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Politics : Obama Watch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LTK007 who wrote (249)	5/16/2009 1:37:57 PM
From: Crimson Ghost	Respond to of 290

Obama: more dangerous than Bush (Reverend Wright was correct about Obama just being another politician) TPMCafé May 16, 2009 Barack Obama has continued to prove that he said things to get votes that he had no intention of actually doing. He espoused morals and ideals in order to fool voters. He is a serial deceptionist, a liar, and more dangerous than Bush. Look how much Bush loves him, that is one tight hug, like I would only give to my dad or brother. This is because he has erected a cult-following of Dem-bots that will justify anything he does, no matter what. I do not know why Barack Obama calls him self a Democrat, other than Bush poisoned the Republican brand so bad that Obama opportunisticly rode a wave of NEED for change, and fooled the country in the most Machiavellian and disgusting way. I pray that Obama does not get a second term, and an actual Democrat can be elected who is truthful, and has one or two progressive bones in his body. Obama has vast record of breaking his promises on the primary trail. Obama lying to your face is his Modus Operendi: 1. NAFTA Hopey-Changey Obama: "I would immediately call the president of Mexico, the president of Canada, to try to amend NAFTA, because I think that we can get labour agreements in that agreement right now," Obama said. "And it should reflect the basic principle that our trade agreements should not just be good for Wall Street; it should also be good for Main Street." Gotchya Suckers Obama: "Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified," bottom line: Obama says slowly and clearly to the 10million auto workers, the whole middle class, unions, and the entire state of Michigan: FUCK YOU! DIE SLOWLY! Barack Obama has no compunction about lying to voters faces about the issues that effect and affect them the most, it was in fact a deliberate strategy. How the fuck did his rhetoric get "overheated and amplified"? What a bunch of bullshit. 2. FISA Hopey-Changey Obama: Bill Burton issues a statement, October 24, 2007, reaffirming Obama's position and pledging to support Chris Dodd's filibuster: "To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies." Gotchya Suckers Obama: Obama votes for cloture on the FISA bill that included retroactive immunity for telecoms bottom line: Obama threw his lot in with the criminals in our Government, he is no different than any common crook of the Bush Administration. Coopting the arguments, language of Bush, Obama shows the country how he will act when he becomes the King. 3. Torture Hopey-Changey Obama: Obama says waterboarding is torture, and nobody is above the law. Gotchya Suckers Obama: Obama mimmicks the exact words of Bush: "The United States doesn't torture." Obama then proceeds in Orwellian language to insist that the last thing the head of the executive branch should do is actually enforce laws, or investigate crimes, cuz they are in the past, and distractions. Except (of course) for the crimes commited by ordinary citizens, who are locked up at the highest rate and totals in all of the Earth. bottom line: Obama has the gall to pretend like it is his decision alone on who/when/how to prosecute lawbreakers. He shows the country that he thinks that crimes are acceptable if committed by high-ranking government officials. Torture got worse at Gitmo after Obama was elected according to prisoners there: "Since the election it's got harsher," Mr Mohamed said. [snip] his chest and penis were slashed with razors . Obama has claimed King priveleges to ship Muslim prisoners to Bagram and torture them forever with no trial. I think Obama takes pleasure in torturing Muslims, because he resents his middle name, and his father that abandoned him like the garbage he turned out to be. 4. Covering up Government (War) Crimes Hopey-Changey Obama: My view is also that nobody's above the law and, if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen. Gotchya Suckers Obama: President Obama insists "we should be looking forward and not backwards." bottom line: Covering up War Crimes is a War Crime. Obama is no better than Bush on this. But we are just "ordinary citizens" so why should King Obama care about what he says to us? 5. Blackmailing the citizenry of Britain Hopey-Changey Obama: OK, there was never any pretense here, but this is so dispicable and thuggish it needs to be pointed out to as wide an audience as possible Gotchya Suckers Obama: bottom line: Obama is commiting an international War Crime by covering up War Crimes, and he is committing a crime in Brittain by covering up evidence of the torture of one of their citizens. I hope all you Dems out there are proud of Obama blackmailing a whole country and threatening them with a terrorist attack unless they too illegally cover up for Bush's War Crimes. Fucking awesome! 6. Health Care Hopey-Changey Obama: May 14, 2007 Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama, seeking support from labor union members in New Jersey, vowed Monday to make health insurance available to all Americans by the end of his first term in the White House. ''We can have universal health care by the end of the next president's first term, by the end of my first term,'' Obama said, bringing 600 union workers to their feet during a question-and-answer session with members of AFL-CIO affiliated unions. Gotchya Suckers Obama: "Got the little single-payer advocates up here.....The only problem is that we're not starting from scratch. We have historically a tradition of employer-based health care. ....We don't want a huge disruption as we go into health care reform where suddenly we're trying to completely reinvent one-sixth of the economy...... If you don't have health care or you're highly unsatisfied with your health care, then let's give you choices, let's give you options, ....produce a bill before the August recess. And it may not have everything I want in there or everything you want in there, but it will be a vast improvement over what we currently have." bottom line: I supported Obama in the primary, but I always thought Clinton's healthcare plan was better. It is still extremely disheartening. We are looking at at least 8 years of the same shitty for profit abuses and poor health care. Obama has his public option, why should he care about others? Additionally, it was those union workers' own faults for believing what Obama said, not Obama's fault for lying yet again. 7. Military Commisions Hopey-Changey Obama: "we need not throw away 200 years of American jurisprudence while we fight terrorism" Gotchya Suckers Obama: "will permit commissions to prosecute terrorists effectively ... This is the best way to protect our country, while upholding our deeply held values" bottom line: I'm glad Obama doesn't even attempt to explain why we can't use our existing courts to try terrorists. After all, once he is elected King, he is the only person whose opinion matters. He is so much smarter than us "ordinary citizens", we wouldn't be able to understand anyway. 8. DADT (gay bashing) Hopey-Changey Obama AND Gotchya Suckers Obama: towleroad.com link to John Stewart showing Obama's continued hypocrisy and outright dishonesty bottom line: way to break the stereo type of the homophobic black guy, you should be proud of yourself Obama! And the bigger threat to our security is gays translating versus the backlog of wiretaps of suspected terrorists. FAAAABULOUS! I am done with Obama, he is worse than Clinton. He lets Al Franken and Dawn Johnsen languish, he lets cramdown fail by not lifting a finger, he plays King and knights Arlen Specter the next Democratic Senator (fuck what the voters of PA think) and makes Gillibrand his annointed dutchess. I don't think anybody voted for any of this shit! If we wanted all these disgusting behaviors from a President we would have voted for John McCain. Face it, Obama is a fraud, additced to the power of lies and deceit. It appears to me that Obama's top priorities are: 1. (TIE) redistributing wealth from the taxpayers to the banksters AND playing basketball 2. permanent land war in Asia (how did that work out for the Romans, Greeks, and Russians?) 3. the rendition, permanent imprisonment and torture (especially slicing of penises) of Arab Muslims at his personal whim 4. Covering up the crimes of the Bush Admin, supressing evidence, or whole lawsuits by claiming national security 5. Keeping enough Republicans and Blue Dogs (Specter, Coleman, Gates) in power so that he has an excuse to not enact any of the meaningful promises he made 6. Letting EFCA fail, or become so watered down it is no change I fully expect Obama to appoint a Federalist Society member to the supreme court to cap off his DINO performance

To: LTK007 who wrote (249)	5/16/2009 10:23:49 PM
From: Crimson Ghost	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 290

Obama’s Animal Farm: Bigger, Bloodier Wars Equal Peace and Justice James Petras May 2009 “The Deltas are psychos…You have to be a certified psychopath to join the Delta Force…”, a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980’s. Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s rise to leadership is marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building. Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations. The point of the ‘Special Operations’ teams (SOT) is that they do not distinguish between civilian and military oppositions, between activists and their sympathizers and the armed resistance. The SOT specialize in establishing death squads and recruiting and training paramilitary forces to terrorize communities, neighborhoods and social movements opposing US client regimes. The SOT’s ‘counter-terrorism’ is terrorism in reverse, focusing on socio-political groups between US proxies and the armed resistance. McChrystal’s SOT targeted local and national insurgent leaders in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan through commando raids and air strikes. During the last 5 years of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld period the SOT were deeply implicated in the torture of political prisoners and suspects. McChrystal was a special favorite of Rumsfeld and Cheney because he was in charge of the ‘direct action’ forces of the ‘Special Missions Units. ‘Direct Action’ operative are the death-squads and torturers and their only engagement with the local population is to terrorize, and not to propagandize. They engage in ‘propaganda of the dead’, assassinating local leaders to ‘teach’ the locals to obey and submit to the occupation. Obama’s appointment of McChrystal as head reflects a grave new military escalation of his Afghanistan war in the face of the advance of the resistance throughout the country. The deteriorating position of the US is manifest in the tightening circle around all the roads leading in and out of Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul as well as the expansion of Taliban control and influence throughout the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Obama’s inability to recruit new NATO reinforcements means that the White House’s only chance to advance its military driven empire is to escalate the number of US troops and to increase the kill ratio among any and all suspected civilians in territories controlled by the Afghan armed resistance. The White House and the Pentagon claim that the appointment of McChrystal was due to the ‘complexities’ of the situation on the ground and the need for a ‘change in strategy’. ‘Complexity’ is a euphemism for the increased mass opposition to the US, complicating traditional carpet ‘bombing and military sweep’ operations. The new strategy practiced by McChrystal involves large scale, long term ‘special operations’ to devastate and kill the local social networks and community leaders, which provide the support system for the armed resistance. Obama’s decision to prevent the release of scores of photographs documenting the torture of prisoners by US troops and ‘interrogators’ (especially under command of the ‘Special Forces’), is directly related to his appointment of McChrystal whose ‘SOT’ forces were highly implicated in widespread torture in Iraq. Equally important, under McChrystal’s command the DELTA, SEAL and Special Operations Teams will have a bigger role in the new ‘counter-insurgency strategy’. Obama’s claim that the publication of these photographs will adversely affect the ‘troops’ has a particular meaning: The graphic exposure of McChrystal’s modus operendi for the past 5 years under President Bush will undermine his effectiveness in carrying out the same operations under Obama. Obama’s decision to re-start the secret ‘military tribunals’ of foreign political prisoners, held at the Guantanamo prison camp, is not merely a replay of the Bush-Cheney policies, which Obama had condemned and vowed to eliminate during his presidential campaign, but part of his larger policy of militarization and coincides with his approval of the major secret police surveillance operations conducted against US citizens. Putting McChrystal in charge of the expanded Afghanistan-Pakistan military operations means putting a notorious practitioner of military terrorism – the torture and assassination of opponents to US policy – at the center of US foreign policy. Obama’s quantitative and qualitative expansion of the US war in South Asia means massive numbers of refugees fleeing the destruction of their farms, homes and villages; tens of thousands of civilian deaths, and eradication of entire communities. All of this will be committed by the Obama Administraton in the quest to ‘empty the lake (displace entire populations) to catch the fish (armed insurgents and activists)’. Obama’s restoration of all of the most notorious Bush Era policies and the appointment of Bush’s most brutal commander is based on his total embrace of the ideology of military-driven empire building. Once one believes (as Obama does) that US power and expansion are based on military conquests and counter-insurgency, all other ideological, diplomatic, moral and economic considerations will be subordinated to militarism. By focusing all resources on successful military conquest, scant attention is paid to the costs borne by the people targeted for conquest or to the US treasury and domestic American economy. This has been clear from the start: In the midst of a major recession/depression with millions of Americans losing their employment and homes, President Obama increased the military budget by 4% - taking it beyond $800 billion dollars. Obama’s embrace of militarism is obvious from his decision to expand the Afghan war despite NATO’s refusal to commit any more combat troops. It is obvious in his appointment of the most hard-line and notorious Special Forces General from the Bush-Cheney era to head the military command in subduing Afghanistan and the frontier areas of Pakistan. It is just as George Orwell described in Animal Farm: The Democratic Pigs are now pursuing the same brutal, military policies of their predecessors, the Republican Porkers, only now it is in the name of the people and peace. Orwell might paraphrase the policy of President Barack Obama, as ‘Bigger and bloodier wars equal peace and justice’. __.