Beyond Vomiting, Obama/Dem Fascism (2-25-13)

Norman Pollack in an article entitled “Democrats’ Complicity in Political Murder” morally “calls out” Obama and Democrats. Pollack writes:

Why even try to reason with Obama supporters, they have abdicated all moral responsibility for a bloodthirsty president and administration, whose Terror Tuesdays are a Mardi Gras celebration of death and the prowess of America’s paramilitary operations. International law has been flushed down the toilet. The killing of noncombatants (defined by Obama via specious criteria as combatants), women, children, funeral attendees, first responders, is a deliberated and heinous act intended for the sole purpose of cowing a people into submission–the Obama variant of GENOCIDE.

Progressives of today have become the apologists for fascism. Period. The litmus test of any humane, democratic standard, is the absolute rejection of Obama and his administration. Lesser-evil arguments are a means to accommodate ourselves to EVIL itself.

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Obama has a thirst for command, after first placating the military and intelligence communities to the extent of proving his admiration for them—one increasingly reciprocated by those communities.  Each decision, portrayed as pragmatic, altogether necessary compromise to get through anything, actually constitutes a consecutive record of achievement in the wrong direction—the further fascisization of the social structure, from a growing concentration of wealth and its corollary, widening differentials of income, status, and power, to the open sesame of capital accumulation fully assisted by not compliant but actively sympathetic government.

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Mental divestiture from the fakery of Democratic politics-as-usual is the first step to moral sanity.  I began writing for CounterPunch with recalling Melville’s deeply disturbing short story, “Bartleby the Scrivener, the Story of Wall Street,” because then it already appeared clear that Obama, a cardboard creation of market fundamentalism and prowar doctrine and practice, had played treacherously with well-meaning American sympathies for socioeconomic decencies.

Now, even more, he has stepped out of the cardboard to become a fullblown menace in his own right, synthesizing the powers of his creators to put capitalism to the test of its own inner spirit: wealth inequality, a government wedded to the private sector at the expense of the public interest, and the criminalization of all dissenting views.  At this point, he appears to be succeeding admirably, with a narcotized public still shouting hosannas of praise, and John Brennan, the proud face of an America that can act with impunity at home and abroad on behalf of its most affluent, more familiarly known in an earlier day as the ruling class (although I would settle for C. Wright Mills’s “Power Elite”).

But to rub salt in the wounds of the affronted, this is not the work of nefarious, imbecilic Republicans, but the straightforward, consciously-realized policy-framework of the Democrats.  Bartleby, faced with the selfish corruption of a society that hemmed in its people with the walls of alienation (yes, Melville was brilliant, a century ahead of his time in identifying the moral questions Americans have ever since shoved under the rug), simply and eloquently responded to every entreaty to be sucked in, “I prefer not to.”

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The Feinstein-Brennan photo [The New York Times (Feb. 21)] says it all–how cozy Democrats themselves have come to the table of war crimes, repression, torture, and bow at the waist of their leader, The Assassination President, asking only for a fig leaf to cover their treachery, i.e., the publication of legal memos to justify Obama’s barbaric program of political murder, as though these memos, even assuming their existence, could somehow prove exonerative. Eric Holder meet John Yoo; the OLC is rotten to the core. The so-called “leak” to NBC was a contrived act to make Brennan’s appearance before Senate Intelligence go more smoothly.

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John Brennan’s appointment as CIA Director, with a photograph of him standing alongside an admiring Diane Feinstein, aka Madame Apologist for CIA-JSOC Paramilitary Operations, a truly dynamic duo, symbolizing the Executive-Congressional consensus on permanent war through means which makes the garden-variety war criminal’s hair stand on edge.

[cross-posted on open salon]