[Peace-discuss] obama's groundhog day

[E. Wayne Johnson]

(Porter Davis from FreeOklahoma pointed me to this article...)

Beware of Obama's Groundhog Day
by John Pilger
http://www.lewrockwell.com/pilger/pilger72.html

One of the cleverest films I have seen is Groundhog Day, in which Bill 
Murray plays a TV weatherman who finds himself stuck in time. At first 
he deludes himself that the same day and the same people and the same 
circumstances offer new opportunities. Finally, his naivety and false 
hope desert him and he realizes the truth of his predicament and 
escapes. Is this a parable for the age of Obama?

Having campaigned with "Change you can believe in," President-elect 
Barack Obama has named his A-team. They include Hillary Clinton, who 
voted to attack Iraq without reading the intelligence assessment and has 
since threatened to "totally obliterate" Iran on behalf of a foreign 
power, Israel. During his primary campaign, Obama referred repeatedly to 
Clinton's lies about her political record. When he appointed her 
secretary of state, he called her "my dear friend."

Obama's slogan is now "continuity." His secretary of defense will be 
Robert Gates, who serves the lawless, blood-soaked Bush regime as 
secretary of defense, which means secretary of war (America last had to 
defend itself when the British invaded in 1812). Gates wants no date set 
for an Iraq withdrawal and "well north of 20,000" troops to be sent to 
Afghanistan. He also wants America to build a completely new nuclear 
arsenal, including "tactical" nuclear weapons that blur the distinction 
with conventional weapons.

Another product of "continuity" is Obama's first choice for CIA chief, 
John Brennan, who shares responsibility for the systematic kidnapping 
and torturing of people, known as "extraordinary rendition." Obama has 
assigned Madeleine Albright to report on how to "strengthen US 
leadership in responding to genocide." Albright, as secretary of state, 
was largely responsible for the siege of Iraq in the 1990s, described by 
the UN's Denis Halliday as genocide.

There is more continuity in Obama's appointment of officials who will 
deal with the economic piracy that brought down Wall Street and 
impoverished millions. As in Bill Murray's nightmare, they are the same 
officials who caused it. For example, Lawrence Summers will run the 
National Economic Council. As treasury secretary, according to the New 
York Times, he "championed the law that deregulated derivatives, the... 
instruments -- aka toxic assets -- that have spread financial losses 
[and] refused to heed critics who warned of dangers to come."

There is logic here. Contrary to myth, Obama's campaign was funded 
largely by rapacious capital, such as Citigroup and others responsible 
for the sub-prime mortgage scandal, whose victims were mostly African 
Americans and other poor people.

Is this a grand betrayal? Obama has never hidden his record as a man of 
a system described by Martin Luther King as "the greatest purveyor of 
violence in the world today." Obama's dalliance as a soft critic of the 
disaster in Iraq was in line with most Establishment opinion that it was 
"dumb." His fans include the war criminals Tony Blair, who has "hailed" 
his appointments, and Henry Kissinger, who describes the appointment of 
Hillary Clinton as "outstanding." One of John McCain's principal 
advisers, Max Boot, who is on the Republican Party's far right, said: "I 
am "gobsmacked by these appointments. [They] could just as easily have 
come from a President McCain."...

http://www.lewrockwell.com/pilger/pilger72.html


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