[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Worse Than McCain?

[Bill Totten]

by Mike Whitney

Counterpunch (July 11 2008)


Every four years, liberals and progressives are expected to set aside
their beliefs and stand foursquare behind the Democratic Party
candidate. This ritual is invariably performed in the name of party
unity. It doesn't matter if the candidate is a smooth-talking politician
who's willing to toss his pastor of twenty years overboard for a few
awkward comments, or whether he refuses to defend basic civil liberties
like the Fourth Amendment's right to privacy. All that matters is that
there's a big "D" following his name and that he shows he's willing to
engage in some meaningless verbal jousting with his Republican opponent.

For nearly a year now, the public has been treated to regular doses of
Mr Obama's grandiloquent oratory and his sweeping "Follow me to
Shangri-la" promises. These flourishes are usually followed by
"clarifications" on the central issues which identify Obama as a
center-right conservative with no intention of disrupting the status
quo. CounterPunch co-editor Alexander Cockburn summed it up like this in
a recent article on this site:

"There have plenty of articles recently with headlines such "Obama's
Lunge to the Right". I find these odd. Never for one moment has Obama
ever struck me as someone anchored, or even loosely moored to the left,
or even displaying the slightest appetite for radical notions, aside
from a few taglines tossed from the campaign bus."

Obama-boosters on the left simply ignore the facts because the thought
of the unstable John McCain in the Oval Office with his stubby fingers
just inches from the Big Red Switch is too much to bear. So, they throw
their support behind Obama and hope for the best. But Obama has done
nothing to earn their vote and there's nothing to indicate that he has
any interest in restoring the republic or putting and end to US
adventurism. He's just a one-term senator who doesn't want to rock the
boat. That's it. He'd rather keep his position on the issues blurry and
rattle off lofty-sounding platitudes than state plainly how he feels.
Unfortunately, when he's pinned down and has to give a straight answer,
he quickly swerves to the right where he feels most at home.

Some Obamaniacs admit to feeling troubled from time to time. They  worry
that behind the rhetorical fanfare, Barack is just an empty gourd; a
well-spoken pitch man with no moral core. Could he be another Slick
Willie, they wonder; another self-promoting politico as eager to sell
out his working class supporters as chase a frisky intern around the
Lincoln bedroom? No one knows, because no one has figured out exactly
why Obama is running. Does he really want to lift the country from the
muck of eight years of Bush misrule or does he just want to gad about on
Airforce One and make pretty speeches in the Rose Garden? What really
drives Obama? It's a mystery.

But don't be fooled, Obama could turn out to be worse than McCain, much
worse. No one doubts that he is brighter and more charismatic than the
irritating senator from Arizona. And no one underestimates his Pied
Piper ability to galvanize crowds and stir up national pride. But what
good is that? Obama works for the same group of venal plutocrats as
Bush; a fact that was made painfully clear just last week when he voted
to approve the new FISA bill that allows the president to continue
spying on American citizens with impunity. Obama is a constitutional
scholar; he understood what he was voting for. He was sending a message
to his supporters that they don't really matter; that what really counts
is the small gaggle of powerful corporatists who run the country and
believe the president is above the law. That's what his vote really meant.

So, why vote for him? We don't need a glamor boy to trash the Bill of
Rights. And we don't need another paper-mache president who tries to
conceal America's war crimes behind stuffy-sounding pronouncements about
"Islamofacism" and other terrorist mumbo-jumbo. What we need is someone
with enough guts and moral fiber to shake up the political
establishment, put an end to the wars and covert operations, and clean
up Wall Street.

Obama has dazzled the media with his easy manner and his savoir faire,
but he's not the right man for the job. He has surrounded himself with
ex-Clintonistas who will continue the global onslaught with even greater
ferocity than Bush, although much more discreetly. (After all, this is
the empire's A Team) And just like Clinton, who bombed the bejesus out
of Belgrade for 87 days without batting an eye; Obama will keep the war
machine chugging along at full-throttle. No thanks.

What the world really needs is a five or ten year break from the United
States; a little breather so people can unwind and take it easy for a
while without worrying that their wedding party will be vaporized in a
blast of napalm or that their brother-in-law will be dragged off to some
CIA hellhole where his eyes are gouged out and his fingernails ripped
off. That's what the world really needs, a temporary pause in the
imperial violence. But there won't be any sabbatical under
Field-Marshall Obama; no way. As Bill Van Auken points out in an article
on the World Socialist web site, Obama may turn out to be the point-man
for reinstating the draft:

Obama has "lamented the failure of the Bush administration to issue "a
call to service" and "a call for shared sacrifice ...There is no
challenge greater than the defense of our nation and our values", said
Obama. We "need to ease the burden on our troops, while meeting the
challenges of the 21st century", which, according to Obama, will require
an "increase US ground forces by 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 Marines".
("Obama continues lurch to the right on Iraq war and militarism" by Bill
Van Auken)

Is that why the political establishment is so enthusiastic about Obama,
because they need a better recruiting sergeant than the uninspiring McCain?

No one has followed Obama's rightward drift with greater interest and
bemusement than the editors of the Wall Street Journal. They have
faithfully chronicled all the vacillating, obfuscating and backpedaling
and they've made up their minds; Obama is marching straight towards the
welcoming arms of the Republican Party. That's right; he's gradually
embracing the conservative platform and abandoning any pretense of
liberalism. Two weeks ago the WSJ ran an editorial that summarized
Obama's metamorphosis in an article titled "Bush's Third Term":

We're beginning to understand why Barack Obama keeps protesting so
vigorously against the prospect of 'George Bush's third term'. Maybe
he's worried that someone will notice that he's the candidate who's
running for it.

Most Presidential candidates adapt their message after they win their
party nomination, but Mr Obama isn't merely 'running to the center'.
He's fleeing from many of his primary positions so markedly and so
rapidly that he's embracing a sizable chunk of President Bush's policy.
Who would have thought that a Democrat would rehabilitate the
much-maligned Bush agenda?

That's fair enough. Obama has changed his position on his "support of  a
filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for
telecommunications companies". He has wormed his way out of a definite
commitment on withdrawing the troops from Iraq (which was a real lesson
in Clintonian triangulation). He's backed off on his promise to rewrite
the NAFTA free trade agreement. He's thrown his support behind Bush's
"faith-based" social programs which provide state money for religious
organizations. He's sided with the majority  on the Supreme Court on gun
rights and whether to ban the death penalty for rape. How can anyone
support a candidate who is on the same ideological side of legal issues
as Antonin Scalia?

In the past few weeks, Senator Switcheroo has blasted Fidel Castro, Hugo
Chavez, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad while, at the same time, heaping praise
on our "good friend" Israel. Obama even has a two paragraph commentary
on his campaign web site lauding Israel's devastating attack on Lebanon
a year ago which killed 1,500 civilians and reduced much of the
country's vital infrastructure to rubble.

Still think the "peace candidate" does not have the warmongering bone
fides to do the empire's dirty work?

Think again.

Many of us who have criticized Obama are being dismissed as cynics, but
that's nonsense. The truth is that the left Obama supporters have
projected their own values onto their candidate and are trying to make
him out to be something that he is not. They put words in his mouth so
they can continue to hold on to the crazy notion that the system really
isn't broken and that it can be fixed by simply pulling a lever on
election day. This is just the lazy-person's way of ignoring the real
work that needs to be done to restore American democracy; the organizing
of groups and networks, the building of labor unions and working
coalitions, the focussed determination to root-out corruption and
entrenched corporate power. The system has to be rebuilt from the
bottom-up not the top-down. It'll take a revolution in thinking and lots
of hard work. There's no quick fix. Freedom isn't free anymore; deal
with it. Voting for Obama and keeping one's fingers crossed, is not a
sign of hope. It's a sign of self-delusion.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state and can be reached at
fergiewhitney at msn.com

http://www.counterpunch.com/whitney07112008.html


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