[Peace-discuss] Power & corruption

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The following is from Alex Cockburn's end of the year summary, all of which is 
worth reading. Those of us who have the leisure to read and write, think and 
talk, about what is being done in our name -- who don't have to be in the 
factory or on the farm or caring for the kids or looking for work -- should be 
talking about it when we have the chance. The late Peter Cook once said, "The 
greatest satire of the twentieth century was the Weimar cabaret, and they 
stopped Hitler in his tracks"... --CGE]


How long does it take a mild-mannered, antiwar, black professor of 
constitutional law, trained as a community organizer on the South Side of 
Chicago, to become an enthusiastic sponsor of targeted assassinations, 
“decapitation” strategies and remote-control bombing of mud houses the far end 
of the globe?

There’s nothing surprising here. As far back as President Woodrow Wilson in the 
early twentieth century, American liberalism has been swift to flex imperial 
muscle, to whistle up the Marines. High explosive has always been in the hormone 
shot.

The nearest parallel to Obama in eager deference to the bloodthirsty counsels of 
his counter-insurgency advisors is John F. Kennedy ... By the time he himself 
had become the victim of Lee Harvey Oswald’s “decapitation” strategy, brought to 
successful conclusion in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, on November 22, 1963, Kennedy had 
set in motion the counter-insurgency operations, complete with programs of 
assassination and torture, that turned South-East Asia and Latin America into 
charnel houses, some of them, like Colombia, to this day...

  <http://www.counterpunch.org/>