http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=11386Obama’s descent into moral and spiritual Hell continues to accelerate in nearly precise accord with his national political ascent. The “work with war criminal Bush” comment is a typical gem, consistent with his growing record of collaboration with evil.
On Win Without Vision Night (last Tuesday), I caught a fleeting Obama sound bite on ABC. The smiling, suspiciously overnight superstar told the Disney-owned network that American voters were expressing a welcome and “pragmatic” repudiation of “ideology” and a desire for more “competence” and less “partisanship” and “anger” in government and politics. Here’s my long translation of that comment: “If you support majority U.S. (and indeed world) opinion and want to see U.S. troops out of Iraq now... and if you advocate the dismantlement of Empire and the diversion of public resources from militarism and corporate welfare to social justice and health at home and abroad, then you are a silly and unrealistic ‘ideologue.’ Let’s drop all our nasty partisan and ideological story lines and all just get along, with existing social, racial, and imperial hierarchies intact and, perhaps, with me in ostensible charge in about 26 months. Bush’s murderous oil invasion of Iraq (which has butchered 700,000 Iraqi civilians) and his related successful efforts to further the upward concentration of wealth (in what was already the industrialized world’s most unequal nation) aren’t criminal (only deranged and extremist “ideologues” say that). They’re just incompetent and show what happens when people act in accord with “ideology.”
Remember that the next time you see somebody robbing, murdering, and/or raping in your neighborhood: the perpetrators are being "incompetent" and are probably driven by “ideology.”
I have the distinct impression that Obama’s Harvard-certified “realistic,” “pragmatic,” and (according to David Brooks) “Hamiltonian” world view (more fully enunciated in his second book) marks the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. – a dedicated left opponent of the (for him) inseparably interrelated evils of militarism, racism, and economic exploitation (capitalism) – as a hopelessly dysfunctional “ideologue.”
A future edition of “The Empire and Inequality Report” will provide a more extensive critique of Obama’s second book, which carries the ironic title The Audacity of Hope (2006) and includes the following pearls of collaborationist wisdom:
*On poor folks’ responsibility to understand the rich and the benevolence of the rich:
“If we fail to help…people who are struggling in this society…we diminish ourselves. But that does not mean that those who are struggling – or those of us who claim to speak for those who are struggling – are thereby free from trying to understand the perspectives of those who are better off...…That’s what empathy does – it calls us to task, the conservative and the liberal, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressed and the oppressor...No one is exempt from the call to find common ground” (Obama, Audacity, p.68).
“Most rich people want the poor to succeed” (Obama, p. 51)
*On how well “our poor” are doing and on “our” capitalist “business culture” as the source of America’s greatness:
“We need to take a look at how our market system has evolved over time...Our constitution places the ownership of private property at the very heart of our system of liberty…Rather than vilify the rich, we hold them up as role models...As Ted Turner famously said, in America money is how we keep score. The result of this business culture has been a prosperity that’s unmatched in human history. It takes a trip overseas to fully appreciate just how good Americans have it; even our poor take for granted goods and services – electricity, clean water, indoor plumbing, telephones, televisions, and household appliances – that are still unattainable for most of the world. America may have been blessed with some of the planet’s best real estate, but clearly it’s not just our natural resources that account for our economic success. Our greatest asset has been our system of social organization, a system for generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative, and the efficient allocation of resources.” (Obama, pp. 149-150)
*On why no radical revolution in America (the most unequal and wealth-top-heavy nation in the industrialized world), where the top 1 percent owns half the wealth and a larger share of the politicians and policymakers (including Obama):
“ ..and if we have declined to heed Jefferson’s advice to engage in a revolution every two or three generations, it’s only because the Constitution itself provided a sufficient defense against tyranny” (Obama, p. 93)
*On the mind-blowing coolness and wisdom of the nation’s wealthy, slave-owning, and “rabble”-hating Founders:
“I’ve often wonder whether the Founders themselves recognized at the time the scope of their accomplishment. They didn’t simply design the Constitution in the wake of revolution; they wrote the Federalist Papers to support it, shepherded the document through ratification, and amended it with the Bill of Rights – all in the span of a few short years
. As we read these documents, they seem so incredibly right that it’s easy to believe they are result of natural law if not divine inspiration” (p. 90)
No further commentary from me on B.O. at present; I’ll let his words speak for themselves for now and will return to all this and much more from "The Audacity of Hope" in a future issue.