Barack Obama
(image by PBoGS)
I am a Democrat, but I hold "Democratic"
politicians to the same standards as I do ones who are self-professedly
Republicans.
Sadly, only few Democrats do: they refuse to recognize that
they voted for a Republican-at-heart in "progressive" sheep's
clothing, a conservative who had pretended to be a progressive in order to win
the Democratic Presidential nomination.
Respondents to it didn't challenge the facts that it
summarized, which were damning in the view of any progressive -- and some even
in the view of any non-fascist. Instead, these readers listed the good things
that Obama has done as President, such as, "Rescuing the Auto
Industry." Every President has done some good things. Such readers were
simply refusing to believe that Obama is a liar and is at least as conservative
as he is liberal. Instead, they diverted onto irrelevancies: onto the good
things he has done, which have nothing to do with those bad things.
A real progressive doesn't avoid the truth, but instead
faces and tries to understand the truth.
For example, the progressive magazine
Mother Jones
headlined on 25 August 2005,
"Bush's Biggest Achievements," and
listed four: "Humanitarian Aid in Africa," "Tsunami
Relief," "Marine Protections," and "Executive Branch
Diversity." Even that man who might have been America's worst-ever
President, did some excellent things.
Oddly (and admirably),
The American Conservative bannered
on 5 February 2009,
"Bush's Good Deed," and praised
a different action by him, which also happened to be actually a progressive
action that he had taken: "Bush's last -- it might seem his only -- good
deed: rejection of an Israeli request for overflight permission
and perhaps military assistance in bombing Iran's nuclear reactor. There's
been very little about this in the mainstream press -- though it's the kind
of major incident that history often turns on." That's correct.
Should we assume, therefore, that Bush was a good
President? Of course, that would be silly.
My article didn't merely list a few middling-bad things
that President Obama has intentionally done: it described many very-bad things
he's done (not things done very badly -- very bad things), and then ended the
litany with: "Anyone who doubts that Obama is a liar (except when
addressing banksters in private), whose actual values are often the exact
opposite of his sanctimonious public statements, should read not only the IG's
report, but, regarding other issues, things such as," and I then
linked to six more -- each of which, likewise, entailed Obama's intentionally
doing things that were exactly contrary to his publicly expressed (and always
more-liberal) stated objectives.
As to the question of why Obama would have
entered politics in 1996 as a "Democrat," instead of a
"Republican," perhaps the reason for this is he recognized
that, after Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy," starting
in the 1970s, the likelihood for any person with a dark skin-color to win
the Republican Presidential nomination was clearly nil; whereas in
the Democratic Party, there would be lots of voters who would actually
like the idea of voting the first Black into the White House. Being a
"Democrat" was thus the only path by which a young black person
in 1996 could realistically hope to become the U.S. President. To an
ambitious black person entering politics in 1996, being a
"Democrat" instead of a "Republican" was a no-brainer
choice. And Obama is clearly not a no-brainer person: he could
figure this out.
But Obama is no progressive. He isn't even much of a
liberal. He is an enormously gifted politician. Unfortunately, part of that
gift-set is a phenomenal ability to deceive.
This isn't to say that he's purely a conservative, either.
Some of his remarks, such as the famous one about which the Romney campaign
headlined against him "You Didn't Build That," were
obviously stated by him with an actual progressive intent.
Obama told donors on 24 November 2013,
"I'm not a particularly ideological person," and
that statement by him was unfortunately true: he has never even thought
seriously about his values, his ideology; he just accepts unquestioningly the
ones that he has absorbed from the people around him, especially from the
aristocrats who enabled him to receive a first-rate education. Not everything
that he says is a lie.
Perhaps that will satisfy Obama-bots that he's okay, after
all. Far from it.
At best, Obama is a bad President. And I say this as a
progressive historian who respects, above all Presidents, the progressive
Republican Abraham Lincoln, whose Party transformed into something very
different and vastly more conservative practically as soon as he was murdered by
an extreme conservative; and as one who respects almost as highly the
progressive Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose impact on our entire
world was more beneficial than that of any other leader in all of human history
(if you consider what would the world be like if Hitler had won?), but who additionally
has the unquestionable black mark on his record, of having rounded up and
imprisoned Americans of Japanese descent for no good reason.
An authentic progressive applies the same standards,
scientific standards, empirical facts, to everything, including human
relations. But it seems that many people who consider themselves to be liberal
or even progressive, are actually too filled with some kind of tribal loyalty
(to "Democrats," in this instance), which prevents them from being
that. To the extent they do, they're being conservative.
Perhaps that's not as bad as being a Republican, but it can
turn out to be worse than being a Republican if what it means is that
one will vote for a conservative like Hillary Clinton to be the
Democratic Presidential nominee, which will mean that the nation will
"choose" a conservative President no matter what.
Our main obligation as progressives is to do everything we
can to assure that one of the two Parties' Presidential nominees will be
a progressive; because, if we fail to do that, then we will have failed
the country.
Anyone who relies upon a third-party candidate to deliver
the nation a progressive as a serious contender for President, is
entertaining a fantasy, not a strategy, because the two political
parties are ideologically polarized so that the Democrat will inevitably
be less fascist than the Republican, and no third-party candidate will
stand a chance to win unless he's a billionaire who can fund his own
campaign, which won't happen. (Nader's efforts, especially to get onto
the states' ballots, were funded largely by big-money Republican donors,
and it gave them a Bush "win" in 2000, so that's what happens when
progressives bury their heads in the sand: bad news that turns into
catastrophic history.)
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