Watching Obama Morph Into Dick Cheney
America has lost her soul, and so has her president.
A despairing country elected a president who promised change. Americans arrived from every state to witness in bitter cold Obama's swearing-in ceremony. The Mall was packed in a way that it has never been for any other president.
The people's good will toward Obama and the expectations they had for him were sufficient for Obama to end the gratuitous wars and enact major reforms. But Obama has deserted the people for the interests. He is relying on his non-threatening demeanor and rhetoric to convince the people that change is underway.
The change that we are witnessing is in Obama, not in policies. Obama is morphing into Dick Cheney.
Obama has not been in office four months and already a book could be written about his broken promises.
Obama said he would close the torture prison, Guantanamo, and abolish the kangaroo courts known as military tribunals. But now he says he is going to reform the tribunals and continue the process, but without confessions obtained with torture. Getting behind Obama's validation of the Bush-Cheney policy, House Democrats pulled the budget funding that was to be used for closing Guantanamo.
The policy of kidnapping people (usually on the basis of disinformation supplied by their enemies) and whisking them off to Third World prisons to be interrogated is to be continued. Again, Obama has substituted a "reform" for his promise to abolish an illegal policy. Rendition, Obama says, has also been reformed and will no longer involve torture.
How would anyone know? Is Obama going to assign a U.S. government agent to watch over the treatment given to disappeared people by Third World thugs? Given the proclivity of American police to brutalize U.S. citizens, nothing can save the victims of rendition from torture.
Obama has defended the Bush-Cheney warrantless wiretapping program run by the National Security Agency and broadened the government's legal argument that "sovereign immunity" protects government officials from prosecution and civil suits when they violate U.S. law and constitutional protections of citizens. Obama's Justice Department has taken up the defense of Donald Rumsfeld against a case brought by detainees whose rights Rumsfeld violated.
In a signing statement this month, Obama abandoned his promise to protect whistle-blowers who give information of executive branch illegality to Congress. Obama is making even more expansive claims of executive power than Bush. As Bruce Fine puts it: "In principle, President Obama is maintaining that victims of constitutional wrongdoing by the U.S. government should be denied a remedy in order to prevent the American people and the world at large from learning of the lawlessness perpetrated in the name of national security and exacting political and legal accountability."
Obama, in other words, is committed to covering up the Bush regime's crimes and to ensuring that his own regime can continue to operate in the same illegal and unconstitutional ways.
Obama is fighting the release of the latest batch of horrific torture photos that have come to light. Obama claims that release of the photos would anger insurgents and cause them to kill our troops. That, of course, is nonsense. Those resisting occupation of their land by U.S. troops and NATO mercenaries are already dedicated to killing our troops, and they know that Americans torture whomever they capture. Obama is fighting the release of the photos because he knows the barbaric image that the photos present of the U.S. military will undermine the public's support for the wars that enrich the military-security complex, appease the Israel lobby and repay the campaign contributions that elect the U.S. government.
As for bringing the troops home from Iraq, this promise, too, has been reformed. To the consternation of his supporters, Obama is leaving 50,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The others are being sent to Afghanistan and to Pakistan, where on Obama's watch war has broken out big-time, with already 1 million refugees from the indiscriminate bombing of civilians.
Meanwhile, war with Iran remains a possibility, and at Washington's insistence, NATO is conducting war games on former Soviet territory, thus laying the groundwork for future enrichment of the U.S. military-security complex. The steeply rising U.S. unemployment rate will provide the needed troops for Obama's expanding wars.
Obama can give a great speech without mangling the language. He can smile and make people believe his rhetoric. The world, or much of it, seems to be content with the soft words, which now drape Dick Cheney's policies in pursuit of executive supremacy and U.S. hegemony.
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Do you really think Obama would have even been nominated if he actually was going to pursue all of those things? The elites want to not only maintain, but to also increase their power exponentially, so they just got themselves a gimmick candidate, albeit one that is more polished and congenial than their last one!!!!
I still hold out small hope that your judgment is premature. However, I evaluated O as a liberal interventionist, in spite of the hysteria of the neocons. I wish I were wrong.
Throughout his brief political career, Obama has been an enthusiastic proponent of every manner of taking prenatal human life, and even opposed saving the lives--ex-utero--of children who managed to survive attempts on their lives in utero. Although all abortions are barbaric, Obama has been steadfast in defending and protecting even the most overtly grisly kinds of abortions.
Why was there ever even the least bit of speculation about or belief in him as anti-war or as a defender of innocent lives? His war on the unborn has been unrelenting. His reputed Cheney-esque present was entirely predictable, and involved no change of heart or mind or philosophy at all. For that matter, even Cheney never showed himself to be so bloodthirsty as CIC #44.
What is so surprising. After all, Ronald Reagan morphed into Lyndon Johnson after he got in---big spender and social liberal.
I agree with Clyde Wilson - no surprise. Any US president operates within a very narrow consensus determined by the ruling oligarchy but subscribed to by something like 99+% of the ruled. The real agents of change were Bush and Cheney who changed the default settings of the American electorate from peace and prosperity to permanent war. Then they had to be reined in by their behind-the-scenes masters lest their recklessness lead to an extremely destructive nuclear war. Obama is the ideal front man - obedient to his masters and keeping the masses entertained. More war, but not too much more; more torture, but it won't be discussed; more government - of course; the economic crisis demands it.
"they had to be reined in by their behind-the-scenes masters lest their recklessness lead to an extremely destructive nuclear war."
My view is a little different. I don't think they were reined in at all. The Cheney administration kept up business as usual to their last day in office and handed their programs off in a seamless transfer to the Kenyan and his little gaggle of "replacement faces".
Nuclear war is probably still as much a possibility now as it was this time last year. Nothing changes in DC, except for the extent to which the rulers flaunt their power over us all.
Today, we have an illegal alien as president. That's the main difference that I can see between Bush and Obama. In every other way, we might as well have Bush still in office for all the change that's taking place.
#6 - Bush, Cheney and the neo-cons and AIPAC crowd wanted to attack Iran with nuclear weapons and this is where they were reined in. I agree that the chances of nuclear war may be about the same as last year at this time, although InTrade prediction futures shows much lower odds of an attack on Iran. But the reining in took place in 2006-2007. Bush was on a very short leash for the last couple of years of his term and Obama is on a very short one now.
Short memories, selective memories, questionable moral values.
Not so long ago, current Vice President, Secretary of State and various Special Envoys of the State Department, members of Senate, Congress etc. eagerly participated in planning, organizing and conducting the final crime of the twentieth century. Current President did not, as far as I know, participate in "humanitarian bombing" and consequent distraction of Yugoslavia, violent coup d'etat, kidnappings of state officials, their shipping to remote kangaroo court which still runs etc. etc. etc.
It is not wrong example at all. Contrarily it is so right that all we see and read now, could be easily predicted last November. All you need is open eyes and good memory.
Why Barak Obama refuses to expose all of his Military, Intelligence and Security Forces as a bunch of murderous psychopaths is beyond reason. Right. That's exactly what we all would do. Right?
Be fair people and help the Guy. It's the only chance you've got so far.
Big surprise. Anyone willing to get off his ass and search for information about the community agitator from the south side would have known the Alenyski agitator for what he is.
Why the foreign policy concerns? With multi-trillion dollar deficits readers had best plan for hyper-inflation and the joys of 25 percent, plus, unemployment and $6.00 a loaf bread.
@8: Uh, did Sacha Baron Cohen just join this thread? "Be fair people and help the Guy." Nothing like some comic relief to break the tension.
"But the reining in took place in 2006-2007. Bush was on a very short leash for the last couple of years of his term and Obama is on a very short one now."
Bush was on an elastic leash for his entire tenure. He dithered about as he pleased for the entire time he was in office, as far as I can see. Cheney and his cabal are the ones who would have been reined in if such had ever been the case. It was more as if they simply bayed a little more loudly for nuclear strikes in Iran at certain times and at others were more vocal about other insanities they wanted to promote.
The neocons haven't been reined in, shoved aside, discredited or otherwise silenced. They have the same influence they always had, but their pundits are simply being given less space onstage than they enjoyed prior to Rumsfeldt's ouster.
The fact that Dick Cheney is still wandering around playing his same old chin music while being guarded by SS agents should illustrate how much he has been reined in. He should be on trial for war crimes, treason and numerous other capitol crimes, as should his sock puppet, W and every single Israeli double agent they looked to for guidance.
Nothing has changed as far as I can see.
InTrade odds seem to be based on current media manipulations. I wouldn't place too much faith in such sources.
Mr. Milosevic, I'm sorry, but I really can't determine what you meant to convey in post # 8.
You know, I am always surprised that some very intelligent people are surprised that the winner of the presidency has not fulfilled any of his campaign promises. One would think that by now intelligent people would realize that the government does not represent Americans, and would quit the game and quit being exasperated. However, their patterings give me cause to chuckle and to pray for them.
Obama had nothing to recommend him for election. He is still spouting his cliches, as though talking would solve problems.
You won't understand Obama until you recognize that his obsession to hold power. He throws anything under the bus that hinders that ambition.
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Yes we can! Uh....yeah right.
Men such as Obama, who wrote wistfully of having "wanted to punch [someone] in the stomach" but have never done so, will always go weak in the knees around men in uniform. Force is something mysterious to them, hence they fear it and submit to it, even as they affect to transcend it. The generals are probably the only people around from whom Obama doesn't expect routine obeisance. Quite the contrary, when these guys walk into the oval office there's still that notorious tingle running down the leg - but it's Obama's leg!