Blagnet.net

Obama-bashing quote of the day

In reality, the quote of the day is Chris Floyd’s entire post about Tony Blair’s warmongering glorification of the Iraq War and Obama’s warmongering glorification of any war the Imperial Federal Government embarks on—in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, no less! But since I know you all read Chris Floyd’s every word like the good boys and girls that you are, I’ll just remind you of the highest highlights that flowed Tuesday from Floyd’s acerbic keyboard.

…the intense, near-pathological self-regard in the speech was not Obama’s alone, of course; we must do him the credit of acknowledging that in this regard, at least, he was what we so often proclaim our leaders to be: the embodiment of the nation. His soaring proclamation of American exceptionalism, in a setting supposedly devoted to universal principles of peace, was breathtaking in its chutzpah—but entirely in keeping with the feelings of the vast majority of his countrymen, and the ruling elite above all.
[...]
Here is chutzpah—and hubris—raised to the level of the sublime. Obama has taken the words he used to instigate the certain death of thousands of human beings and the acceleration of hatred, extremism, chaos and brutal corruption around the world—and offered them as justification for the hideous, unabashedly Orwellian doctrine at the core of his speech: War is Peace. In this perverse inversion of values, Obama, as a warmaker, is actually a peacemaker, you see—and thus a legitimate heir to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., who was evoked at several points in the speech.

And here we come to what was for me the most revolting part of the speech. And perhaps the most significant too. All the cant about America’s altruism and “enlightened self-interest” in killing millions of people—Indochina was one of many convenient blank spots in Obama’s historical survey—for the sake of all the children of the world (red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in our sight) was just par for the rhetorical course. It was nothing that had not been said many times before, including the references—so lauded by Obama’s liberal apologists—to those inadvertent “mistakes” America seems to keep making; out of a surfeit of good intentions, no doubt. But I don’t think an American president has so openly and directly traduced the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi before. (And to do it while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, no less! Oh, that sublime brass….)
[...]
In any case, aside from the particulars of any real situation or hypothetical scenario, the speech is a glaring example of Obama’s deep-seated (and perhaps unconscious) contempt for the path of peace, and its practitioners. It is also a manifestation of his own inferno, of his desperate need to justify—to himself and to the world—his free, deliberate choice to follow the blood-choked “path of action” as the commander-in-chief of a bloated, brutal war machine.

No one forced any of these decisions—or these specious, obscene justifications—on Obama or Blair. It is their own narcissism—their own lust for power, and their love for the system that gave them that power—has covered them with the blood and shame that now taint their every word and deed.

I skipped a lot of commentary on the specifics of his speech, and there is some great stuff (one of the primary focuses of the essay, actually) on the utility and success of non-violent resistance to bloodthirsty war machines and terrorists alike.

Posted in Democracy, Fascism, Foreign policy, Obama crimes, Obama failures