June 9, 2008, Volume 16 Nr. 11, Issue 242

Obamanation

Jozef Hand-Boniakowski

Barack Obama has declared victory in the Democratic Party primary.  Hillary Clinton suspended her campaign on June 7, 2008.  After a grueling year-and-a-half of campaigning, this stage of the oppressive election frenzy is over.  Obama has won.  And so what?  Obama asked no hard questions. Obama provided no solutions. Obama gave the electorate a preacher’s delivery, a rock star’s persona, a basketball player’s hand claps. Obama gave the public what the media programmed them to want: a feel good candidate delivered via Madison Avenue finesse which they are conditioned to accept. The main stream corporate media orchestrated the so-called Obama movement as an acceptable option to the Republicans. The only game allowed, after all, is the one played by only two teams owned by the same controlling interests.  

Regardless of the candidate who becomes president, the presiding power in the White House will remain with the managers and owners of the military industrial complex. The masters of war will continue manipulating the masses to do their bidding as they will manipulate Obama who embraces their imperial tenets. Such is the paradigm into which the “savior” Obama cometh.   

Obama's big theme is "change that we can count on".  Yet there is precious little change we have left in our wallets after we fill up our gas tanks or buy the week's groceries.  And what does presumptive presidential nominee, Barack Obama, offer as a means to ameliorate our pain?  Obama offers us nothing.  We are, however, so used to being fed nothing candidates who offer nothing concrete as solutions, that when a candidate comes along who does so well we embrace them.  And being offered nothing well beats being offered something poorly.  Ask most Obama supporters what their candidate's solutions are to any of the country's pressing problems and you get blank stares.  They may say, "I believe that Obama can solve that problem".  Ask them how?  They do not know.  

  

We support our politicians with the same mythological fervor that we embrace our religion.  We have faith that a better future is just beyond this reality.  And just as in religion we prefer our cherished stories over fact until we die.  It may feel good to embrace delusion but It gets us nowhere.  The current electoral abomination where only corporate lackeys have any possibility of success is the reality.  The Obama phenomenon is but the next phase.

 

Barack Obama is touted as being the leader for these times? We have no evidence of his leadership ability. We do have Obama saying,  "I am confident in my ability to lead".  This is hardly reassuring.  When asked about covering the health care uninsured in his first term, Obama has stated,     

Every four years somebody trots out a white paper, they post it on the Web....But the question we have to challenge ourselves is do we have the political will and the sense of urgency to actually get it done.

Get what done?  The political will to do what?  We have no idea.  Lack of substance and ambiguity go hand-in-hand in the Obama campaign.

Robert Fisk, in his article "The West’s Weapon of Self-Delusion - There are gun battles in Beirut –- and America thinks things are going fine", for The Inedpendent/UK writes,

So they are it again, the great and the good of American democracy, grovelling and fawning to the Israeli lobbyists of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), repeatedly allying themselves to the cause of another country and one that is continuing to steal Arab land...Barack Obama...found time to tell his Jewish audience that Jerusalem is the one undivided capital of Israel, which is not the view of the rest of the world which continues to regard the annexation of Arab East Jerusalem as illegal...Israel’s security comes first and Mr Baracka [sic] wants Israel to keep all of Jerusalem — so much for the Palestinian state.    

Chris Hedges writing in "The Iran Trap" says of Barack Obama and the Democrats,

Barack Obama, when we need sane leadership the most, has proved feckless and weak. He, and the Democratic leadership, is as morally bankrupt as those preparing to ignite our funeral pyre in the Middle East....He illustrates how the lust for power is morally corrosive. And while he may win the White House, by the time he takes power he will be trapped in George Bush’s alternative reality.

Bold new leadership, indeed, Mr. Obama.  

 

Voting For Someone Else

   

I will be voting for Ralph Nader.  Ralph Nader's platform is clear.  Nader offers concrete steps presenting solutions such as single payer universal health care, ending the war in Iraq, peace in Palestine/Israel, etc.  Very importantly, Nader demands that the perpetrators of the crimes of the Bush administration be brought to justice.  Obama avoids the issue of impeachment.  Like Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Obama has no interest in enforcing the U.S. Constitution and bringing the criminals to justice.  As Nader puts it,    

This is the most impeachable Presidency in American history....These are defiant, continual, recidivistic war criminals, constitutional criminals and statutory criminals. They should have been immediately impeached and convicted in the Senate the moment the Democrats took over. But, the Democrats have taken impeachment off the table. Barack Obama has taken it off the table, Hillary Clinton has taken it off the table, and of course John McCain doesn’t want it on the table.”

Obama tells us that the Bush administration is made up of a "variety of characters" with "loose ethical standards".  Obama further states that, "I think you reserve impeachment for grave, grave breaches, and intentional breaches of the president's authority".  Breaches?  No.  Crimes!  So then, Mr. Obama, you don't have enough evidence that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, et al, have committed crimes?  How much more evidence do you need?

Ralph Nader and Kevin Reese posted the evidence for impeachment on May 31, 2005 on the website Boston.com  Nader and Reese asked the questions to which  affirmative answers necessitate impeachment, 

Did the administration mislead us into war by manipulating and misstating intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to Al Qaeda, suppressing contrary intelligence, and deliberately exaggerating the danger a contained, weakened Iraq posed to the United States and its neighbors?  

The answer to this question is now, unequivocally, yes.  The evidence is in and it is overwhelming.  Obama's ignoring of the facts that demand impeachment cement his loyalty to the corporate system, the Party and his candidacy over the United States Constitution.  This is unacceptable.  And it should be unacceptable to the people that make up the Obamanation.  In a letter to Representative John Conyers regarding impeachment, Ralph Nader wrote,

It is never too late to enforce the Constitution. It is never too late to uphold the rule of law. It is never too late to awaken the Congress to its sworn duties under the Constitution.  But it will soon be too late to avoid the searing verdict of history when on January 21, 2009, George W. Bush becomes a fugitive from a justice that was never invoked by those in Congress so solely authorized to hold the President accountable.  

So then, Mr. Obama.  So then, citizens of Obamanation, what do you say?  Will you defend the Constitution?  Or are you part of the abomination that doesn't give a damn about it?  I have answered this question for myself and that is why I am voting for Ralph Nader.    
    

©2008 Jozef Hand-Boniakowski, PhD

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