Soul-Dead President Walking (589 Obama-dumping days until 2012 election)
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(589 Obama-dumping days left until 2012 election, Hugh's Obama's Scandals List)
Obama is a political gamesman. He lied his way into power.
Now he is determined to do and say anything to ensure a second term in 2012. That is his priority. His focus. His limited character.
Human needs and rights of others? Not so important.
Peace and a sensibility of the common good for this country and the globe seem permanently off the table for him. I am not talking about say-anything lip service about things humanitarian. I mean actual recognition and action. A true sense of responsibility as a fellow human being with the power to make change yes we could have believed in. Responsibility? The ability to respond? He hasn’t got it. At least in a moral way.
Maybe if it were pragmatically politically useful to him, Obama might just give altruism a go. But that ain’t gonna happen. The ruling class elite is not about altruism and Obama’s political ambitions have been fulfilled thanks to their mentorship. He will, of course, continue to pretzel himself for their continuing support.
Obama also knows he needs to counterpoint all those idiots who incredibly still think he is a liberal. Led by Rush Limbaugh, the Koch brothers, et al. Must list further and further to the right to futilely coax the irrationally uncoaxable to a recognition of his ever escalating disdain for the needs of the average citizens.
You might want to ponder that quote, Barack, by Groucho about the wisdom of only wanting to belong to a club that won’t have you as a member.
Obama perceives he must act tough about US foreign policy. Thus he will. It is called "reaction formation." Of course that is well worth lives lost or devastated to him. Thousands of lives. Hundreds of thousands. The posturing for 2012 is all.
The bloody irony that Obama ran as the anti-war President is a colossal insult to all of us so disenfranchised today, the people of conscience whom Cindy Sheehan describes as “lost in the wilderness of integrity.” (By the way, Hillary Clinton is certainly proving that a woman in a leadership position can be just as coldly militaristic and amorally game-playing as any man. Nice counter-pointing yourself, Hill. Hope it is worth it to you, all the gratuitous death, to prove you are no girlie woman!)
Arthur Silber expressed some rage for all of us recently. He describes us as a “nation led by blood-guzzling, flesh eating pigfuckers.”
I too feel such rage at the KILL KILL KILL, our only tool is a hammer then everything is a nail, gotta destroy the village to save it, violent military industrial security complex corporate-pimped monster that our leadership Pavlovianly answers to every time, that devours a minimal $500 million a week isn’t that what Kucinich estimates for its wars?
Hey, there are 330 million Americans. What if instead of fighting one little week we have a 7-day moratorium and each of us Americans gets one of those $500 million? Please please please? Just for that one week can’t we use the money for ourselves and not to bomb the shit out of fellow human beings and watch so many of our own young people get maimed or killed to promote corporate interests? Just for a week, guys ... and gals? Seven short days? Or, okay, maybe just give that money out to the people instead of bombing them? See where that gets us? Not money to their corrupt leaders. But to them! How novel would that be?
Sorry!!! I know, I know. What am I thinking???? That is just CRAZY talk, isn’t it?
That money must go into the mission creep addiction of spreading global death and destruction, again, using our overly-trusting, unfoundedly patriotic young people to sacrifice their lives and sanity to commit homicide for profits for corporations. I know. We need the oil. Blood for oil. A trade the leadership is willing to make for our own good, right?
It is the American Way. IT IS THE AMERICAN WAY!!!!
I guess for half a sec those fools who gave Obama that Peace Prize thought they could nudge him into a different direction. As well as the millions who hit the pavement for him in 2008. How wrong so many of us were. Charles Ferguson said on Tavis Smiley recently that Obama has singlehandedly wiped out American idealism for a generation or two. Way to go, Barack. What a bunch of optimistic wimps we all were apparently in your eyes. You really pulled the biggest fast one in American history, I’d say. You are so shameless you are beyond acknowledging your flip-floppiness. Colossal flip-floppiness. You did tell us you adored Reagan. Big clue, I admit. Many of us were lazy liberals led by a disinforming media.
This is America. Where lying to win is more than okay. It gets you big hugs from Oprah and a media just as pimped by the corporate overlords as the politicians who took oaths to represent our needs.
As for the Bush-era Dems now so thoroughly lobotomized to moral sensibility that they defend this President and his war-mongering, his assumption of the right to assassinate citizens, to authorize and defend torture of a soldier whistleblower of war crimes, all against those bad ol’ tea partiers, I am still at a loss. Is being on a “winning team” or never having to admit you were wrong that irrationally strong for them?
More and more when I click on the tv I brace myself and know I am going to be “played.” I crave certain websites and commentators whom I am learning to trust on the net. I wonder how long before that plug will be pulled on us, or the honest ones eliminated?
We’ve got our death squads in most countries in the world. Why not our own? How much more patience will the fascist regime have in citizens speaking out like this? I guess the status quo is so strong for now, such objections based on morality are just crazy talk. Naive crazy talk.
The fast hardening of soft fascism seems to be happening with little conscious struggle among the masses. A big ol’ amiable smile and a Democrat in name only at the helm is all that is required as our constitutional republic becomes toast.
There is a provocative quote from one of the most haunting pieces of science fiction (novel and movie) by Ray Bradury, Fahrenheit 451. It offers a glimmer of hope for those calling out for morality.
Some day the load we're carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn't use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And some day we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steam-shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we're going to go build a mirror-factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them."
Let me repeat:
... we'll build the biggest goddamn steam-shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up.
Jim Quinn also offers this comment on his website about Fahrenheit 451.
Montag is stalked by the Mechanical Hound throughout the book. It was programmed to hunt down Montag and lethally inject him with poison. Bradbury didn't know it, but he had described an early version of a predator drone. Today, a man can sit in front of his computer in the Pentagon and direct an unmanned predator drone to fire missiles at "enemies" without faces, halfway around the world. No danger, no consequences, no responsibility. The American public blindly believes the state is protecting them by murdering "enemies of the state". They will think differently when predator drones circle the skies above their towns seeking out "domestic terrorists" and non-conformists.
As I type this Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates are on a replay of Meet the Press congratulating themselves on the humanitarian intervention. Spin time. War for peace. Oxymoronic and evil. Hillary Clinton talking about the war crimes of Gaddafi. Robert Gates saying the hammer isn’t the only tool in our tool box. Mirror, anyone?
Tell me, David Gregory. What is the Obama doctrine coming up after the commercial? I'd say "the say anything big con."
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Comments
You're expecting the Last Supper?
The politics of personal rage.
You know the story of the scorpion and the frog right? The scorpion asks the frog for a ride across the river. "Scorpion, you'll bite me and I'll die" says the frog. "I just want a ride across the river" says the scorpion. Halfway across the river, the scorpion bites the frog, who, in his dying breath asks "Why"? "I'm a scorpion, that's what I do."
In this allegory, what I'm not doing is calling President Obama a scorpion, an immoral liar, or whatever insult you have for him. This kind of personal attack, from a supposed moral high-ground, is both false and unproductive. "Everyone says what THEY do is right"* and apparently whatever someone else does is wrong. I'm sorry, it's not that simple.
What I'm trying to point out is that the issue is not the President, it's the Presidency. The person who occupies the office of the Presidency is themselves possessed of it's power and purpose**. The purpose of the Presidency is to preside over the sometimes competing economic interests that reside in the states (including especially Wall Street) plus the military. That's the function of the Presidency and that's the job of the President. The President is not the "Prime Advocate of the People", but the President of the United States.
This view is a more classic anarchist view, and to my mind, far more productive. Or at least much less a waste of time. To expect some kind of Ghandi, King, Mandela, or Mother Theresa to occupy the White House and do anything other that what the Office demands is just fantasy. Or an outlet for personal rage and anger.
*quote by John Giorno.
** Wm Burroughs, 1989
“We have a new type of rule now. Not one man rule or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decisions. They are representatives of abstract forces who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past. There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers. The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident; inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine that they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which button to push.”
one more apologist ... not just for Obama but for amorality?
Diogenes was looking for an honest man.
I'm looking for a moral one who gets the insanity and evil of war.
I guess the most moral man today is sitting in a cell in Quantico (being tortured by the frightened pilot Obama who is willing to defy morality and public outcries). That's where morality gets you, or a supercilious put down on corrente.
Inept, frightened pilots. They make the worst scorpions of all. I'd feel sorry for such people if they didn't have the power to bring down hell on so many.
Lots of soul-sellers in this world, but I am looking at the Soul-Seller-In-Chief at the moment.
It does become personal if one's life and the lives of one's family are impacted by amorality. And the environment and the global family of man and woman. I didn't think above I was aiming exclusively at one man's corruption, now was I?
How dare you tell me I am wasting my time calling out amorality. Calling out a dysfunctional system. You eat their shit and rationalize. Leave me alone. Going after the messengers is always a way to go, isn't it? Especially one expressing feeling. That is the true enemy of dysfunction.
"Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." Forgive that simplicity. We need a paradigm shift to decency and all the too cool for the golden rule folk are part of the problem in this country, not the solution.
william blum on obama
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27777.htm
not an apology, but a realism
The morality that you call for in the head-of-state is of course admirable. One worth calling for, but not so realistic.
First of all, morality, and its active counterpart, ethics, are an internalized system of rules that came about in human beings roughly around the time of the adoption of large-scale agriculture. In order for cities to work, a system of rules that allow for the cooperation of large numbers of people not related to each other is necessary. This is the origin of religion and morality. There's some scientific evidence that there's a genetic marker for it. It is evolutionary.
So the development of morality is a process that takes place within individuals and 'enforced' if necessary by the institutions of church and/or state (or parents). This process simply does not occur within organizations. Not within states, or corporations, or unions or religious organizations. There is no internal moral mechanism in organizations, even Google with its rare 'Do No Evil' admonition.
So again, my point is that it's not the President, it's the Presidency. That's not an apology, that's a more direct focus on where the problem lies, in the institution, not the man. If Obama gets dumped, he won't be replaced by Diogenes*.
I did not call you out, personally. I don't know you and am in no position to make assumptions or moral judgements. There is only one instance in my post where a personal pronoun is used, generically. What I said was that I think focusing on the institution is more productive than personal attacks. But I did wonder about the anger.
*"I went looking for Diogenes and all I got was Bill Maher." ~my joke.
malagodi, glad I caught this, thank you ...
sorry about sounding angry ... defensiveness comes too easily to me. I appreciate your thoughtfulness on this. forgive me.
don't you think morality (as in empathy) existed from the beginning of humans in the attitudes of mothers, and mother animals, to their children? And what about way back when gods were feminine? Gaia? It seems like male gods emphasiznig power and fear were a step in a worsening not better direction?
Anyway, I can't help but yearn for human leaders who can catalyze a community. it doesn't happen often maybe, but when it does there is a spiritual shift.
it is amazing how one person in an organization with a stout and honest heart can make a difference. Like a MLK. A Gandhi. Jesus. Mohammed. Who calls on the higher selves of a society and his or her own higher self.
it is amazing how a seemingly sociopathic and/or ego-driven leader can abuse an authority role and call on the lower selves of others. Fear makes people narcissistic naturally, so the more threatened a leader feels the more narcissistic they get.
I have occasionally written about Eric Berne's theory of transactional analysis. where you have three ego states you relate to others from, parent, adult and child. He wrote about leaders that relate from their primitive and immature child ego state but masquerade it as the parent ego state. Like when a parent tells a child something for their own safety but with the child masqerading behind the tone of the parent ego state it is narcissistic instead of about the welfare of the other person in a more vulnerable role. The authoritarian in the child ego state Berne calls the "pig parent". And often people who had real parents who operated from the "pig parent' states (abused their authority a lot with kids and let their untrustworthy child ego state get abusive) get swept up in that Stockhold Syndrome lemming obedience and even identify with the aggressor who is actually victimizing them and/or others around them.
How sad that Obama did not have the inner strength, clarity and calling to do right by the country and really embrace his powerful role. Arrested ego development. We as a population are often mesmerized by personality. Character is harder to discern and often is not even differentiated by people. Obama is not spiritually grounded at least in this point in time in my humble opinion and I wouldn't judge him so loudly, except he impacts so many so negatively because of that.
Obama seems consumed with impression management. So overly protective about appearances. Style not substance. Instead of exporing the problems, he puts his energy into hiding them or distracting from them. You either protect or explore, you can't do both. We need a leader who is strong enough to explore. And empathize while exploring. Not so dependent on peer group think. I suspected that Obama was a tad too young to have learned some of our collective lessons from Viet Nam, too. He has a callowness about war that maybe if he were older would be less. Maybe not.
I admire the 12-step community. Though not perfect, the precepts and organization often function well, and the mandate, too, "principle above personality" works well. It is organized as a democracy and calls the leadership people trusted servants. Hopefully most will try to be earnest to come from that humble stance. Reality vs. the ideal I know.
I want a "feminine" (yin not yang) paradigm shift from the patriarchal one of power and competition to partnership and cooperation with global governments.
Now Obama et al. are waging wars for interests and "values". What are the values and are they real or faux for self or elitist aggrandizement? Faux so far it seems pretty clear. Exploitng the very concept of idealism and humanitarianism.
Charles Ferguson said on Tavis Smiley Obama snuffed out American idealism maybe for a generation or two. I hope not. It got kindled really fast from the hope he inspired. I hope another leader can regenerate that hope.
These are some fast thoughts. My feeling temperament goes for the psychological end of things.
By the way, I love your joke. :)
Best, libby