Odious Obama’s Path to Hell
…A former neighborhood organizer on Chicago’s impoverished South Side, Obama claims fealty to the ideals of Jesus and King. Still, he:
* “refuses to take any options,” including the supremely sinful strategy of preemptive nuclear war, “off the table” in attempting to deter Iran from doing something U.S. global strategy would seem to strongly recommend to that nation: developing nuclear weapons.
* voted to fill the nation’s top diplomatic jobs (of all offices) with a mendacious war-criminal named Condaleeza (“Chevron”) Rice.
* refuses to call for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from illegally and mass-murderously occupied Iraq, placing more value on maintaining America’s blood-soaked “military credibility” than on recognizing standard world norms of civilized state behavior or on honoring Jesus’ and King’s commitment to nonviolence.
* distanced himself from fellow Illinois Senator Dick Durbin’s (D-Illinois) courageous criticism of illegal U.S. torture practices in Guantanamo Bay.
* followed the counsel of the rich men of corporate America by backing a “tort reform” that makes it more difficult for ordinary people to attain just compensation from business that cheat and damage.
* voted to close filibuster proceedings that would have attempted to block the appointment of the reactionary Judge Alito – a known civil and women’s rights enemy.
* voted to re-authorize the Patriot Act, which uses real and imagined foreign threats created by empire to roll back liberty at home.
* fled fellow Senator Russ Feingold’s (D-Wisconsin) motion to officially censure the Bush administration for its monumentally criminal actions at home and abroad.
* applies his campaign finance Midas touch to the reelection efforts of his “mentor,” the de facto Republican Senator Joe Liberman (“D”- Connecticut), a close ally of Bush’s occupation, and a leading architect of the nation’s oppressive and racist “welfare reform,” which slashed basic government assistance for the most disadvantaged members of the industrialized world’s most unequal, wealth-top-heavy society.
In the horrible 2004 Democratic Convention Keynote address that did so much to catapult him into national prominence, Obama set some centrist tone for his subsequent predictable betrayals of cherished principles and leaders. In that instantly celebrated speech, Obama:
* claimed that the U.S. is the ultimate “beacon for freedom and opportunity,” the “only country on earth” where “my story” (a supposedly Horatio-Alger-esque tale of climb from poverty to prominence and now [thanks to some generous book deals] prosperity) “is even possible.” This despite the fact that the U.S. is actually the most rigidly hierarchical nation in the industrialized world, home to a stultifying corporate plutocracy, massive persistent and highly racialized poverty, astonishing incarceration rates (also quite racially disparate) and low mobility from lower to upper segments in its steep socioeconomic pyramid.
* said that “every child in America” should “have a decent shot at life,” not that every kid deserves a full and decent life now and thereafter
* expected Americans to be ecstatic over the “miracle” (!) that they don’t live under the iron heel of open state repression (he made not exceptions for the nation’s 2 million prisoners, nearly half black), as if democracy is just the absence of a police state and not the power of the people to run their own society in an egalitarian fashion (talk about low expectations for freedom).
* praised a Marine enlisted in the racist and imperialist oil occupation of Iraq for (of all things) “defending the United States of America” and (supposedly) expressing “absolute faith in the country and its leaders.” Now there’s a nice democratic sentiment: such chilling “faith” is the stuff of the very police state whose absence in the U.S. Obama called a “miracle.”
* scaled new heights of cringing, pseudo-patriotic nausea-inducement by making disturbing “hope” parallels between: “the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs:” “the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta;” and the “hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him.”
axisoflogic.com