the Democrats in congress are some of the most ineffectual cowards ever to populate it. The plain fact is that the DNC's proves time and tima again as entirely inept at finding the pulse of America.

Why is the GOP the default government of the US? The two parties are near identical but one is actually exudes confidence and competency. The DNC also attempts an uncomfortable mix of pseudo-progressive messages mixed with suicidally regressive measures in an attempt to sway so-called swing voters. Actual progressives are not fooled by what is clearly pandering and the more conservative swingers look at the Dems and see a party unsure of what it wants to be, and are repulsed by what appears to be poorly executed manipulation. The Republicans burn ahead with a confident lead and waste little time bleating about the particular politics of the attacks on its party. If the Dems wish to start winning elections again they are going to have to at least appear to be an actual opposition party, not just the "other" party which lazily attempts to chisel away just enough votes for themselves to secure the win. 




A V.P. Hint? VP's Convention Day Is Veteran Themed
Does the schedule for August's Democratic convention provide any clues to whom Barack Obama will pick as his vice president?

On a conference call on Monday morning, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and top ranking aide Anita Dunn announced that the theme for Wednesday -- the night on which the vice presidential candidate is scheduled to speak -- will be national security and honoring veterans. The choice, a reporter noted, lent itself to the interpretation that Obama would choose a running mate with background in military affairs -- like, say, Sen. Chuck Hagel or John Kerry.

Sebelius tried to nip the speculation in the bud.

"I think it is clear that Sen. Obama will announce his vice presidential choice when he is fully prepared to do that," she said. "It is my understanding that every potential vice presidential choice also has a speaking slot, so nothing should be read into themes, issues and ideas. There is an array of talent out there and when the senator makes that announcement you will be prepared to know."

But her answer fell somewhat short, leading Dunn to interject before the next question could be asked. "Wednesday night is thematically about securing America's future, it is about honoring our veterans and the families of our veterans... and how to make us safer and move past the divisiveness and into the future. I think anyone Sen. Obama picks as Vice President will be more than prepared to address those issues."

As for Sebelius, she was asked to divulge whether she, currently, was being vetted for the running mate spot.

"I have made it clear since I enthusiastically endorsed Sen Obama that I would be enthusiastic to do anything I can to help elect him president of the United States," she said. "Because I believe we need a leader just like him to take over the helm of this country and have the kind of change desperately needed. All of the information about the vice presidential selection process is being answered by the campaign. All the surrogates have been ask to defer requests for information to the campaign. And I will continue to do that."



Running against a War President?
Captain Jingoism Reports For Duty in 2004
* <a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/4MiBBb7DQpI" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/4MiBBb7DQpI</a>

Running against a Vietnam Veteran and Massive Hawk?
Captain Chauvinism Reports For Duty in 2008?

[matthew]

20 July 2008
                                                   
Obama's Foreign Tour
                                                       
By Gwynne Dyer     
                   

        Barack Obama wants three things out of his tour of the Middle East
and Europe.  He wants people everywhere to think that he has the answers
for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He wants Jewish Americans to believe
that he is Israel's unquestioning supporter. And he wants Americans to
notice that Europeans would  vote for him by a five-to-one majority, if
they could vote in US elections.

        Americans will certainly notice that, although it will not do him
much good among the key group of American voters whose support would make
an Obama victory next November a dead certainty: the white poor in decaying
rust-belt towns who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who
aren't like them...as a way to explain their frustrations," as he famously
put it last spring. Those people are not impressed by the views of
foreigners, and they don't automatically vote Democratic any more.

        Neither do Jewish Americans, and the Zionist majority among them
are deeply suspicious about Obama's commitment to Israel. This is true even
though he now toes the line, saying that Israel is just the innocent victim
of "the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam." All the history
has vanished down the memory hole, and he no longer refers to the
underlying issues of conquest and settlement.

        Last year's formula that "nobody is suffering more than the
Palestinian people" has been modified into a more satisfactory "nobody has
suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the
Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel," and Obama now declares that
Jerusalem "must remain undivided."

        That's enough to win him the neutrality of major Zionist
organisations, although they know that he really thinks the situation  is
more complicated than that. So long as he gets through the Middle Eastern
leg of his trip without anybody from Hamas giving him flowers, he'll be all
right on that front.

        The one foreign policy question that Obama cannot avoid is what to
do about Bush's wars.  His short-term solution is to couple his
long-standing opposition to the "wrong war," Iraq, with a newfound
enthusiasm for the "right war": Afghanistan.

        Obama's proposal to send an extra 10,000 American troops to fight
in Afghanistan will not change the situation there. Even a hundred thousand
American troops wouldn't change it. He may even know that, but this is his
only way of dealing with the politically inconvenient fact that Bush's
troop "surge" in Iraq has brought about a visible improvement in the local
security situation.

        The improvement may not last -- the Sunni militias, and indeed
Moqtada al-Sadr's big Shia militia, too, may only be biding their time
until the Americans leave -- but the perception that will dominate the few
remaining months until the election is that Iraq is on the way to being an
American success story. Obama , quite rightly, opposed the invasion from
the start, and is committed to pulling out US combat troops within sixteen
months of taking office.  So how does he fight off the accusation that he
risks throwing a victory away?

        By arguing that ending the war in Iraq is "essential to meeting our
broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the
Taliban is resurgent and al-Qaida has a safe haven."  He is quite right to
want to bail out of Iraq as soon as possible, but he needs the war in
Afghanistan to explain it to American voters, who have been persuaded by
years of propaganda that the best way to deal with terrorist threats is to
invade places.

        "I continue to believe that we're under-resourced in Afghanistan,"
he said in Washington recently. "That is the real centre for terrorist
activity that we have to deal with and deal with aggressively."

        That's nonsense, although it is intoned by media pundits and
so-called military analysts in the United States a thousand times a day. No
Afghan has ever carried a terrorist attack in a Western country, and it's
not likely to happen in the future, either. Nor can the Afghan insurgency
be suppressed by pouring more foreign troops into the country: the Russians
had twice as many soldiers in Afghanistan in the 1980s as the West has now,
and they still lost.

        Not only was invading Iraq in 2003 a ghastly mistake; invading
Afghanistan in 2001, although a political necessity in the US after 9/11,
was also a strategic error.  In terms of neutralising Osama bin Laden and
al-Qaeda, more would have been achieved, at a far lower cost, by placing
the country under a strict blockade and quarantine. In the end, Western
troops will have to leave Afghanistan again, and if that means that the
Taliban regain control (which is not actually very likely), then quarantine
may yet have to be the long-term solution.

        Does Obama realise this? Maybe not, for it is not yet accepted by
any large group of American "foreign policy experts," including his own
advisers. But the line about needing to pull out of Iraq in order to have a
better chance of "winning" in Afghanistan sounds plausible enough to get
him through the next few months.

        So his trip will be a success so long as he sticks with the
platitudes while he's in the Middle East, and avoids too much adulation
while he's in Europe.

[matthew]

How Obama Blew It
Loserville

By DAVE LINDORFF

Well, it’s happened, and it’s no surprise.

Barack Obama, the prospective Democratic presidential candidate, has managed to turn a 5-8 point lead over prospective Republican opponent John McCain into a 7-point deficit—a double-digit slide—in just two and a half months following a campaign that had voters really excited over his candidacy.

How did he manage this feat (which is documented in the latest latest Reuters/Zogby poll)?

Simple: he followed the tried-and-true strategy of Democratic centrist advisers who have increasingly dominated his campaign since the end of the primaries, and who have a proven track record of producing Democratic electoral disasters now for several decades.

Like John Kerry and Al Gore before him, Obama, who ran his primary campaign as a liberal, staking out an anti-war position, has morphed over recent weeks into a Republican-lite candidate, calling for a hard line against Palestinian rights, threatening to attack Iran, calling for an expansion of the disastrous war in Afghanistan, and backing away from genuine health care reform and other important progressive goals here at home.

One might think that after watching Democratic candidates lose the last two presidential elections by following exactly this kind of “strategy,” if it can be called that, Obama and his campaign managers would have decided to try something different, but it appears that the Democratic Party at the top is hopelessly in the grip of corporate interests that favor war, free-market nostrums and corporate welfare. (Okay, I know Gore really won the 2000 election, but he should have won it so convincingly—for example taking New Hampshire and his home state of Tennessee—that the election couldn’t have been stolen. And Kerry, similarly, should not have had his race determined by a close vote in economically distressed Ohio, which should have been his by a blowout.)

Obama got where he is—the first African-American major party nominee and the first black candidate with a real shot at winning the White House—by appealing to the Democratic Party’s liberal base. Now Zogby reports that Obama’s support among liberals has plunged 12 percent. That’s liberals folks!

I count myself among those on the left who have turned away from this fast-talking eel of a candidate.

It’s not a matter of turning to McCain, who is if anything more dangerous than President Bush because of his fondness for war and his evident lack of any kind of principles, not to mention his personal greed.

But how can I or any progressive vote for a presidential candidate who goes from opposing a war to saying he not only supports the idea of keeping troops in Iraq for another five years—the length of the entire WWII!—but who further says he won’t rule out attacking Iran, even if that country poses no imminent threat to the US, simply because it develops nuclear weapons—the same weapons that our putative friends, Pakistan and India, have? How can I vote for a candidate who wants to expand the military (by 65,000 troops) instead of shrinking this huge, bloodsucking parasite of an organization which is costing as much as the rest of the world spends on its armies?

How can I or any progressive vote for a presidential candidate who cannot state categorically that he will defend the Constitution by reversing all of President Bush’s abuses of power and who will not promise to prosecute the president and members of his administration for any crimes committed while in office?

If you look at Obama's vaunted website, and check out his positions on the big issues of healthcare, education, the economy, labor, social security, etc., you can see he’s pretty good on most things (okay, his health care “reform” is a loser and will never fly. He should be calling for a nationally-run insurance system modeled on Medicare and paid for by the government). The problem is that there has been a deliberate effort to soft-pedal all of it, while backpedaling on his position on the Iraq War. It's almost as if he and his campaign think the "smart" progressives will go to his website and be satisfied with his online positions, while the "dumb" unaffiliated voters will not go there and will just base their votes on his gauzy image TV ads.  (More importantly, if he can go from anti-war to pro-war, what's to say he won't backpedal in office on the rest of his positions, especially if he won't highlight and defend them vigorously on the campaign trail?)

There has clearly been a decision made in the Obama campaign to soft-pedal liberal positions and to make Obama appear “safe” and uncontroversial.

The result has been his precipitous slide in the polls.

That’s not the worst of it, either. Obama is not just losing liberals in droves. Many liberals, after all, will in the end return and vote for grudgingly for Obama, though they probably won’t volunteer to do any of the critical campaign work registering voters, promoting his candidacy or getting people to the polls. The worst part is that by becoming just another middle-of-the-road, namby-pamby, Republican-lite clone of Kerry circa 2004 and Gore circa 2000, Obama is losing the young and also the disaffected, unaffiliated voters who were flocking to his campaign during the primaries. This group of erstwhile enthusiasts is down 12 percent, too. And it’s those people—particularly the unaffiliated voters--who are raising McCain’s numbers. The Zogby poll reports that McCain’s support among younger voters has reached 40 percent—not that much below Obama’s 52 percent.

There is probably still time to turn this electoral debacle in the making around. Obama needs to come out unambiguously for a quick end to the war in Iraq. He needs to do an about face on his call for an expansion of the war in Afghanistan. He needs to flatly rule out preemptive war as a policy for the United States of America, unless the country is in danger of imminent attack. He needs to scotch plans for expanding the military, and instead to start talking about how to reduce military spending, so that those funds can be shifted to domestic priorities like improving education and dramatically increasing research into carbon-free energy production. He needs to call for a national healthcare system that will provide quality, affordable medical care for all, and he needs to call for an aggressive campaign to combat joblessness and to reduce income disparity within the US.

Do that, and we will see an Obama presidency and a Democratic sweep of both houses of Congress.

Continue with the present losing strategy, and we will see John McCain as president, and the continuation of a weak, compromised, sell-out Democratic Congress for at least the next four years.

Now as sympathetic as I am to the politics espoused by Ralph Nader and by the Green Party, I'm well aware of the futility of Third Party campaigns. Even so, count me as one progressive who at this point has stopped supporting Obama.

[matthew]

I don't care for the second half of the editorial, but this is unfolding just as I believed it would.

I also believe the author is wrong: Obama cannot suddenly undo what he has undone. Obama may have lost the day he won the primary.

[matthew]

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/_e4daR54iIQ" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/_e4daR54iIQ</a>

Naomi Klein on Obama

[Just Some Girl]

"To get US out of Iraq"?

LOVE Naomi (interviewed with her husband a couple years ago to work with/for her), but id she mean to say that? Too drunk at this point, but here's what I'm thinking: referring to US as... us... is, oh slightlyy problematic.

[matthew]

December 2, 2008
Not One Anti-War Voice
Obama's Kettle of Hawks

By JEREMY SCAHILL

Barack Obama has assembled a team of rivals to implement his foreign policy. But while pundits and journalists speculate endlessly on the potential for drama with Hillary Clinton at the state department and Bill Clinton's network of shady funders, the real rivalry that will play out goes virtually unmentioned. The main battles will not be between Obama's staff, but rather against those who actually want a change in US foreign policy, not just a staff change in the war room.

When announcing his foreign policy team on Monday, Obama said: "I didn't go around checking their voter registration." That is a bit hard to believe, given the 63-question application to work in his White House. But Obama clearly did check their credentials, and the disturbing truth is that he liked what he saw.

The assembly of Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Susan Rice and Joe Biden is a kettle of hawks with a proven track record of support for the Iraq war, militaristic interventionism, neoliberal economic policies and a worldview consistent with the foreign policy arch that stretches from George HW Bush's time in office to the present.

Obama has dismissed suggestions that the public records of his appointees bear much relevance to future policy. "Understand where the vision for change comes from, first and foremost," Obama said. "It comes from me. That's my job, to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure, then, that my team is implementing." It is a line the president-elect's defenders echo often. The reality, though, is that their records do matter.

We were told repeatedly during the campaign that Obama was right on the premiere foreign policy issue of our day – the Iraq war. "Six years ago, I stood up and opposed this war at a time when it was politically risky to do so," Obama said in his September debate against John McCain. "Senator McCain and President Bush had a very different judgment." What does it say that, with 130 members of the House and 23 in the Senate who voted against the war, Obama chooses to hire Democrats who made the same judgement as Bush and McCain?

On Iraq, the issue that the Obama campaign described as "the most critical foreign policy judgment of our generation", Biden and Clinton not only supported the invasion, but pushed the Bush administration's propaganda and lies about Iraqi WMDs and fictitious connections to al-Qaida. Clinton and Obama's hawkish, pro-Israel chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, still refuse to renounce their votes in favour of the war. Rice, who claims she opposed the Iraq war, didn't hold elected office and was not confronted with voting for or against it. But she did publicly promote the myth of Iraq's possession of WMDs, saying in the lead up to the war that the "major threat" must "be dealt with forcefully". Rice has also been hawkish on Darfur, calling for "strik[ing] Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets".

It is also deeply telling that, of his own free will, Obama selected President Bush's choice for defence secretary, a man with a very disturbing and lengthy history at the CIA during the cold war, as his own. While General James Jones, Obama's nominee for national security adviser, reportedly opposed the Iraq invasion and is said to have stood up to the neocons in Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, he did not do so publicly when it would have carried weight. Time magazine described him as "the man who led the Marines during the run-up to the war – and failed to publicly criticise the operation's flawed planning". Moreover, Jones, who is a friend of McCain's, has said a timetable for Iraq withdrawal, "would be against our national interest".

But the problem with Obama's appointments is hardly just a matter of bad vision on Iraq. What ultimately ties Obama's team together is their unified support for the classic US foreign policy recipe: the hidden hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of US militarism to defend the America First doctrine.

Obama's starry-eyed defenders have tried to downplay the importance of his cabinet selections, saying Obama will call the shots, but the ruling elite in this country see it for what it is. Karl Rove, "Bush's Brain", called Obama's cabinet selections, "reassuring", which itself is disconcerting, but neoconservative leader and former McCain campaign staffer Max Boot summed it up best. "I am gobsmacked by these appointments, most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain," Boot wrote. The appointment of General Jones and the retention of Gates at defence "all but puts an end to the 16-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, the unconditional summits with dictators and other foolishness that once emanated from the Obama campaign."

Boot added that Hillary Clinton will be a "powerful" voice "for 'neoliberalism' which is not so different in many respects from 'neoconservativism.'" Boot's buddy, Michael Goldfarb, wrote in The Weekly Standard, the official organ of the neoconservative movement, that he sees "certainly nothing that represents a drastic change in how Washington does business. The expectation is that Obama is set to continue the course set by Bush in his second term."

There is not a single, solid anti-war voice in the upper echelons of the Obama foreign policy apparatus. And this is the point: Obama is not going to fundamentally change US foreign policy. He is a status quo Democrat. And that is why the mono-partisan Washington insiders are gushing over Obama's new team. At the same time, it is also disingenuous to act as though Obama is engaging in some epic betrayal. Of course these appointments contradict his campaign rhetoric of change. But move past the speeches and Obama's selections are very much in sync with his record and the foreign policy vision he articulated on the campaign trail, from his pledge to escalate the war in Afghanistan to his "residual force" plan in Iraq to his vow to use unilateral force in Pakistan to defend US interests to his posturing on Iran. "I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel," Obama said in his famed speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last summer. "Sometimes, there are no alternatives to confrontation."

Jeremy Scahill pledges to be the same journalist under an Obama administration that he was during Bill Clinton and George Bush's presidencies. He is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

[matthew]

http://www.wenholee.org/

[Poop Fresh-Herbed Pickles]

When both Obama and McCain jumped on Paulson's bailout, my heart kind of sank.  In some ways there's no important difference between D & R.

Paulson only changes his mind every day what to do with the treasury he created for the banks.  There was no plan except to print a large amount of money.

There have been no conditions with the loans to the banks that help anybody but the banks.  The money is a rat chasing its tail down a sewer.

Now Obama wants another $700B, but hopefully with better terms for the citizens.  Paulson is still just sitting on at least 60% of the original bailout.  Why not just rewrite the conditions for that money?