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Sunday, December 13, 2009

Not Even a Peanut -- Alexander Cockburn

Short intro: a couple years ago, I worked on a network of women trying to scare up money for poor women who needed abortions. I quit after a couple of months because I always seemed to run out of money on the first day of my assigned week and I couldn't take talking with all the clients who called after that. Not proud of it, but I just didn't know how to handle it.

Anyway, yesterday at McDermott's health care rally, the woman who ran that network was up there shilling for McDermott -- after what the Dems did to women in the Stupak amendment passage! I pointedly called her name and pointed to my sign about women needing health care too (the reverse of my single payer sign). I decided then and there that these liberal mercenaries for the Dems are the scum of the earth.

Alexander Cockburn nails this diehard Democrat addicition very well in this article, a part of which is below and the whole thing at the link. Linda J.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12112009.html
After eight years of Bushian crudities the Empire needed an upgrade in its salespitch, which is why we have Obama. Back at the time of the medieval crusades, the Western kings used to take Holy Communion from their Archbishops before heading east to battle Islam and scour the land for booty. I thought the ceremony in that austere hall in Oslo was a straight lineal descent – as Obama accepted his wafer, in the form of the prize -- in this modern age a substantial check – and then pledged his holy war.

There have been yelps, but I detect a certain caution on the left, a certain reluctance to toss Obama on the dung heap where he belongs. Often it’s simple self-preservation. A great many nominally left organizations are dependent on liberal non-profit foundations whose executives are swift to cancel grants to those swerving from commitment to the Democratic cause and to the White House. Rather than confess to these coarse inhibitions, the progressives murmur about the lot of Afghan women, the monstrous Taliban, and sit on their hands. And they too see nothing wrong with Obama’s endless pledges to kill Bin Laden – a commitment that aroused ecstasy in Congress last week when General McChrystal told the Senate Armed Services Committee last Tuesday that the world can not defeat al Qaeda until Osama bin Laden is captured or killed.

As Pierre Sprey remarked in the hearing’s wake, “It's clear to me that, although Gen. McChrystal's credentials in the assassination business are impeccable, his assassination-based grand strategy is a shameless crib from that great strategic innovator, the USAF's Col. Worden (e.g., "decapitation of the enemy's leadership"--by air power, of course). Quibbles over authorship aside, victory through assassination is a brilliant grand strategy for America: it's cheap, particularly at a time when we're a bit strapped; it's politically irresistible to a nation raised on Terminator 2 and Tupac; and, for the defense intellectuals, it offers wonderfully clear cut measures of success. And, empirically speaking, it's got a great track record. Look how well a single well-conceived execution worked out for Pontius Pilate, the High Priests of the Second Temple, and the Roman Empire.”

Here’s a president who can’t even toss the progressives the one peanut a year they need to keep them happy. Obama’s refusal on the eve of Thanksgiving here ago to sign the U.S. on to the landmine ban was the breaking point for many.

The American Medical Association, mentioned by Clancy Sigal here earlier this week had a study reckoning that an estimated 24,000 people, mainly civilians, are killed or ripped apart by landmines and “unexploded ordinance” (cluster bombs) each year across the world. Mostly the victims are the rural poor, many of them children. As a senator, Barack Obama voted for the ban; as President, he’s against it. Looking at the AMA Report’s numbers it’s a safe bet to say that somewhere in the world, even as Obama invoked Martin Luther King and the peacelovers, some kids the same age as his own two daughters were killed or crippled by a landmine.

Obama could have tossed the peanut through the bars, and ratified the ban. The liberals would have cheered and then Obama could have told Rahm Emanuel to pass the word along to Congress that he’d much prefer the legislators not ratify his decision.

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