Obama Slouches Rightward, part 2

Lets be ultra-charitable and forgive Obama for doing what he thinks he must to get elected. If he doesn’t want to be pictured with Muslim women wearing headscarves, as happened at the Gore endorsement rally in Detroit, that’s reprehensible, but OK. In a better possible world, public displays of godliness would be as offensive to the vast majority as public displays of same-sex love are to the godly in this possible world. But, in our time and place, the exclusion of those women makes public relations sense – notwithstanding the plain fact that it represents a concession to the most rampant form of contemporary xenophobia. A Democrat’s gotta do what a Democrat’s gotta do. Ditto for rejecting public financing. Ditto even for abject pandering to right-wing Cubans and Zionists; though that’s even more blatantly reprehensible because it wouldn’t happen in that better possible world where the godly would feel compelled to act out their superstitions and ignorance in private. One could even forgive Obama’s likely acquiescence in the Pelosiite “compromise” on Bush war funding when it comes to the Senate. I’ll bet he finds some way to absent himself when the time come to vote. If he doesn’t, my guess is that he’ll vote like the Pelosiite he is. What is least likely, the way things are now going, is that he’ll side with the minority of Democrats who are finally willing to join the handful of their more principled colleagues who were in the opposition from day one, by insisting that enough is enough. Ever since Bush and Cheney launched their campaigns of murder and mayhem, Democrats have been falling over themselves to “support the troops” (by keeping them in harm’s way and forcing them to perform unspeakable and often criminal acts). Don’t count on Obama to put that perceived public relations “necessity” in jeopardy any time soon.

What I find more troubling, precisely because it is so plainly unnecessary, is Obama’s incorporation of Clintonites into his “Senior Working Group on National Security.” About the only redeeming feature is that Richard Holbrooke isn’t included – yet. But Madeleine (Mad Maddy) Albright is. Our former Secretary of State is at least as guilty as her boss of actionable offenses in Iraq (killing at least a half million children and many more adults through sanctions), Yugoslavia (illegally promoting the disintegration of the country, causing wanton devastation and encouraging ethnic cleansing), and wherever else it seemed expedient. So is the hapless Warren G. Christopher, Clinton’s first Secretary of State and the “mastermind” of Al Gore’s strategy in the Florida vote recount. There is also Tony Lake, Clinton’s national security advisor; Georgia’s former right-wing Senator Sam Nunn of fund-the-military-industrial-complex fame; and Oklahoma’s David Boren, lifelong friend of the “intelligence” community. There are others equally bad. Read about them here.

During the primary season, when the worst of the Clintonites still had a Clinton to work for, Obama, whether by necessity or conviction, assembled a slightly less motley crew of foreign policy advisors, comprised of people who at least had the good sense to oppose the Iraq War and otherwise to fault the Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld crew for their rank incompetence. Thus we had the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Clarke, Larry Korb, and “humanitarian interventionist” (and other woman’s other woman) Samantha Power running the show. It was, on the whole, a lesser evil. But now even that improvement over the Hillary group is slipping away, as the Hillary group is melded into the Obama fold.

It could get a lot worse too. There are many indications that the Bush government will soon give Israel the green light to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. If that happens, all hell will break loose. Who can say how much worse the situation in the Middle East will then become, or what the effects will be on the American economy. All that is predictable is that instead of slouching rightward at his present, ever accelerating pace, Obama, eternal friend of the Promised Land, will go into full gallop mode – with the worst of the Clintonites in tow.