January 2008

Wed Jan 23 21:16:23 PST 2008

Scratch a Rightie, Find a Racist

Case in point.

No, it’s not always the case, of course. And I’ve never had one be so enthusiastic about white supremacy as to actually exhibit pride in having volunteered to fight for a foreign apartheid regime before. But it is the case to some degree surprisingly often.

And ya gotta love how the guy sees no contradiction in first claiming there was no “bloody civil war” in Rhodesia, then a few posts later relating how bloody the civil war was getting before the international community managed to broker the peace deal that ended it.

Sun Jan 27 12:03:45 PST 2008

Evaluating Obama

Prompted by articles like this one, and by how the guy is actually holding his own against Hillary Clinton (whom I would find it very difficult to vote for, for reasons to be detailed in a later entry), I decided to kick a few ideological tires last night.

First, the premise of the Z article is bizarre. Chiefly, it attacks Obama for not being a democratic leftist. Well, of course he’s not one: there’s simply not enough class consciousness for any sort of leftist to get more than a paltry fraction of votes (just look at left-liberal Kucinich’s totals). Expecting a leftist to somehow win office and direct a process of social change from above is the worst sort of bourgeois liberal magical thinking.

The real question isn’t whether the Democratic Party is fielding a viable leftist candidate: it’s whether the Democrats are fielding a candidate that can even temporarily beat back the trend towards empire and fascism that the political establishment has1 launched the USA onto.

That said, reading the article wasn’t a total loss, since it did clarify the sort of stuff one should really be paying attention to in his campaign. No, there’s not enough class consciousness for a leftist to win office. But there is still enough widespread support for of good old-fashioned high-school-civics values like rule of law and anti-imperialism2 which can be leveraged very usefully to stem current unfavorable trends, at least for the time being.

Unfortunately, when evaluated in this light, Obama disappoints.

To open with, he is plagued by the battered-wife syndrome that most Democrats are. Case in point: he is too chicken to support any impeachment resolutions against Bush, because he’s afraid conservatives might not like him if he does. This is a pretty serious example, as it shows that personal cravenness trumps even his sworn duty to defend the Constitution.

In a similar vein to the above, he opposed Sen. Feingold’s censure resolution against the Bush Administration for its illegal wiretaps. He’s unwilling to give the enemies of the Constitution even a symbolic slap on the wrist for their crimes.

Nothing in any speeches or writings of his indicates any awareness of how the dynamics of the class system paved the way for the the whole imperialist debacle. That limits any ability to prevent a future one, but to reiterate, neither Obama nor any other potential White House occupant is a leftist. So this limitation, serious though it may be, is only to be expected. It’s a reason why simply voting is not going to be enough.

More serious, he seems unaware of the criminal (with respect both to the US Constitution and international law) and ethical dynamics of the whole thing. His opposition to it is mainly focused on how it has damaged the standing of the organization responsible for it, and how it wasn’t a winnable war in the first place. I’ve searched — and failed — to find any condemnation of it by him on moral grounds.

The problem is never that the global Mafia is issuing orders to murder the innocent and building an empire based on blood and fear; it’s simply that it’s been imprudent in doing so as of recently and thus has weakened itself and undermined its own power. I’ve been able to locate nothing by Obama denouncing imperialism qua imperialism (absent any discussion of the roots of it). It hardly takes a leftist to simply see the existence of imperialism, and how it has bred hatred and enmity through the world, as evidenced by the numerous speeches and writings of libertarian conservative Ron Paul.

The most crucial task in the wake of 9/11 was to ask why it happened, and Obama is apparently not up to that task. This is a deeply serious deficiency. Absent any such introspection, a change in leadership becomes the mere rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic. It ensures that the reaction to the next terrorist attack — thanks to the the reaction to the last one, now nearly inevitable, and likely to be worse than 9/11 — will end up being as disastrous as the reaction to 9/11, if not more so. This will continue to strongly bias the inevitable fall of the American empire towards being as dangerous and unpleasant as possible.

Worse, upon careful reading, the guy actually appears to be an imperialist. For openers, Obama actually does appear to want permanent US bases and troop presence in Iraq. It’s a desire cleverly disguised through misleading wording: on his campaign’s foreign policy page he talks about keeping “some troops in Iraq to protect our embassy and diplomats.” The rub is, that so-called “embassy” is in reality a small military base, 104 acres in size (larger than the UN in New York) and planned to employ a staff of thousands to manage and oversee the puppet government in Iraq. It’s unlike any other embassy in world; it’s an “embassy” in name only, an instrument of imperialism, not diplomacy.

Obama also mentions “[I]f al Qaeda attempts to build a base within Iraq, he will keep troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region to carry out targeted strikes on al Qaeda.” Given that al Qaeda would be utter fools not to capitalize on the hatred the war and occupation have bred, they will almost certainly at least “attempt” to build a base there. This is, therefore, a loophole approximately the size of the planet Mars.

Is it any surprise, therefore, that Obama’s chief lesson from militarism and Iraq is not the danger of having a superpower that’s so powerful, but of one that’s not powerful enough to win whatever fights it decides to pick? He’s very much in favor of maintaining a Cold War level of military spending, to the point of actually advocating an increase in the number of ground forces.3

What would Obama really be likely to do when the more overt militarists started baying for the blood of third world people? He wasn’t in Congress when Bush stampeded the sheep into Iraq, so his claim he would have opposed it can’t be verified, of course.

However, he was in Congress when another ill-advised military operation was launched: client state Israel’s rampage of destruction in Lebanon in retaliation for the kidnapping of its soldiers. It was as obviously unjustifiable as the Iraq War: a core component of it was collective punishment of the entire Lebanese people for the actions of just a few (civilian infrastructure was deliberately targeted). The claim that Lebanon should be held responsible for failing to squelch Hezbollah was preposterous, considering Israel’s own failure to do the same (with their much more powerful military) when they occupied south Lebanon. The chance of them ever finding the hostages was more remote than the chance of finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. It was, in other words, a clear-cut case of militarism to be opposed on both moral and practical grounds.

Support for it was also being advocated by the extremely powerful Israel lobby, thus making it an acid test: would he show backbone and bring about “real change,” or would he play politics as usual. Would he oppose it openly? Would he timidly vote “present” or arrange to be conveniently absent when it came to the floor? Would he meekly but unenthusiastically vote “aye?”

Obama did none of these things. Instead, he proudly signed on as a cosponsor of the resolution.

Real change? A new direction? Au contraire. I smell a smooth operator skilled at artfully disguising his true nature as yet another establishment politician in the service of empire.

Notes:

1 Inevitably; there’s an intrinsic tendency towards fascism in any capitalist society.

2 Consider what side the school textbooks take in the American revolutionaries’ battle against an imperialist empire.

3 Don’t believe me? It’s right there in black and white on his campaign’s foreign policy page.

Sun Jan 27 12:56:25 PST 2008

A Note on the Above Entry

My reason in writing it is not to foster a sense of hopelessness and withdrawal. Quite the contrary; I’m very much in favor of people being active in addressing issues such as imperialism. If there’s no pressure from below, we’re doomed: certainly there’s nothing in the system itself that will steer it away from its murderous march.

However, deluded action can be as bad as no action. A false sense of hope can lull one into a complacency as deadly as one born of hopelessness and resignation. Ultimately, in fact, it matters not if a complacency that allows the establishment to continue its rampage towards collective suicide is born of deluded hopelessness or deluded hopefulness. The outcome in either case is identical.

As Bertrand Russell once wrote: “No satisfaction based upon self-deception is solid, and however unpleasant the truth may be, it is better to face it once and for all, to get used to it, and to proceed to build your life in accordance with it.”

Sun Jan 27 12:59:40 PST 2008

Regarding Hillary

A short while ago I promised to relate my impressions of Hillary. It turns out that I already have, and there’s really nothing significant I can think of adding to that succinct explanation of why she is seriously wanting as a candidate.

Sun Jan 27 16:29:10 PST 2008

Naming the Democrats

What the hey, I seem to be on a roll today with coming up with content to post. Thought of these over the past 24 hours and might as well share them:

Dragon Lady
Oh, come on, this one is so obvious it really needs no further explanation. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Smooth Operator
Barack Obama, by virtue of his carefully crafted rhetoric, complete with cleverly disguised escape hatches, that hides what an establishment guy he actually is (see today’s earlier entries).
Talk-is-Cheap
John Edwards, who wants us all to believe he has by some unexplained miracle become more progressive than when he was in office. Maybe he has, but he’s putting his present-day talk up against his past actions, and, well, talk is cheap.
UFO Boy
Dennis Kucinich. Sure, a UFO is technically just a flying object one is uncertain of, but to see one while hobnobbing with an über-new-ager like Shirley MacLaine and get all woo-woo spiritual about it? Ugh. Why does such new-agey crap appeal so much to so many on the left, anyhow?

No, the fact that I have yet to give the GOP candidates similarly unflattering nicknames should in no way be taken as an endorsement on my part of any of those ghouls. I’ve simply had less motivation to, by simple virtue of the fact that I have lots of bourgeois liberal friends but no conservative friends. So my nose is rubbed in liberal rhetorical excrement by virtue of daily conversation far more than it is in right-wing rhetorical excrement.

Tue Jan 29 20:03:13 PST 2008

Equal Time for the Republicans

With respect to nicknames, that is:

Gold Bug
Ron Paul. Gotta love that quasi-religious superstition that the amount of gold that just happened to coalesce in the earth’s crust is precisely the amount of an exchange medium needed for the economy across all time.
Fried Squirrel
Mike Huckabee, in honor of his too-much-information moment.
Keating’s Pet
John McCain, to honor the only member of the Keating Five to have the audacity to run for President.1
Mr. Opportunism
Mitt Romney, for demonstrating that crass pragmatism is not the exclusive domain of the Democrats. Centrist when it suits him in Massachusetts, doctrinaire conservative when that suits him in the presidential race.
Nine-Eleven
Oh, come on, this one is so obvious it really needs no further explanation. Rudy Guiliani.

1 Yes, I know about John Glenn; however, he wasn’t a member of the Keating Five at the time he ran for president in 1984. Ditto for Alan Cranston.

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Last updated: Tue Sep 13 16:14:09 PDT 2011