I am losing my patience with my fellow "true progressives" ( a label I am more than proud to wear) who just can't seem to get it through their heads that Obama's campaign was a performance, he was never remotely progressive, and has been playing for the other team the whole time. By team I don't mean the Republicans. I mean the Plutocrats both parties play for.
Day after day I see people trying to reconcile the Obama they came to love on the campaign trail, and the Obama we see now, repeatedly defying belief with his willingness to out-ronald-reagan Ronald Reagan. And I am constantly bewildered by the creativity of the concoctions used to try and dispose of these internal inconsistencies.
So strip away the speeches and the campaign image and what is left? Zero evidence that Obama is really a progressive (as he claimed to be twice, once to the NY Times) who is in a compromised situation or is somehow secretly working in the shadows to advance a progressive agenda.
No 11D chess. No brilliant strategy to defeat the forces of darkness by stealth. No other bullshit fantasy dreamt up by shills, propagandists, and believers to make people accept his utterly and incontrovertibly right wing agenda.
This should have been obvious in January 2009, when Obama suddenly shifted so far and so fast to the right I thought the Earth might move off its axis.
Go back and reread some of the exposes from 06-08 that people did on Obama. Watch the Frontline piece where they visited his tenure at the Harvard Law Review and how, to many of his colleague's dismay, as soon as Obama became editor, he took up with the wingnuts instead of his "fellow liberals" there.
The guy was a Randian neoliberal from the start. His campaign was a fraud. As soon as the election was over, he proceeded to assemble a veritable mafia of banksters and cronies or, left in place Bush's banksters and cronies.
His campaign wasn't just a fraud, it was a brilliant fraud, which is why his campaign team won a best marketing campaign of the year award.
His loyalist defenders will revise that he never ran as a progressive Democrat in the first place. This is a lie. He not only ran as a progressive Democrat, he ran as a great progressive Democrat, striking at the core of what it actually means to be a Democrat: "I am my brother's keeper".
He won my vote with these magic words:
If there is a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription drugs, and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.
Obama repeated this theme throughout his campaign. And then upon taking office, completely abandoned it as though he never said it.
Obama is one of the most cynical, conniving politicians I have ever witnessed. He is a Trojan horse. Selected and installed by Wall Street to continue what Reagan, Clinton and both Bushs started - the complete dismantling of the FDR welfare state - replaced by a corporatist one.
If you had been told in 2008 that we would be fighting for Social Security by now under our "Democratic" president, would you have even believed it?
Our country is under attack. Our people are under attack. As is our very way of life. This is war. But not between Democrats and Republicans. Between the corporate plutocracy and the people.
The Democrat Republican show we're fed on TV every night is just a theatrical diversion. Divide and conquer. Feed on people's fear and resentment, distort their minds with advanced propaganda techniques, and turn a nation on itself while the corporations loot all of our wealth.
That's the real play. And Obama has a starring role.
Progressives need to adjust and see through the brand that was created around Obama, the "community organizer."
Obama is just another elite, Ivy League technocrat. They're a dime a dozen on Wall Street. He, like most of them, believes that democracy cannot be trusted, that democratic government is completely incompetent, that market forces are a better governance system than democracy, and that all those elites from fancy schools are best suited to rule the world.
He believes this because he, like so many high IQs who have been assimilated into the plutocratic class, is an idiot.
Only a complete idiot can look at the world we live in, created by those very same elites, and still believe that they should have any say at all in governing the world.
Just like only an idiot could believe that Larry Summers and all the other Rubinites Obama has surrounded himself with are the best ones to get us out of the financial disaster they themselves created.
How can such smart people be so stupid? Assimilation. That's what Ivy League schools are in the business of now. They don't, except on rare occasions, turn out brilliant, independent thinkers.
They turn out technocratic clones who, upon completion of their programming, are simply incapable of having a truly original thought.
Now, I know good people who come from "good schools". And I know a lot more who drop out just in time. But this trend is unmistakable. And more and more, these student are taught a very different set of values than their grandparent were.
Values like, preserve The Establishment first. Be loyal to that Establishment and you may, if you can show that you can serve that Establishment, become a permanent member.
And believe me, the draw to membership is a seductive enticement.
These people need to be removed from leadership positions in our society. Before they destroy us all. Nothing matters more than their membership. And they are destroying the planet, the future of humanity to preserve it.