[Peace-discuss] The Politics of Lying and the Culture of Deceit in Obama's America:

[Brussel Morton K.]

I find that there is a lot of critical commentary around, even if  
missing from the major media. Here's an example, an extract,  by Henry  
A. Giroux. [http://www.truthout.org/092109R?n] .


… Obama's presence on the national political scene gave literacy,  
language and critical thought a newfound sense of dignity, interlaced  
as they were with a vision of hope, justice and possibility - and  
reasonable arguments about the varied crises America faced     … In  
this case, the politics of distortions and misrepresentations that  
Obama's lack of integrity has produced may prove to be even more  
dangerous than what we got under Bush because it wraps itself in a  
moralism that seems uplifting and hopeful while it supports policies  
that reward the rich, reduce schools to testing centers and continue  
to waste lives and money on wars that should have ended when Obama  
assumed his presidency. Obama claims he is for peace, and yet the  
United States is the largest arms dealer in the world. He claims he  
wants to reduce the deficit, but spends billions on the defense  
industry and wars abroad. He says he wants everyone to have access to  
decent health care, but makes backroom deals with powerful  
pharmaceutical companies. Orwell's ghost haunts this new president and  
the country at large. Reducing the critical power of language has been  
crucial to this effort. Under such circumstances, democracy as either  
a moral referent or a political ideal appears to have lost any vestige  
of credibility. The politics of lying and the culture of deceit are  
inextricably related to a theater of cruelty and modes of corrupt  
power in which politics is reduced to a ritualized incantation, just  
as matters of governance are removed from real struggles over meaning  
and power.

Some might argue that Bush et al. already caused democracy as either a  
moral referent or a political ideal …to have lost any vestige of  
credibility.

--mkb
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