Do you want to know why Barack Obama will be re-elected President of the United States?
It
is not because he has signaled his willingness to eviscerate the last
remaining shreds of the sparse "safety net" of social programs set in
train by the New Deal.
It is not because he has shown which side
he is on in the elite's war against workers who serve the public by
freezing federal salaries.
It is not because he has appointed
Wall Street insiders to guide not only his economic policies but the
daily operations of the entire executive branch.
It is not because he actually stands up in public and defends the torture of an American soldier i ncarcerated for releasing a few shards of truth about the war crimes committed by a previous administration.
Of course, all these desperate attempts to kowtow, bow, cringe and scurry before the vicious, ruthless, blood-soaked, bloodthirsty elites of this howlingly dysfunctional society will indeed stand Barack Obama in good stead as he seeks another term as a "safe pair of hands" for the American Imperium. But the real clincher for our militarist Dominationists will be this (from Fortune):
Thanks to a surge in overseas demand, the F-15 and other aging U.S. weapons systems are hotter than they've been in years. The Department of Defense last year told Congress of plans to sell up to $103 billion in weapons to overseas buyers, a staggering rise from an average of $13 billion a year between 1995 and 2005 ...
As defense giants like Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin increasingly seek to peddle their wares to well-financed (sometimes by the U.S.) international customers, they have a surprising ally: the President. "Obama is much more favorably disposed to arms exports than any of the previous Democratic administrations," says Loren Thompson, a veteran defense consultant. Or, as Jeff Abramson, deputy director of the Arms Control Association, puts it: "There's an Obama arms bazaar going on."
...the Obama team has hustled to pave the way for big sales like the Saudi deal; the President himself recently sought to secure a pending $4 billion aircraft deal with India. Obama is also backing a massive push to rewrite the rules that govern arms exports, a process that some say will reduce oversight of U.S. weapons sales.
Obama in his first term is peddling almost 10 times as many weapons of death, destruction, repression and suffering than George W. Bush in his second term at the helm of the world-engulfing American War Machine. This is the reason why our Masters of War gave more money to Obama than to John McCain in 2008. The historic agent of hope and change had obviously clued them in on how well he would serve their sinister interests.
And the bulk of the Obama arms bazaar is going to one of the most
repressive, hidebound, extremist regimes on earth: Saudi Arabia. The
Saudi royals make the odious Moammar Gaddafy look like Thomas Jefferson
in comparison. Yet Obama has gifted them with one of the biggest arms
deals in human history. What will the Saudis do with these weapons? They
will, like Gaddafy, turn them against their own people should they dare
rise up against the ethnic, religious, economic, gender and political
repression that stifles them.
What can you say about this sort of
thing? It is sickening beyond words. It is a total -- even gleeful --
abdication to the very worst instincts of our common human kind:
grasping greed, domination, brutality, corruption, and a pervasive,
corrosive nihilism drained of compassion, of empathy, of all but the
most base, most bestial impulses.
Yet even now, the "progressive
blogosphere" is ablaze with partisan fervor bent toward a single goal:
the re-election of Barack Obama in 2012. Because if Obama is not
re-elected, we might get a president who ... kowtows to Wall Street,
tortures Americans, kills innocent people -- that is, who actually, literally, physically has children torn into splatters and shreds of viscera and bone -- and sells arms to tyrants. And if we don't support this, if we don't "stop bitching and get to work" making sure that this continues, then we could end up with a Republican president
who kowtows to Wall Street, tortures Americans, shreds innocent
children into viscera and sells arms to tyrants. And that would be just
terrible.
(I must confess here a lamentable failure of
imagination. I simply cannot get my mind around the concept of
progressive lovers of humanity who support the shredding of innocent
children into splatters of viscera and bone. I simply cannot fathom
progressive defenders of freedom and human rights who pledge themselves
to arms peddlers dealing weapons to brutal regimes that have a proven
record of using them against the legitimate demands and aspirations of
their people. No doubt I lack some genetic component or neuronal
constellation that would make all of this clear to me. But, stunted as I
am, it looks like the most blinkered, willfully ignorant, Tea Partyish
partisan extremism to me.)
In any case, it is good to see the
bipartisanship that has long been the Holy Grail of the Potomac
political class now taking shape at last. With both progressives and
war-profiteering plutocrats making common cause on his behalf, the
re-election of Barack Obama looks more certain all the time.