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Things Not Heard in Obama’s Acceptance Speech




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The men and women who gathered there could have heard many things

 

- Barack Obama, speaking of the people who listened to Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech (on August 28, 1963) during his Democratic Convention Nomination Acceptance Speech in Denver, Colorado, August 28, 2008. 


 

Barack Obama’s grandiose oration before 84,000 listeners at the Democratic National Convention in Denver last Thursday night was a masterpiece in the combined arts of mass propaganda and managed democracy.

 

Brand Obama directed anger and criticism at the arch-regressive Republican agenda, the “failed policies of George W. Bush,” and the dangerous and deceptive John McCain. Obama delivered clever and biting lines on McCain and the Republicans’ aristocratic distance from the lived realities of economic pain in the American heartland. Obama mocked the Republicans’ self-serving notion of an “Ownership Society,” observing that this phrase translates into the abandonment and shaming of ordinary working people.

 

His eyes flared as he skewered McCain and the Republicans for supporting “tax breaks for big corporations,” the privatization of Social Security, and the like.

 

He invoked the difficult experience of working Americans struggling to reap “the American promise” of upward mobility and economic security for those who “play by the rules” and work hard while exercising “personal responsibility.” 

 

He showed a glimmer of the populist outrage that has been so sorely missing from his campaign, leading many observers to see him as Dukakis/Gore/Kerry 2.0.   

 

Fine, but anybody who wants to believe that Obama’s Latest Greatest Speech placed his campaign outside the standard capitalist, and imperial parameters of the American political tradition is living in a dream world. They are interpreting power as they wish it to be, not as it is.  

 

Beneath occasionally populist-sounding rhetoric, Obama offered no fundamental challenge to dominant domestic and imperial hierarchies and doctrines. His populace-pleasing anger was for show.  It was meant to provide deceptive rebel’s clothing for a deeper underlying commitment to empire, inequality, and American exceptionalism, incorporated.

 

Obama’s latest celebrated sermon made no effort to transcend the narrow and elitist boundaries of the American “one-and-a-half party” system and authoritarian, narrow-spectrum business- and Empire-friendly U.S. political culture. Its proposals came nowhere close to meeting the real needs of the poor and working-class majority whose plight the millionaire senator Obama used as a rhetorical device to recapture his recently faded standing in the daily tracking polls. It did not begin to match the monumental misery caused by U.S., institutions, policies, “values,” and practices at home and abroad.   

 

Like John McCain, Obama made no call for an immediate end to the criminal occupation of Iraq – an occupation Obama will clearly continue and which he has long supported in numerous ways both fiscal and rhetorical.

 

Like McCain, Obama made no mention of the 1.2 million Iraqi’s killed by America’s wicked invasion – an attack Obama has absurdly attributed to the Bush II administration’s supposed noble but excessive commitment to exporting democracy. 

 

Obama had nothing to say about the illegal, immoral, and brazenly imperial, oil-driven nature of “America’s” rape of Mesopotamia.   

 

He did not call for an end to the equally illegal occupation of Afghanistan, a bloody imperial incursion Obama hopes to escalate.

 

He repeated his offensive claim that the U.S. is “a nation at war” – a preposterous way to describe an imperial state that is waging one-sided colonial campaigns on another side of the world. Most Americans go through their daily lives entirely free of “war’s” demands and sacrifices while “their” government imposes a veritable Holocaust on Iraq and murders civilians in Afghanistan.  

 

Obama did not call for deep cuts in the U.S. military budget to free up billions and even trillions of dollars for social programs to end poverty and reduce inequality in America. He did not pick up on the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to argue that the U.S. should stop spending half of its federal budget on a mammoth “defense” (actually about what the Pentagon calls “forward force projection”) system that maintains more than 720 foreign military bases (located across nearly every nation on Earth) and accounts for half the world’s military spending.

 

Obama did not note that this vast and expensive Empire poses a grave threat to the physical and economic security and the political freedom of U.S. citizens by diverting money from social programs, provoking “anti-American” anger and “blowback” around the world and justifying U.S. attacks on civil liberties at home and abroad.

 

Obama did not join King in observing that a nation reaches “spiritual death” when it spends hundreds of billions of dollars each year on a cancerous military-industrial complex while millions of its own children live in poverty.

 

He did not call for the introduction of free health care for all, paid for by the federal government.

 

He did not propose a government guarantee of meaningful, socially useful and decently remunerative employment to everyone who needs a job. 

 

He did not call for massive government housing relief for millions dealing with foreclosure and eviction.

 

He did not call for a guaranteed national income set at the real cost of a minimally decent living in the U.S.

 

He did not denounce the grotesque mal-distribution of wealth in the U.S., the world’s most unequal industrialized and wealth top-heavy state by far – a nation where the top 1 percent owns 40 percent of the wealth and a probably larger share of its politicians and policymakers. He said that “this country of ours has more wealth than any other nation” without bothering to mention the profoundly regressive way in which that “national wealth” is allotted insides the U.S. He said nothing about the harshly fixed lines of class immobility which ensure that the children of rich parents tend to stay rich (no matter how “personally irresponsible” the Few’s progeny may be) while children of poor parents tend to stay poor no matter how “personally responsible” they may be in the U.S.

 

He did not mention the shocking and growing number of Americans living in poverty and extreme poverty

 

He did not call for radical changes in the nation’s tax and spending policies to fund social uplift and reconstruction.

 

He did not advance union organizing rights to rebuild and expand the labor movement, the single greatest anti-poverty program in American history.

 

He did not call for the introduction of participatory and egalitarian labor process and workplaces or for the re-orientation of the nation’s core economic activities around social utility and use value, not hierarchy and private profit. 

 

He gave no mention to the deep and persistent problem of institutional racism in American life, a difficulty so great that the median black household’s net worth is equivalent to seven cents on the median white household dollar.

 

He did not call for an end to the racist War on Drugs, which feeds a globally unmatched U.S. prison state that places a million black Americans behind bars and saddles one in three adult black males with the lifelong mark of a felony record.

 

He did not note the danger that his candidacy and the success of other prominent, upper-class blacks threatens to deepen “post-Civil Rights” America’s chronic national blindness to persistent underlying racial oppression while reinforcing white America’s toxic habit of explaining racial disparities purely in terms of black Americans’ own alleged personal and cultural failures. This is a habit that Obama has furthered on more than one occasion, both directly and indirectly.

 

For all his claims of anger at the “politics of the past,” Obama did not call for the full public financing of U.S. elections or for other measures to end the wildly disproportionate influence of the privileged and corporate Few on America’s “dollar democracy” – the best that money can and did buy. 

 

He did not call for the reform of election laws to open political debate and contest up to progressive non-corporate parties and thereby to create electoral choices that accurately reflect the real spectrum of U.S. public opinion on key policy issues.

 

He did not call for restricting the right of corporations to draft laws governing their industries.

       

He did not advocate making it illegal for corporations to use shareholder funds for political purposes.

 

He did not call for forbidding former high-level politicians from becoming business lobbyists for ten years or more.

 

He did not advocate forbidding former high-level corporate officers from sitting on commissions with regulatory power over their industries.

       

He did not call for making it illegal for corporations to try to influence their employees’ votes.

       

He did not call for the repeal of “investor rights” clauses in trade agreements, which let foreign and multinational corporations sue a national government for passing environmental, safety (job and consumer), labor, and/or anti-discrimination laws.

 

He did not call for the break-up the powerful corporate media monopoly through the vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws and the introduction of strict limits on what percentage of local and national media can be owned by single firms.

 

He did not call for the expansion of public media and the provision of significant new public subsidies and other resources for alternative and grassroots citizen’s media.

 

He did not call for new corporate charters that redefine big business as a public entity required to serve the public interest and the common good and to be accountable to the broader community.

 

Blaming America’s problems almost entirely on the Republicans, Obama gave no indication of knowing that his own corporate-captive and militantly militaristic party has been fully complicit and centrally involved in crafting and implementing the corporate-neoliberal policies of Empire and Inequality that have done so much interrelated harm at home and abroad.  Corporate Democrats remained invisible in his discourse.

 

 

Of course, there is nothing surprising about Obama’s deafening silence on policies and other matters that would be at the forefront of any serious progressive left “change” agenda.  As Howard Zinn noted last March, “the Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from fellow, as in the Thirties and the Sixties.”  There is no radical or populist “rebellion from below” worth mentioning right now. There’s nobody holding Obama’s feet to the fire on the left and from the bottom up at present.  Indeed many of the people who should be doing precisely that have become captive, Kool-Aid-drinking Obamaniacs. The “antiwar movement’s” miniscule showing in Denver was due in part to many “Left” leaders’ childish and/or cynical notion that Obama is a progressive antiwar candidate.  

 

Serious progressives need to get over that illusion – they might need to see their hero operate in the oval office to do so – and to aggressively embrace the progressive agenda that Obama did not give voice to last night. Along the way they need to appreciate the wisdom of Noam Chomsky’s commentary on the eve of the last great corporate-crafted narrow-spectrum candidate-centered U.S. election spectacle:

       

“A huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas and to think, ‘That’s politics.’  But it isn’t.  It’s only a small part of politics. ..The urgent task for those who want to shift policy in progressive direction – often in close conformity to majority opinion – is to grow and become strong enough so that that they can’t be ignored by centers of power…  In the election, sensible choices have to be made.  But they are secondary to serious political action.  The main task is to create a genuinely responsive democratic culture, and that effort goes on before and after electoral extravaganzas, whatever their outcome” (Chomsky, Interventions [San Francisco, 2007] pp. 99-100).        

 

It is true that Obama couldn’t say much of what I criticize him for leaving out without opening himself up to massive and deadly corporate assault. The big money actors who run the hidden ruling-class primary behind the egalitarian façade of America’s “managed democracy” have their ways of undermining anybody who seriously questions concentrated power. So yes, the deeply conservative Obama’s silence on issues that matter to true progressives reflects the rules of the U.S. electoral game.  Those rules must be followed by any candidate who is seriously “in it to win it.”

 

Fine, but then maybe – as Chomsky suggested right before the last great presidential freak show - progressive U.S. politics aren’t primarily or even all that much about presidential elections. Maybe progressives need to do more to demote the capitalist ballot game and focus more on movement activism across and between election cycles.  Maybe the real and urgent politics that matters most is about rebuilding and expanding popular organization and democratic institutions and values and capacities beneath and beyond the big clashes of mass-marketed candidate brands. Maybe it’s about developing a grassroots political culture and movement and a regularly engaged and participatory citizenry, not expanding a managed “electorate” that is “bamboozled” and “hoodwinked” by Democrats and Republicans alike. Maybe true progressives need to de-emphasize the Masters’ personality-focused political burlesque and “Election Trap” (Charles Derber’s excellent term) and focus more on “serious political action” before and after the partial, deceptive, and predictably betrayed promises and telling silences of the quadrennial election spectacles.

 

 

Paul Street’s latest book is Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (order at http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987) Paul can be reached at paulstreet00@yahoo.com

Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Please exchange money for this commodity...

By Street, Paul at Sep 02, 2008 18:37 PM

Please think about purchasing the fine new commodity recently advertised in this excellent ZNet Book Interview. If you purchase this commodity you will see that yes I do not in fact single Obama out but rather (to the contrary) place him in the long historical context of the  narrow-spetcrum party system and political culture you rightly bemoan (the same system and culture that brought us Dukakis and Kerry and Gore and the Clintons and so on...the same one for which even John Edwards was too left) .  Now that I think about it, some of my argument is with those of Obama\'s many supporters who childishly single him out as a  magical exception to the corporate-imperial political culture, with its one-and-a-half party system.  You will also see that I understand voting for Obama to block (the truly dangerous) McCain, especially if you live in a contested state.

 I also think it is worth bearing in mind that the mainstream Democrats are more readily exposed as servants of Empire and Inequality, inc. when they hold power and actually have to implement policy; when out of office they are better able to pose as members of an opposition.

The changes that are required in the political system are not mysterious (proportional representation and full public financing and free media just to start with) but would likely require a constitutional amendment under existing U.S. rules - hard to imagine.  in the shorter term, we cannot hold politicians of either party (perhaps I  should say "either wing of the ruling national business and empire party") accountable at the current pathetic level of autonmous popular and working-class organization.  One critical argument for getting Democrats in is to making it possible to pass the Employee Free Choice Act and try to get unions rolling again.... 

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Reflections

By Street, Paul at Sep 02, 2008 15:35 PM

Matthew every Democratic  candidate is always for Equal Pay for Equal Work and while it would be better ot have them say they\'re for it than that theyre against it I suppose, the real proof is in the pudding of policy and real commitment  would mean pouring real money and energy into investigation and enforcement.  There\'s all kind of civil rights and environmental and labor rights laws on the books that aren\'t really backed up and enforced.

It would have been nice if Obama had mentioned the Employee Free Choice Act (allowing check-card union certification) in his speech - it\'s a really big deal for the labor movement,  which Edwards used to call (on the campaign trail) the "single greatest anti-poverty program in American history."  Technically, I think the Obama campaign is for Employee Free Choice Act, but of course it didn\'t make into his speech (given centrist fears about mentioning unions in a positive light no doubt) and of course the proof is in the pudding of policy. 

Enforcement of civil rights and the introduction of social programs to fight poverty and the like costs money and of course one of the big problems with the modern corporate-imperial Dems (all of them, hardly just Obama) is their commitment to maintaining a stupendous imperial "defense" (really mainly about what the Pentagon more candidly calls "forward force proiection") budget.  Dr. Martin Luther King said that a nation approached "spiritual death" when it spent half its government resources on militarism while millions lived in poverty in its own communities.  Bush I and Bill Clinton\'s great gift to the corporate empire and military-industrial- complex was to strangle the notion of a "peace dividend" (remember that lost idea?) in its post-Cold War cradle.  The brazenly imperial "No Shock Barack" is showing few signs of wanting to act in real accord with Dr. King\'s warning about what happens when guns trump butter in the nation\'s priorities.

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Plague or cholera?

By Honningsvåg, Per-Stian at Sep 02, 2008 17:20 PM

I admit I have in the past overlooked several of your articles, Paul, because I felt you were on a \"crusade\" to pin Obama to the cross. Sadly you are right on the money on Obama. Since the outrageous remarks on Iraq on the very day the Democrats won the midterm election, where they basically said \"No, we won\'t pull out,\" I knew Obama would never follow through on his early promises of an Iraq pull out. He is a capitalist as good as any, as any US presidential candidate has to be. He isn\'t even remotely close to the \"left.\" He isn\'t even remotely close to being \"progressive.\" He isn\'t a war criminal yet, as McCain is in any meaningful definition of the word. But it\'ll come. If he wins he\'ll probably pull some troops out of Iraq and pour them into Bush\'s other outrageous criminal and imperial war: in Afghanistan. The really sad part is that there isn\'t a real alternative in the US. There is Nader and Kucinich. But as long as you need 15% to get on the debates (or was it ballot?) we can just forget about a real competition from 3rd parties. The plain and simple truth is that the US does not have a multiparty political system. The Democratic and Republican party are two sides of the same coin. There are superficial differences on policy. Just as there are superficial differences between the head and the tail end of a coin. I think Chomsky\'s phrase \"they are two wings of the Business Party\" is very apt. Both \"parties\" are (well) to the right of the political centre (in an actual left-right spectrum, not a US left-right spectrum). The challenge for US citizens is how one can change this unjust and undemocratic political system, so that other alternatives can be included in the political system. I have no idea how that can be done. Apart from hard and dedicated for over many years. As long as both parties control the political system they have veto power over any change of it. A Norwegian saying (which I can\'t translate properly) is quite apt for this phenomenon: the goat is watching the sack of oat. Having said all this, though, the alternative of 4 or 8 more years of Bush policy is enough to make corpses shudder. So although I know Obama\'s policies will be horrible, the alternative is even worse. The only good that can come from 4-8 more years of Bush-Cheney-McCain-Rice etc is that the Emperor will still have no clothes.

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Re: Plague or cholera?

By Honningsvåg, Per-Stian at Sep 02, 2008 17:22 PM

Err, what happened to all my paragraphs??

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668672

Equal Pay for Equal Work

By Loewen, Matt at Sep 02, 2008 11:06 AM

I always enjoy your articles, Paul. I\'ll definitely be showing this one to some unfortunate Obamaniacs I know. One thing, though: You said, \"Beneath occasionally populist-sounding rhetoric, Obama offered no fundamental challenge to dominant domestic and imperial hierarchies and doctrines.\" When he mentioned \"equal pay for equal work\" wasn\'t he challenging the blatantly sexist unequal pay between men and women? Of course, aside from that, there wasn\'t much else other than the usual \"let\'s all pan for gold in that polluted river called the American mainstream\" type schtick. Cheers. Thanks for all the great stuff.

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Liberals to Radicals: \"Just Shut Up\"

By Street, Paul at Sep 01, 2008 14:39 PM

Lucy says "Susan, would you rather that thinkers and writers such as Paul Street would just shut up and go away so that you and the hordes of Democrat Party supporters can continue to watch and cheer this theater of the absurd without the slightest intrusion from facts and analysis?"

If Susan is like many other liberal and even "progressive" Obamaists I have encountered in the last year, the answer is yes, she would.  Basically, what Ive heard from many of them is that people with actual left sentiments against Empire and inequality, Inc. are now supposed to go off into a corner and die - never to be heard of again.  The militantly centrist Barack Obama phenomeon is supposed to be understood as the outer leftmost parameter of acceptable debate and discourse. His great victory is going to show that "hey, the U.S. political order works and so all you crazy old school radicals can go light yourselves on fire."  It\'s the glorious End of History So Get With the Program.  Any substantive and detailed critique of His record, rhetoric, image (branding), propaganda, agenda, hubris, funding, and staffing etc. --- any serious discussion of the real downsides of the Obama phenomenon from a Left perspective --- is to be demonized as vicious personal hatred and as pathological, "unrrealistic," and "over the top" carping.  It reminds me of my six years of writing against Cheney-Bush: you can make all the logical, evidence-based arguments  (richly supported with tons of sources) you want and it is essentially irrelevant because, frankly its not not about facts or logic or reasoned debate; its about power. pure and simple. Plus ca change, plus c\'est la meme chose.

Nothing surprising here: Democrats are deeply complicit in the construction of Superpower\'s  corporate-totalitarian "managed democracy" (Sheldon Wolin\'s term). 

Ray, I agree with Chomsky in thinking that your father has a point on the danger of McCain - unfortunately JM  is very dangerous indeed...a potential loose cannon who would move the doomsday clock closer to midnight and continue the extremist and radical-regressive GOP\'s assault on whatever social programs are left from earlier popular victories in U..S history.

If you live on a contested state, vote your fears. .

I agree with Gui that everyday citizens should be held accoutnable for not seeing through the mass-marketed spectacles that pass for meaningful democratic politics in the U.S.  I\'ve often thought that the hard left has failed to sufficiently embrace the concept of personal responsibility, Citizens need to take reponsibility for letting thsmelves be ruled by arrogant Masters and illusion-makers and for not challenging those masters\' immoral morality.

Lucy raises good and very specific questions about Obama\'s own not-so-progressive immoral morality --- questions that too many "liberals" tell you to forget about in the interest of "getting things done" and winning at all costs. 

 

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Re: Things Not Heard in Obama’s Acceptance Speech

By Rochat, Gui at Aug 31, 2008 20:48 PM

These reactions to Street’s article demonstrate the depth of the illusion that elections matter and that is why Dr. King’s remarks long ago remain very valid. The belief that every one of us has a meaningful vote is negated by a reality that few wish to see. Obama is undoubtedly an intelligent politician whose regime may well be less lethal than that of McCain, but the power remains where it is and that is definitely not in the hands of the voting public. As I wrote below, we live in Plato’s cave where we are being manipulated by shadows on the wall, and thus kept once removed from  true reality (of which we have less and less awareness). That is why \'bread and circuses\' replace serious social discussion and why inconsequential cosmetics matter in the candidates (actually already appointees). Both of them and their sidekicks are stars in the true sense of the word and we judge them on their looks, behavior and mellow diction, while flattering ourselves that their words have meaning. Thus also we remain guilty of collective guilt because

instead of insisting forcefully on accountability, we allow the establishment to get away with creating incompetent figureheads like the present office holder. And we should not blame him as he is what he is and does not even pretend to be other, but ourselves for allowing such power to be placed in his hands. True change and political insight can only come about by a brutally honest analysis and that shall set you free…

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good article

By Amberg, Ray at Aug 31, 2008 16:31 PM

My family votes traditionally Democrat, and I see pretty much the same reaction when I ask about their support for Obama, although it doesn\'t seem to be as bad as Street\'s experience.  As for their reasons for their support, I am told that he is a lesser evil than McCain (my father for example said that McCain is just too dangerous) and that having an African-American president would perhaps set in motion a change in American political culture.  I agree with the first premise, and would rather see Obama in the White House than McCain, but the rest of the "four year extravaganza" as Chomsky astutely put it, has become particularly meaningless for me.  We are in California where Obama will most certainly win, so I am going to most likely go the "tactical voting" route and probably just vote on local issues.

I think many concerned activists would agree with the suggestions in Street\'s concluding paragraph.  I recall a very astute comment from Obama himself in the primaries when asked which candidate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would support (who I think was indeed a genuine democracy builder), and Obama responded (paraphrasing), "None of us.  I think Dr. King was not concerned with supporting this or that candidate but working to build power and pressure from below at the grassroots level and helping to shape policy in this way."  Obama\'s supporters would do well to remember that before dismissing criticism out of hand.

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HEEERE\'S OOOOBAMA !!!!!!

By Rochat, Gui at Aug 31, 2008 10:55 AM

The reality remains that the public is mesmerized by the visual impact of propaganda and sound bite reasoning (much like the Roman church mesmerizes by spectacle and  exhortations of instant heavenly benevolence). Substance is a difficult concept, best avoided in this speed addicted world with immediate gratifications from television and internet. It is not that people have become superficial, but that like McLuhan perceived, they are anesthetized to reality from too much technological input. This has been understood brilliantly by the Obama campaign with its clever slogans and big theatre, easily absorbed and causing no pain, i.e. not demanding much action beyond applause. Only now has McCain caught up by his choice of another marketable but impenetrable symbol. In a world where as Derrida has pointed out, all that glitters is gold, the real has become a threat best to be avoided, where making no choice is better than making the wrong choice. And the eternal binary one between two parties is no choice, because as Vidal has said both are branches of the same conservative entity, much like the World Trade towers who were a pair, each out of the same architectural cookie form, truly symbolized the American political landscape. It is the fear for the non-conforming truth (which is intrinsically of a different caliber), not the apparent one like for gender or skin color that causes the inertia of the political process, and that is why progressives are ineffectual calling out into the wilderness for any reasoning at all. It is also why the sixties were feared because the street theatre that they espoused was an extremely subversive element in the conservative propaganda world. That is why demonstrators have now to be penned in to reduce them to ineffectual battalions of gray mass well beyond the center of activity. In Greek mythology it was the Meanads who broke rational bondage and the Furies who pursued the person who broke societal rules. Well, maybe ‘here we should go again’ to paraphrase a goony president, and re-institute the sixties disintegration of bondage and rationality. As soon as the Furies are set on us from the conservative side, we will know that we are effective....

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Susan\'s Tantrum

By Street, Paul at Aug 31, 2008 10:15 AM

Susan - you should be  ashamed of your comment.  Like other Obama supporters who harass the phenomenon\'s left critics on the blogosphere, you can\'t be bothered to address specifics and deeper systemic issues.  This article is loaded with specifics and with deep context that is much more important than the frankly childish question of whether one likes or dislikes "Obama" (while I confess to disliking politicians as a group, I\'\'m basically indifferent on the individual candidate behind "Brand Obama,"  personally...I have zero distinctive personal sentiments on him up or down).  

You respond reflexively --- this is typical of your ilk - with hot  personal attack on those who dare to tell basic truths from the left about your candidate and more importantly about the political culture he reflects and reproduces. You falsely imply that I have told people to vote for McCain-Palin or not to vote for Obama-Biden. 

You are unwilling or unable to process and respond respectfully to the deeper critique of  U.S. political culture (with its 1 and a half party system, its candidate-centered politics, its imperial and capitalist consensus and its corporate-crafted electoral spectacles).  So you come back with a nursery-school-level tantrum:  "you hate Obama, you hate Obama, you hate Obama. Bad Paul Street! I don\'t like you Street ---- you are so over the top!" 

This is profoundly inadequate.

Obama is what he is --- a smart and self-interested politician whose campaign is playing the game and incentives of the dominant political system quite well all things considered.  It would probably blow your mind to know that I recently penned a cogent and detailed critique of Jerome Corsi\'s far-right hit-job on Obama.

For what it\'s worth, while I am indifferent on Obama the individual (who strikes as no more or less deceptive and narcissistic than politicians as a general class),  I have developed a profound distaste for many of his clueless and privileged know-it-all/know-nothing supporters. This distaste comes out of simple personal experience, not prior personal bias.  I did a fair amount of campaign work leading up to the Iowa Caucus and Obama people were very distinctive. When it came to Dodd, Kucinich, Gravel, Edwards, Clinton, and Richardson supporters, you could actually say --- imagine --- "so why do do you support your candidate?" and then get two or three respectfully related and policy specific reasons relating to the candidate\'s record and agenda. Voters\' defenses of their candidate (I exempt the Kucinich and Gravel people here) were highly flawed and  often full of ignorance and denial (especially on questions of Empire) but at least the repsonses were respectful and moderately pleasant and reasonably informed.

You\'d ask an Obamanist why they backed the great Barack and they were literally.offended.  They were either unwilling or unable to give specifics and were amazingly ignorant about their candidate\'s record and policy agenda. Much of the stuff that some of the more forthcoming and less tight-lipped Obama supporters were willing to divulge about Him -  like that he was (they thought) an antiwar "peace" candidate --- was flatly false. They were completely unwilling to listen to counter-evidence. They did and do zero due diligence on their hero: do not actually read any of his speeches to outfits like the (imperial) Chicago Council on Global Affairs or his essay in the imperial Council of Foreign Relations\' journal Foreign Affairs and so on.  

One nice upper middle class lady with a really big house living high up on a hill above City High literally had a sputtering meltdown when I politely asked her why she backed Obama.  I actually thought she was going to call the police. It hit me by September of 2007 that some of the Obama people were seriously messed up.

I think some of you "progressive" Obama fans need to get a grip and quit  responding to serious critique in such a reflexively defense and childish, candidate-centered way.  It just feeds the "cult" aura that the right is talking about. 

Here are two pieces I did that relate to my comments above (I am having no luck with the linking function today):

"Totalitarianism: It Can Happen Here," Dissident Voice (August 23, 2008), read at http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/08/totalitarianism-it-can-happen-here/

"The Madness of Jerome Corsi," ZNet (August 25, 2008), read at http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/18540

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672083

Overkill

By Carl, Susan at Aug 31, 2008 07:31 AM

Lolololol......your hatred for Obama is too obvious to take your articles seriously.

How do you like McCains choice of VP? No Foreign experience, barely any expericence at all, unless you are looking for a pageant queen to drape off your shoulder, wearing a newly exploited wolf pelt of course.

You seem to almost be the "Michael Moore" of Republicans.

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Re: Overkill

By Beringer-Newlin, Gretchen at Aug 31, 2008 16:20 PM

Susan, would you rather that thinkers and writers such as Paul Street would just shut up and go away so that you and the hordes of Democrat Party supporters can continue to watch and cheer this theater of the absurd without the slightest intrusion from facts and analysis? To call Paul Street \"The Michael Moore of Republicans\" for giving his readers something to think about says a lot about how poorly you use your own brain. I think Paul did a good job using his. You don\'t even bother to challenge Paul\'s arguments, as if an argument using facts and real history (Obama\'s record, for example) all are completely out of fashion this election. You\'re fine with the lofty speeches, the charisma (Ted Bundy springs to mind), the call to defeat the \"terrorists,\" speeches full of half-truths, false promises, false hope. Now that you\'ve been challenged, will you rise to the occasion, dear Susan? Tell us your thoughts on Obama\'s vote to give the telecoms immunity from THE LAW that says it\'s illegal to spy on me (and you) without a court warrant. While you\'re at it, why is Obama promising to increase military spending? We already spend close to half the budget on defense. Why does Obama want to increase troop levels in Afghanistan, where just last week 90 innocent people were killed by US air strikes - most of them CHILDREN! And why would Obama want to help out loan sharks and banks at the expense of the poor by voting against a 35% cap on what lenders can charge in interest? High interest rates are strapping the poor to a never ending cycle of high interest payments, just so they can pay their rent, feed their kids, make that car payment and buy gas.

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Re: Overkill

By Fellows, Barbara at Aug 31, 2008 16:26 PM

\"How do you like McCains choice of VP? No Foreign experience, barely any experience at all,....\" From what I have read about Governor Palin\'s background, it seems like she has more experience than the head of the Democratic ticket. More than a few have made the comment that he is a one term US Senator, and spent most of that term running for President. The Washington Post has a site where they have listed Obama\'s votes and missed votes. Pathetic. Am also more than a little concerned that the one who preaches \"Change\" pays almost all (except one) of the women on his Senate staff less than the men (several thousand less). Then there\'s Biden...Google: \"Biden AND Anita Hill\". Some women actually remember how he handled the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.

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