The Somambulant Party

[President Obama] is accelerating the advance of the military industrial complex, but is percevied in many quarters as doing the exact opposite. President Obama has increased the size, cost, prioritization, and global presence of the U.S. military. He has, with his War on Libya, established the prerogative to take the nation into war against the will of the United States Congress. He has created drone warfare on a significant scale. He has enlarged and formalized due-process-free imprisonment, and cemented in place warrantless spying and the power to abuse prisoners. He has expanded the use of assassination, including U.S. citizens. President Obama has radically expanded claims of state secrets to protect the crimes of his predecessor, and made greater use of the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. Obama has formalized, legalized, systematized and normalized what was illicit under Bush. He has pursued base construction and expansion of missile “defense” systems to the detriment of U.S. relations with China, North Korea, Russia, Iran and Pakistan, among other nations. Like all presidents during this permanent war, Obama is a war president. Unlike all other Nobel Peace Prize recipients, Obama praised war in his acceptance speech. David Swanson, opening remarks at a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower’s weak-kneed remarks concerning the Military Industrial Complex. (Emphasis added)

There was a reason why Ike made his famous MIC speech as he left office rather than during his eight-year term – he was afraid to speak up. Even then, only twelve years after passage of the National Security Act, the military had such a hold on government that even a president could not counter its power. So he yelled back a warning to us as we viewed his asshole and elbows.

But the reason the passage above caught my eye was, of course, the reference to Obama being “perceived” in many quarters as doing the exact opposite of what he is really doing. The degree of perception management in this country is amazing, and the critical feature in the mechanics of such a PSYOP is the manner in which the “opposition” speaks about him. It’s a simple concept – the enemy of my enemy is my friend. To call Obama a “socialist” is equivalent to calling Marx a capitalist, but it is done routinely. Most (almost all) Americans operate on low information, so that their attitudes about policy and politicians is cemented by brief glimpses via corporate media. They catch a debate on one of the cable networks of talking heads talking over and by each other, and only a few words resonate, “socialist” one of them. Many like the word, many fear it, and thereby perception is framed and hanged.

Obama has been a disaster from the beginning, but partisans plow through every event in government since he took office looking for something, anything they like, in order to credit him. Then they say that it would not have happened without him. He doesn’t need to convince them of anything – they literally self-indoctrinate. Then we get the mantra – yes, he’s not been everything we want, but he’s better than the opposition.

It’s infuriating to hear this repeated at every Democratic website. It is so off-target. He’s not better. He’s worse. He’s much worse. And this is so precisely because of managed perceptions. He gets away with stuff, as outlined by David Swanson above, that would have merited at least weak-kneed opposition had they been done or attempted by George W. Bush.

The coming election appears to he headed towards a choice between Obama and Romney. Neither of these wimps would rise even to Ike’s nervous mumbled protest as he walked out the door – we don’t even have that low standard anymore. So electoral politics will not save us. But if one chooses to vote, from my vantage point it appears that the reasonable choice would be Romney. If he won, at least Democrats would be a little less somnambulant.

That’s not much to hope for, but who ever said we have high standards in this country? Who ever said we even have standards?