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[Kuros]

[ubermenzch]

richard engel (nbc news chief foreign correspondent) was on bill mahers show friday night. he has lived in the middle east for 14 years and speaks arabic.
i was for some reason surprised when he said that most people that he speaks to in the region believe barack obama is a muslim.
he also said that there has been a significant decrease in anti-american feelings in the middle east since his election. i realize that this can't really be put in the category of "achievement" by the obama administration, but still, thats's pretty good news.
on an admittedly superficial level, obama's presidency has seemingly created a more hospitable environment for progress in relations between the u.s. and the middle east. the hard work is yet to come. but as it concerns foreign policy in this region, i would say things look much less bleak than they did six months ago (except for that little pakistan problem).

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3MB snarled:

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[RJjr]

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Good grief, even George Bush thought Obama was the best choice for the country. Just look at what he said in his farewell speech:

[bacasper]

For many, his first 100 days have been disappointing, especially to "liberals."

A Lexicon of Disappointment
Lookout

By Naomi Klein

This article appeared in the May 4, 2009 edition of The Nation.
April 15, 2009

All is not well in Obamafanland. It's not clear exactly what accounts for the change of mood. Maybe it was the rancid smell emanating from Treasury's latest bank bailout. Or the news that the president's chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, earned millions from the very Wall Street banks and hedge funds he is protecting from reregulation now. Or perhaps it began earlier, with Obama's silence during Israel's Gaza attack.

Whatever the last straw, a growing number of Obama enthusiasts are starting to entertain the possibility that their man is not, in fact, going to save the world if we all just hope really hard.

This is a good thing. If the superfan culture that brought Obama to power is going to transform itself into an independent political movement, one fierce enough to produce programs capable of meeting the current crises, we are all going to have to stop hoping and start demanding.

The first stage, however, is to understand fully the awkward in-between space in which many US progressive movements find themselves. To do that, we need a new language, one specific to the Obama moment. Here is a start.

Hopeover. Like a hangover, a hopeover comes from having overindulged in something that felt good at the time but wasn't really all that healthy, leading to feelings of remorse, even shame. It's the political equivalent of the crash after a sugar high. Sample sentence: "When I listened to Obama's economic speech my heart soared. But then, when I tried to tell a friend about his plans for the millions of layoffs and foreclosures, I found myself saying nothing at all. I've got a serious hopeover."

Hoper coaster. Like a roller coaster, the hoper coaster describes the intense emotional peaks and valleys of the Obama era, the veering between joy at having a president who supports safe-sex education and despondency that single-payer healthcare is off the table at the very moment when it could actually become a reality. Sample sentence: "I was so psyched when Obama said he is closing Guant�namo. But now they are fighting like mad to make sure the prisoners in Bagram have no legal rights at all. Stop this hoper coaster--I want to get off!"

Hopesick. Like the homesick, hopesick individuals are intensely nostalgic. They miss the rush of optimism from the campaign trail and are forever trying to recapture that warm, hopey feeling--usually by exaggerating the significance of relatively minor acts of Obama decency. Sample sentences: "I was feeling really hopesick about the escalation in Afghanistan, but then I watched a YouTube video of Michelle in her organic garden and it felt like inauguration day all over again. A few hours later, when I heard that the Obama administration was boycotting a major UN racism conference, the hopesickness came back hard. So I watched slideshows of Michelle wearing clothes made by ethnically diverse independent fashion designers, and that sort of helped."

Hope fiend. With hope receding, the hope fiend, like the dope fiend, goes into serious withdrawal, willing to do anything to chase the buzz. (Closely related to hopesickness but more severe, usually affecting middle-aged males.) Sample sentence: "Joe told me he actually believes Obama deliberately brought in Summers so that he would blow the bailout, and then Obama would have the excuse he needs to do what he really wants: nationalize the banks and turn them into credit unions. What a hope fiend!"

Hopebreak. Like the heartbroken lover, the hopebroken Obama-ite is not mad but terribly sad. She projected messianic powers onto Obama and is now inconsolable in her disappointment. Sample sentence: "I really believed Obama would finally force us to confront the legacy of slavery in this country and start a serious national conversation about race. But now he never seems to mention race, and he's using twisted legal arguments to keep us from even confronting the crimes of the Bush years. Every time I hear him say 'move forward,' I'm hopebroken all over again."

Hopelash. Like a backlash, hopelash is a 180-degree reversal of everything Obama-related. Sufferers were once Obama's most passionate evangelists. Now they are his angriest critics. Sample sentence: "At least with Bush everyone knew he was an asshole. Now we've got the same wars, the same lawless prisons, the same Washington corruption, but everyone is cheering like Stepford wives. It's time for a full-on hopelash."

In trying to name these various hope-related ailments, I found myself wondering what the late Studs Terkel would have said about our collective hopeover. He surely would have urged us not to give in to despair. I reached for one of his last books, Hope Dies Last. I didn't have to read long. The book opens with the words: "Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up."

And that pretty much says it all. Hope was a fine slogan when rooting for a long-shot presidential candidate. But as a posture toward the president of the most powerful nation on earth, it is dangerously deferential. The task as we move forward (as Obama likes to say) is not to abandon hope but to find more appropriate homes for it--in the factories, neighborhoods and schools where tactics like sit-ins, squats and occupations are seeing a resurgence.

Political scientist Sam Gindin wrote recently that the labor movement can do more than protect the status quo. It can demand, for instance, that shuttered auto plants be converted into green-future factories, capable of producing mass-transit vehicles and technology for a renewable energy system. "Being realistic means taking hope out of speeches," he wrote, "and putting it in the hands of workers."

Which brings me to the final entry in the lexicon.

Hoperoots. Sample sentence: "It's time to stop waiting for hope to be handed down, and start pushing it up, from the hoperoots"

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[Gopher]

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[Kuros]

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[bacasper]

North America

The Madmen did well


John Pilger

Published 30 April 2009


The first 100 days of Barack Obama�s presidency have shown him to be a marketing exec�s dream, a Marlboro Man for the Noughties � and little else

The BBC�s American soap Mad Men offers a rare glimpse of the power of corporate advertising. The promotion of smoking half a century ago by the �smart� people of Madison Avenue, who knew the truth, led to countless deaths. Advertising and its twin, public relations, became a way of deceiving dreamt up by those who had read Freud and applied mass psychology to anything from cigarettes to politics. Just as Marlboro Man was virility itself, so politicians could be branded, packaged and sold.

It is more than 100 days since Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. The �Obama brand� has been named �Advertising Age�s marketer of the year for 2008�, easily beating Apple computers. David Fenton of MoveOn.org describes Obama�s election campaign as �an institutionalised mass-level automated technological community organising that has never existed before and is a very, very powerful force�. Deploying the internet and a slogan plagiarised from the Latino union organiser C�sar Ch�vez � �S�, se puede!� or �Yes, we can� � the mass-level automated technological community marketed its brand to victory in a country desperate to be rid of George W Bush.

No one knew what the new brand actually stood for. So accomplished was the advertising (a record $75m was spent on television commercials alone) that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition to Bush�s wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush�s warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King�s legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous �Change you can believe in�, it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. �We will be the most powerful,� he often declared.

Perhaps the Obama brand�s most effective advertising was supplied free of charge by those journalists who, as courtiers of a rapacious system, promote shining knights. They depoliticised him, spinning his platitudinous speeches as �adroit literary creations, rich, like those Doric columns, with allusion . . .� (Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian). The San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote: �Many spiritually advanced people I know . . . identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who . . . can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.�

In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government. He has kept Bush�s gulag intact and at least 17,000 prisoners beyond the reach of justice. On 24 April, his lawyers won an appeal that ruled Guantanamo Bay prisoners were not �persons�, and therefore had no right not to be tortured. His national intelligence director, Admiral Dennis Blair, says he believes torture works. One of his senior US intelligence officials in Latin America is accused of covering up the torture of an American nun in Guatemala in 1989; another is a Pinochet apologist. As Daniel Ellsberg has pointed out, the US experienced a military coup under Bush, whose secretary of �defence�, Robert Gates, along with the same warmaking officials, has been retained by Obama.

All over the world, America�s violent assault on innocent people, directly or by agents, has been stepped up. During the recent massacre in Gaza, reports Seymour Hersh, �the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of �smart bombs� and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel� and being used to slaughter mostly women and children. In Pakistan, the number of civilians killed by US missiles called drones has more than doubled since Obama took office.

In Afghanistan, the US �strategy� of killing Pashtun tribespeople (the �Taliban�) has been extended by Obama to give the Pentagon time to build a series of permanent bases right across the devastated country where, says Secretary Gates, the US military will remain indefinitely. Obama�s policy, one unchanged since the Cold War, is to intimidate Russia and China, now an imperial rival. He is proceeding with Bush�s provocation of placing missiles on Russia�s western border, justifying it as a counter to Iran, which he accuses, absurdly, of posing �a real threat� to Europe and the US. On 5 April in Prague, he made a speech reported as �anti-nuclear�. It was nothing of the kind. Under the Pentagon�s Reliable Replacement Warhead programme, the US is building new �tactical� nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war.

Perhaps the biggest lie � the equivalent of Smoking Is Good for You � is Obama�s announcement that the US is leaving Iraq, the country it has reduced to a river of blood. According to unabashed US army planners, as many as 70,000 troops will remain �for the next 15 to 20 years�. On 25 April, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, alluded to this. It is not surprising that the polls are showing that a growing number of Americans believe they have been suckered � especially as the nation�s economy has been entrusted to the same fraudsters who destroyed it. Lawrence Summers, Obama�s principal economic adviser, is throwing $3trn at the same banks that paid him more than $8m last year, including $135,000 for one speech. Change you can believe in.

Much of the American Establishment loathed Bush and Cheney for exposing, and threatening, the onward march of America�s �grand design�, as Henry Kissinger, war criminal and now Obama adviser, calls it. In advertising terms, Bush was a �brand collapse� whereas Obama, with his toothpaste advertisement smile and righteous clich�s, is a godsend. At a stroke, he has seen off serious domestic dissent to war, and he brings tears to the eyes, from Washington to Whitehall. He is the BBC�s man, and CNN�s man, and Murdoch�s man, and Wall Street�s man, and the CIA�s man. The Madmen did well.