[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Hopelessness You Can Believe In

[Bill Totten]

Why Obama is scarier than George W Bush

by Ted Rall

Boise Weekly: www.boiseweekly.com (February 04 2009)


ANGOULEME, FRANCE―Dave Eggers preceded his memoir A Heartbreaking Work
of Staggering Genius (2000) with a section titled "Rules and Suggestions
for Enjoyment of this Book". It's a brilliant attempt to disarm the
reader and preempt criticism. Among its warnings, referring to chapter
four: "The book thereafter is kind of uneven". (Disclosure: Eggers
edited my work at two magazines in the 1990s.)

Barack Obama shares Eggers' talent for managing expectations. "There
will be false starts, there will be setbacks, there will be frustrations
and disappointments", Obama said upon his arrival in Washington, DC. "I
will make some mistakes". In other words, don't expect much.

The soaring optimistic rhetoric of the campaign ("yes we can") is no
more, replaced by the sober, string-synced cello strains of Yo-Yo Ma. So
is Obama's million-dollar smile. The Dour One is demanding patience. And
he's getting it, for now: "Most respondents [to the New York Times/CBS
News poll taken January 19] said they thought it would take Mr Obama two
years or more to deliver on campaign promises to improve the economy,
expand health-care coverage and end the war in Iraq".

Setting the bar low seems to be working. Seventy-nine percent of
Americans say they're optimistic about the next four years under Obama.

Sad, pathetic Americans. Like a dog that's been beaten eight long years,
they're so psyched about the fact that their new master doesn't drool
and speaks coherent English that they'll follow him anywhere. The media
is in love with The One and so, therefore, is the public. No one
questions him.

Frightening but true: Barack Obama is even more dangerous to liberal
ideals than George W Bush. Obama, who didn't appoint a single liberal to
a senior position, has neutered the left. "Protesters, a fixture of
every inauguration since President Nixon's in 1973, were few and
scattered on Tuesday as Barack Obama assumed the presidency", reported
the Times.

The antiwar types have thrown away their signs. The sight of the first
black president has the fair weather pacifists goo-goo-ga-gaing over a
man who plans to transfer US occupation troops and the carnage they
bring from Iraq to Afghanistan.

No demonstrators in the streets. No reporters asking tough questions. A
political honeymoon based on nothing. Didn't we learn anything from
9/11, when ninety percent of Americans, and the media, and Congress,
issued George W Bush a similar blank check?

People think things will be better four years from now, but there's
little reason for hope. America faces radical problems. Radical problems
require radical solutions. Unfortunately, Obama's proposals, and the
moderates and conservatives with whom he has filled his cabinet, are
woefully inadequate to the challenges at hand.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman calculates that there's at
least a $2.1 trillion hole in the economy - an "output gap" between
production capacity and consumers' ability to buy goods. Filling that
hole would require direct investment (like Obama's public works
proposal) of at least $1.5 trillion. But Obama's plan only contains $355
billion, of which only $136 billion would be spent within the next two
years. It's better than nothing, but not by much. Obama wants to plug a
gushing artery with a Band-Aid one-tenth the size of the wound.

It's churlish to predict that Obama's approach won't work. But even
Obama admits it won't. He promises to create four million new jobs by
2011. But we're currently losing four million jobs every five months. If
Obama delivers, 25 million Americans will have lost their jobs by 2011.
(The math differential is due to the fact that population growth
increases the workforce by 2.8 million jobs annually.) With unemployment
figures like that, no one will doubt that we're in a real depression:
bread lines, suicides, the whole bit.

Obama's order to close Guantanamo and the CIA's secret "black site"
torture prisons within a year is heartening. But as with his other
initiatives, it doesn't go far enough. The detainees should have been
freed, paid a generous compensation package, and given a formal apology
from the US government on Day One of his administration. Gitmo should
have been shuttered immediately. All the torture criminals from Bush to
the US Navy guards should have been thrown in prison and put on trial.

Instead, Obama's goons (they're his now) will keep torturing the
detainees for at least another year. Some detainees may still be
subjected to kangaroo courts. And Obama's executive orders contain
weasel words that let him take back America's renewed commitment to
constitutional rights with the snap of a finger. The orders, reports the
Times, "could also allow Mr Obama to reinstate the CIA's detention and
interrogation operations in the future, by presidential order, as some
have argued would be appropriate if Osama bin Laden or another top-level
leader of al-Qaida were captured".

Meanwhile, the Bush administration creeps who personally ordered the
murder and torture of innocents kidnapped by the military, including
young children, will not face prosecution.

During the campaign, Obama promised there would be "no more illegal
wiretapping of American citizens". He has since changed his mind. Obama
will keep the USA-Patriot Act. Habeas corpus, eliminated by the Military
Commissions Act, won't come back.

The biggest reason hope doesn't stand a chance is Afghanistan, where
Obama plans to send the soldiers he wants to pull out of Iraq. The
international community, which understands that the 2001 US invasion of
Afghanistan had no more to do with 9/11 than the war against Iraq, will
not take kindly to this escalation. Moreover, the war against
Afghanistan is even less winnable than Iraq. At a time when we can least
afford foreign adventurism, Obama plans to pour billions of dollars and
thousands of lives into an Afghan charnel house with no prospect of victory.

Bush faced energetic opposition. Obama, on the other hand, is adored by
the very people who should be shouting at him the loudest. Conservatives
lost their credibility by supporting Bush, leaving Republican voices out
in the cold.

Give the man a chance? Not me. I've sized up him, his advisers and their
plans, and already found them sorely wanting. It won't take long, as
Obama's failures prove the foolishness of Americans' blind trust in him.
Obama isn't our FDR. He's our Mikhail Gorbachev: likeable, intelligent,
well-meaning, and ultimately doomed by his insistence on being
reasonable during unreasonable times.

_____

Ted Rall is the author of To Afghanistan and Back: A Graphic Travelogue
and Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East? (2002)  He
draws cartoons and writes columns for Universal Press Syndicate.

http://www.boiseweekly.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=320830


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