Barack Obama: What Does Anyone Really See In This Guy?

Thank the universe for people like Paul Street, John Pilger and the entire crew at Black Agenda Report.

For, without people such as these fine human beings, we'd never know the truth about Barack Obama.

Or at least those of us with minds of our own wouldn't and would probably be the pod-people that are Obama supporters.

I used to be the Senior Correspondent to the Mike Malloy show. I used to revere Malloy and people such as Greg Palast, to name but two.

Then Obama came along, playing his syren song, and they went brain dead.

I kept my nose to the grindstone, gathering more and more information from the above linked sources, sending this information to Malloy's show and getting the door slammed in my face time and time again.

So I gave up. I stopped trying to go through a shut and locked door, stopped banging my head against a brick wall.

I stopped being the Senior Correspondent.

Occasionally, I come across information and I catch myself thinking, "This would be great to send to Malloy." And then I remember that I don't do that anymore because it would never make it to his eyes and, if it did, it wind up in the trash anyway. It took me a while but I now know that Malloy is an Obamaist of the highest order.

For a show that has purported to seek the truth, the truth is now only a one way street.

But I digress.

My question was what anyone sees in Obama and I'd dearly love to know the answer to this question. I'd love to hear someone explain Obama to me in something other than slogans or buzzwords like "hope" and "cool".

I really would like someone to explain Obama to me after reading the following.

On July 6, Paul Street wrote a piece that I got from his Z Blog titled "The Audacity Of Imperial Airbrushing: Barack Obama's Whitewashed History Of U.S. Foreign Policy And Why It Matters".

Inside, Paul Street rips apart Obama's (partially ghost-written) book "The Audacity Of Hope", taking the Senator's words and putting them in the light of day.

Upon reading some of what Obama had to say in this tome, I have to think that one of the reasons that this thug is the Democratic nominee for Puppet of the United States of America is because most Americans are illiterate. I mean, there are other reasons he's where he's at but, come on, that's got to be one of them.

A questionable statement that isn't mentioned in Obama's book but was in his speech in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, was his appraisal of George H.W. Bush's handling of the "first" Gulf "war". Obama was, according to Street, "flattering and favorable" in his praise.

Paul Street:

"Nobody in the mainstream commentariat acted on (or likely even remotely felt) the urge to point out that Bush I's assault on Iraq involved heinous Superpower butchery, including the bombing and bulldozing to death of thousands of surrendered Iraqi soldiers and the decision to let Saddam Hussein slaughter Kurds and Shiites the U.S. had initially encouraged to rebel. Iraq is still dealing with epidemic cancers caused by American deployment of depleted uranium in the first one-sided Iraq 'war', described by many participants as a one-sided 'turkey shoot'."

This is but an inkling of what Barack Obama really believes about history, about war, about foreign policy.

But, as Street mentions, as Pilger mentions, as Harold Pinter is quoted as saying, "Such crimes never happened...they are of no interest."

Of no interest to Obama or his supporters, the so-called truth-seekers that call themselves "progressives", "liberals" and "Democrats".

Street goes on to write about Obama praising the "leadership of President Truman, Dean Acheson, George Marshall and George Kennan" for "crafting a new order that married Wilsonian idealism to hardheaded realism, an acceptance of American power with a humility regarding America's ability to control events around the world."

Keep the name George Kennan in mind while I jump around Street's piece to a Kennan quote and remember that Kennan is one of Obama's heroes of "leadership".

Paul Street:

"To grasp some of the 'hardheaded realism' behind such U.S. Cold War policies as the sponsorship of vicious military dictatorships in Indonesia, Iran, Greece and Brazil (to name just a few "Free World" partners), we can consult an interesting formulation from Obama's wise "Wilsonian" hero George Kennan. As Kennan explained in Policy Planning Study 23, crafted for the State Department in 1948:

"'We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population...In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity...to do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives...We should cease to talk about vague and...unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.'"

Understand that George Kennan is one of Obama's heroes. Kennan believed that human rights and the raising of living standards were "vague and unreal" and that they needed to be done away with if we were to continue to lord our power over the barbarian hordes known as the rest of the world.

If I came at Malloy with something like this, if it actually got read, it would be sloughed off and never make the air, let alone a dent in his love for Obama.

Back to Paul Street's piece, Street mentions that Obama calls the bombing of Cambodia, an illegal action taken by the Nixon regime, "morally rudderless", within the pages of his book. As Street says, that's charitable at best.

Obama grew up in Indonesia in the 1960s. Obama proudly calls this fact forward when it suits his interests, especially the interest of furthering the myth of why he's the man for the job, that he's lived with every kind of people all his life and thus he can bring us all together.

What's interesting about this is that he mentions his time growing up in Indonesia but not the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, in which thousands upon thousands of people will slaughtered, all with the say-so of Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger.

Street:

"Obama deleted the Timor atrocities from his reflections in 'The Audacity of Hope' on what he learned about 'Indonesia's subsequent history' after he lived in that country as a young boy during the 1960s. In Obama's world view, as in that of his Harvard friend and former foreign policy adviser, Samantha Power, American crimes generally don't exist. They didn't happen."

Perhaps the greatest slap in the face to history comes next in Street's piece, in which our savior-to-be discusses Vietnam and "the biggest casualty of that war".

Street:

"Obama's nationalistic and whitewashed take on the history of U.S. foreign relations was starkly evident in 'The Audacity Of Hope's' reflections on the Vietnam War, an illegal U.S. invasion that killed at least 3 million Indochinese. By Obama's disturbing account:

"'The disastrous consequences of that conflict - for our credibility and prestige abroad, for our armed forces (which would take a generation to recover), and most of all for those who fought - have been amply documented. But perhaps the biggest casualty of that war was the bond of trust between the American people and their government - and between Americans themselves. As a consequence of a more aggressive press corps and the images of body bags flooding into the living rooms, Americans began to realize that the best and the brightest in Washington didn't always know what they were doing - and didn't always tell the truth." [italics are mine]

I want you, if you're an Obama fanatic, to read that passage again. Those are your man's words, from his book, unadulterated, unabridged. I want you to pay special attention to the italicized words.

There is no mention of the 3 million dead Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodia. That is not the "biggest casualty of that war"; that distinction is reserved for the severed "trust" between Americans and their government.

And on whose doorstep does Obama place the blame for that severed "trust"? The media for their "aggressive" coverage and the showing of body bags coming back to the U.S. Better there should have been a blackout. Think of the pain that could have been avoided, especially the pain of a severed "trust".

I tried month after month from January through March (perhaps even early April; the timeline is a bit hazy but I know it was definitely through March) to get Mike Malloy to read (even if for himself) Obama's Council On Foreign Relations piece, to no avail.

In the piece in Foreign Affairs, the Council's newsletter/magazine, Obama says the following:

"A strong military is, more than anything, necessary to sustain peace...We must retain the capacity to swiftly defeat any conventional threat to our country and our vital interests. But we must also become better prepared to put boots on the ground in order to take on foes that fight asymmetrical and highly adaptive campaigns on a global scale...I will not hesitate to use force unilaterally, if necessary, to protect the American people or our vital interests wherever we are attacked or imminently threatened...We must also consider using military force in circumstances beyond self-defense, in order to provide for the common security that underpins global stability - to support friends, participate in stability and reconstruction operations, or confront mass atrocities."

Does this sound peaceful, as Obama has tried to portray himself for the last year and a half? Does this sound like change?

These are questions I asked when I sent that and much more to Malloy. They fell on deaf ears, didn't even reach his eyes and forced me to leave a position (fictitious though it may have been) that I had held for nearly ten years.

Does it sound peaceful to you? Does it sound like change to you?

Street:

"Last February, Obama told autoworkers in Janesville, Wisconsin that, "It's time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money putting America back together."

In other words, destroy a country, slaughter its people, rape its land, steal its resources and its history and then move on to the next feast.

"Funny" story, by the way, Barack Obama continues to fund this "war", the soldiers who kill innocent Iraqis and the equipment and weapons, the bombs and the tanks and the guns and bullets, that they use to do the slaughtering.

Yet, in front of autoworkers, the duped sheep, he says something else, something jingoistic, something that autoworkers will cheer like crazy. And his sycophantic minions say he tells lies because "he needs to, in order to get elected".

On July 24, John Pilger wrote a piece for the New Statesman titled, "Obama, the Prince Of Bait And Switch.

Pilger writes, "In the New York Times on 14 July, in an article spun to appear as if he's ending the war in Iraq, Obama demanded more war in Afghanistan and, in effect, an invasion of Pakistan. He wants more combat troops, more helicopters, more bombs. Bush may be on his way out, but the Republicans have built an ideological machine that transcends the loss of electoral power - because their collaborators are, as the American writer Mike Whitney put it succinctly, 'bait-and-switch' Democrats, of whom Obama is the prince.

"Those who write of Obama that 'when it comes to international affairs, he will be a huge improvement on Bush' demonstrate the same wilful naivety that backed the bait-and-switch of Bill Clinton - and Tony Blair. Of Blair, wrote the late Hugo Young in 1997, 'ideology has surrendered entirely to 'values'...there are no sacred cows [and] no fossilised limits to the ground over with the mind might range in search of a better Britain...'

"Eleven years and five wars later, at least a million people lie dead. Barack Obama is the American Blair. That he is a smooth operator and a black man is irrelevant. He is of an enduring, rampant system whose drum majors and cheer squads never see, or want to see, the consequences of 500lb bombs dropped unerringly on mud, stone and straw houses."

This was one of the things that didn't jibe with me where it concerned the lengths to which Malloy went and continues to go to push his man, Obama.

Obama is the same as Blair and Clinton and Bush and his daddy. He is surrounding by the same advisers that told Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan to get into bed with people like Osama bin Laden (who may or may not even exist except in the deep recesses of the American psyche; exactly what he was created for). He takes money from the same corporations that every other politician does, even as he pretends not to, for your benefit. And he believes Imperial America is a "force of good" at any cost, no matter how many lives are destroy or lost, no matter how much blood is spilled. And when the facts don't fit the fairy tale that he's selling, he omits the facts.

Tell this to someone that has drank the Obama Holy Water and they just come up with something else to call you, having exhausted the word "racist" and every variation thereof. Present proof and you're told that you don't understand politics and this is what has to be done to win the office of president and, after Obama has done so, he'll go back to being the so-called progressive that "he's always been".

Why pretend you're something you're not? Furthermore, are we really supposed to believe that the powers that be, the ones that have hand-picked Obama to be the next puppet, could be so duped as to fall for an act? How long do you think a puppet that cut his strings would last in the Oval Office before he was stepped on?

Paul Street, writing again yesterday at his Z Blog, gave us the following bit of insight into Obama.

A day after Obama's speech in Berlin, the Senator was interviewed by Candy Crowley of CNN. The transcript reads as follows:

"CROWLEY: You talked yesterday in your speech, saying, look, I recognize that there are people in the world who think that the U.S. has been part of what has gone wrong in the world. Do you think that there's anything that's happened in the past 7 1/2 years that the U.S. needs to apologize for in terms of foreign policy?"

I pause now so that you realize what she's asking Obama. She's asking Obama if he thinks that Bush is a failure in foreign policy. She's asking Obama to hit a fucking home run not just out of the park but out of the city.

Obama's response?

"OBAMA: No, I don't believe in the U.S. apologizing. We've made some mistakes. As I said I think the war in Iraq was a mistake. We didn't keep our eye on the ball in Afghanistan. But, you know, hindsight is 20/20, and I'm much more interested in looking forward rather than looking backwards.

"And so the point of my speech yesterday was, you know, for Europe to recognize that whatever mistakes we do make, we have been overwhelmingly a force of good in the world that Europe and European Union would not exist, as we understand, had it not been for the enormous sacrifice of U.S. troops and taxpayers."

Obama doesn't believe in the US apologizing. For anything? There are Obamaists that claim that when he comes to power, reparations will be the top of the list. Really? Slavery will not be apologized for; Obama doesn't believe in the US apologizing.

Don't expect Obama to apologize to the Iraqi people for the slaughter of 1.2 million of their fellow citizens, either. The US doesn't apologize. And, besides, that whole thing there? It was just a "mistake". Not a crime, not genocide, not illegal. Just a "mistake". Sorry about that, but not really.

Then he goes into the same old thing about how we have to go back to Afghanistan, you know, the "good war", the "smart war".

And then he makes an excuse for Bush, saying, "But, you know, hindsight is 20/20 and I'm much more interested in looking forward rather than looking backwards".

In other words, Bush and company didn't have any real idea what they were getting into in Iraq but we can't blame them for that.

There are Obamaists that say, once Obama comes into power, Bush and company will be brought to justice.

Really? Want to read that statement of Obama's again?

Finally, Obama says that Europeans should hit their knees every night and thank their gods and their stars that the US finally decided to get off its collective fat ass in 1941 to come to Europe and take on their former lackey, Adolph Hitler. Never mind that Hitler had been in power for nearly 10 years at that point and that World War II had been in full swing for three years already.

The arrogance of the statement that Europeans need to understand that they wouldn't exist in the manner that they do right now had it not been for the "force of good" is unfathomable.

Know your place, Obama is saying, and scrape and bow before your saviors.

I keep asking, what is it that turns your head about this guy? I would dearly love an answer. If you've got one, you know where to find me.