The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim
children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in
numerous nations with
drones,
cluster bombs and other
forms of attack. He has
sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for
assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has
waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a
Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become
darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to
amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.
He has
entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the
state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has
vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely
racist War on Drugs,
including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy,
efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an
endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s
brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the
brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as
subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s
most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.
Most of all, America’s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before. The nation suffers from what
National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh
just christened “Obama’s Romance with the CIA.” He has created what
The Washington Post just dubbed"a vast drone/killing operation,” all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obama’s steadfast devotion to what Dana Priest and William Arkin
called “Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well, building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (
including Obama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.
