Barack Obama: Neocon?

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Obama isn't even left-wing by American standards. His administration has governed to the right of the American center.

Agreed. Far enough to the right to possibly lose my vote: Why should I vote for a guy who doesn't actually other much of an improvement over the last one? Sure, the other candidate may be worse on highly emotional social/cultural issues, but on the core, substantive matters of power and wealth, they're in the same camp.

Only a corporate whore can find the money for an effective run at the presidency. You need huge campaign finance reform before any serious change can happen in the White House, Senate or Congress.

Harry S. Truman was the last person of moderate means to have become President.

ruveyn

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt155906.html


Watch the video. Michael Parenti actually explains that when he explains the various levels/types of elections that goes on during an election.

Thanks for that. I'll try and view the whole thing at some point. The guys like a geekier Chomsky.

He gets into the election part pretty early-on (ie, in the first 10 or so minutes).

Heh Inuyasha has had absolutely 0 exposition to the real left.

Even the - often demonized by the US right - health care reform has been pretty horribly in the right's side of things by comparison to any other country.

Last edited by Vexcalibur on 24 Mar 2011, 3:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

And even in comparison to the policies desired by the majority of people in this country. Hell, it's pretty much exactly what the right wing advocated.

Obama's not a neocon. Trust me, I know. I am one.

Okay, brush it up with a little bit of Old Europe endorsement, get a UN Security Council resolution; and it can be called liberal interventionism instead so that you guys can still read separate journals and attend separate Beltway cocktail parties.

Well, did see today that some left of center were up in arms over the administrations decision to scrap Mirada rights for terrorists.

"So Long, Miranda"
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/ ... g-miranda/

I wouldn't wish being falsely accused of being a terrorist by the United states government on my worst enemy. It happened to some guy in Italy.He was abducted off the street with no due process and put on Rendition flight where he had his balls cut with a knife by CIA operatives. I think they took him to Eqypt or somewhere to be tortured by the Mukhbarat before finding out that they'd got the wrong guy. Guy ended
up being dumped outside an airforce base in the middle of nowhere in Eastern Europe and being warned "not to tell anybody". f*****g sick. If that's what we know about god knows what they get away with that we don't know. Probably Abu Ghriab times a hundred.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_El-Masri

Khalid El-Masri (also Khaled El-Masri[1] and Khaled Masri[2]) (born June 29, 1963) is a German citizen who was kidnapped in the Republic of Macedonia,[3] flown to Afghanistan, interrogated and tortured by the CIA for several months as a part of the War on Terror, and then released. This extrajudicial detention was apparently due to a misunderstanding that arose concerning the similarity of the spelling of El-Masri's name with the spelling of suspected terrorist al-Masri[4] (the names are spelled the same way when using Arabic script). snip


The Macedonian authorities also contacted the local CIA station, who in turn contacted the agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. A December 4, 2005, article in the Washington Post said that an argument arose within the CIA over whether they should remove him from Macedonia in an extraordinary rendition. The decision to do so was made by the head of the al Qaeda division of the CIA's Counter-terrorism Center on the basis of a hunch he was involved in terrorism

Love the use of the word "hunch" in that paragraph. If some guy in Langley gets a "hunch" that your involved in terrorism then you best watch out.

The biggest difference is Obama is smart enough not to make an ass of himself internationally by acting like some wild-west gung-ho sheriff that goes off tilting at windmills. It looks like he has silently endorsed torture, even of non-combatants, and legally pushed domestic spying to an even more unprecedented/unconstitutional level. At least those items should make you happy.

Neoconservatism refers to the aggressive, interventionist foreign policy pushed by some elements of the political right since about 2000, exemplified in the Bush administration policies of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. In virtually all foreign policy matters, Obama has either continued or even expanded on Bush's policies; nowhere have we seen a reversal or change of policy in our international stance since the change of administration. If it looks like a neocon, walks like a neocon, and detains and tortures people without a trial, call it a neocon.