http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/10/01/fox-news-poll-perecent-vote-elect-obama/
Fox News Poll: Only 39 Perecent Would Vote to Re-Elect Obama in 2012
Dana Blanton
October 01, 2010
FoxNews.com
The 2012 presidential race begins in earnest on Nov. 3 -- the day after the upcoming midterm elections -- and President Obama looks to be in trouble at the starting gate.
A Fox News poll released Friday shows that 54 percent of voters say they would vote for someone else rather than re-electing Obama if the presidential election were held today. That’s up from 47 percent in a January poll and 31 percent in April 2009.
Thirty-nine percent would vote to re-elect the president now, down from 43 percent in January. That's a dramatic drop from the 52 percent who felt that way in April, at his term's 100-day mark.
Among Democrats, the overall number who would re-elect the president has dropped to 75 percent, down from 87 percent at the beginning of his term. And there is an even more significant decline in the number of Democrats who say they would “definitely” vote to re-elect Obama -- from 69 percent near the start of his term to 41 percent now.
There’s a similar falloff in support among those who voted for Obama in the 2008 election. In the new poll, 40 percent of 2008 Obama voters say they would “definitely” vote to re-elect him, down from 64 percent in April 2009.
Among independents, 32 percent would vote to re-elect Obama, down from a high of 43 percent in April 2009. Meanwhile 57 percent of independents say they would vote for someone else -- twice as many as the 28 percent who felt that way near the start of his term.
The national telephone poll was conducted for Fox News by Opinion Dynamics Corp. among 900 registered voters from Sept. 28 to Sept. 29. For the total sample, the poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Voters would also like to see a change in the No. 2 slot on the Obama ticket. By more than 2-to-1 they would prefer to have Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (55 percent) as vice president over Vice President Joe Biden (25 percent). There’s an even stronger preference among Democrats: 67 percent say Clinton compared to 25 percent who prefer Biden.
Hypothetically Speaking
Even with all the negatives, in hypothetical head-to-head matchups Obama tops each of the Republican candidates tested, although in the case of former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, it’s by just 1 percentage point (41-40 percent). In January, Obama led by 12 percentage points (47-35 percent).
Obama has a 43-40 percent edge over former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and an even wider advantage over New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (42-30 percent), former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (45-37 percent), and former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin (48-35 percent).
The president tops an unnamed candidate from the Tea Party movement by 11 points (43-32 percent), which is a much narrower spread than earlier this year when Obama’s advantage was 25 points (48-23 percent).
What about if an independent candidate makes it a three-way race? Obama gets 40 percent to Palin’s 28 percent, with independent candidate New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg capturing 18 percent.
It’s a tighter race if it includes Hillary Clinton as the independent candidate. In that hypothetical matchup, Obama would receive 30 percent, Palin 29 percent and Clinton 27 percent.
Mike Huckabee is the host of “Huckabee” on Fox News Channel and Sarah Palin is a Fox News contributor.
Showing posts with label Joe Biden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joe Biden. Show all posts
Friday, October 8, 2010
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
BP CEO's yacht outing infuriates Gulf residents
http://enews.earthlink.net/article/top?guid=20100619%2Fd5ce863a-ff11-4f91-a101-71ab979d794a
BP CEO's yacht outing infuriates Gulf residents
HOLBROOK MOHR
June 20, 2010
EMPIRE, La. (AP) — BP chief executive Tony Hayward took a day off Saturday to see his 52-foot yacht "Bob" compete in a glitzy race off England's shore, a leisure trip that further infuriated residents of the oil-stained Gulf Coast.
While Hayward's pricey ship whipped around the Isle of Wight on a good day for sailing — breezy and about 68 degrees — anger simmered on the steamy Gulf Coast, where crude has been washing in from the still-gushing spill.
"Man, that ain't right. None of us can even go out fishing, and he's at the yacht races," said Bobby Pitre, 33, who runs a tattoo shop in the crossroads town of Larose, La. "I wish we could get a day off from the oil, too."
BP spokespeople rushed to defend Hayward, who has drawn withering criticism as the public face of BP PLC's halting efforts to stop the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
Company spokesman Robert Wine said the break is the first for Hayward since the Deepwater Horizon rig BP was leasing exploded April 20, killing 11 workers and setting off the undersea gusher.
"He's spending a few hours with his family at a weekend. I'm sure that everyone would understand that," Wine said.
He noted Hayward is a well known as a fan of the J.P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race, one of the world's largest, which attracts more than 1,700 boats and 16,000 sailors as famous yachtsmen compete with wealthy amateurs in a 50-nautical mile course around the island at England's southern tip.
"Bob" finished fourth in its group. It was not clear whether Hayward actually took part in Saturday's race or attended as a spectator.
The boat, made 10 years ago by the Annapolis, Md.-based boatbuilder Farr Yacht Design, lists for nearly $700,000.
Hayward had already angered many in the U.S. when he was quoted in the Times of London as suggesting that Americans were particularly likely to file bogus claims for compensation from the spill. He later shocked Louisiana residents by telling them that no one wanted to resolve the crisis as badly as he did because "I'd like my life back."
Ronnie Kennier, a 49-year-old oysterman from Empire, La., said Hayward's day among the sailboats showed once again just how out of touch BP executives are with the financial and emotional suffering along the Gulf.
"He wanted to get his life back," Kennier said. "I guess he got it."
In Washington, President Barack Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel made the same observation Saturday on ABC's "This Week."
Obama and Vice President Joe Biden enjoyed a round of golf Saturday near Washington, something they've done on other weekends since the spill and a fact that wasn't lost on users of social networking sites. Twitter feeds compared Obama and Biden's golfing to Hayward's yachting, lumping them together as diversions of privileged people who should be paying more attention to the oil gushing into the Gulf.
"Our government, the executives at BP, it looks like they decide to worry about it later," said Capt. Dwayne Price, a charter fisherman in Grand Isle, La., who now spends his days shuttling media out to the oiled waters. "Things need to happen now. The longer this is strung out, the worse it's going to be."
Messages seeking comment were left for officials at the White House, who have struggled to counter criticism at home of how the administration has handled the disaster. An Associated Press-GfK poll released Tuesday showed 52 percent now disapprove of Obama's handling of the oil spill, up significantly from last month.
BP, Britain's largest company before the oil rig exploded, has lost about 45 percent of its value since the explosion — a drop that has alarmed millions of British retirees whose pension funds hold BP stock. Just this week, the company announced that it was canceling its quarterly dividend.
The British press, much more sympathetic than the American media to BP's plight, has expressed disbelief at the company's strategy.
"It is hard to recall a more catastrophically mishandled public relations response to a crisis than the one we are witnessing," the Daily Telegraph's Jeremy Warner wrote Friday.
About 50 miles off the coast, a newly expanded containment system is capturing or incinerating more than 1 million gallons of oil daily, the first time it has approached its peak capacity, according to the Coast Guard. BP hopes that by late June it will be able to keep nearly 90 percent of the flow from the broken pipe from hitting the ocean.
More than 120 million gallons have leaked from the well, according to the most pessimistic federal daily flow rate estimates. Oil has been washing up from Louisiana to Florida, killing birds and fish, coating delicate marshes and wetlands and covering pristine beaches with tar balls.
A pair of relief wells considered the best chance at a permanent fix won't be done until August.
BP has put many idled commercial fishermen to work on the cleanup. But not everyone.
Sai Stiffler spent Saturday doing some repairs on his shrimp boat at Delta Marina in Empire, La., after a passing shower made things stiflingly hot and muggy. He signed up for BP's "vessel of opportunity" program but hasn't been hired, and he was not pleased that Obama was playing golf and BP's CEO was at a yacht race while his life is on hold.
"Right now is no time for that," Stiffler said. "I don't think they know how bad people are hurting. They make a lot of promises but that's it."
Raymond Canevari, 59, of Pensacola, said he was insulted by the fact that Hayward would take in a yacht race while the oil still flows.
"I think everyone has the right to do what they want in their free time, but he doesn't have the right to have free time at all," said Canevari, who scouts the bayous, bays and Gulf for driftwood and other found objects, and turns the debris into nature-themed art. "Not until this crisis is resolved."
___
Satter reported from London. Associated Press writers Ramit Plushnick-Masti in New Orleans, Mary Foster in Larose, La., Jay Reeves in Gulf Shores, Ala., and Tamara Lush in Pensacola, Fla., and AP videojournalist Bonny Ghosh in Grand Isle, La., contributed to this report.
BP CEO's yacht outing infuriates Gulf residents
HOLBROOK MOHR
June 20, 2010
EMPIRE, La. (AP) — BP chief executive Tony Hayward took a day off Saturday to see his 52-foot yacht "Bob" compete in a glitzy race off England's shore, a leisure trip that further infuriated residents of the oil-stained Gulf Coast.
While Hayward's pricey ship whipped around the Isle of Wight on a good day for sailing — breezy and about 68 degrees — anger simmered on the steamy Gulf Coast, where crude has been washing in from the still-gushing spill.
"Man, that ain't right. None of us can even go out fishing, and he's at the yacht races," said Bobby Pitre, 33, who runs a tattoo shop in the crossroads town of Larose, La. "I wish we could get a day off from the oil, too."
BP spokespeople rushed to defend Hayward, who has drawn withering criticism as the public face of BP PLC's halting efforts to stop the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
Company spokesman Robert Wine said the break is the first for Hayward since the Deepwater Horizon rig BP was leasing exploded April 20, killing 11 workers and setting off the undersea gusher.
"He's spending a few hours with his family at a weekend. I'm sure that everyone would understand that," Wine said.
He noted Hayward is a well known as a fan of the J.P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race, one of the world's largest, which attracts more than 1,700 boats and 16,000 sailors as famous yachtsmen compete with wealthy amateurs in a 50-nautical mile course around the island at England's southern tip.
"Bob" finished fourth in its group. It was not clear whether Hayward actually took part in Saturday's race or attended as a spectator.
The boat, made 10 years ago by the Annapolis, Md.-based boatbuilder Farr Yacht Design, lists for nearly $700,000.
Hayward had already angered many in the U.S. when he was quoted in the Times of London as suggesting that Americans were particularly likely to file bogus claims for compensation from the spill. He later shocked Louisiana residents by telling them that no one wanted to resolve the crisis as badly as he did because "I'd like my life back."
Ronnie Kennier, a 49-year-old oysterman from Empire, La., said Hayward's day among the sailboats showed once again just how out of touch BP executives are with the financial and emotional suffering along the Gulf.
"He wanted to get his life back," Kennier said. "I guess he got it."
In Washington, President Barack Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel made the same observation Saturday on ABC's "This Week."
Obama and Vice President Joe Biden enjoyed a round of golf Saturday near Washington, something they've done on other weekends since the spill and a fact that wasn't lost on users of social networking sites. Twitter feeds compared Obama and Biden's golfing to Hayward's yachting, lumping them together as diversions of privileged people who should be paying more attention to the oil gushing into the Gulf.
"Our government, the executives at BP, it looks like they decide to worry about it later," said Capt. Dwayne Price, a charter fisherman in Grand Isle, La., who now spends his days shuttling media out to the oiled waters. "Things need to happen now. The longer this is strung out, the worse it's going to be."
Messages seeking comment were left for officials at the White House, who have struggled to counter criticism at home of how the administration has handled the disaster. An Associated Press-GfK poll released Tuesday showed 52 percent now disapprove of Obama's handling of the oil spill, up significantly from last month.
BP, Britain's largest company before the oil rig exploded, has lost about 45 percent of its value since the explosion — a drop that has alarmed millions of British retirees whose pension funds hold BP stock. Just this week, the company announced that it was canceling its quarterly dividend.
The British press, much more sympathetic than the American media to BP's plight, has expressed disbelief at the company's strategy.
"It is hard to recall a more catastrophically mishandled public relations response to a crisis than the one we are witnessing," the Daily Telegraph's Jeremy Warner wrote Friday.
About 50 miles off the coast, a newly expanded containment system is capturing or incinerating more than 1 million gallons of oil daily, the first time it has approached its peak capacity, according to the Coast Guard. BP hopes that by late June it will be able to keep nearly 90 percent of the flow from the broken pipe from hitting the ocean.
More than 120 million gallons have leaked from the well, according to the most pessimistic federal daily flow rate estimates. Oil has been washing up from Louisiana to Florida, killing birds and fish, coating delicate marshes and wetlands and covering pristine beaches with tar balls.
A pair of relief wells considered the best chance at a permanent fix won't be done until August.
BP has put many idled commercial fishermen to work on the cleanup. But not everyone.
Sai Stiffler spent Saturday doing some repairs on his shrimp boat at Delta Marina in Empire, La., after a passing shower made things stiflingly hot and muggy. He signed up for BP's "vessel of opportunity" program but hasn't been hired, and he was not pleased that Obama was playing golf and BP's CEO was at a yacht race while his life is on hold.
"Right now is no time for that," Stiffler said. "I don't think they know how bad people are hurting. They make a lot of promises but that's it."
Raymond Canevari, 59, of Pensacola, said he was insulted by the fact that Hayward would take in a yacht race while the oil still flows.
"I think everyone has the right to do what they want in their free time, but he doesn't have the right to have free time at all," said Canevari, who scouts the bayous, bays and Gulf for driftwood and other found objects, and turns the debris into nature-themed art. "Not until this crisis is resolved."
___
Satter reported from London. Associated Press writers Ramit Plushnick-Masti in New Orleans, Mary Foster in Larose, La., Jay Reeves in Gulf Shores, Ala., and Tamara Lush in Pensacola, Fla., and AP videojournalist Bonny Ghosh in Grand Isle, La., contributed to this report.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Beast of the Month - May 2009
Beast of the Month - May 2009
Timothy Geithner
Obamanomics Mastermind
"I yam an anti-Christ..."
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"
"While the boss man takes his bonus pay and jets on out of town
And DC's bailing out them bankers as the farmers auction ground
Yeah while they're living it up on Wall Street in that New York City town
Here in the real world they're shuttin' Detroit down"
John Rich, "Shuttin' Detroit Down"
Well, it's been 100 days into the Obama Administration, and already a picture of the next four years is becoming pretty evident. True, he isn't the combo of Hitler, Stalin and Chairman Mao that the "teabaggers" (quit snickering!) of the Beck-Hannity-Limbaugh crowd try to make him out as. On the other hand, he clearly isn't the perfect mixture of JFK, MLK & Jesus Christ that the so-called "progressive" cultists fantasize he is either.
Say what you will about the teabaggers, but their anger at Barack Hussein Obama, however misdirected, at least seems like the logical response to the looting of America that has continued under his reign. Indeed, it seems that the left is far more delusional about what Barack Obama is than the Fox News watchers could ever be as they continue to wave pom-poms for the dude. For the general direction of the Obama Administration is exactly what The Konformist warned it would be: a sniveling betrayal of the duped progressives who supported his election victory as he bootlicks Wall Street and the Pentagon.
To be fair, Prez Obama hasn't been as terrible as some predicted he'd be. (And he certainly isn't as bad as George W. Bush, though that's hardly an amazing feat.) The good news: he has yet to launch World War III against Russia and/or China. Of course, the main reason is because there's no money left to finance WWIII after the massive swindling by the banksters and Wall Street under his reign, and that of his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, The Konformist Beast of the Month.
Under Geithner and Team Obama, the siphoning of bucks to prop up the Wall Street monoliths has continued unabated. And though the Obama Administration pushed through a $787 billion "stimulus" program as well as a $75 billion plan to help homeowners facing foreclosure, the general direction of the Obama years is definitely still slanted towards funneling money to the powerful few. Indeed, though the $787 billion was more than the Wall Street Bailout - no doubt done to convince the public they've received more help than the bankers have - the vast majority of these dollars will only come to the poor, working class and middle class indirectly, if at all. Likewise, the foreclosure plan appears to be just enough to help only the subprime debtors who the financial system can profit off via the aid. Tellingly, it is the stimulus program and the homeowner plan that became the focus of the rage ranted over the airwaves by reactionary blowhards like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rick Santelli rather than the Wall Street Bailout. This appears to be a calculated obfuscation by these loathsome pundits. The end result is threefold: one, to channel the legitimate anger of the masses at the economic crisis towards those who are the victims rather than the perpetrators; two, to make it seem that it is only right-wing nut jobs and racists who oppose Obamanomics; and three, to frame the Obama economic policies as far left via distortion and shift the entire debate even farther to the right than before.
After the stimulus plan was pushed through, the Obama Administration offered up a trillion dollar "toxic assets" bailout for Wall Street. (In fact, it appears the push to get the stimulus program passed so quickly was because another round of obscene Wall Street handouts without a penny to the public would've been too in-your-face class warfare.) The plan puts federal funds to back 97 percent of the money used to buy away these bad assets, with the loans and three quarters of all losses backed by Uncle Sam. The investors in this scam will thus have their losses pretty much covered with a big upside for any financial rewards. All in all, the plan seems to be born from the big business philosophy of "socialize the costs, privatize the profits."
While the Obama team has been warm and snuggly to Wall Street, they have been equally ruthless to anyone with a United Auto Workers union card. While they coddle the bankers with trillions in bailouts, the pocket change handed to the Detroit Big Three was conditional on UAW workers accepting massive layoffs, pay cuts and reductions in retiree benefits. This shouldn't be too surprising, as the head of Obama's Auto Task Force is a real life Gordon Gekko in Steve Rattner, a corporate raider who has made a living crushing worker benefits for personal profits.
All this seems to follow the reactionary pattern that's been in place since the Wall Street Bailout of last October. Which leads to a logical question: just who was behind the bailout in the first place? As it turns out, a key player in creating the TARP program was the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank at the time. This was none other than (drum roll please) Timothy Geithner himself.
The appointments of guys like Rattner and Geithner shouldn't be too surprising either: as has been noted on The Konformist, Obama has long surrounded himself with the most right-wing elements economically tied to the Democratic Party. This includes Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago professor who is on the "left" side of the far-right economic program made famous thanks to Milton Friedman. Goolsbee was named staff director and chief economist for the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, whose chairman, also appointed by Obama, is former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, the man whose ruthless monetary policies (also inspired by Milton Friedman) led to a nasty recession that nearly destroyed Ronald Reagan's presidency in its first term.
Beyond just surrounding himself with right-wingers, Obama's positions, even before his election, were decidedly to the right of Edwards and Clinton. Indeed, though it is almost never acknowledged, by the end of the 2008 campaign, John McCain had offered a far more generous solution to foreclosure victims than any Obama proposal. Of course, Obama may have been too busy raising a record $650 million dollars to show any concern for these bitter financial victims. And though the sales job of Obama feigns his campaign was fueled by small donors, the Campaign Finance Institute concluded Obama "raised significantly more large-donor money in absolute terms than any of his rivals or predecessors." (It should be mentioned as almost an afterthought that Obama's VP pick, Joe Biden of Delaware, is so tied to the banking industry he has earned the nickname of "Credit Card Joe" for his efforts.)
The punch line in this rightward tilt in Obamanomics: after repeatedly being accused of being a far-left socialist by the Beck-Hannity-Limbaugh crowd, the left will be blamed for any failures in his economic programs. The general suspicion of The Konformist staff is the stimulus program will be enough to stop a major depression, but not enough to stop a lingering recession. Meanwhile, in January, economist Paul Craig Roberts warned the deficit would be $3 trillion in 2009, and his projection looks more accurate by the day than the predictions of others. With the unemployment rate looking to hit double digits soon, it appears there's a lot of failure ready to be pinned on the left in the coming years.
In any case, we salute Timothy Geithner as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Timmy!!!
Sources:
Allen, Mike. "Volcker Will Head New Obama Board." Yahoo News 26 November 2008 <http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20081126/pl_politico/15997>.
"Credit Card Joe." The Real Joe Biden. 24 August 2008 <http://therealjoebiden.wordpress.com/2008/08/24/credit-card-joe>.
Eley, Tom. "Buyer Beware! Obama Named 'Marketer of the Year'." World Socialist Web Site 6 December 2008 <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/dec2008/obad-d06.shtml>.
Grey, Barry. "Wall Street Celebrates Government Windfall for Banks and Big Investors." World Socialist Web Site 24 March 2009 <http://wsws.org/articles/2009/mar2009/toxi-m24.shtml>.
Marshall, Bruce. "Barack 'Hoover' Obama." Rense.com 11 March 2009 <http://rense.com/general85/hoov.htm>.
"Obama: 'Everybody Thinks They’re Economists'." Infowars 6 February 2009 <http://www.infowars.com/obama-everybody-thinks-theyre-economists>.
"Reality Check: Obama Received About the Same Percentage from Small Donors in 2008 as Bush in 2004." The Campaign Finance Institute 24 November 2008 <http://www.cfinst.org/pr/prRelease.aspx?ReleaseID=216>.
Roberts, Paul Craig. "Another Real Estate Crisis Is About to Hit." Online Journal 23 January 2009 <http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4274.shtml>.
Sirota, David. "Obama's Gordon Gekko Targets Union Workers." OurFuture.org 31 March 2009 <http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009031431/obamas-gordon-gekko-targets-union-workers-0>.
Tarpley, Webster G. "Defeat Obama - Advice For Voters." Rense.com 3 November 2008 <http://www.rense.com/general83/advi.htm>.
Tarpley, Webster G. "Motormouth Joe Biden - Warmonger, Wordmonger And Political Hit Man." Rense.com 25 August 2008 <http://rense.com/general83/biden.htm>.
Timothy Geithner
Obamanomics Mastermind
"I yam an anti-Christ..."
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"
"While the boss man takes his bonus pay and jets on out of town
And DC's bailing out them bankers as the farmers auction ground
Yeah while they're living it up on Wall Street in that New York City town
Here in the real world they're shuttin' Detroit down"
John Rich, "Shuttin' Detroit Down"
Well, it's been 100 days into the Obama Administration, and already a picture of the next four years is becoming pretty evident. True, he isn't the combo of Hitler, Stalin and Chairman Mao that the "teabaggers" (quit snickering!) of the Beck-Hannity-Limbaugh crowd try to make him out as. On the other hand, he clearly isn't the perfect mixture of JFK, MLK & Jesus Christ that the so-called "progressive" cultists fantasize he is either.
Say what you will about the teabaggers, but their anger at Barack Hussein Obama, however misdirected, at least seems like the logical response to the looting of America that has continued under his reign. Indeed, it seems that the left is far more delusional about what Barack Obama is than the Fox News watchers could ever be as they continue to wave pom-poms for the dude. For the general direction of the Obama Administration is exactly what The Konformist warned it would be: a sniveling betrayal of the duped progressives who supported his election victory as he bootlicks Wall Street and the Pentagon.
To be fair, Prez Obama hasn't been as terrible as some predicted he'd be. (And he certainly isn't as bad as George W. Bush, though that's hardly an amazing feat.) The good news: he has yet to launch World War III against Russia and/or China. Of course, the main reason is because there's no money left to finance WWIII after the massive swindling by the banksters and Wall Street under his reign, and that of his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, The Konformist Beast of the Month.
Under Geithner and Team Obama, the siphoning of bucks to prop up the Wall Street monoliths has continued unabated. And though the Obama Administration pushed through a $787 billion "stimulus" program as well as a $75 billion plan to help homeowners facing foreclosure, the general direction of the Obama years is definitely still slanted towards funneling money to the powerful few. Indeed, though the $787 billion was more than the Wall Street Bailout - no doubt done to convince the public they've received more help than the bankers have - the vast majority of these dollars will only come to the poor, working class and middle class indirectly, if at all. Likewise, the foreclosure plan appears to be just enough to help only the subprime debtors who the financial system can profit off via the aid. Tellingly, it is the stimulus program and the homeowner plan that became the focus of the rage ranted over the airwaves by reactionary blowhards like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rick Santelli rather than the Wall Street Bailout. This appears to be a calculated obfuscation by these loathsome pundits. The end result is threefold: one, to channel the legitimate anger of the masses at the economic crisis towards those who are the victims rather than the perpetrators; two, to make it seem that it is only right-wing nut jobs and racists who oppose Obamanomics; and three, to frame the Obama economic policies as far left via distortion and shift the entire debate even farther to the right than before.
After the stimulus plan was pushed through, the Obama Administration offered up a trillion dollar "toxic assets" bailout for Wall Street. (In fact, it appears the push to get the stimulus program passed so quickly was because another round of obscene Wall Street handouts without a penny to the public would've been too in-your-face class warfare.) The plan puts federal funds to back 97 percent of the money used to buy away these bad assets, with the loans and three quarters of all losses backed by Uncle Sam. The investors in this scam will thus have their losses pretty much covered with a big upside for any financial rewards. All in all, the plan seems to be born from the big business philosophy of "socialize the costs, privatize the profits."
While the Obama team has been warm and snuggly to Wall Street, they have been equally ruthless to anyone with a United Auto Workers union card. While they coddle the bankers with trillions in bailouts, the pocket change handed to the Detroit Big Three was conditional on UAW workers accepting massive layoffs, pay cuts and reductions in retiree benefits. This shouldn't be too surprising, as the head of Obama's Auto Task Force is a real life Gordon Gekko in Steve Rattner, a corporate raider who has made a living crushing worker benefits for personal profits.
All this seems to follow the reactionary pattern that's been in place since the Wall Street Bailout of last October. Which leads to a logical question: just who was behind the bailout in the first place? As it turns out, a key player in creating the TARP program was the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank at the time. This was none other than (drum roll please) Timothy Geithner himself.
The appointments of guys like Rattner and Geithner shouldn't be too surprising either: as has been noted on The Konformist, Obama has long surrounded himself with the most right-wing elements economically tied to the Democratic Party. This includes Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago professor who is on the "left" side of the far-right economic program made famous thanks to Milton Friedman. Goolsbee was named staff director and chief economist for the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, whose chairman, also appointed by Obama, is former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, the man whose ruthless monetary policies (also inspired by Milton Friedman) led to a nasty recession that nearly destroyed Ronald Reagan's presidency in its first term.
Beyond just surrounding himself with right-wingers, Obama's positions, even before his election, were decidedly to the right of Edwards and Clinton. Indeed, though it is almost never acknowledged, by the end of the 2008 campaign, John McCain had offered a far more generous solution to foreclosure victims than any Obama proposal. Of course, Obama may have been too busy raising a record $650 million dollars to show any concern for these bitter financial victims. And though the sales job of Obama feigns his campaign was fueled by small donors, the Campaign Finance Institute concluded Obama "raised significantly more large-donor money in absolute terms than any of his rivals or predecessors." (It should be mentioned as almost an afterthought that Obama's VP pick, Joe Biden of Delaware, is so tied to the banking industry he has earned the nickname of "Credit Card Joe" for his efforts.)
The punch line in this rightward tilt in Obamanomics: after repeatedly being accused of being a far-left socialist by the Beck-Hannity-Limbaugh crowd, the left will be blamed for any failures in his economic programs. The general suspicion of The Konformist staff is the stimulus program will be enough to stop a major depression, but not enough to stop a lingering recession. Meanwhile, in January, economist Paul Craig Roberts warned the deficit would be $3 trillion in 2009, and his projection looks more accurate by the day than the predictions of others. With the unemployment rate looking to hit double digits soon, it appears there's a lot of failure ready to be pinned on the left in the coming years.
In any case, we salute Timothy Geithner as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Timmy!!!
Sources:
Allen, Mike. "Volcker Will Head New Obama Board." Yahoo News 26 November 2008 <http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20081126/pl_politico/15997>.
"Credit Card Joe." The Real Joe Biden. 24 August 2008 <http://therealjoebiden.wordpress.com/2008/08/24/credit-card-joe>.
Eley, Tom. "Buyer Beware! Obama Named 'Marketer of the Year'." World Socialist Web Site 6 December 2008 <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/dec2008/obad-d06.shtml>.
Grey, Barry. "Wall Street Celebrates Government Windfall for Banks and Big Investors." World Socialist Web Site 24 March 2009 <http://wsws.org/articles/2009/mar2009/toxi-m24.shtml>.
Marshall, Bruce. "Barack 'Hoover' Obama." Rense.com 11 March 2009 <http://rense.com/general85/hoov.htm>.
"Obama: 'Everybody Thinks They’re Economists'." Infowars 6 February 2009 <http://www.infowars.com/obama-everybody-thinks-theyre-economists>.
"Reality Check: Obama Received About the Same Percentage from Small Donors in 2008 as Bush in 2004." The Campaign Finance Institute 24 November 2008 <http://www.cfinst.org/pr/prRelease.aspx?ReleaseID=216>.
Roberts, Paul Craig. "Another Real Estate Crisis Is About to Hit." Online Journal 23 January 2009 <http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4274.shtml>.
Sirota, David. "Obama's Gordon Gekko Targets Union Workers." OurFuture.org 31 March 2009 <http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009031431/obamas-gordon-gekko-targets-union-workers-0>.
Tarpley, Webster G. "Defeat Obama - Advice For Voters." Rense.com 3 November 2008 <http://www.rense.com/general83/advi.htm>.
Tarpley, Webster G. "Motormouth Joe Biden - Warmonger, Wordmonger And Political Hit Man." Rense.com 25 August 2008 <http://rense.com/general83/biden.htm>.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
US Occupation of Iraq Continues Unabated
http://www.truthout.org/070609J
US Occupation of Iraq Continues Unabated
Monday 06 July 2009
Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t
"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
- George Orwell
On July 4 in Baghdad, Vice President Joe Biden, who campaigned with Barack Obama on a platform of ending the occupation of Iraq, found himself in one of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's lavish buildings, the Al-Faw Palace. While one of Saddam Hussein's thrones sat on the side of the room, Biden presided over a swearing-in ceremony for 237 soldiers, who were becoming US citizens. Speaking of the ceremony, Biden said, "We did it in Saddam's palace, and I can think of nothing better. That S.O.B. is rolling over in his grave right now." Perhaps the irony of both the scene and his statement were lost to Biden. For if Saddam Hussein was rolling in his grave, the reason would have less to do with one of his palaces being used as a naturalization center for US soldiers, and more to do with the fact that the US government has no intention of withdrawing from Iraq anytime soon.
We have passed the June 30 deadline that, according to a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed between US Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari on November 17, 2008, was the date all US forces were to have been withdrawn from all of Iraq's cities. Today, however, there are at least 134,000 US soldiers in Iraq - a number barely lower than the number that were there in 2003. In addition, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates testified on June 9 that the United States would maintain an average of at least 100,000 troops in Iraq through fiscal year 2010.
The SOFA is a sieve, and the number of US military personnel in Iraq is remaining largely intact for now. Add to the 134,000 US soldiers almost the exact number of military contractors (132,610 and increasing), 36,061 of which, according to a recent Department of Defense report, are US citizens.
While the military and most corporate media would like you to believe that from now on no US soldiers will step foot in Iraqi cities, US military patrols in them are ongoing and will continue.
In addition, there has been an assumption that all US military bases within Iraqi city limits would be moved. For example, US Army Forward Operating Base Falcon, home to 3,000 US troops, is clearly within the city limits of Baghdad. But US military officials, working with Iraqis in the US-supported Iraqi government, have other ideas. "We and the Iraqis decided it wasn't in the city," a military official told the Christian Science Monitor. Thus, city lines are redrawn, to the convenience of the US military, to render certain bases and forward operating bases "outside" of Iraqi cities.
While military commanders claim to have handed over 142 military outposts around Iraq to the Iraqis, US troops will continue to occupy 320 other outposts around Iraq.
Meanwhile, the Democratically controlled Congress just passed a war-spending bill that allocated over $100 billion more for the ongoing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military (and military contractors) in Iraq is busily expanding and augmenting new bases in rural areas of Iraq. In fact, they are even building new bases in Iraq.
Furthermore, at least 50,000 troops will remain in Iraq until at least the end of 2011, despite the fact that, according to the SOFA, all US "combat" forces will leave Iraq by December 31, 2011.
A July 30 referendum vote on the SOFA is scheduled to take place in Iraq. Despite attempts by the Obama administration to postpone the referendum, it appears as though the vote will take place. Considering the fact that according to recent polls, 73 percent of Iraqis oppose the presence of US forces, the referendum, if legitimate, will put the Obama administrations long-term plans for Iraq in jeopardy as the vote could force US forces out of Iraq as they would no longer be under the legal "protection" of the SOFA.
Although we can only speculate as to whether the referendum will actually reflect the will of the Iraqi people, there will be one of two outcomes:
1. Due to Kurdish and Sunni opposition to the withdrawal of US forces, Maliki postpones the referendum. The US, which is also interested in maintaining the SOFA, supports Maliki in the delay they (Obama administration) have previously pushed for.
2. The Maliki regime overcomes this opposition and does not interfere with the carrying out of the vote or the results of the referendum, which will most likely reflect the will of the Iraqi people to have US forces withdraw from Iraq completely. This would mean the Maliki regime does not want US forces to remain in Iraq, feels strong enough to finally stand on its own and is prepared to settle scores with the formerly US-backed Sahwa forces (Sunni militia), to establish absolute control in Baghdad.
Regardless of the outcome, it is clear that Iraq is further down the road of Balkanization, a plan that Biden has supported for years -to have Iraq split into three rump states. There is already evidence for this - for as Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan have been forced to return home due to funding to support them having been cut due to the Maliki regime pressuring hosting countries, as well as the UN, to have them return. Those returning have been unable to return to their homes. Instead, they are being forced to relocate to either Sunni or Shia areas. Moreover, the Iraqi government has been making no effort to help them return to their original homes, which indicates the Maliki regime is interested in supporting the Balkanization of Iraq.
Nevertheless, again we find the US policy of long-term, indefinite occupation of Iraq to be at loggerheads with the will of the vast majority of the Iraqi people.
From June 28 to July 5, at least 82 Iraqis were killed and 225 wounded, which amounts to another typical week of US occupation of their country. Let us watch how the Obama administration reacts to the referendum at the end of this month, since President Obama is clearly not interested in withdrawing from Iraq anymore than he is interested in a withdrawal from Afghanistan.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of "Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq," (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for eight months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last four years.
US Occupation of Iraq Continues Unabated
Monday 06 July 2009
Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t
"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
- George Orwell
On July 4 in Baghdad, Vice President Joe Biden, who campaigned with Barack Obama on a platform of ending the occupation of Iraq, found himself in one of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's lavish buildings, the Al-Faw Palace. While one of Saddam Hussein's thrones sat on the side of the room, Biden presided over a swearing-in ceremony for 237 soldiers, who were becoming US citizens. Speaking of the ceremony, Biden said, "We did it in Saddam's palace, and I can think of nothing better. That S.O.B. is rolling over in his grave right now." Perhaps the irony of both the scene and his statement were lost to Biden. For if Saddam Hussein was rolling in his grave, the reason would have less to do with one of his palaces being used as a naturalization center for US soldiers, and more to do with the fact that the US government has no intention of withdrawing from Iraq anytime soon.
We have passed the June 30 deadline that, according to a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed between US Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari on November 17, 2008, was the date all US forces were to have been withdrawn from all of Iraq's cities. Today, however, there are at least 134,000 US soldiers in Iraq - a number barely lower than the number that were there in 2003. In addition, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates testified on June 9 that the United States would maintain an average of at least 100,000 troops in Iraq through fiscal year 2010.
The SOFA is a sieve, and the number of US military personnel in Iraq is remaining largely intact for now. Add to the 134,000 US soldiers almost the exact number of military contractors (132,610 and increasing), 36,061 of which, according to a recent Department of Defense report, are US citizens.
While the military and most corporate media would like you to believe that from now on no US soldiers will step foot in Iraqi cities, US military patrols in them are ongoing and will continue.
In addition, there has been an assumption that all US military bases within Iraqi city limits would be moved. For example, US Army Forward Operating Base Falcon, home to 3,000 US troops, is clearly within the city limits of Baghdad. But US military officials, working with Iraqis in the US-supported Iraqi government, have other ideas. "We and the Iraqis decided it wasn't in the city," a military official told the Christian Science Monitor. Thus, city lines are redrawn, to the convenience of the US military, to render certain bases and forward operating bases "outside" of Iraqi cities.
While military commanders claim to have handed over 142 military outposts around Iraq to the Iraqis, US troops will continue to occupy 320 other outposts around Iraq.
Meanwhile, the Democratically controlled Congress just passed a war-spending bill that allocated over $100 billion more for the ongoing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military (and military contractors) in Iraq is busily expanding and augmenting new bases in rural areas of Iraq. In fact, they are even building new bases in Iraq.
Furthermore, at least 50,000 troops will remain in Iraq until at least the end of 2011, despite the fact that, according to the SOFA, all US "combat" forces will leave Iraq by December 31, 2011.
A July 30 referendum vote on the SOFA is scheduled to take place in Iraq. Despite attempts by the Obama administration to postpone the referendum, it appears as though the vote will take place. Considering the fact that according to recent polls, 73 percent of Iraqis oppose the presence of US forces, the referendum, if legitimate, will put the Obama administrations long-term plans for Iraq in jeopardy as the vote could force US forces out of Iraq as they would no longer be under the legal "protection" of the SOFA.
Although we can only speculate as to whether the referendum will actually reflect the will of the Iraqi people, there will be one of two outcomes:
1. Due to Kurdish and Sunni opposition to the withdrawal of US forces, Maliki postpones the referendum. The US, which is also interested in maintaining the SOFA, supports Maliki in the delay they (Obama administration) have previously pushed for.
2. The Maliki regime overcomes this opposition and does not interfere with the carrying out of the vote or the results of the referendum, which will most likely reflect the will of the Iraqi people to have US forces withdraw from Iraq completely. This would mean the Maliki regime does not want US forces to remain in Iraq, feels strong enough to finally stand on its own and is prepared to settle scores with the formerly US-backed Sahwa forces (Sunni militia), to establish absolute control in Baghdad.
Regardless of the outcome, it is clear that Iraq is further down the road of Balkanization, a plan that Biden has supported for years -to have Iraq split into three rump states. There is already evidence for this - for as Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan have been forced to return home due to funding to support them having been cut due to the Maliki regime pressuring hosting countries, as well as the UN, to have them return. Those returning have been unable to return to their homes. Instead, they are being forced to relocate to either Sunni or Shia areas. Moreover, the Iraqi government has been making no effort to help them return to their original homes, which indicates the Maliki regime is interested in supporting the Balkanization of Iraq.
Nevertheless, again we find the US policy of long-term, indefinite occupation of Iraq to be at loggerheads with the will of the vast majority of the Iraqi people.
From June 28 to July 5, at least 82 Iraqis were killed and 225 wounded, which amounts to another typical week of US occupation of their country. Let us watch how the Obama administration reacts to the referendum at the end of this month, since President Obama is clearly not interested in withdrawing from Iraq anymore than he is interested in a withdrawal from Afghanistan.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of "Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq," (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for eight months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last four years.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Obama administration: Expect rise in US casualties
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/25/obama-airstrikes-pakistan
Obama administration warns public to expect rise in US casualties
Vice-president Biden reveals US forces will step up operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Pakistani president tells American ambassador strikes 'do not help war on terror'
Ewen MacAskill in Washington and Saeed Shah in Islamabad
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 25 January 2009
The Obama administration warned the US public yesterday to brace itself for an increase in American casualties as it prepares to step up the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan.
Against a background of widespread protests in Pakistan and Afghanistan over US operations since Obama became president, the vice-president, Joe Biden, said yesterday that US forces would be engaged in many more operations as it takes the fight to its enemies in the region.
The Obama administration is to double the number of US troops in Afghanistan to 60,000 and when asked in a television interview if the US public should expect more American casualties, Biden said: "I hate to say it, but yes, I think there will be. There will be an uptick."
Greater US involvement in Afghanistan is a political risk for Obama, with the danger that mounting American casualties could make the war as unpopular as Iraq. Obama, in his first military action as president, sanctioned two missile attacks inside Pakistan on Friday, killing 22 people, reportedly women and children among them. The attacks drew criticism from Pakistani officials at the weekend.
Pakistani president, Asif Zardari, told the US ambassador to Islamabad, Anne Patterson, that the strikes "do not help the war on terror". According to reports, he also warned her that "these attacks can affect Pakistan's cooperation in the war on terror".
A foreign ministry spokesman, Mohammad Sadiq, said: "With the advent of the new US administration, it is Pakistan's sincere hope that the United States will review its policy and adopt a more holistic and integrated approach towards dealing with the issue of terrorism and extremism. We maintain that these [missile] attacks are counter-productive and should be discontinued."
Biden, in an interview with CBS news, defended the strikes, saying that Obama had repeatedly said on the campaign trail he would not hesitate to strike against any high-level al-Qaida targets. He suggested cooperation between the US and Pakistani counter-terrorist agencies would increase, with more US training for their Pakistani counterparts.
Over the last year, there have been at least 30 US missile attacks on Pakistan's wild tribal area, which is used as a haven for insurgents fighting international troops in neighbouring Afghanistan.
On Sunday, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, condemned a separate US operation within Afghanistan that he said killed 16 Afghan civilians, prompting hundreds of villagers to demonstrate against the American military.
The US said the raid, on Saturday in Laghman province, killed 15 armed militants, including a woman with an RPG. But Afghan officials said they killed civilians, including two women and three children. In Laghman's capital, hundreds of protesters demanded an end to overnight raids.
Karzai warned the killing of innocent Afghans during US military operations "is strengthening the terrorists". He also announced that his government had sent Washington a draft agreement that seeks to give Afghanistan more oversight over US military operations. The document has also been sent to Nato headquarters.
The death toll on both the Pakistan borders and within Afghanistan has caused widespread public anger, with resentment directed at the US, as well as the Afghanistan and Pakistan governments.
"It undermines the position of the government, its ability to negotiate [a peace deal] with the militants when the Taliban can say: 'You're not even master in your own house,'" said Ayaz Amir, a newspaper columnist and an opposition member of Pakistan's parliament. "It undercuts the credibility of a government, whose credibility is already low."
Some of the strikes in Pakistan have killed senior al-Qaida militants but they tend to live with local families in the tribal area, making civilian casualties inevitable - which are then used by the Taliban as a recruitment tool.
Rustam Shah Mohmand, an analyst who was formerly Pakistan's ambassador to Afghanistan, said that Pakistan had leverage it could use, by stopping supplies to Nato troops in Afghanistan to pass through its territory or threatening to withdraw the Pakistani forces deployed along the Afghan border."
"If anything, the policy [of missile strikes] is going to be more focused, more aggressive, under Obama. There is going to be a 'surge' in Afghanistan," said Mohmand. "The Americans can't wage this war without Pakistan's assistance."
Obama administration warns public to expect rise in US casualties
Vice-president Biden reveals US forces will step up operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Pakistani president tells American ambassador strikes 'do not help war on terror'
Ewen MacAskill in Washington and Saeed Shah in Islamabad
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 25 January 2009
The Obama administration warned the US public yesterday to brace itself for an increase in American casualties as it prepares to step up the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan.
Against a background of widespread protests in Pakistan and Afghanistan over US operations since Obama became president, the vice-president, Joe Biden, said yesterday that US forces would be engaged in many more operations as it takes the fight to its enemies in the region.
The Obama administration is to double the number of US troops in Afghanistan to 60,000 and when asked in a television interview if the US public should expect more American casualties, Biden said: "I hate to say it, but yes, I think there will be. There will be an uptick."
Greater US involvement in Afghanistan is a political risk for Obama, with the danger that mounting American casualties could make the war as unpopular as Iraq. Obama, in his first military action as president, sanctioned two missile attacks inside Pakistan on Friday, killing 22 people, reportedly women and children among them. The attacks drew criticism from Pakistani officials at the weekend.
Pakistani president, Asif Zardari, told the US ambassador to Islamabad, Anne Patterson, that the strikes "do not help the war on terror". According to reports, he also warned her that "these attacks can affect Pakistan's cooperation in the war on terror".
A foreign ministry spokesman, Mohammad Sadiq, said: "With the advent of the new US administration, it is Pakistan's sincere hope that the United States will review its policy and adopt a more holistic and integrated approach towards dealing with the issue of terrorism and extremism. We maintain that these [missile] attacks are counter-productive and should be discontinued."
Biden, in an interview with CBS news, defended the strikes, saying that Obama had repeatedly said on the campaign trail he would not hesitate to strike against any high-level al-Qaida targets. He suggested cooperation between the US and Pakistani counter-terrorist agencies would increase, with more US training for their Pakistani counterparts.
Over the last year, there have been at least 30 US missile attacks on Pakistan's wild tribal area, which is used as a haven for insurgents fighting international troops in neighbouring Afghanistan.
On Sunday, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, condemned a separate US operation within Afghanistan that he said killed 16 Afghan civilians, prompting hundreds of villagers to demonstrate against the American military.
The US said the raid, on Saturday in Laghman province, killed 15 armed militants, including a woman with an RPG. But Afghan officials said they killed civilians, including two women and three children. In Laghman's capital, hundreds of protesters demanded an end to overnight raids.
Karzai warned the killing of innocent Afghans during US military operations "is strengthening the terrorists". He also announced that his government had sent Washington a draft agreement that seeks to give Afghanistan more oversight over US military operations. The document has also been sent to Nato headquarters.
The death toll on both the Pakistan borders and within Afghanistan has caused widespread public anger, with resentment directed at the US, as well as the Afghanistan and Pakistan governments.
"It undermines the position of the government, its ability to negotiate [a peace deal] with the militants when the Taliban can say: 'You're not even master in your own house,'" said Ayaz Amir, a newspaper columnist and an opposition member of Pakistan's parliament. "It undercuts the credibility of a government, whose credibility is already low."
Some of the strikes in Pakistan have killed senior al-Qaida militants but they tend to live with local families in the tribal area, making civilian casualties inevitable - which are then used by the Taliban as a recruitment tool.
Rustam Shah Mohmand, an analyst who was formerly Pakistan's ambassador to Afghanistan, said that Pakistan had leverage it could use, by stopping supplies to Nato troops in Afghanistan to pass through its territory or threatening to withdraw the Pakistani forces deployed along the Afghan border."
"If anything, the policy [of missile strikes] is going to be more focused, more aggressive, under Obama. There is going to be a 'surge' in Afghanistan," said Mohmand. "The Americans can't wage this war without Pakistan's assistance."
Beast of the Month - November 2008
Beast of the Month - November 2008
Sarah Palin
Republican VP Candidate
"I yam an anti-Christ..."
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"
"Oh! Oh! Remember the time he picked Sarah Palin? I totally get it now! She's totally unqualified, and he's so old! There's a really good chance she'd be president!"
Stephen Colbert on John McCain's wacky sense of humor
Well, the 2008 election is over, and, for the first time in twelve years, George W. Bush didn't steal it. This, of course, is worthy of celebration, although the celebration so far seems misguided, misguided in a way that seems by design.
The korporate media, which has shilled for Barack Obama shamelessly throughout the campaign, went into overdrive, declaring the election was confirmation of what an amazing and transformational figure he was. Oh, and by the way, did we mention he was black? The two lessons of the election, therefore, were that Obama is totally rad and America is no longer racist (the only reason anyone could possibly be opposed to someone as awesome as Barack Obama.)
It's curious that while the establishment media was so quick to give Obama all the credit for the victory, they failed to point (and give) the finger to the one person who deserves credit for John McCain's loss: George W. Bush. After all, it is really Bush who loomed over the entire election like a frightening specter, and it is Bush who has given the entire GOP a deserved bad name. It is Bush and his disasters that turned both houses of Congress decidedly to the Democrats, and it is Bush in the end who convinced American voters to reject a fairly well-liked former Vietnam POW for an entity whose magnetic charisma couldn't cover how decidedly untrustworthy he is. The impossible hurdle facing McCain was hilariously spoofed on a Saturday Night Live guest-starring Will Ferrell as George W. Bush. Sounding like George Jr., Ferrell declared in a fake ad for McCain: "John was there for me ninety percent of the time over the last eight years. When you think of John McCain, think of me, George W. Bush. Think of this face. When you're in the voting booth, before you vote - picture this face right here. A vote for John McCain is a vote for George W. Bush. You're welcome." With that kind of background, a ham sandwich labeled "Democrat" would've been able to beat John McCain.
This, of course, is no mere trivial fact. If the election was a referendum on Bush and the last eight years, then that would mean the public was demanding economics that serve the middle class, working class and poor rather than mere crony capitalism and Wall Street bailouts, an end to the Iraq quagmire and a rejection of the militarism that has led to potential conflict with Pakistan, Iran and even both Russia and China, and an end to the massive criminality that has led to legalized torture and big brother snooping. If, on the other hand, the meaning of the election is that Barack Obama is just totally bitching, then nothing is demanded of him, indeed, everything is merely demanded of us, that we cry at his transcendental speeches and cheer him on in his sheer perfection.
Aside from George W. Bush, there's another dude who has evaded much of the blame for the loss in the election of John McCain: John McCain himself. From the start of the campaign, he appeared clueless, delusional and desperate, pathetically clinging to every right wing talking point to convince (unsuccessfully) the dwindling hardcore Republicans he was one of them. Meanwhile, he tied himself more closely to George W. Bush on Iraq than any other elected official alive, dooming him to be linked to that gigantic failure. And while the financial meltdown unraveled, all he could do was repeat the same old Republican mantras, mantras that only reminded the public that they've already had eight years too many of this crap. Still, when the election was all over, the korporate media felt sorry for the guy that, until he faced off against St. Obama, was one of their decided BFFs in the GOP. He wasn't so bad after all, they insisted, just a good man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The same couldn't be said about their treatment of Sarah Palin, The Konformist Beast of the Month, McCain's VP pick and the decided scapegoat of the 2008 election.
It didn't actually start out that way. When she was first announced as the pick by McCain, she became a populist sensation, a "hockey mom" turned Alaska governor who could match the celebrity cult devoted to Obama. It didn't hurt that "Caribou Barbie" was an attractive former beauty queen, looking MILFish with her trademark glasses and eerily similar to Tina Fey (something she would soon regret) or porn star Eva Angelina. Though there were nasty sneers about her in the establishment press from the start (for example, during the GOP convention, NBC blowhard Tom Brokaw could barely conceal his contempt for her) she gave an ass-kicking convention speech that cemented her popularity in the public, and suddenly, McCain passed Mr. Rock Star in the polls. This didn't appear to be a mere post-convention bounce, it appeared to be a game changer.
About right now, The Konformist should insert a little point: unlike most of the press which seemed stunned by her selection, we were indeed aware of her and not completely surprised. She was, after all, very attractive and charismatic, as well as the most popular governor in America according to public opinion polls. However, we pretty much dismissed her as a pick because, as any examination of her politics would reveal, she was a far right ideologue who, when exposed for what she was, would become quickly discredited, especially by a public with widespread loathing of the right wing policies of Bush, Cheney and co.
Tellingly, Obama didn't attack her on ideological lines. Instead, with his predictable level of smug arrogance (a decidedly notable trait of the guy) he mocked her as inexperienced, a curious claim from a dude with less than four years in the Senate and no record as either a mayor or governor. Why did Obama avoid pointing out that she was an ultra-right candidate? Perhaps because Obama's modus operandi is to evade all discussion of politics in politics, in hopes of reducing the campaign to a narcissistic cult of personality where issues are ignored.
What then followed from the Obamaheads were the predictable hack attacks, some laced with sexism in politics not seen since, well, since the Obamaheads went after Hillary. They were egged on by Obama himself, who took her now famous convention quote ("What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.") and declared about McCain-Palin less than a week after her speech: "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig." The smirky comment echoed his not-so-subtle middle finger during a speech while referring to Hillary in the heat of the Democratic primary, or this comment from him about Ms. Clinton's political attacks: "I understand that Senator Clinton, periodically when she's feeling down, launches attacks as a way of trying to boost her appeal." (No reference to female biology in that statement whatsoever!) As with the Hillary comments (which, unlike the Palin dig, were basically ignored by the korporate media, as they were clearly mean-spirited if intentional) Obama would later insist the "lipstick on a pig" comment in no way referred to Palin. (As if somebody using the word "lipstick" in a political context less than a week after the GOP Convention could in any way be referring to her or her speech!) The Obamamaniacs followed in kind, and Palin became a point of almost obsessive derision, leading to charming things like Obama rallies where t-shirts declaring "SARAH PALIN IS A CUNT" were on open display. (Good thing "liberal" politics have removed sexism from the political debate!) Meanwhile, a West Hollywood Halloween display had a Palin effigy in a hangman's noose, something that probably would have been labeled slightly politically incorrect if it was Obama instead. But the multiple cases of sexist insults of Palin were pretty much downplayed by the korporate media, who instead focused on the theme that Sarah Palin and McCain voters were a bunch of racist, hate-filled inbreds.
Indeed, the mainstream press seemed to have a hard-on for destroying Palin from the start, mocking her credentials while latching on to news her seventeen-year-old daughter was pregnant. The message behind these attacks: Palin was a cross-eyed hillbilly with a slut for a daughter who was unfit for office. Unfortunately for the korporate media, Palin-fever was so high after her convention speech, they toned down the criticisms.
This was merely a reprieve. As it turned out, Palin wasn't the big game-changer of the election, it was the financial crisis. As the economic downturn that hit Main Street suddenly swallowed Wall Street, derisions of Palin went into overdrive. The fixation of heaping hatred on Palin was so unhealthy, you'd think McCain's pick for VP had done something like shoot a friend in the face while drunk, or mastermind a pointlessly destructive war in the Middle East based on lies.
Okay, The Konformist no doubt knows what some readers are saying right now: this is the Beast of the Month prize here, you should be burying the bitch and not defending her. Fair enough. And we admit that many of the mockings of Palin were pretty damn funny, starting with the Stephen Colbert quote above. There's also this one from Matt Damon on Palin: "It's like a really bad Disney movie. The hockey mom, you know, 'Oh, I'm just a hockey mom.' And she's facing down President Putin... It's totally absurd..." (Personally, we think this is a pretty good movie pitch, and expect it to be in theaters in 2009, with Ice Cube in a supporting role as the goofy-but-lovable neighbor.) And then there's the increasingly hysterical performances by Tina Fey on SNL as Palin, performances that were so effective in mockery they pretty much trashed Palin's chances as a viable political candidate. Even a good-sport guest appearance on SNL by Palin couldn't stop the damage that had been done.
Still, The Konformist is about honesty, especially when others are being dishonest. So granted, Palin may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but for a party that has had Ronald Reagan, Dan Quayle and George W. Bush as previous top two figureheads, is she really at the bottom of the curve? Sure, she looked bad in her interview with Katie Couric (so mock-worthy that Fey and SNL satirized her without changing her many bungled quotes) but did Couric suddenly get street-cred as a legitimate journalist by doing what was essentially a calculated smear job?
Let's compare Palin's treatment to her competitor in the VP contest, Joe Biden, a guy considered to be one of the more intelligent fellows in the Senate. Despite the gravitas he is given for his vast knowledge base, Biden is also known to be a virtual gaffe machine. Probably his most embarrassing one on the campaign trail this fall was declaring "the number-one job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S, jobs." This gaffe was given a few chuckles in the mainstream press, but no doubt if Palin said the same, it would've turned into "Potatoe-gate II" by the media.
Here's something to give a clue how rigged the game was: a list (courtesy of the No Quarter Blog) of the questions asked by another anchor, ABC's Charlie Gibson, to both Barack Obama (after securing the Democratic nomination) and Sarah Palin:
Obama interview:
* How does it feel to break a glass ceiling?
* How does it feel to "win"?
* How does your family feel about your “winning” breaking a glass ceiling?
* Who will be your VP?
* Should you choose Hillary Clinton as VP?
* Will you accept public finance?
* What issues is your campaign about?
* Will you visit Iraq?
* Will you debate McCain at a town hall?
* What did you think of your competitor’s [Clinton] speech?
Palin interview:
* Do you have enough qualifications for the job you’re seeking? Specifically have you visited foreign countries and met foreign leaders?
* Aren’t you conceited to be seeking this high level job?
* Questions about foreign policy:
-territorial integrity of Georgia
-allowing Georgia and Ukraine to be members of NATO
-NATO treaty
-Iranian nuclear threat
-what to do if Israel attacks Iran
-Al Qaeda motivations
-the Bush Doctrine
-attacking terrorists harbored by Pakistan
* Is America fighting a holy war?
Meanwhile, here's a good case against Ms. Palin that could've been presented, but was mainly ignored:
* SHE'S A RIGHT-WING HARDCORE CHRISTIAN: Thanks to George W. Bush, the ultra-right fundamentalist movement is in shambles, and John McCain has almost no influence among them. Palin is the best hope for the "Moral Majority" crowd to remain a powerful voting bloc, rather than become increasingly marginalized and disappear as a force in the political arena altogether.
* SHE'S A BIG PUSSY: Despite being a major media sensation, the McCain campaign was notoriously paranoid about letting her do anything crazy, like, say, speaking to the press. Her only encounters with the media were her VP debate with Joe Biden, and her interviews with Gibson and Couric. (Sorry, Sean Hannity, your softball interview doesn't count.) She didn't hold a single press conference during her campaign. What, is Palin trying to hide that she's secretly an idiot or something?
* HER CLAIM TO BE A FISCAL CONSERVATIVE IS A CROCK: Despite her far right leanings, her boast of being opposed to "big government" is, like it was for Reagan and Shrub, a lie. Under her six-year reign as Mayor of Wasilla, the city's debt grew from $1 million to $25 million (which for a city of 7,000 residents equals an extra $3,500 debt per capita) despite receiving an extra $27 million in federal funds. The city's budget grew 55% during her reign, while taxes increased by 43%, fueled by a 0.5 percent sales tax increase she personally pushed for. As Alaska governor, her 2007 operating budget was a record $6.6 billion, and in 2008 it went up to $11 billion, a 67 percent increase. When she ran for governor, she supported funding the now infamous Gravina Island Bridge, known as the "Bridge to Nowhere" thanks to its dubious merits, for which Alaska received $442 million. As governor, she cancelled the project but kept the money. Later, during the GOP, she disingenuously claimed she said "thanks, but no thanks, on that bridge to nowhere."
* SHE'S A WANNABE BOOK BANNER: This was such a widespread email rumor, it was even featured on the urban legends website Snopes.com. The korporate media, while quick to hack attack her throughout the campaign, were just as quick to dismiss this, even though the facts tell another tale. Here's the story: as a Wasilla city councilwoman, Palin had a hissy fit over the gay-friendly children's book Daddy's Roommate being in the public library. (Curiously, there's no word on her opinion about Heather Has Two Mommies.) When elected mayor, Palin asked Wasilla librarian Mary Ellen Emmons on multiple times if she would okay censoring library books with "objectionable" content if asked to. Emmons told her she wouldn't do this: Palin would fire her from the job in January 1997, claiming Emmons didn't give "full support in my efforts to govern the city of Wasilla." She reversed herself the following day after a huge public outcry. So the scoreboard reads as thus: Sarah Palin isn't a book banner, she's merely someone who was interested in banning books, then tried to fire someone opposed to such a move. There, doesn't that make you feel better about her?
* SHE'S FOR A BIG SISTER POLICE STATE: The book-banning is merely part of a bigger issue of a woman who is a petty tyrant and authoritarian. Besides the Wasilla librarian, Palin successfully fired the police chief and the museum director and forced out two others out as mayor. As governor, she fired Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan in what appears to be a vendetta over an ex-brother-in-law. In another political feud while she was Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Chairwoman, she hacked into the computer of a fellow commissioner (a Republican, no less) to obtain evidence of wrongdoing. Add to this her GOP convention dismissal of opposition to abuse and torture of prisoners coming from Democrats like Obama who are "worried that someone won't read them their rights." The pattern emerging is of a woman who believes she is above the law and enjoys destroying her political opponents. Writer Naomi Wolf, who has increasingly warned of the rise of fascism in America, has concluded "Palin Power" is merely a Rove-ian push for a continued Bush-Cheney police state.
Instead of all this, we got the equivalent of "You might be a redneck" jokes.
Why the crude insults of Palin? Certainly a lot of this involves the Obama cult worship which seems to be centered in the mainstream press. If a ham sandwich could beat a Republican thanks to Bush, anyone who gets in the way of Barky becoming prez would be thrashed by the establishment media as well. And it doesn't hurt that Palin is pure white trash, the only racial group that can be mocked without it being labeled politically incorrect.
But perhaps the bigger reason for the hack attacks on Palin has to do with something bigger, namely the Wall Street bailout. This was, after all, the turning point in the election when the cheering for Obama and the scorn of Palin went into hyperspace. This leads to a political fact that many progressives clinging to the Democratic Party must squirm over: though the bailout was proposed by the Bush Administration, it was the Democrats, and not the Republicans, who got it passed through Congress. Indeed, Barack Obama personally took the lead in pushing the bailout through Congress. Coincidentally, even though September was one the worst months in Wall Street history with job losses beginning to explode, it was the same month he raised a record $150 million, more than double his previous record of $66 million. One has to wonder where all this money came from at a time of economic crisis.
Meanwhile, it was the hardcore conservative Republicans who were most opposed to the bailout, albeit only for ideological "free market" reasons. It is this same group of GOPers that looked upon Palin as their answer to "Obama as a savior" in politics. Unfortunately for them, McCain had decided to support the bailout, and Caribou Barbie was forced to defend something completely inconsistent with her politics. (Perhaps that is why when defending the bailout she invariably looked her most clueless.) It is telling to note that after the Wall Street crisis dominated the news, conservative establishment hacks like George Will, David Brooks and David Frum joined the chorus calling Palin unfit and began to shill for Obama. Even a still-devoted neocon like Christopher Hitchens suddenly jumped on the Obama bandwagon. This leads to a simple question: did Colin Powell endorse Barack Obama because he was black (as Rush Limbaugh would froth) or because he knows a good fellow tool for Wall Street when he sees one?
The good news is Sarah Palin may be toast as a politician thanks to Obamamania. It appears Republican competitors are already joining in the backstabbing, as rumors (likely false, and likely spread by the Mitt Romney team desiring to take over the GOP) have been spread that Palin didn't know Africa was a continent. At least we hope she is toast, but concede that political memory is short and if Nixon could comeback in 1968, anything is possible. This is especially true since there are no real charismatic Republicans waiting in the wings with the star power Palin has. (And besides, after trashing Palin for two months, will the establishment media be able to pretend Tim Pawlenty and Bobby Jindal - two GOP governors deemed to be strong competitors with almost identical ideological slants - are any different in politics than Palin in 2012?) The bad news is if she was destroyed, it was for the wrong reasons, the end result of the thorough takeover of the Democratic Party by Wall Street plutocrats.
In any case, we salute Sarah Palin as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Sarah!!!
Sarah Palin
Republican VP Candidate
"I yam an anti-Christ..."
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"
"Oh! Oh! Remember the time he picked Sarah Palin? I totally get it now! She's totally unqualified, and he's so old! There's a really good chance she'd be president!"
Stephen Colbert on John McCain's wacky sense of humor
Well, the 2008 election is over, and, for the first time in twelve years, George W. Bush didn't steal it. This, of course, is worthy of celebration, although the celebration so far seems misguided, misguided in a way that seems by design.
The korporate media, which has shilled for Barack Obama shamelessly throughout the campaign, went into overdrive, declaring the election was confirmation of what an amazing and transformational figure he was. Oh, and by the way, did we mention he was black? The two lessons of the election, therefore, were that Obama is totally rad and America is no longer racist (the only reason anyone could possibly be opposed to someone as awesome as Barack Obama.)
It's curious that while the establishment media was so quick to give Obama all the credit for the victory, they failed to point (and give) the finger to the one person who deserves credit for John McCain's loss: George W. Bush. After all, it is really Bush who loomed over the entire election like a frightening specter, and it is Bush who has given the entire GOP a deserved bad name. It is Bush and his disasters that turned both houses of Congress decidedly to the Democrats, and it is Bush in the end who convinced American voters to reject a fairly well-liked former Vietnam POW for an entity whose magnetic charisma couldn't cover how decidedly untrustworthy he is. The impossible hurdle facing McCain was hilariously spoofed on a Saturday Night Live guest-starring Will Ferrell as George W. Bush. Sounding like George Jr., Ferrell declared in a fake ad for McCain: "John was there for me ninety percent of the time over the last eight years. When you think of John McCain, think of me, George W. Bush. Think of this face. When you're in the voting booth, before you vote - picture this face right here. A vote for John McCain is a vote for George W. Bush. You're welcome." With that kind of background, a ham sandwich labeled "Democrat" would've been able to beat John McCain.
This, of course, is no mere trivial fact. If the election was a referendum on Bush and the last eight years, then that would mean the public was demanding economics that serve the middle class, working class and poor rather than mere crony capitalism and Wall Street bailouts, an end to the Iraq quagmire and a rejection of the militarism that has led to potential conflict with Pakistan, Iran and even both Russia and China, and an end to the massive criminality that has led to legalized torture and big brother snooping. If, on the other hand, the meaning of the election is that Barack Obama is just totally bitching, then nothing is demanded of him, indeed, everything is merely demanded of us, that we cry at his transcendental speeches and cheer him on in his sheer perfection.
Aside from George W. Bush, there's another dude who has evaded much of the blame for the loss in the election of John McCain: John McCain himself. From the start of the campaign, he appeared clueless, delusional and desperate, pathetically clinging to every right wing talking point to convince (unsuccessfully) the dwindling hardcore Republicans he was one of them. Meanwhile, he tied himself more closely to George W. Bush on Iraq than any other elected official alive, dooming him to be linked to that gigantic failure. And while the financial meltdown unraveled, all he could do was repeat the same old Republican mantras, mantras that only reminded the public that they've already had eight years too many of this crap. Still, when the election was all over, the korporate media felt sorry for the guy that, until he faced off against St. Obama, was one of their decided BFFs in the GOP. He wasn't so bad after all, they insisted, just a good man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The same couldn't be said about their treatment of Sarah Palin, The Konformist Beast of the Month, McCain's VP pick and the decided scapegoat of the 2008 election.
It didn't actually start out that way. When she was first announced as the pick by McCain, she became a populist sensation, a "hockey mom" turned Alaska governor who could match the celebrity cult devoted to Obama. It didn't hurt that "Caribou Barbie" was an attractive former beauty queen, looking MILFish with her trademark glasses and eerily similar to Tina Fey (something she would soon regret) or porn star Eva Angelina. Though there were nasty sneers about her in the establishment press from the start (for example, during the GOP convention, NBC blowhard Tom Brokaw could barely conceal his contempt for her) she gave an ass-kicking convention speech that cemented her popularity in the public, and suddenly, McCain passed Mr. Rock Star in the polls. This didn't appear to be a mere post-convention bounce, it appeared to be a game changer.
About right now, The Konformist should insert a little point: unlike most of the press which seemed stunned by her selection, we were indeed aware of her and not completely surprised. She was, after all, very attractive and charismatic, as well as the most popular governor in America according to public opinion polls. However, we pretty much dismissed her as a pick because, as any examination of her politics would reveal, she was a far right ideologue who, when exposed for what she was, would become quickly discredited, especially by a public with widespread loathing of the right wing policies of Bush, Cheney and co.
Tellingly, Obama didn't attack her on ideological lines. Instead, with his predictable level of smug arrogance (a decidedly notable trait of the guy) he mocked her as inexperienced, a curious claim from a dude with less than four years in the Senate and no record as either a mayor or governor. Why did Obama avoid pointing out that she was an ultra-right candidate? Perhaps because Obama's modus operandi is to evade all discussion of politics in politics, in hopes of reducing the campaign to a narcissistic cult of personality where issues are ignored.
What then followed from the Obamaheads were the predictable hack attacks, some laced with sexism in politics not seen since, well, since the Obamaheads went after Hillary. They were egged on by Obama himself, who took her now famous convention quote ("What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.") and declared about McCain-Palin less than a week after her speech: "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig." The smirky comment echoed his not-so-subtle middle finger during a speech while referring to Hillary in the heat of the Democratic primary, or this comment from him about Ms. Clinton's political attacks: "I understand that Senator Clinton, periodically when she's feeling down, launches attacks as a way of trying to boost her appeal." (No reference to female biology in that statement whatsoever!) As with the Hillary comments (which, unlike the Palin dig, were basically ignored by the korporate media, as they were clearly mean-spirited if intentional) Obama would later insist the "lipstick on a pig" comment in no way referred to Palin. (As if somebody using the word "lipstick" in a political context less than a week after the GOP Convention could in any way be referring to her or her speech!) The Obamamaniacs followed in kind, and Palin became a point of almost obsessive derision, leading to charming things like Obama rallies where t-shirts declaring "SARAH PALIN IS A CUNT" were on open display. (Good thing "liberal" politics have removed sexism from the political debate!) Meanwhile, a West Hollywood Halloween display had a Palin effigy in a hangman's noose, something that probably would have been labeled slightly politically incorrect if it was Obama instead. But the multiple cases of sexist insults of Palin were pretty much downplayed by the korporate media, who instead focused on the theme that Sarah Palin and McCain voters were a bunch of racist, hate-filled inbreds.
Indeed, the mainstream press seemed to have a hard-on for destroying Palin from the start, mocking her credentials while latching on to news her seventeen-year-old daughter was pregnant. The message behind these attacks: Palin was a cross-eyed hillbilly with a slut for a daughter who was unfit for office. Unfortunately for the korporate media, Palin-fever was so high after her convention speech, they toned down the criticisms.
This was merely a reprieve. As it turned out, Palin wasn't the big game-changer of the election, it was the financial crisis. As the economic downturn that hit Main Street suddenly swallowed Wall Street, derisions of Palin went into overdrive. The fixation of heaping hatred on Palin was so unhealthy, you'd think McCain's pick for VP had done something like shoot a friend in the face while drunk, or mastermind a pointlessly destructive war in the Middle East based on lies.
Okay, The Konformist no doubt knows what some readers are saying right now: this is the Beast of the Month prize here, you should be burying the bitch and not defending her. Fair enough. And we admit that many of the mockings of Palin were pretty damn funny, starting with the Stephen Colbert quote above. There's also this one from Matt Damon on Palin: "It's like a really bad Disney movie. The hockey mom, you know, 'Oh, I'm just a hockey mom.' And she's facing down President Putin... It's totally absurd..." (Personally, we think this is a pretty good movie pitch, and expect it to be in theaters in 2009, with Ice Cube in a supporting role as the goofy-but-lovable neighbor.) And then there's the increasingly hysterical performances by Tina Fey on SNL as Palin, performances that were so effective in mockery they pretty much trashed Palin's chances as a viable political candidate. Even a good-sport guest appearance on SNL by Palin couldn't stop the damage that had been done.
Still, The Konformist is about honesty, especially when others are being dishonest. So granted, Palin may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but for a party that has had Ronald Reagan, Dan Quayle and George W. Bush as previous top two figureheads, is she really at the bottom of the curve? Sure, she looked bad in her interview with Katie Couric (so mock-worthy that Fey and SNL satirized her without changing her many bungled quotes) but did Couric suddenly get street-cred as a legitimate journalist by doing what was essentially a calculated smear job?
Let's compare Palin's treatment to her competitor in the VP contest, Joe Biden, a guy considered to be one of the more intelligent fellows in the Senate. Despite the gravitas he is given for his vast knowledge base, Biden is also known to be a virtual gaffe machine. Probably his most embarrassing one on the campaign trail this fall was declaring "the number-one job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S, jobs." This gaffe was given a few chuckles in the mainstream press, but no doubt if Palin said the same, it would've turned into "Potatoe-gate II" by the media.
Here's something to give a clue how rigged the game was: a list (courtesy of the No Quarter Blog) of the questions asked by another anchor, ABC's Charlie Gibson, to both Barack Obama (after securing the Democratic nomination) and Sarah Palin:
Obama interview:
* How does it feel to break a glass ceiling?
* How does it feel to "win"?
* How does your family feel about your “winning” breaking a glass ceiling?
* Who will be your VP?
* Should you choose Hillary Clinton as VP?
* Will you accept public finance?
* What issues is your campaign about?
* Will you visit Iraq?
* Will you debate McCain at a town hall?
* What did you think of your competitor’s [Clinton] speech?
Palin interview:
* Do you have enough qualifications for the job you’re seeking? Specifically have you visited foreign countries and met foreign leaders?
* Aren’t you conceited to be seeking this high level job?
* Questions about foreign policy:
-territorial integrity of Georgia
-allowing Georgia and Ukraine to be members of NATO
-NATO treaty
-Iranian nuclear threat
-what to do if Israel attacks Iran
-Al Qaeda motivations
-the Bush Doctrine
-attacking terrorists harbored by Pakistan
* Is America fighting a holy war?
Meanwhile, here's a good case against Ms. Palin that could've been presented, but was mainly ignored:
* SHE'S A RIGHT-WING HARDCORE CHRISTIAN: Thanks to George W. Bush, the ultra-right fundamentalist movement is in shambles, and John McCain has almost no influence among them. Palin is the best hope for the "Moral Majority" crowd to remain a powerful voting bloc, rather than become increasingly marginalized and disappear as a force in the political arena altogether.
* SHE'S A BIG PUSSY: Despite being a major media sensation, the McCain campaign was notoriously paranoid about letting her do anything crazy, like, say, speaking to the press. Her only encounters with the media were her VP debate with Joe Biden, and her interviews with Gibson and Couric. (Sorry, Sean Hannity, your softball interview doesn't count.) She didn't hold a single press conference during her campaign. What, is Palin trying to hide that she's secretly an idiot or something?
* HER CLAIM TO BE A FISCAL CONSERVATIVE IS A CROCK: Despite her far right leanings, her boast of being opposed to "big government" is, like it was for Reagan and Shrub, a lie. Under her six-year reign as Mayor of Wasilla, the city's debt grew from $1 million to $25 million (which for a city of 7,000 residents equals an extra $3,500 debt per capita) despite receiving an extra $27 million in federal funds. The city's budget grew 55% during her reign, while taxes increased by 43%, fueled by a 0.5 percent sales tax increase she personally pushed for. As Alaska governor, her 2007 operating budget was a record $6.6 billion, and in 2008 it went up to $11 billion, a 67 percent increase. When she ran for governor, she supported funding the now infamous Gravina Island Bridge, known as the "Bridge to Nowhere" thanks to its dubious merits, for which Alaska received $442 million. As governor, she cancelled the project but kept the money. Later, during the GOP, she disingenuously claimed she said "thanks, but no thanks, on that bridge to nowhere."
* SHE'S A WANNABE BOOK BANNER: This was such a widespread email rumor, it was even featured on the urban legends website Snopes.com. The korporate media, while quick to hack attack her throughout the campaign, were just as quick to dismiss this, even though the facts tell another tale. Here's the story: as a Wasilla city councilwoman, Palin had a hissy fit over the gay-friendly children's book Daddy's Roommate being in the public library. (Curiously, there's no word on her opinion about Heather Has Two Mommies.) When elected mayor, Palin asked Wasilla librarian Mary Ellen Emmons on multiple times if she would okay censoring library books with "objectionable" content if asked to. Emmons told her she wouldn't do this: Palin would fire her from the job in January 1997, claiming Emmons didn't give "full support in my efforts to govern the city of Wasilla." She reversed herself the following day after a huge public outcry. So the scoreboard reads as thus: Sarah Palin isn't a book banner, she's merely someone who was interested in banning books, then tried to fire someone opposed to such a move. There, doesn't that make you feel better about her?
* SHE'S FOR A BIG SISTER POLICE STATE: The book-banning is merely part of a bigger issue of a woman who is a petty tyrant and authoritarian. Besides the Wasilla librarian, Palin successfully fired the police chief and the museum director and forced out two others out as mayor. As governor, she fired Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan in what appears to be a vendetta over an ex-brother-in-law. In another political feud while she was Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Chairwoman, she hacked into the computer of a fellow commissioner (a Republican, no less) to obtain evidence of wrongdoing. Add to this her GOP convention dismissal of opposition to abuse and torture of prisoners coming from Democrats like Obama who are "worried that someone won't read them their rights." The pattern emerging is of a woman who believes she is above the law and enjoys destroying her political opponents. Writer Naomi Wolf, who has increasingly warned of the rise of fascism in America, has concluded "Palin Power" is merely a Rove-ian push for a continued Bush-Cheney police state.
Instead of all this, we got the equivalent of "You might be a redneck" jokes.
Why the crude insults of Palin? Certainly a lot of this involves the Obama cult worship which seems to be centered in the mainstream press. If a ham sandwich could beat a Republican thanks to Bush, anyone who gets in the way of Barky becoming prez would be thrashed by the establishment media as well. And it doesn't hurt that Palin is pure white trash, the only racial group that can be mocked without it being labeled politically incorrect.
But perhaps the bigger reason for the hack attacks on Palin has to do with something bigger, namely the Wall Street bailout. This was, after all, the turning point in the election when the cheering for Obama and the scorn of Palin went into hyperspace. This leads to a political fact that many progressives clinging to the Democratic Party must squirm over: though the bailout was proposed by the Bush Administration, it was the Democrats, and not the Republicans, who got it passed through Congress. Indeed, Barack Obama personally took the lead in pushing the bailout through Congress. Coincidentally, even though September was one the worst months in Wall Street history with job losses beginning to explode, it was the same month he raised a record $150 million, more than double his previous record of $66 million. One has to wonder where all this money came from at a time of economic crisis.
Meanwhile, it was the hardcore conservative Republicans who were most opposed to the bailout, albeit only for ideological "free market" reasons. It is this same group of GOPers that looked upon Palin as their answer to "Obama as a savior" in politics. Unfortunately for them, McCain had decided to support the bailout, and Caribou Barbie was forced to defend something completely inconsistent with her politics. (Perhaps that is why when defending the bailout she invariably looked her most clueless.) It is telling to note that after the Wall Street crisis dominated the news, conservative establishment hacks like George Will, David Brooks and David Frum joined the chorus calling Palin unfit and began to shill for Obama. Even a still-devoted neocon like Christopher Hitchens suddenly jumped on the Obama bandwagon. This leads to a simple question: did Colin Powell endorse Barack Obama because he was black (as Rush Limbaugh would froth) or because he knows a good fellow tool for Wall Street when he sees one?
The good news is Sarah Palin may be toast as a politician thanks to Obamamania. It appears Republican competitors are already joining in the backstabbing, as rumors (likely false, and likely spread by the Mitt Romney team desiring to take over the GOP) have been spread that Palin didn't know Africa was a continent. At least we hope she is toast, but concede that political memory is short and if Nixon could comeback in 1968, anything is possible. This is especially true since there are no real charismatic Republicans waiting in the wings with the star power Palin has. (And besides, after trashing Palin for two months, will the establishment media be able to pretend Tim Pawlenty and Bobby Jindal - two GOP governors deemed to be strong competitors with almost identical ideological slants - are any different in politics than Palin in 2012?) The bad news is if she was destroyed, it was for the wrong reasons, the end result of the thorough takeover of the Democratic Party by Wall Street plutocrats.
In any case, we salute Sarah Palin as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Sarah!!!
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
2009 Terror Attack Being Peddled By Media
http://www.prisonplanet.com/2009-terror-attack-being-peddled-by-establishment-media-intelligence-sources.html
2009 Terror Attack Being Peddled By Establishment Media, Intelligence Sources
London Times report conveniently links alleged terror cells to Obama’s number one target - Pakistan
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Saturday, November 15, 2008
The notion that terrorists will attack America shortly after Barack Obama takes office is again being vigorously pushed by the corporate media as well as shadowy intelligence sources, and has reached the same crescendo that preceded 9/11, a disturbing sign that the public is being prepared for a newly manufactured mass casualty event.
The London Times today reports, “Barack Obama is being given ominous advice from leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to brace himself for an early assault from terrorists.”
“Lord West of Spithead, the (UK) Home Office Security Minister, spoke recently of a “huge threat”, saying: “There is another great plot building up again and we are monitoring this.”
The report links the activity to so-called Al-Qaeda cells operating out of Pakistan, which is certainly convenient considering Obama’s stated intention to support and even expand the scope of continued bombing raids on the country in the name of killing terrorists.
Is a new atrocity being planned so as to provide President Obama with the complete justification to attack areas of Pakistan, just as 9/11 provided the pretext for Bush to launch the pre-arranged attack on Afghanistan in the same year that he took office in 2001?
Warnings that Obama will face a crisis shortly after entering office have been voluminous.
Vice-President elect Joe Biden, told an audience in Seattle last month ”We’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”
Biden was vehement in his proclamation, stating that it was a “guarantee” and a “promise” that Obama would face an international crisis and that “tough” and “unpopular” decisions would have to be made to combat it.
Colin Powell made similar statements when he endorsed Obama on Meet the Press, saying “There’s going to be a crisis which will come along on the 21st, 22nd of January that we don’t even know about right now.”
Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright also told CNN’s John Roberts, “It’s just a statement of fact…something unexpected, you always have to be prepared for that.”
Top Obama advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski also told CNN that Obama will face “imminent problems” immediately upon taking office.
The confidence with which top globalists are forecasting a crisis that will unfold at some point next year is staggering and it strongly hints that a new manufactured horror is in the works to get the country behind Obama and mandate him to make the “unpopular decisions” that he is already preparing.
2009 Terror Attack Being Peddled By Establishment Media, Intelligence Sources
London Times report conveniently links alleged terror cells to Obama’s number one target - Pakistan
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Saturday, November 15, 2008
The notion that terrorists will attack America shortly after Barack Obama takes office is again being vigorously pushed by the corporate media as well as shadowy intelligence sources, and has reached the same crescendo that preceded 9/11, a disturbing sign that the public is being prepared for a newly manufactured mass casualty event.
The London Times today reports, “Barack Obama is being given ominous advice from leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to brace himself for an early assault from terrorists.”
“Lord West of Spithead, the (UK) Home Office Security Minister, spoke recently of a “huge threat”, saying: “There is another great plot building up again and we are monitoring this.”
The report links the activity to so-called Al-Qaeda cells operating out of Pakistan, which is certainly convenient considering Obama’s stated intention to support and even expand the scope of continued bombing raids on the country in the name of killing terrorists.
Is a new atrocity being planned so as to provide President Obama with the complete justification to attack areas of Pakistan, just as 9/11 provided the pretext for Bush to launch the pre-arranged attack on Afghanistan in the same year that he took office in 2001?
Warnings that Obama will face a crisis shortly after entering office have been voluminous.
Vice-President elect Joe Biden, told an audience in Seattle last month ”We’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”
Biden was vehement in his proclamation, stating that it was a “guarantee” and a “promise” that Obama would face an international crisis and that “tough” and “unpopular” decisions would have to be made to combat it.
Colin Powell made similar statements when he endorsed Obama on Meet the Press, saying “There’s going to be a crisis which will come along on the 21st, 22nd of January that we don’t even know about right now.”
Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright also told CNN’s John Roberts, “It’s just a statement of fact…something unexpected, you always have to be prepared for that.”
Top Obama advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski also told CNN that Obama will face “imminent problems” immediately upon taking office.
The confidence with which top globalists are forecasting a crisis that will unfold at some point next year is staggering and it strongly hints that a new manufactured horror is in the works to get the country behind Obama and mandate him to make the “unpopular decisions” that he is already preparing.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Beware of the Obama hype
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=511
Beware of the Obama hype. What 'change' in America really means
12 Nov 2008
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger writes that the lauding of Barack Obama has a history and that 'historical moments' ought to be less about their symbolism and accompanying histrionics than what they really mean. The question is: what is Obama's true relation to unchanging American myths about the imposition of its notorious power?
My first visit to Texas was in 1968, on the fifth anniversary of the assassination of president John F Kennedy in Dallas. I drove south, following the line of telegraph poles to the small town of Midlothian, where I met Penn Jones Jr, editor of the Midlothian Mirror. Except for his drawl and fine boots, everything about Penn was the antithesis of the Texas stereotype. Having exposed the racists of the John Birch Society, his printing press had been repeatedly firebombed. Week after week, he painstakingly assembled evidence that all but demolished the official version of Kennedy’s murder.
This was journalism as it had been before corporate journalism was invented, before the first schools of journalism were set up and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around those whose “professionalism” and “objectivity” carried an unspoken obligation to ensure that news and opinion were in tune with an establishment consensus, regardless of the truth. Journalists such as Penn Jones, independent of vested power, indefatigable and principled, often reflect ordinary American attitudes, which have seldom conformed to the stereotypes promoted by the corporate media on both sides of the Atlantic. Read American Dreams: Lost and Found by the masterly Studs Terkel, who died the other day, or scan the surveys that unerringly attribute enlightened views to a majority who believe that “government should care for those who cannot care for themselves” and are prepared to pay higher taxes for universal health care, who support nuclear disarmament and want their troops out of other people’s countries.
Returning to Texas, I am struck again by those so unlike the redneck stereotype, in spite of the burden of a form of brainwashing placed on most Americans from a tender age: that theirs is the most superior society in the history of the world, and all means are justified, including the spilling of copious blood, in maintaining that superiority.
That is the subtext of Barack Obama’s “oratory”. He says he wants to build up US military power; and he threatens to ignite a new war in Pakistan, killing yet more brown-skinned people. That will bring tears, too. Unlike those on election night, these other tears will be unseen in Chicago and London. This is not to doubt the sincerity of much of the response to Obama’s election, which happened not because of the unction that has passed for news reporting from America since 4 November (e.g. "liberal Americans smiled and the world smiled with them") but for the same reasons that millions of angry emails were sent to the White House and Congress when the “bailout” of Wall Street was revealed, and because most Americans are fed up with war.
Two years ago, this anti-war vote installed a Democratic majority in Congress, only to watch the Democrats hand over more money to George W Bush to continue his blood fest. For his part, the "anti-war" Obama never said the illegal invasion of Iraq was wrong, merely that it was a “mistake”. Thereafter, he voted in to give Bush what he wanted. Yes, Obama’s election is historic, a symbol of great change to many. But it is equally true that the American elite has grown adept at using the black middle and management class. The courageous Martin Luther King recognised this when he linked the human rights of black Americans with the human rights of the Vietnamese, then being slaughtered by a liberal Democratic administration. And he was shot. In striking contrast, a young black major serving in Vietnam, Colin Powell, was used to “investigate” and whitewash the infamous My Lai massacre. As Bush’s secretary of state, Powell was often described as a “liberal” and was considered ideal to lie to the United Nations about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Condaleezza Rice, lauded as a successful black woman, has worked assiduously to deny the Palestinians justice.
Obama’s first two crucial appointments represent a denial of the wishes of his supporters on the principal issues on which they voted. The vice-president-elect, Joe Biden, is a proud warmaker and Zionist. Rahm Emanuel, who is to be the all-important White House chief of staff, is a fervent "neoliberal" devoted to the doctrine that led to the present economic collapse and impoverishment of millions. He is also an “Israel-first” Zionist who served in the Israeli army and opposes meaningful justice for the Palestinians – an injustice that is at the root of Muslim people’s loathing of the United States and the spawning of jihadism.
No serious scrutiny of this is permitted within the histrionics of Obamamania, just as no serious scrutiny of the betrayal of the majority of black South Africans was permitted within the “Mandela moment”. This is especially marked in Britain, where America’s divine right to “lead” is important to elite British interests. The once respected Observer newspaper, which supported Bush’s war in Iraq, echoing his fabricated evidence, now announces, without evidence, that “America has restored the world’s faith in its ideals”. These “ideals”, which Obama will swear to uphold, have overseen, since 1945, the destruction of 50 governments, including democracies, and 30 popular liberation movements, causing the deaths of countless men, women and children.
None of this was uttered during the election campaign. Had it been allowed, there might even have been recognition that liberalism as a narrow, supremely arrogant, war-making ideology is destroying liberalism as a reality. Prior to Blair’s criminal warmaking, ideology was denied by him and his media mystics. “Blair can be a beacon to the world,” declared the Guardian in 1997. “[He is] turning leadership into an art form.”
Today, merely insert “Obama”. As for historic moments, there is another that has gone unreported but is well under way – liberal democracy’s shift towards a corporate dictatorship, managed by people regardless of ethnicity, with the media as its clichéd façade. “True democracy,” wrote Penn Jones Jr, the Texas truth-teller, “is constant vigilance: not thinking the way you’re meant to think and keeping your eyes wide open at all times.”
Monday, October 27, 2008
Colin Powell Warns Of Coming Crisis
http://www.prisonplanet.com/colin-powell-warns-of-coming-crisis-we-dont-even-know-about-right-now.htmlColin Powell Warns Of Coming Crisis “We Don’t Even Know About Right Now”
Echoes Biden comments that Obama will be tested in early days of his term
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Tuesday, Oct 21, 2008
Colin Powell has made bizarre comments that echo the recent declaration by Democratic VP candidate Joe Biden that there will be an “international crisis” early into Barack Obama’s presidency that will test the new president by forcing him to make unpopular decisions.
Speaking on meet the press two days ago, Powell officially endorsed Obama and also made the following statement:
“The problems will always be there and there’s going to be a crisis which will come along on the 21st, 22nd of January that we don’t even know about right now.
So I think what the President has to start to do is to start using the power of the oval office and the power of his personality to convince the American people and convince the world that America is solid, that America is going to move forward, we are going to fix our economic problems, we’re going to meet out overseas obligations.”
Watch Powell make the comment at 2.35 into the following video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LDBOPcHpeo&eurl=http://www.prisonplanet.com/colin-powell-warns-of-coming-crisis-we-dont-even-know-about-right-now.html
Is Colin Powell referring to a theoretical crisis that could occur at any time? If so why does he choose a specific date, within the first two days after the inauguration? Also why does he refer to general problems that the new president will have to deal with in a separate context? We are already in an economic crisis, everyone knows that, so what new crisis is Powell talking about?
Whatever you read into Powell’s comments, they sound somewhat bizarre, particularly as they come on the back of Joe Biden’s “guarantee” of a “generated crisis” to “test the mettle” of the new leader within six months of the new presidential term:
What does Biden mean by “generated crisis”? It is an undeniably strange term to use.
His reference to John F. Kennedy indicates that Biden may have been referring some kind of geopolitical crisis in the vain of the Cuban missile crisis of April 1961. The confrontation between the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba at the height of the Cold War came within the first four months of JFK’s presidency.
Obama’s running mate made the comments at a fundraising event in Seattle two days ago, on the same day Powell also spoke of a coming crisis.
We shouldn’t be surprised at Powell’s comments however, given that the former Secretary of State seemingly has a knack for predicting events before they take place.
Previous to the beginning of the Iraq war in February 2003, an audio tape containing a voice described as that of Osama Bin Laden was touted as proof positive of Al Qaeda links with Saddam Hussein.
Hours before the tape was discovered and aired by TV channel Al Jazeera, Powell announced in the US Senate that a “Bin Laden tape is coming proving Iraq’s links with Al-Qaeda.”
This led some to raise the question how does Colin Powell know what Al Jazeera are going to broadcast before they do?
In an amazing and timely coincidence, the tape came barely a week after Powell’s attempts to link Al Qaeda and Saddam in his botched presentation of lies and exaggerations before the UN Security Council.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Coming Soon: A Sarah Palin Porno
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/10/coming_soon_the_sarah_palin_po.htmlComing Soon: A Sarah Palin Porno
10/1/08
Jessica Pressler
It was only a matter of time. Last night, someone sent us an ad from Craigslist L.A., supposedly placed by porn producers searching for a Sarah Palin lookalike for an upcoming skin flick. It's since been removed (perhaps they were able to cast Eva Angelina?), but here is the original text for your edification.
Sarah Palin look-alike for an adult film to be shot in next 10 days. Major adult studio. Please send pix, stats etc. ASAP Pay: $2000-3000 No anal required.
Obviously, this is disgusting and horrific, and we must demand that Vivid counter by producing a porno starring a Joe Biden lookalike immediately for parity. But also we're intrigued — by the no-anal clause, of course, and the title potential. Our tipster suggested Impalin' Sarah: The Pork She Couldn't Say "No Thanks" To, but we think they'll probably go with Drill Baby Drill.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Palin Power
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/election_20082/2008_presidential_election/palin_power_fresh_face_now_more_popular_than_obama_mccain
Palin Power: Fresh Face Now More Popular Than Obama, McCain
Friday, September 05, 2008
A week ago, most Americans had never heard of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Now, following a Vice Presidential acceptance speech viewed live by more than 40 million people, Palin is viewed favorably by 58% of American voters. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 37% hold an unfavorable view of the self-described hockey mom.
The figures include 40% with a Very Favorable opinion of Palin and 18% with a Very Unfavorable view (full demographic crosstabs are available for Premium Members). Before her acceptance speech, Palin was viewed favorably by 52%. A week ago, 67% had never heard of her.
The new data also shows significant increases in the number who say McCain made the right choice and the number who say Palin is ready to be President. Generally, John McCain’s choice of Palin earns slightly better reviews than Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden.
Perhaps most stunning is the fact that Palin’s favorable ratings are now a point higher than either man at the top of the Presidential tickets this year. As of Friday morning, Obama and McCain are each viewed favorably by 57% of voters. Biden is viewed favorably by 48%.
There is a strong partisan gap when it comes to perceptions of Palin. Eighty-nine percent (89%) of Republicans give her favorable reviews along with 33% of Democrats and 59% of voters not affiliated with either major party.
She earns positive reviews from 65% of men and 52% of women. The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll shows that Obama continues to lead McCain among women voters while McCain leads among men. The Friday morning update—the first to include interviews conducted after Palin’s speech--showed the beginning of a Republican convention bounce that may match Obama’s bounce from last week.
Fifty-one percent (51%) of Americans believe that most reporters are trying to hurt Palin’s campaign, a fact that may enhance her own ratings.
The Palin pick has also improved perceptions of John McCain. A week ago, just before he introduced his running mate, just 42% of Republicans had a Very Favorable opinion of their party’s nominee. That figure jumped to 54% by this Friday morning. Among unaffiliated voters, favorable opinions of McCain have increased by eleven percentage points in a week—from 54% before the Palin announcement to 65% today.
Fifty-one percent (51%) of all voters now believe that McCain made the right choice when he picked Palin to be his running mate while 32% disagree. By way of comparison, on the night after Biden gave his acceptance speech, 47% said that Obama made the right choice.
Eighty-one percent (81%) of Republicans say that McCain made the right choice while just 69% of Democrats said the same about Obama.
Among unaffiliated voters, 52% said that McCain made the right choice for his running mate and 45% said the same about Obama.
Forty percent (40%) now say that Palin is ready to be President, if necessary. That’s up from 29% last week. Forty-nine percent (49%) say the same about Biden.
However, following the Wednesday night speech, voters are fairly evenly divided as to whether Palin or Obama has the better experience to be President. Forty-four percent (44%) of voters say Palin has the better experience while 48% say Obama has the edge. Among unaffiliated voters, 45% say Obama has better experience while 42% say Palin.
Fifty-eight percent (58%) of voters say that Palin’s speech helped McCain’s chances of becoming President while only 10% believe it hurt those prospects.
While Palin’s numbers are stunning today, it remains to be seen how the Alaska Governor’s numbers will hold up through the next two months. She has made a tremendous first impression, but the country will get to know her a lot better between now and November.
Palin Power: Fresh Face Now More Popular Than Obama, McCain
Friday, September 05, 2008
A week ago, most Americans had never heard of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Now, following a Vice Presidential acceptance speech viewed live by more than 40 million people, Palin is viewed favorably by 58% of American voters. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 37% hold an unfavorable view of the self-described hockey mom.
The figures include 40% with a Very Favorable opinion of Palin and 18% with a Very Unfavorable view (full demographic crosstabs are available for Premium Members). Before her acceptance speech, Palin was viewed favorably by 52%. A week ago, 67% had never heard of her.
The new data also shows significant increases in the number who say McCain made the right choice and the number who say Palin is ready to be President. Generally, John McCain’s choice of Palin earns slightly better reviews than Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden.
Perhaps most stunning is the fact that Palin’s favorable ratings are now a point higher than either man at the top of the Presidential tickets this year. As of Friday morning, Obama and McCain are each viewed favorably by 57% of voters. Biden is viewed favorably by 48%.
There is a strong partisan gap when it comes to perceptions of Palin. Eighty-nine percent (89%) of Republicans give her favorable reviews along with 33% of Democrats and 59% of voters not affiliated with either major party.
She earns positive reviews from 65% of men and 52% of women. The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll shows that Obama continues to lead McCain among women voters while McCain leads among men. The Friday morning update—the first to include interviews conducted after Palin’s speech--showed the beginning of a Republican convention bounce that may match Obama’s bounce from last week.
Fifty-one percent (51%) of Americans believe that most reporters are trying to hurt Palin’s campaign, a fact that may enhance her own ratings.
The Palin pick has also improved perceptions of John McCain. A week ago, just before he introduced his running mate, just 42% of Republicans had a Very Favorable opinion of their party’s nominee. That figure jumped to 54% by this Friday morning. Among unaffiliated voters, favorable opinions of McCain have increased by eleven percentage points in a week—from 54% before the Palin announcement to 65% today.
Fifty-one percent (51%) of all voters now believe that McCain made the right choice when he picked Palin to be his running mate while 32% disagree. By way of comparison, on the night after Biden gave his acceptance speech, 47% said that Obama made the right choice.
Eighty-one percent (81%) of Republicans say that McCain made the right choice while just 69% of Democrats said the same about Obama.
Among unaffiliated voters, 52% said that McCain made the right choice for his running mate and 45% said the same about Obama.
Forty percent (40%) now say that Palin is ready to be President, if necessary. That’s up from 29% last week. Forty-nine percent (49%) say the same about Biden.
However, following the Wednesday night speech, voters are fairly evenly divided as to whether Palin or Obama has the better experience to be President. Forty-four percent (44%) of voters say Palin has the better experience while 48% say Obama has the edge. Among unaffiliated voters, 45% say Obama has better experience while 42% say Palin.
Fifty-eight percent (58%) of voters say that Palin’s speech helped McCain’s chances of becoming President while only 10% believe it hurt those prospects.
While Palin’s numbers are stunning today, it remains to be seen how the Alaska Governor’s numbers will hold up through the next two months. She has made a tremendous first impression, but the country will get to know her a lot better between now and November.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
How Obama lost the election
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JI03Aa02.html
Sep 3, 2008
How Obama lost the election
By Spengler
DENVER - Senator Barack Obama's acceptance speech last week seemed vastly different from the stands of this city's Invesco Stadium than it did to the 40 million who saw it on television. Melancholy hung like think smog over the reserved seats where I sat with Democratic Party staffers. The crowd, of course, cheered mechanically at the tag lines, flourished placards, and even rose for the obligatory wave around the stadium. But its mood was sour. The air carried the acrid smell of defeat, and the crowd took shallow breaths. Even the appearance of R&B great Stevie Wonder failed to get the blood pumping.
The speech itself dragged on for three-quarters of an hour. As David S Broder wrote in the Washington Post: "[Obama's] recital of a long list of domestic promises could have been delivered by any Democratic nominee from Walter Mondale to John Kerry. There was no theme music to the speech and really no phrase or sentence that is likely to linger in the memory of any listener. The thing I never expected did in fact occur: Al Gore, the famously wooden former vice president, gave a more lively and convincing speech than Obama did."
On television, Obama's spectacle might have looked like The Ten Commandments, but inside the stadium it felt like Night of the Living Dead. The longer the candidate spoke, and the more money he promised to spend on alternative energy, preschool education, universal health care, and other components of the Democratic pinata, the lower the party professionals slouched into their seats. The professionals I sat with were Hillary Clinton people, to be sure, and had reason to sulk, for an Obama victory might do them little good in any event.
The Democrats were watching the brightest and most articulate presidential candidate they have fielded since John F Kennedy snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And this was before John McCain, in a maneuver worthy of Admiral Chester Nimitz at the Battle of Midway, turned tables on the Democrats' strategy with the choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.
Speaking to Obama supporters on the periphery of the big event, I was startled by the rapturous devotion elicited by the junior senator from Illinois. He is no symbol for identity politics, no sacrifice on the altar of white guilt, but the most gifted persuader of individuals that I have encountered in any country's politics, as well as a powerful orator on the grand stage. This is not a crowd phenomenon nor a fad, but the response of hundreds of people to an individual.
I sat in on a session with three leaders of Veterans for Obama, a group of retired young officers who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, courtesy of the New Republic's writer on the scene, David Samuels. With passion and enthusiasm, these young people spoke of their hopes for nation-building in Iraq. The George W Bush administration should have put twice the resources into the beleaguered country, they harangued me - not just soldiers, but agronomists, traffic cops, lawyers, judges, and physicians. The Department of Agriculture should have mobilized, along with the Department of Justice.
Nation-building? Doubling down on the US commitment to Iraq? Isn't that trying to out-Bush the Bush administration, while Obama campaigned on getting out of Iraq and spending the money on programs at home? Unblinking, one of the soldiers said, "That's what we think Barack will do." They believed in a more expensive version of the administration's program, and faulted Bush for half measures - and somehow they believed that Obama really agreed with them, all the public evidence to the contrary. And they believed in Barack with perfect faith.
Gandalf's warnings about the irresistible voice of the wizard Saruman in J R R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings come to mind. If these battle-hardened veterans of America's wars fell so easily under the spell of Obama's voice, who can withstand it? Obama's persuasive powers, though, are strongest when channeled through the empathy of his interlocutor. Everyone believes that Obama feels his pain, shares his dream, and will fight his fight and heal his ills. But that is everyone as an individual. Add all the individuals up into a campaign platform, and it turns into three-quarters of an hour worth of promises that echo all the ghosts of conventions past.
Obama will spend the rest of his life wondering why he rejected the obvious road to victory, that is, choosing Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential nominee. However reluctantly, Clinton would have had to accept. McCain's choice of vice presidential candidate made obvious after the fact what the party professionals felt in their fingertips at the stadium extravaganza yesterday: rejecting Clinton in favor of the colorless, unpopular, tangle-tongued Washington perennial Joe Biden was a statement of weakness. McCain's selection was a statement of strength. America's voters will forgive many things in a politician, including sexual misconduct, but they will not forgive weakness.
That is why McCain will win in November, and by a landslide, barring some unforeseen event. Obama is the most talented and persuasive politician of his generation, the intellectual superior of all his competitors, but a fatally insecure personality. American voters are not intellectual, but they are shrewd, like animals. They can smell insecurity, and the convention stank of it. Obama's prospective defeat is entirely of its own making. No one is more surprised than Republican strategists, who were convinced just weeks ago that a weakening economy ensured a Democratic victory.
Biden, who won 3% of the popular vote in the Democratic presidential primary in his home state of Delaware, and 1% or less in every other contest he entered, is ballot-box poison. Obama evidently chose him to assuage critics who point to his lack of foreign policy credentials. That was a deadly error, for by appearing to concede the critics' claim that he knows little about foreign policy, Obama raised questions about whether he is qualified to be president in the first place. He had a winning alternative, which was to pick Clinton. That would have sent a double message: first, that Obama is tough enough to make the slippery Clintons into his subordinates, and second, that he is generous enough to extend a hand to his toughest adversary in the cause of unity.
Why didn't Obama choose Hillary? The most credible explanation came from veteran columnist Robert Novak May 10, who reports that Michelle Obama vetoed Hillary's candidacy. "The Democratic front-runner's wife did not comment on other rival candidates for the party's nomination, but she has been sniping at Clinton since last summer. According to Obama sources, those public utterances do not reveal the extent of her hostility," Novak wrote. If that is true, then Obama succumbed to the character weakness I described in a February 26 profile of (Obama's women reveal his secret). His peculiar dependency on an assertive and often rancorous spouse, I argued, made him vulnerable, and predicted that Obama "will destroy himself before he destroys the country".
Alternately, Obama might have chosen a rising Democratic star like Virginia's 50-year-old governor Tim Kaine. A weaker choice than Hillary, Kaine (or someone like him) would have made a bold statement of self-confidence. Obama could have said with credibility that he would bring to Washington a new generation of outsiders who would change the old system. Instead, Obama saddled an old and unpopular Washington warhorse.
Curiously, Obama ignored the rising stars of his own party, offering the prime time speaking slots to familiar faces, including Senator Edward Kennedy and Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as his own wife, the first prospective First Lady to take the keynote spot in the history of American party conventions.
McCain doesn't have a tenth of Obama's synaptic fire-power, but he is a nasty old sailor who knows when to come about for a broadside. Given Obama's defensive, even wimpy selection of a running-mate, McCain's choice was obvious. He picked the available candidate most like himself: a maverick with impeccable reform credentials, a risk-seeking commercial fisherwoman and huntress married to a marathon snowmobile racer who carries a steelworkers union card. The Democratic order of battle was to tie McCain to the Bush administration and attack McCain by attacking Bush. With Palin on the ticket, McCain has re-emerged as the maverick he really is.
The young Alaskan governor, to be sure, hasn't any business running for vice president of the United States with her thin resume. McCain and his people know this perfectly well, and that is precisely why they put her on the ticket. If Palin is unqualified to be vice president, all the less so is Obama qualified to be president.
McCain has certified his authenticity for the voters. He's now the outsider, the reformer, the maverick, the war hero running next to the Alaskan amazon with a union steelworker spouse. Obama, who styled himself an agent of change, took his image for granted, and attempted to ensure himself victory by doing the cautious thing. He is trapped in a losing position, and there is nothing he can do to get out of it.
Obama, in short, is long on brains and short on guts. A Shibboleth of American politics holds that different tactics are required to win the party primaries as opposed to the general election, that is, by pandering to fringe groups with disproportionate influence in the primaries. But Obama did not compromise himself with extreme positions. He did not have to, for younger voters who greeted him with near-religious fervor did not require that he take any position other than his promise to change everything. Obama could have allied with the old guard, through an Obama-Clinton ticket, or he could have rejected the old guard by choosing the closest thing the Democrats had to a Sarah Palin. But fear paralyzed him, and he did neither.
In my February 26 profile, I called Obama "the political equivalent of a sociopath", without any derogatory intent. A sociopath seeks the empathy of all around him while empathizing with no one. Obama has an almost magical ability to gain the confidence of those around him. Perhaps it was the adaptation of a bright and sensitive young boy who was abandoned by three parents - his Kenyan father Barack Obama Sr, who left his pregnant young bride; his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetero; and by his mother, Ann Dunham, who sent her 10-year-old son to live with her grandparents while she pursued her career as an anthropologist.
Combine a child's response to serial abandonment with the perspective of an outsider, and Obama became an alien species against which American politics had no natural defenses. He is a Third World anthropologist profiling Americans, in but not of the American system. No country's politics depends more openly on friendships than America's, yet Obama has not a single real friend, for he rose so fast that all his acquaintances become rungs on the ladder of his ascent. One human relationship crowds the others out of his life, his marriage to Michelle, a strong, assertive and very angry woman.
If Novak's report is accurate, then Michelle's anger will have lost the election for Obama, as Achilles' anger nearly killed the Greek cause in the Trojan War. But the responsibility rests not with Michelle, but with Obama. Obama's failure of nerve at the cusp of his success is consistent with my profile of the candidate, in which I predicted that he would self-destruct. It's happening faster than I expected. As I wrote last February:
It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama ... Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they wish for. As the horrible example of Obama's father shows, there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals.
By all rights, the Democrats should win this election. They will lose, I predict, because of the flawed character of their candidate.
Sep 3, 2008
How Obama lost the election
By Spengler
DENVER - Senator Barack Obama's acceptance speech last week seemed vastly different from the stands of this city's Invesco Stadium than it did to the 40 million who saw it on television. Melancholy hung like think smog over the reserved seats where I sat with Democratic Party staffers. The crowd, of course, cheered mechanically at the tag lines, flourished placards, and even rose for the obligatory wave around the stadium. But its mood was sour. The air carried the acrid smell of defeat, and the crowd took shallow breaths. Even the appearance of R&B great Stevie Wonder failed to get the blood pumping.
The speech itself dragged on for three-quarters of an hour. As David S Broder wrote in the Washington Post: "[Obama's] recital of a long list of domestic promises could have been delivered by any Democratic nominee from Walter Mondale to John Kerry. There was no theme music to the speech and really no phrase or sentence that is likely to linger in the memory of any listener. The thing I never expected did in fact occur: Al Gore, the famously wooden former vice president, gave a more lively and convincing speech than Obama did."
On television, Obama's spectacle might have looked like The Ten Commandments, but inside the stadium it felt like Night of the Living Dead. The longer the candidate spoke, and the more money he promised to spend on alternative energy, preschool education, universal health care, and other components of the Democratic pinata, the lower the party professionals slouched into their seats. The professionals I sat with were Hillary Clinton people, to be sure, and had reason to sulk, for an Obama victory might do them little good in any event.
The Democrats were watching the brightest and most articulate presidential candidate they have fielded since John F Kennedy snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And this was before John McCain, in a maneuver worthy of Admiral Chester Nimitz at the Battle of Midway, turned tables on the Democrats' strategy with the choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.
Speaking to Obama supporters on the periphery of the big event, I was startled by the rapturous devotion elicited by the junior senator from Illinois. He is no symbol for identity politics, no sacrifice on the altar of white guilt, but the most gifted persuader of individuals that I have encountered in any country's politics, as well as a powerful orator on the grand stage. This is not a crowd phenomenon nor a fad, but the response of hundreds of people to an individual.
I sat in on a session with three leaders of Veterans for Obama, a group of retired young officers who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, courtesy of the New Republic's writer on the scene, David Samuels. With passion and enthusiasm, these young people spoke of their hopes for nation-building in Iraq. The George W Bush administration should have put twice the resources into the beleaguered country, they harangued me - not just soldiers, but agronomists, traffic cops, lawyers, judges, and physicians. The Department of Agriculture should have mobilized, along with the Department of Justice.
Nation-building? Doubling down on the US commitment to Iraq? Isn't that trying to out-Bush the Bush administration, while Obama campaigned on getting out of Iraq and spending the money on programs at home? Unblinking, one of the soldiers said, "That's what we think Barack will do." They believed in a more expensive version of the administration's program, and faulted Bush for half measures - and somehow they believed that Obama really agreed with them, all the public evidence to the contrary. And they believed in Barack with perfect faith.
Gandalf's warnings about the irresistible voice of the wizard Saruman in J R R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings come to mind. If these battle-hardened veterans of America's wars fell so easily under the spell of Obama's voice, who can withstand it? Obama's persuasive powers, though, are strongest when channeled through the empathy of his interlocutor. Everyone believes that Obama feels his pain, shares his dream, and will fight his fight and heal his ills. But that is everyone as an individual. Add all the individuals up into a campaign platform, and it turns into three-quarters of an hour worth of promises that echo all the ghosts of conventions past.
Obama will spend the rest of his life wondering why he rejected the obvious road to victory, that is, choosing Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential nominee. However reluctantly, Clinton would have had to accept. McCain's choice of vice presidential candidate made obvious after the fact what the party professionals felt in their fingertips at the stadium extravaganza yesterday: rejecting Clinton in favor of the colorless, unpopular, tangle-tongued Washington perennial Joe Biden was a statement of weakness. McCain's selection was a statement of strength. America's voters will forgive many things in a politician, including sexual misconduct, but they will not forgive weakness.
That is why McCain will win in November, and by a landslide, barring some unforeseen event. Obama is the most talented and persuasive politician of his generation, the intellectual superior of all his competitors, but a fatally insecure personality. American voters are not intellectual, but they are shrewd, like animals. They can smell insecurity, and the convention stank of it. Obama's prospective defeat is entirely of its own making. No one is more surprised than Republican strategists, who were convinced just weeks ago that a weakening economy ensured a Democratic victory.
Biden, who won 3% of the popular vote in the Democratic presidential primary in his home state of Delaware, and 1% or less in every other contest he entered, is ballot-box poison. Obama evidently chose him to assuage critics who point to his lack of foreign policy credentials. That was a deadly error, for by appearing to concede the critics' claim that he knows little about foreign policy, Obama raised questions about whether he is qualified to be president in the first place. He had a winning alternative, which was to pick Clinton. That would have sent a double message: first, that Obama is tough enough to make the slippery Clintons into his subordinates, and second, that he is generous enough to extend a hand to his toughest adversary in the cause of unity.
Why didn't Obama choose Hillary? The most credible explanation came from veteran columnist Robert Novak May 10, who reports that Michelle Obama vetoed Hillary's candidacy. "The Democratic front-runner's wife did not comment on other rival candidates for the party's nomination, but she has been sniping at Clinton since last summer. According to Obama sources, those public utterances do not reveal the extent of her hostility," Novak wrote. If that is true, then Obama succumbed to the character weakness I described in a February 26 profile of (Obama's women reveal his secret). His peculiar dependency on an assertive and often rancorous spouse, I argued, made him vulnerable, and predicted that Obama "will destroy himself before he destroys the country".
Alternately, Obama might have chosen a rising Democratic star like Virginia's 50-year-old governor Tim Kaine. A weaker choice than Hillary, Kaine (or someone like him) would have made a bold statement of self-confidence. Obama could have said with credibility that he would bring to Washington a new generation of outsiders who would change the old system. Instead, Obama saddled an old and unpopular Washington warhorse.
Curiously, Obama ignored the rising stars of his own party, offering the prime time speaking slots to familiar faces, including Senator Edward Kennedy and Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as his own wife, the first prospective First Lady to take the keynote spot in the history of American party conventions.
McCain doesn't have a tenth of Obama's synaptic fire-power, but he is a nasty old sailor who knows when to come about for a broadside. Given Obama's defensive, even wimpy selection of a running-mate, McCain's choice was obvious. He picked the available candidate most like himself: a maverick with impeccable reform credentials, a risk-seeking commercial fisherwoman and huntress married to a marathon snowmobile racer who carries a steelworkers union card. The Democratic order of battle was to tie McCain to the Bush administration and attack McCain by attacking Bush. With Palin on the ticket, McCain has re-emerged as the maverick he really is.
The young Alaskan governor, to be sure, hasn't any business running for vice president of the United States with her thin resume. McCain and his people know this perfectly well, and that is precisely why they put her on the ticket. If Palin is unqualified to be vice president, all the less so is Obama qualified to be president.
McCain has certified his authenticity for the voters. He's now the outsider, the reformer, the maverick, the war hero running next to the Alaskan amazon with a union steelworker spouse. Obama, who styled himself an agent of change, took his image for granted, and attempted to ensure himself victory by doing the cautious thing. He is trapped in a losing position, and there is nothing he can do to get out of it.
Obama, in short, is long on brains and short on guts. A Shibboleth of American politics holds that different tactics are required to win the party primaries as opposed to the general election, that is, by pandering to fringe groups with disproportionate influence in the primaries. But Obama did not compromise himself with extreme positions. He did not have to, for younger voters who greeted him with near-religious fervor did not require that he take any position other than his promise to change everything. Obama could have allied with the old guard, through an Obama-Clinton ticket, or he could have rejected the old guard by choosing the closest thing the Democrats had to a Sarah Palin. But fear paralyzed him, and he did neither.
In my February 26 profile, I called Obama "the political equivalent of a sociopath", without any derogatory intent. A sociopath seeks the empathy of all around him while empathizing with no one. Obama has an almost magical ability to gain the confidence of those around him. Perhaps it was the adaptation of a bright and sensitive young boy who was abandoned by three parents - his Kenyan father Barack Obama Sr, who left his pregnant young bride; his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetero; and by his mother, Ann Dunham, who sent her 10-year-old son to live with her grandparents while she pursued her career as an anthropologist.
Combine a child's response to serial abandonment with the perspective of an outsider, and Obama became an alien species against which American politics had no natural defenses. He is a Third World anthropologist profiling Americans, in but not of the American system. No country's politics depends more openly on friendships than America's, yet Obama has not a single real friend, for he rose so fast that all his acquaintances become rungs on the ladder of his ascent. One human relationship crowds the others out of his life, his marriage to Michelle, a strong, assertive and very angry woman.
If Novak's report is accurate, then Michelle's anger will have lost the election for Obama, as Achilles' anger nearly killed the Greek cause in the Trojan War. But the responsibility rests not with Michelle, but with Obama. Obama's failure of nerve at the cusp of his success is consistent with my profile of the candidate, in which I predicted that he would self-destruct. It's happening faster than I expected. As I wrote last February:
It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama ... Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they wish for. As the horrible example of Obama's father shows, there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals.
By all rights, the Democrats should win this election. They will lose, I predict, because of the flawed character of their candidate.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Motormouth Joe Biden
http://rense.com/general83/biden.htm
Motormouth Joe Biden - Warmonger, Wordmonger And Political Hit Man
By Webster G. Tarpley
8-25-8
WASHINGTON DC -- The vice presidential candidate chosen to run with Obama is Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, a discredited, sleazy, and shopworn political hack -- and therefore an anti-climax for all the callow and feckless youth who got the word via text message at 3am in the morning. The ability of the Trilateral-Bilderberg machine which controls Obama to put up a person like Biden already reflects the further degradation of US political life over the past 9-12 months, largely as a result of Obama's own demagogic, no- issues, personality cult agitation.
A year ago, there was wide agreement in the US middle class that Bush and Cheney should be impeached, that the police state be rolled back, and that the Iraq war should be ended as soon as physically possible. Thanks largely to the advent of the vapid and messianic Obama, these issues have now been thoroughly deflated. Biden is himself an incurable warmonger who voted for the Iraq war and blathered ceaselessly in favor of Bush's aggressive adventure to all who would listen. Naming Biden is a brutal insult to the antiwar majority of the Democratic Party, and Obama is obviously hoping that the Iraq war issue is dead, so nobody will care. Last year, Obama promised that he would work against the mentality that produced Iraq; if anyone incarnates that mentality, it is Biden. Biden is an incurable imperialist and an eager advocate of the discredited Bush-Cheney "war on terror." He even tried to use one of the Democratic debates last year to whip up hysteria in favor of attacking Sudan over the Darfur issue, and with some success. "I went there. I sat in the borders. I went in those camps. They're going to have thousands and thousands and thousands of people die. We've got to stop talking and act," Biden postured in Manchester New Hampshire on June 3, 2007 in an apparent call for bombing Sudan, a coup in Khartoum, or an invasion. Incredibly, the crowd applauded wildly.
Biden remains convinced that it is up to the United States to dictate the form of government and economic system of virtually every country in the world. His specialty is blatant interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, with left-cover of soft power issues like human rights and humanitarian concerns furnishing his favorite pretexts. Biden has learned nothing from the Iraq debacle except that Iraq was not the right victim; more appropriate victims and more effective methods will have to be found, argues Biden. The real lesson of Iraq (and Lebanon 2006) is that US-British imperialism and world domination are finished historically, but this is lost on Biden.
Biden is the author of the odious plan to balkanize, partition, and subdivide Iraq into three zones: a Kurdish state designed to carve up Iran, Syria and Turkey as well as Iraq; a landlocked and oil- poor Sunni desert entity; and an oil-rich Shiastan in the south that might absorb the Arabistan or Achwaz province of Iran is a later breakup scenario for Iran. Biden's plan is a continuation of the Bernard Lewis plan to break up the existing states of the Middle East in a way destined to create a mosaic of pseudo- independent, squabbling mini-states or micro-states. This approach places Biden squarely behind the Zbigniew Brzezinski "dignity" doctrine of breaking up the existing nation states of the world in favor of a crazy quilt of micro-states based on ethnic and religious parochialism and particularism; not one of these micro- states could stand up to Exxon-Mobil or JP Morgan Chase.
BIDEN IS MORALLY INSANE ON GEORGIA
Biden's ample track record as an agent provocateur against Russia goes back more than a decade to the time he mobilized his mouth to help demonize Milosevic of Serbia as part of the Albright-Holbrooke- Wesley Clark anti-Russian campaign of those years, which ended with the NATO bombing of Serbia, an act of unprecedented historical vandalism. In the past week, warmonger Biden has rushed to the side of the latest tin pot mini-Mussolini of the Brzezinski-Soros faction, the infamous war criminal and gangster Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia. "I left the country convinced that Russia's invasion of Georgia may be the one of the most significant events to occur in Europe since the end of communism," raved Biden on his return, documenting his own moral insanity by siding with the aggressor. "The claims of Georgian atrocities that provided the pretext for Russia's invasion are rapidly being disproved by international observers, and the continuing presence of Russian forces in the country has severe implications for the broader region," added the Orwellian senator.
BIDEN: $1 BILLION FOR MADMAN SAAKASHVILI
In presenting Biden, Barky reveled in Biden's "tough message" for Russia; we are sure Putin is trembling. Biden wants to prop up the madman Saakashvili with $1 billion of the US taxpayers' money, a gesture which is every bit as obscene as the worst Bush-Cheney excesses. $1 billion would get us on the road to fully funding a program like WIC (high-protein foods for expectant mothers) or Head Start, but this thought does not occur to Biden when he is trying to provoke Russia. We can see the cruel elitism of a financier- controlled Obama regime taking place before our eyes.
Obama and Biden resemble each other closely, Both are insufferable windbags besotted with their own rhetorical verbiage. Biden's celebrated gaffes will provide comic relief, as long as they do not gaffe us into World War III, which is always a distinct possibility. Obama and Biden are addicted to the sound of their own voices, and this may turn out to be the fatal flaw that sinks them when the voters get sick of the endless parade of speeches. Obama and Biden are in danger of drowning in their own endless blabber. Each one has more than a touch of megalomania, which prevents them from seeing their limits. Biden's middle name is Robinette, which is close to the term for a faucet tap in French. Biden has never been able to find the tap to turn off his own mouth.
TWO PLAGIARISTS ON THE DEMOCRATIC TICKET
Obama and Biden are both plagiarists; words are their stock in trade, and even the words are fake. It emerged this spring that Obama was spouting verbatim the canned speeches of Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, his fellow clone from the Trilateral stable. Biden is a picaresque paladin of plagiarism. His 1988 presidential campaign was aborted when he was found to have stolen paragraphs of a speech by the Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock. He had also embroidered his campaign biography. Biden had also been guilty of plagiarism at the Syracuse University law school which he attended, but he had somehow talked his way out of those charges.
BIDEN A CREATURE OF THE WORST CREDIT CARD GOUGERS
Biden represents Delaware in the US Senate. Delaware is not a state, but a giant post box for Dupont, General Motors, and many of the giant corporations and Wall Street firms. The state politics of Delaware are dictated down to the most minute detail by the bankers and their corporate lackeys, since everything depends on keeping a pro-oligarchical political climate in the state. Biden personally is a tool of MBNA, a credit card issuer that was recently absorbed by the Bank of America, which presumably now also owns Biden. Biden got at least $215,000 from MBNA over the past decade. MBNA is notoriously one of the biggest predatory lenders and interest rate gougers in the entire usurious world of credit cards, and Biden's services to them are precisely in this area: Biden was a big supporter of the 2005 bankruptcy law which makes it much harder for working families to escape debt bondage and debt slavery just what the looters at MBNA ordered. Biden has also boasted that he wrote the ban on assault weapons, a measure that is sure to cause problems among the bitter clingers of Appalachia who are concerned about gun ownership.
Obama has voted for the rotten compromise on FISA illegal wiretaps ordered by Bush that grants retroactive immunity to the telecoms. Biden is also an enthusiastic police state totalitarian. In 1995, after the Oklahoma City false flag bombing, Biden submitted an oppressive police state bill, in many ways a precursor of Bush's infamous Patriot Act. "I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing," boasts Biden. "And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill." Biden's only regret is that he was not able to undermine political freedom as much as he wanted to.
Obama's drooling acolytes have argued all summer that to name Senator Clinton to the ticket would negate Barky's profile of youth, change, hope, and so forth. Clinton has been a national figure for almost twenty years, but she has been dumped in favor of Biden, who has been in the US Senate for about 36 years and is about as stale and hackneyed as a political figure could be. The difference is that Biden's track record established him as an obedient servant of the Wall Street banks that have their post box headquarters in his state; the Clintons, by contrast, represent the closest thing we have to political combination not wholly owned by Wall Street and capable of saying no to the bankers when they demand austerity and aggression, as they are assuredly doing now. Rockefeller and Soros do not want Sen. Clinton in the presidential succession under any circumstances, and this is an important positive qualification for the New York senator.
BEAU BIDEN, THE CORRUPT ATTORNEY GENERAL OF DELAWARE
Joe Biden's son is Beau Biden, the current attorney general of Delaware. Beau is involved in one of the dirtiest enemies' list operations in recent memory against Larry Sinclair, who has come forward with explosive charges of gay sex and crack cocaine use in 1999 on the part of Obama. When Sinclair came to the National Press Club in Washington on June 18 to make his case, he was arrested on a trumped-up warrant issued by Beau Biden. Sinclair is being threatened with a long jail term, essentially because he has spoken out against Obama. It was a clear bid to do a favor for Barky and get Joe Biden on the ticket in the veep slot. That has now occurred on the basis of a police state operation against an outspoken political opponent which goes beyond Nixon or Bush- Cheney, since Obama is not yet president and may well never be.
The Biden announcement was thoroughly botched and bungled by Axelrod, Plouffe, and Favreau. The text message gimmick is drawn straight from the Kiev Orange revolution of 2004 and the Tiflis Roses revolution of 2003, the models for Obama's attempt to seize power. The proceedings were a carnival of gaffes and Freudian slips, all ignored by Obama's loyal brigade of media whores. According to Barky, Joe Biden would help enact "a new energy policy to freeze ourselves from our dependence on foreign oil" a chilling prospect.
"BARACK AMERICA" AND OTHER FREUDIAN SLIPS
Barky made another revealing Freudian slip: "the next President the next Vice President Joe Biden." Does Barky know that Biden will act as his resident in-house controller? Biden, evidently mindful that he will have to sell the radical subversive Obama as a wholesome product of the heartland, returned the gaffe by calling the presumptive nominee "Barack America" or "Barack American." Perhaps he was trying to imitate the old Subliminal Man of Saturday Night Live, but was too slow.
Behind Barky's Freudian slip is the fact that Biden will evidently run foreign policy for the clueless Obama in much the same way that Brzezinski ran foreign policy above and behind Carter, or that Cheney has run foreign policy above and behind Bush. Obama is so ignorant and cognitively impaired that he could hardly understand the instructions that bankers' spokesmen like Brzezinski and Soros will be shouting to him on the phone. This is where an experienced hack like Biden is needed. The media, in a transparent attempt to portray an apostolic succession for Biden, are still feeding the illusion that Biden was chosen by Caroline Kennedy. In reality, the choice was probably made by Trilateral-Bilderberg operative Jim Johnson, who was forced to retreat from his announced role as The Vetter by revelations about a sweetheart mortgage, but probably just kept going behind the scenes.
The Obama campaign has repeated ad nauseam its mantra that McCain is running for Bush's third term. McCain has answered that Obama is running for Jimmy Carter's second term. The reality may be that Joe Biden is running for Dick Cheney's third term as the resident controller of a lazy and shallow puppet president Obama, the Manchurian candidate of the Trilateral Commission.
Webster G. Tarpley is the author of Obama: The Postmodern Coup, and Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography, both published by Progressive Press of California.
Motormouth Joe Biden - Warmonger, Wordmonger And Political Hit Man
By Webster G. Tarpley
8-25-8
WASHINGTON DC -- The vice presidential candidate chosen to run with Obama is Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, a discredited, sleazy, and shopworn political hack -- and therefore an anti-climax for all the callow and feckless youth who got the word via text message at 3am in the morning. The ability of the Trilateral-Bilderberg machine which controls Obama to put up a person like Biden already reflects the further degradation of US political life over the past 9-12 months, largely as a result of Obama's own demagogic, no- issues, personality cult agitation.
A year ago, there was wide agreement in the US middle class that Bush and Cheney should be impeached, that the police state be rolled back, and that the Iraq war should be ended as soon as physically possible. Thanks largely to the advent of the vapid and messianic Obama, these issues have now been thoroughly deflated. Biden is himself an incurable warmonger who voted for the Iraq war and blathered ceaselessly in favor of Bush's aggressive adventure to all who would listen. Naming Biden is a brutal insult to the antiwar majority of the Democratic Party, and Obama is obviously hoping that the Iraq war issue is dead, so nobody will care. Last year, Obama promised that he would work against the mentality that produced Iraq; if anyone incarnates that mentality, it is Biden. Biden is an incurable imperialist and an eager advocate of the discredited Bush-Cheney "war on terror." He even tried to use one of the Democratic debates last year to whip up hysteria in favor of attacking Sudan over the Darfur issue, and with some success. "I went there. I sat in the borders. I went in those camps. They're going to have thousands and thousands and thousands of people die. We've got to stop talking and act," Biden postured in Manchester New Hampshire on June 3, 2007 in an apparent call for bombing Sudan, a coup in Khartoum, or an invasion. Incredibly, the crowd applauded wildly.
Biden remains convinced that it is up to the United States to dictate the form of government and economic system of virtually every country in the world. His specialty is blatant interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, with left-cover of soft power issues like human rights and humanitarian concerns furnishing his favorite pretexts. Biden has learned nothing from the Iraq debacle except that Iraq was not the right victim; more appropriate victims and more effective methods will have to be found, argues Biden. The real lesson of Iraq (and Lebanon 2006) is that US-British imperialism and world domination are finished historically, but this is lost on Biden.
Biden is the author of the odious plan to balkanize, partition, and subdivide Iraq into three zones: a Kurdish state designed to carve up Iran, Syria and Turkey as well as Iraq; a landlocked and oil- poor Sunni desert entity; and an oil-rich Shiastan in the south that might absorb the Arabistan or Achwaz province of Iran is a later breakup scenario for Iran. Biden's plan is a continuation of the Bernard Lewis plan to break up the existing states of the Middle East in a way destined to create a mosaic of pseudo- independent, squabbling mini-states or micro-states. This approach places Biden squarely behind the Zbigniew Brzezinski "dignity" doctrine of breaking up the existing nation states of the world in favor of a crazy quilt of micro-states based on ethnic and religious parochialism and particularism; not one of these micro- states could stand up to Exxon-Mobil or JP Morgan Chase.
BIDEN IS MORALLY INSANE ON GEORGIA
Biden's ample track record as an agent provocateur against Russia goes back more than a decade to the time he mobilized his mouth to help demonize Milosevic of Serbia as part of the Albright-Holbrooke- Wesley Clark anti-Russian campaign of those years, which ended with the NATO bombing of Serbia, an act of unprecedented historical vandalism. In the past week, warmonger Biden has rushed to the side of the latest tin pot mini-Mussolini of the Brzezinski-Soros faction, the infamous war criminal and gangster Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia. "I left the country convinced that Russia's invasion of Georgia may be the one of the most significant events to occur in Europe since the end of communism," raved Biden on his return, documenting his own moral insanity by siding with the aggressor. "The claims of Georgian atrocities that provided the pretext for Russia's invasion are rapidly being disproved by international observers, and the continuing presence of Russian forces in the country has severe implications for the broader region," added the Orwellian senator.
BIDEN: $1 BILLION FOR MADMAN SAAKASHVILI
In presenting Biden, Barky reveled in Biden's "tough message" for Russia; we are sure Putin is trembling. Biden wants to prop up the madman Saakashvili with $1 billion of the US taxpayers' money, a gesture which is every bit as obscene as the worst Bush-Cheney excesses. $1 billion would get us on the road to fully funding a program like WIC (high-protein foods for expectant mothers) or Head Start, but this thought does not occur to Biden when he is trying to provoke Russia. We can see the cruel elitism of a financier- controlled Obama regime taking place before our eyes.
Obama and Biden resemble each other closely, Both are insufferable windbags besotted with their own rhetorical verbiage. Biden's celebrated gaffes will provide comic relief, as long as they do not gaffe us into World War III, which is always a distinct possibility. Obama and Biden are addicted to the sound of their own voices, and this may turn out to be the fatal flaw that sinks them when the voters get sick of the endless parade of speeches. Obama and Biden are in danger of drowning in their own endless blabber. Each one has more than a touch of megalomania, which prevents them from seeing their limits. Biden's middle name is Robinette, which is close to the term for a faucet tap in French. Biden has never been able to find the tap to turn off his own mouth.
TWO PLAGIARISTS ON THE DEMOCRATIC TICKET
Obama and Biden are both plagiarists; words are their stock in trade, and even the words are fake. It emerged this spring that Obama was spouting verbatim the canned speeches of Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, his fellow clone from the Trilateral stable. Biden is a picaresque paladin of plagiarism. His 1988 presidential campaign was aborted when he was found to have stolen paragraphs of a speech by the Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock. He had also embroidered his campaign biography. Biden had also been guilty of plagiarism at the Syracuse University law school which he attended, but he had somehow talked his way out of those charges.
BIDEN A CREATURE OF THE WORST CREDIT CARD GOUGERS
Biden represents Delaware in the US Senate. Delaware is not a state, but a giant post box for Dupont, General Motors, and many of the giant corporations and Wall Street firms. The state politics of Delaware are dictated down to the most minute detail by the bankers and their corporate lackeys, since everything depends on keeping a pro-oligarchical political climate in the state. Biden personally is a tool of MBNA, a credit card issuer that was recently absorbed by the Bank of America, which presumably now also owns Biden. Biden got at least $215,000 from MBNA over the past decade. MBNA is notoriously one of the biggest predatory lenders and interest rate gougers in the entire usurious world of credit cards, and Biden's services to them are precisely in this area: Biden was a big supporter of the 2005 bankruptcy law which makes it much harder for working families to escape debt bondage and debt slavery just what the looters at MBNA ordered. Biden has also boasted that he wrote the ban on assault weapons, a measure that is sure to cause problems among the bitter clingers of Appalachia who are concerned about gun ownership.
Obama has voted for the rotten compromise on FISA illegal wiretaps ordered by Bush that grants retroactive immunity to the telecoms. Biden is also an enthusiastic police state totalitarian. In 1995, after the Oklahoma City false flag bombing, Biden submitted an oppressive police state bill, in many ways a precursor of Bush's infamous Patriot Act. "I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing," boasts Biden. "And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill." Biden's only regret is that he was not able to undermine political freedom as much as he wanted to.
Obama's drooling acolytes have argued all summer that to name Senator Clinton to the ticket would negate Barky's profile of youth, change, hope, and so forth. Clinton has been a national figure for almost twenty years, but she has been dumped in favor of Biden, who has been in the US Senate for about 36 years and is about as stale and hackneyed as a political figure could be. The difference is that Biden's track record established him as an obedient servant of the Wall Street banks that have their post box headquarters in his state; the Clintons, by contrast, represent the closest thing we have to political combination not wholly owned by Wall Street and capable of saying no to the bankers when they demand austerity and aggression, as they are assuredly doing now. Rockefeller and Soros do not want Sen. Clinton in the presidential succession under any circumstances, and this is an important positive qualification for the New York senator.
BEAU BIDEN, THE CORRUPT ATTORNEY GENERAL OF DELAWARE
Joe Biden's son is Beau Biden, the current attorney general of Delaware. Beau is involved in one of the dirtiest enemies' list operations in recent memory against Larry Sinclair, who has come forward with explosive charges of gay sex and crack cocaine use in 1999 on the part of Obama. When Sinclair came to the National Press Club in Washington on June 18 to make his case, he was arrested on a trumped-up warrant issued by Beau Biden. Sinclair is being threatened with a long jail term, essentially because he has spoken out against Obama. It was a clear bid to do a favor for Barky and get Joe Biden on the ticket in the veep slot. That has now occurred on the basis of a police state operation against an outspoken political opponent which goes beyond Nixon or Bush- Cheney, since Obama is not yet president and may well never be.
The Biden announcement was thoroughly botched and bungled by Axelrod, Plouffe, and Favreau. The text message gimmick is drawn straight from the Kiev Orange revolution of 2004 and the Tiflis Roses revolution of 2003, the models for Obama's attempt to seize power. The proceedings were a carnival of gaffes and Freudian slips, all ignored by Obama's loyal brigade of media whores. According to Barky, Joe Biden would help enact "a new energy policy to freeze ourselves from our dependence on foreign oil" a chilling prospect.
"BARACK AMERICA" AND OTHER FREUDIAN SLIPS
Barky made another revealing Freudian slip: "the next President the next Vice President Joe Biden." Does Barky know that Biden will act as his resident in-house controller? Biden, evidently mindful that he will have to sell the radical subversive Obama as a wholesome product of the heartland, returned the gaffe by calling the presumptive nominee "Barack America" or "Barack American." Perhaps he was trying to imitate the old Subliminal Man of Saturday Night Live, but was too slow.
Behind Barky's Freudian slip is the fact that Biden will evidently run foreign policy for the clueless Obama in much the same way that Brzezinski ran foreign policy above and behind Carter, or that Cheney has run foreign policy above and behind Bush. Obama is so ignorant and cognitively impaired that he could hardly understand the instructions that bankers' spokesmen like Brzezinski and Soros will be shouting to him on the phone. This is where an experienced hack like Biden is needed. The media, in a transparent attempt to portray an apostolic succession for Biden, are still feeding the illusion that Biden was chosen by Caroline Kennedy. In reality, the choice was probably made by Trilateral-Bilderberg operative Jim Johnson, who was forced to retreat from his announced role as The Vetter by revelations about a sweetheart mortgage, but probably just kept going behind the scenes.
The Obama campaign has repeated ad nauseam its mantra that McCain is running for Bush's third term. McCain has answered that Obama is running for Jimmy Carter's second term. The reality may be that Joe Biden is running for Dick Cheney's third term as the resident controller of a lazy and shallow puppet president Obama, the Manchurian candidate of the Trilateral Commission.
Webster G. Tarpley is the author of Obama: The Postmodern Coup, and Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography, both published by Progressive Press of California.
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