The Chris Moeller Archives

A meaningful challenge

With great bravado, a carnival barker hollers at the passers-by along the midway. “Behold the amazing turtle man. Half-man, half-turtle! Come inside the tent and see this amazing oddity of nature!” An intrigued man turns over two bits and walks into the tent. Atop a couch, he sees a model who has fastened some sort of large shell-looking aparatus to his back. The man shrugs and exits the tent. As he turns to leave, the barker shouts at the man-- and for all to hear: “Is that not the most extraordinary thing you have seen in all your life, sir?!” All eyes nearby turn and peer towards the man to see his reaction. He responds with a sheepish ‘yes.’ The man was had, but he’s not about to compound the mistake by admitting it to the world. Such as it is with Barack Obama and so many of his liberal supporters.

A vote for John McCain, we were told by Democrats, was a vote for a third term for George W. Bush, but lo and behold, we got that third term anyway. In fact, dare I say the Obama presidency has been arguably worse than either of Bush's, a stunningly depressing reality to consider, though I'm pretty sure that American hero Bradley Manning would concur. At least Bush went to the Congress for authorization before launching his illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His cabinet may have phonied up the intelligence to justify one of them, but at least (the very least, oh god, this is depressing) he called for an up-or-down vote from the legislative branch. Democratic lawmakers, almost all of whom cast gutless 'yes' votes when they got their chance, must have vowed not long after to never let that happen again. No more Congressional authority would be needed. Every new war will be "the president's war."

Obama launched his war against Libya. He didn’t allow a Congressional vote. Instead, he extended executive authority over our military’s imperialist actions to an unprecedented new level. Like Bush, he lied about his motives, stating that the war was for humanitarian purposes only, but now it’s about “regime change” and we’re still engaged 60 days later in a bloody civil war between warring tribes. Obama has ended neither of his predecessor’s wars, and in addition to throwing Libya onto the bonfire, he’s also secretly bombed Yemen. Wiki Leaks uncovered that Yemen’s oppressive government claimed credit for the action, but it was the U.S., in actuality.

The Obama administration began launching drone attacks on Pakistan also, killing hundreds of civilians. (Even Bush and Cheney didn’t have the gall to do that.) Then after stepping past the Pakastani government that his and Bush's administrations had paid out in the billions, he launched a military attack to kill the 9/11 mastermind (imagine any U.S. president pulling the same type of unilateral maneuver involving a hotel in London or Paris), and he had the man immediately murdered and buried at sea without trial. The anti-war factions across the country have sat utterly silent throughout all of this aggression because the president is a Democrat.

The rule of law is entirely passé for this administration. This past week, the Patriot Act, once so unpopular with liberals, and many conservatives as well, was extended for the second time during Obama's tenure, both times without any proposed changes by the White House. The Obama Justice Department has continued the Bush/Cheney practice of torturing prisoners; like Bush, trying to officially label the practice something other than torture. Much of the torture is now outsourced to foreign governments (again, as Wiki Leaks confirmed), but Obama hasn't even managed to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison, the symbolic Ground Zero for America's sadistic coercion tactics and for its national shame in violating the Geneva Conventions and the UN Declaration of Human Rights. (Even "John McBush," Bush’s third term, has been an outspoken opponent of torture.)

The Department of Justice has continued the legalistic charade of denying trials for prisoners that they consider "too dangerous," and they’ve even added to the War Powers Act the extraordinary idea of authorizing the assassinations of American citizens who have not been convicted of, or even charged with, a crime. The Obamas have continued to promote the Bush argument that we’re in a permanent war so that the unconstitutional War Powers Act remain legally unchallenged and in effect. President Obama is free to declare and pursue any wars that he chooses anywhere in the world, and enact any laws that he so desires if he publicly claims it in the security interests of the state. For all intents and purposes, he is a king.

It’s hard to imagine that even George W. Bush would have handled the “Arab spring” any worse than Obama has. When the people of Egypt rose up in such historic and peaceful opposition against the dictator of their country, Secretary Clinton and the Obama State Department threw their public support behind the dictator’s second-in-command, anxious over losing their strongman in the region who had been charged with keeping “stability.”

The crimes of Israel continue to go unchallenged. Obama made a soaring speech Thursday in respect to the Middle East, but no change in policy was laid out. (Finding the pretty words has never been Obama's problem.) The governments in Israel, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, where protestors have all been targets of violence by the state, like in Libya, continue to get a free pass. Middle East democracy protestors cannot be fully supported by the compromised U.S. government because logic dictates that the next step would be forcing Israel to retreat to its 1967 borders and cease the assault of the steamroller on the West Bank and Gaza. Obama spoke out of both sides of his mouth Thursday when he said that "every state has the right to self-defense," but then stated that the Palestinians must be content in being "a sovereign non-militarized" one. The president's speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on Sunday should be even more enlightening.

Israel is to this decade something like South Africa was to the 1980s. The Palestinians live walled off as Israel morphs into an apartheid state. The United States refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the Palestinian leadership, labeling their democratically-elected government a terrorist organization. As late as 1988, Nelson Mandela's African National Congress in South Africa was also officially considered one of the world's "most notorious terrorist groups" by the U.S. government. Like South Africa two decades before, Israel's right-wing government, because of its actions, is now becoming increasingly isolated around the world even as it continues to claim the steadfast support of international corporations and the American government and commander-in-chief.

Dr. Cornel West of Princeton dared to challenge the president last week from the position of both a progressive and a black man. He was met by other liberals not with substantive debate, but queer accusations about his personal motives. West called Obama “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats,” which the historical record struggles to contradict, but the high-profile professor, whom incidentally has rarely failed to mention the great hope he continues to hold out for the Obama administration (against all possible indicators, I might add), is accused of acting petty over perceived personal slights from our first post-racial president.

It's worth noting, actually, that part of Obama's original vetting among the Washington Democrats and Wall Street power brokers in 2007 and 2008 was establishing the candidate as the anti-Jesse Jackson, or the anti-Al Sharpton, former Democratic and African-American candidates with whom Dr. West more closely identifies personally and publicly. This central concentration of American political power had to be assured that a "President Obama" would not be a threat to the establishment hierarchy of power in the country. West's personal motives in criticizing are immaterial anyway in respect to his specific policy criticisms. Either they resonate or they don't, and West's accusations about the president's epic failures in office clearly touched a nerve here because the claws came out. It’s sad when the party affiliation attached to the politician's name means more to the establishment liberals than the importance of acknowledging the moral cowardice of the leader of the free world and of its most powerful army.

Most progressives have claimed a position like that of the battered spouse in their relationship with Obama and the Democratic Party. They defend the president, particularly, for his health care initiative and his program for economic stimulus, seemingly without even noticing that even the modestly progressive gains Obama has been responsible for have simultaneously been massive corporate giveaways. And why shouldn't they be? The corporations paid for them with their record-breaking campaign contributions. West’s critics, such as Joan Walsh of Salon, only tolerate criticism of Obama if the criticism is toothless enough not to damage him politically. Dissenting voices are shut out of the party's primary process, but then if the candidate is opposed from the left in the general election, those candidates will be scolded for having not mounted their challenges during the primaries. It would all be a big joke if the results being felt all across the globe weren’t so tragic.

The refrain from Democrats never changes: Trust us... this is the best we can do right now... the timing's not right... first this, then this, then that. Yet as Dr. King said about the civil and economic rights struggles of his era, “'Go slow' means 'don’t go at all.'” Candidate Obama told us he opposed the two Bush/Cheney wars in Asia. Now we have five. He told us there should be no more ignoring of the law after Bush invaded Iraq, now he has his own Iraq underway in Libya, and this is arguably worse because he had the benefit of witnessing Bush's disastrous results. Barack Obama is not “the most liberal president to date,” as Walsh preposterously claims. This president is less liberal than Richard Nixon. That's how much the goalposts have moved during two generations of American political life. Corporations have purchased our government. They’ve purchased our elections and they’ve purchased the officeholders. They’ve even purchased the debate.

Contrary to Walsh’s claims, there are easy choices here. Liberals have tried the capitulation strategy for decades, and we’re getting rolled. Shockingly, when you demand nothing of their leaders, that's exactly what you get. During the early 1930s, Huey Long, the Louisiana lion that challenged Standard Oil, was touring the country, engaged in heavily-attended public policy debates with and against Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas. That’s how mainstream both of those men's ideas were at the time. Now working people and the disenfranchised are fighting to hold on to even the very concept of labor unions. Thanks to the unchallenged Revolution of the Right, the monumental Civil Rights Act is controversial again, as if it were 1963. Activism is being criminalized. Abortion rights are being stripped away little by little, state to state, in clearly unconstitutional ways, yet nobody even challenges the attacks on the firm legal footing on which they stand for the silly fear of opening up Roe v. Wade to the current court. We have a majority of Washington Democrats conceding cuts in Medicare and Social Security, while the president from their party throws exponentially more money down the hole in his imperialist efforts at nation-building. What are a Democrat's priorities if not protecting the safety net over militarist expansion?

Dr. West is damn right that there are racial and class elements to this. Those elements have been fundamental to the destruction of the Democratic Party. Joan Walsh can be a progressive in theory, but she doesn’t really feel it when things go sour. A large percentage of your establishment/corporate/apologist Democrats aren’t feeling it economically even when our government priorities get this far out of whack. They’re typing their political arguments over six dollar coffees. They say they care about the poor, but you’ll never even hear a Democratic politician use the phrase “working class” to describe these Americans. Listen close, they’re always fighting for the “middle class.” That group of voters is much more difficult to categorize.

Walsh decries old-fashioned "identity politics" because it’s divisive, but division is what’s needed. The splinter is required to differentiate the ideas from those of the Republicans. The Democrats now have no "identity" at all. The advantaged class running the show declared war on the disadvantaged class right about the time Ronald Reagan gave them the blueprint to do it.

The solution is excising the tumor. Once liberals and progressives actually free their ideas and agendas from their unholy entanglement with the Democratic Party, its corporate interests, and the industrial war machine, then and only then will be start to see the political pendulum swing back to the left in America. That's a tent show that would actually live up to the advertising, and one I'd pay to see.

posted by CM @ 5:48 PM