The Chameleon: A Lizard for all Seasons

There was never any hope from this farce we call electing a new president. The iron grip of Corporate America would never have allowed anyone that represented change into the White House. Every weapon in the corporate arsenal was brought to bear in order to dupe the populace including propaganda, fear, hate, and big bucks. There were a few candidates that might have started the Ship of State down a road of change for the better but the propaganda machine we call the news media squashed those candidates very early in the game through ridicule and refusing to give them a fair shake but mainly by ignoring them. The DLC, a collection of warmongers and corporate whores, also did their part to prevent any candidate outside their little circle of crony capitalists from posing any challenge to their own manikin candidates. Also liberal bloggers with their mindless group-think did their part to keep any candidate that would represent real change from the national debate either by shucking for their beloved Democrat insiders or not discussing the rather obvious problems with their beloved leaders while viewing anyone like Ralph Nader as a threat to their sainted Democratic candidates though it is doubtful that blogs had much impact either way despite their self-congratulatory antics. Then of course there is the puerile U.S. world view shared by almost every U.S. citizen that entails a self-imposed ignorance and refusal to look at the reality of their sinking nation, a nation that is rapidly collapsing under the weight of its own hubris. After all we are a brand-name nation and most people feel more comfortable with big name-brands than the more unknown brands.

Ejecting one warmonger we have replaced him with another warmonger who worships at the altar of Presidential power and prestige. Obama has shown himself to be a true chameleon with a very clever campaign where he presented himself as the candidate that could be everything to everybody through a purposeful vagueness and clever speeches that allowed everyone to hear what they wanted to hear. Now that Obama has grabbed the brass ring the colors of the chameleon are fading to reveal the true nature of the lizard beneath. I would imagine that a great number of people voted for Obama in the primary because Hillary Clinton was a proven warmonger, the poster girl for the DLC. I can only wonder how they must feel confronted with the possibility of Obama appointing Hillary as Secretary of State. All I can say is get ready for endless war. Is this the price Obama had to pay for winning the presidency? That to be sure that a half white would follow the DLC agenda he must surround himself with the same liars and cheats of the former Clinton administration who brought us NAFTA, the brutal bombing of Yugoslavia, the sanctions against Iraq that murdered over one million people? It may just be a guess but I can just visualize the scene in a dark lit room where sitting at a table with DLC leaders Obama made his deal with the devil while turning a radiant smiley-face to the public. Or is it just that Obama knew all along what the corporate establishment expected of him. Take your pick, it doesn’t really matter for the end results are the same, endless war.

It would be good not to forget that it was Clinton/Gore that began calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein. During the Clinton Regime Al Gore was traipsing about the countryside giving speeches saying Saddam must be removed from power and now that Bush II actually did destroy Iraq Obama is ringing himself inside a circle of the same Clintonian ding-bats that did so much to lay the groundwork for invasion.

Alexander Cockburn writing for The Nation…

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For a Man of Peace, Gore has plenty of blood on his CV. Looking back through the 1980s, we find that on every relevant issue, whether it was supporting the contras or Reagan's bombing of Libya in 1986, shilling for the Pentagon's latest weapons systems, voting for nerve gas or backing the Reagan/Bush position on NATO deployments in Europe, Gore's hawkishness was unflagging. In the course of his career he voted for the neutron bomb, the B-2 bomber, the Trident II missile, the MX missile and the Midgetman. He also backed the mini-Star Wars plan. The defense contractors always loved Al, the same way the nuclear plant manufacturers do today.

When it came to Bush Senior's attack on Iraq, Gore's antics astounded even his hardened colleagues in the Senate as they debated the war resolution. Of course he had long since decided to vote aye on war, having been a hardliner on Iraq since 1988. But on January 12, 1991, he spun out his supposed travails in coming to this decision in prime-time posturing, speaking of his "heavy burden of conscience" and the lonely weeks "questioning, probing, searching for the truth." Saddam, he proclaimed, "has more troops than Hitler did in the early years of World War II." In the New York Times he wrote, "We can no more look forward to a constructive long-term relationship with Saddam Hussein than we could hope to housebreak a cobra" and that the Iraqi dictator is not "an acceptable part of the landscape."

In Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign Gore was told to earn his keep with constant pummeling of George Bush Senior for having been soft on Saddam. Gore duly crisscrossed the country yoking Saddam and Bush in fervid denunciation. "The cover-up of Bush's arming of Saddam was," Gore shouted, "bigger than Watergate ever was."

In January 1993 Vice President-elect Gore announced that there could never be normal relations with Iraq so long as Saddam remained in power. He reiterated the call for a coup, if not by the Iraqi military then by the CIA. Vice President Gore was then given authority in the Clinton Administration for Iraq policy. In this capacity he presided over the sanctions that led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of them children. The mid-1990s saw Gore as a major voice urging NATO's bombing of the Serbs. In his 2000 presidential campaign he publicly distanced himself from the Clinton Administration on Iraq policy, reiterating that Saddam had to fall and pledging support for Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress.

It was Hillary who encouraged Bill to bomb, bomb, and bomb Yugoslavia (though Bill didn’t need much encouragement). Hillary couldn’t bomb enough, and now Bombs away Hillary is likely to hold one of the most powerful positions in the Obama administration. Then there is the other callous and unfeeling monster among the Obama advisors, Albright of the “I think it was worth it” queen of the child killers. The list of Clinton cronies just continues to grow and with each new addition hope fades like a wisp of ground fog ‘neath a hot summer’s sun. More murder, mayhem, thievery, corruption piled on corruption, welcome to your world, the world of the DLC.

Perhaps it is unfair to blame just the DLC because there really is only one political party in our “two-party” system with the Republicans and the Democrats being merely two different factions of the same monstrous Scylla whose entwining tentacles have a strangle-hold on what we, in all “seriousness,” call government. It would almost be amusing if it wasn’t so tragic to think of how the liberal bloggers must be going through all sorts of rigorous intellectual contortions as Obama continues to stick a red hot poker up their nether regions. They’ll talk in minute detail about whatever miniscule and unimportant matter that comes to their mind but will keep their traps shut when it comes to Obama and what is becoming clearer and clearer with each passing day is we should be ready for endless war. But then the U.S. has become a modern day Sparta, a military state, without the Spartan life-style, though it shall become Spartan enough in due time.

There are really only two choices facing Obama. One is to continue down the road to doom called the Imperial Road or he can stand up on his own two feet and do everything in his power to end the mindless, brutal, idiot slaughter to save not only the victims but the health of a nation that is crumbling. Clearly as he plots with his cronies for an all-out war with Afghanistan he has already made the wrong choice which by any sane account is unwinnable whatever winnable means. And that is the rub for when there is no definition of winning there can be no end, war without end, endless war, until the empire disintegrates into the same dust as the Roman Legions became, and indeed, Obama seems to be already treading on the outer marches of reality. In fact, Afghanistan is the elephant’s graveyard of previous imperial endeavors where their bones lie bleaching in the sun.

Simon Jenkins of the Guardian writes…

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The error of Afghanistan is far more serious than the error of Iraq. If the resulting insurgency is now exported to Pakistan, both errors will seem peccadillos. Pakistan is the sixth largest state in the world, and nuclear-armed.

The awful prospect is that Obama and Brown may feel too weak to learn from Iraq and pull back. They will blunder on, not to a clean defeat but to something far worse, a war of attrition whose poison will spread across a subcontinent.

Via Chris Floyd