September 14, 2018
photo above: The U.S. Army | CC BY 2.0
WN: It is astounding that Obama (no less Hillary Clinton) was through and through a warmonger on a grand scale exceeding both Bushes, and far more so far than Trump. This is laid out in the article below. Obama is like those quack doctors who do full-scale operations yet have zero medical training. (Don’t know post-op about their survival rates…)
My “Open Letter to Michelle Obama” of two years ago lays out much of this as well. Yet my liberal friends still think of Ms. Obama as a hero… And when I indicated recently to one that the United States government has been at times the world’s largest drug dealer — and much more/worse! (please see towards the bottom of my Home page) — he said he didn’t want to hear more, indicating it seems genuine disbelief that such a claim could ever be substantiated.
This article also complements “Obama: A Hollow Man With Ruling Class Ideas“.
A more recent outstanding article by Paul Street likewise points some of this out: How Obama Could Find Some Redemption. My response?: Don’t hold your breath! Ancient theologian Origen however believed in even in The Devil’s possible redemption (and likely for that reason had much of his prodigious writings destroyed by the). And therefore I say: thanks to Mr. Street for pointing out so many examples of historical redemption, and holding out possibility even for Obama. I also say Amen!
So the old adage: There are none so blind as they who will not see!
excerpt:
Many liberals and more than a few progressives – not to mention large sectors of the media intelligentsia — will find it difficult to reconcile the picture of an aggressively imperialist Obama with the more familiar image of a thoughtful, articulate politician who laced his talks with references to peace, arms control, and human rights. But this very dualism best corresponds to the historical reality. In his book The Obama Syndrome, Tariq Ali writes: “From Palestine through Iraq, Obama has acted as just another steward of the American empire, pursuing the same aims as his predecessors, with the same means but with more emollient rhetoric.” He adds: “Historically, the model for the current variant of imperial presidency is Woodrow Wilson, no less pious a Christian, whose every second word was peace, democracy, or self-determination, while his armies invaded Mexico, occupied Haiti, and attacked Russia [yes, Russia!], and his treaties handed one colony after another to his partners in war. Obama is a hand-me-down version of the same, without even Fourteen Points to betray.”
As the 2018 midterm elections approach, Obama has chosen to depart from historical norm and go on the attack against a Trump presidency viewed as signifying all that is evil. A Democratic victory would reject Trump’s “dark vision of the the nation and restore honesty, decency, and lawfulness to the American government”. In his first speech Obama said that orchestrated public fear has created conditions “ripe for exploitation by politicians who have no compunction and no shame about tapping into America’s dark history of racial and ethnic and religious division.” Does Obama need to be reminded that such “dark history” also includes militarism and imperialism?
Whatever one’s view of the Trump phenomenon in its totality, the amount of death and destruction he has brought to the world does not (yet) come close to Obama’s record of warfare, drone strikes, regime changes, military provocations, and global deployments. If neocon interests have come to shape U.S. foreign policy, those interests have so far been more fully embraced by Obama and the Clintonites than by Trump, despite the scary presence of Trump’s hawkish circle of lieutenants. Unfortunately, Obama’s eight years of imperial aggression elicited strikingly few liberal or progressive voices of dissent across the political and media terrain. He enjoyed nearly complete immunity from protest at a time when even the smallest vestiges of a once-vigorous American antiwar movement had disappeared from the scene.
Please click on: Obama’s Imperial Presidency
