BHO is not MLK

Linh Dinh, March 2011(via John Caruso):

Suave, articulate and personable, Obama is proving to be just as deadly as Bush, but clearly more cynical. A great, loyal tool of the establishment, Obama has dampened protest from American liberals. Though they know he has betrayed them, they’re reluctant to show appropriate outrage because, not that long ago, they have cheered and wept for him so openly.

Ian Welsh,

1.December 2010, "Obama isn’t about compromise"

Let me put it even more baldly. Obama is, actually, a bad man. He didn’t do the right thing when he had a majority, and now that he has the excuse of a Republican House he’s going to let them do bad thing after bad thing. This isn’t about “compromise”, this is about doing what he wants to do anyway, like slashing social security. The Senate, you remember, voted down the catfood comission. Obama reinstituted it by executive fiat.

and 2, October 2010, "Repudiating Liberalism or Obama"



***

Virtually every day there is something in the news that reminds me of my revulsion for Barach Obama's administration, and how he has come to personify for me the sense that we live in Upside Down World. The age of Obama is an age in which a president can

1.announce the expansion of a war on a backward and essentially defenseless country (and subsequently be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize),

2. obligate millions of poor people to buy healthcare coverage, as a gift to the private insurance companies,

3.make plans to strip-mine social security,

and have besotted and hoodwinked millions hail him as their Great Liberal Hope while millions of others are convinced he's a socialist, secretly African, and possibly even the Antichrist.

As far as I can see both groups of millions are deluded and easily fooled, not necessarily because of stupidity per se, so much as a hunger to believe convenient things that square with their fears and prior beliefs, and don't require much work to sort out. OK, a dose of stupidity also helps.

While I see Obama as a champion con man and a right wing corporate stooge much as Ian Welsh, John Caruso, and Linh Dinh (and many others) do, I sometimes wonder if I have lost my objectivity. I have wondered in the past if Obama's apparent fondness for deliberately ironic bad timing was just a product of my imagination. For example, in late 2009 I wondered if he delayed announcing whether or not he would approve a "surge" of troops in Afghanistan until just before he was due in Norway to accept his peace prize partly in order to pair the unconditioned and conditioned stimuli of the two events, like Pavlov's warmongering dog, hoping to encourage people to associate Obamawar, his own special brand, with peace and humanitarianism. War is peace, freedom is slavery, etc. Was I being too harsh, and seeing links that weren't there? I wasn't sure.

Strictly speaking, the fact that Obama decided to formally announce his 2012 reelection bid today, on the 43rd anniversary of Martin Luther King jr's assassination, doesn't necessarily corroborate my suspicion, nor does it prove BHO's narcissism, or even that he takes black people for granted. But it does disgust me.

(I note also that in terms of linking events deliberately, the administration chose today to announce that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would get a military trial.)