Hairy-Chested Liberals Exult: Big Question, Who Do We Kill Next?

CounterPunch Diary

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN | May 13 – 15, 2011

NYT's Maureen Dowd: "Nothing to apologize" Still enjoying the afterglow from Osama's killing.

Pinko terror-symps and the “rule of law” gang  may cavil and whine at the lack of legal propriety in the execution of Osama , but it’s not cutting much ice with liberal America.  For long years what might be called the “progressive” segment of American voters have chafed at Republican gibes that their guy Obama is a wimp, all the more irritably because deep down many of them thought the charge had some merit.

But now the former professor of constitutional law is really and truly an American. He’s flashed his  long, long Cadillac of a birth certificate, not merely the unconvincing shorty going the rounds for years. Better still, he has cojones.  Bigger cojones than those of  George Bush, who said that the capture of Osama was of no interest to him. Obama  didn’t task the Navy SEALs: “if Osama shows no sign of resistance, it is your duty under Rules of Engagement to bring him home alive to face a fair trial.” No. He said “Make sure it’s Osama, then kill him.”

We have Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma to thank for making Osama’s orders clear. In an interview with CNN’s Eliot Spitzer he described the photographs, thus far denied the American people but available to members of Congress.
Inhofe:

“Three of the first 12 pictures were of Osama when he was alive. And they did this for the purpose of being able to look at those and seeing the nose, the eyes and his relationship for positive identification purposes. And that was good.

“One of the shots went through an ear and out through the eye socket, or it went in through the eye socket and out – and then exploded. It was that kind of ordinance that it was. Now that caused the brains to be hanging out of the eye socket, so that was pretty gruesome.

“But the revealing shots really, I thought, the pictures, were the three that were taken on the USS Vinson in the Northern Arabian Sea, and they were the ones that showed him during the cleanup period…they had taken enough blood and material off his face so it was easier to identify who it was.”

So the SEALs grabbed Osama, took the live pics, then shoved his kid to one side and gave him the business,  twice in the head, once in the chest.  Mind you, Inhofe seems to be varying his account of the photos somewhat. In a Fox interview he apparently says that the three photos of Osama alive were old ones, thus denying the brusque live/dead sequence implied by Inhofe to CNN’s Spitzer, whose remarks in the transcript cited above seem to be entirely clear —  particularly with the phrase “And they did this…” I’ve called Inhofe’s office, with no response yet forthcoming “due to high volume of calls” – no doubt from George Monbiot trying to forge an alliance with Big Jim from Oklahoma for expanded nuclear power. If old photos, then how old? Also, if the SEAL’s helmet camera was working, there would have been live/dead images in sequence anyway.

Maureen Dowd holds up the liberal end of the New York Times’ panel of columnists. Many’s the tetchy column she’s written across the past couple of years railing at Obama for selling out to the bankers and being way too submissive  to his Republican assailants.

It’s wondrous what two expanding bullets to the head of an unarmed man will do. Dowd has written no less than three columns back to back, imparting her raptures. Call them spiritually hairy chested. Here’s some of her afterglow.

“No wonder the president’s top generals call him ‘a Cool Hand Luke.’  [Actually the generals tend to call him far less complimentary names.]  If we could have seen everything unfolding in real time, it would have had the same dramatic effect as the intercutting in the president’s favorite movie, The Godfather, when Michael Corleone calmly acts as godfather at his nephew’s baptism at church, even as his lieutenants carry out the gory hits he has ordered on rival mobsters.

“Just substitute ‘Leave the copter, take the corpse’ for ‘Leave the gun, take the cannoli.’…

“The president’s studied cool and unreadable mien have sometimes distanced him from the public at moments of boiling crisis. But in the long-delayed showdown with Public Enemy No. 1, these qualities served him perfectly….

“I want memory, and justice, and revenge….Liberal guilt may have its uses, but it should not be wasted on this kill-mission. Morally and operationally, this was counterterrorism at its finest. We have nothing to apologize for.”

It fell to the NYT’s young conservative columnist, Ross Douthat,  to make the sensible observation that  “Now that Democrats have learned to stop worrying and embrace the imperial presidency, the United States lacks a strong institutional check on the tendency toward executive hubris and wartime overreach. ..The absence of any sustained outcry over the White House’s willingness to assassinate American citizens without trial should be equally disquieting.”  On the matter of legality, I recommend Doug Lummis’ contribution on this site today, on the new rules of war as formulated by George Bush and adopted by Obama.)

The reference to “American citizens” concerns Anwar al-Awlaki. Towards the end of April Osama signed off on three assassinations: Osama’s, Qaddafi’s (near miss) and Anwar al-Awlaki, (a miss)  the US-born cleric believed to be in Yemen. The Pentagon says a bid on Awlaki’s life was made  by drone attack on May 5 and they reckon they didn’t nail him but hit a car which may or may not have contained bad guys. Hey, who’s counting? A few years ago they blasted another car which they mistakenly thought contained Awlaki, an attack that provoked much fury in Yemen.

The chorus of approval for the SEALs covers the liberal spectrum.  The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill exulted, as did Gary Wills on the New York Review of Books site, with an ecstatic paean, “The President’s Crack Team”, concluding, “we should keep in mind what superb things can be done by our Navy Seals. And we should keep somewhere in the back of our minds a remembrance that the one ultimately pulling the trigger in both Seal actions was the President of the United States.” Typical of the liberal think-tank crowd is Thomas Ricks, formerly of the Washington Post and now writing for ForeignPolicy.com and lodged at something called the Center for a New American Security. Ricks pretty much calls for the US to declare war on Pakistan, seize or destroy nuclear silos and send in SEAL teams  to assassinate suspect ISI officers.

Obama is certainly not the first US president to have taken a keen interest in assassinations. Assassination has always been an arm of US foreign policy, just as in periods of turbulence, like the ’60s, it has always been an arm of domestic repression as well. This is true on either side of the executive order President Gerald Ford issued in 1976 banning assassinations. “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination,” stated Executive Order 11905, now inoperative.

Line up Obama with his fellow assassins, from Eisenhower through Bush, and I believe he’s the most repellent of the bunch, down there with Woodrow Wilson. None of his rivals quite match the instinctive egotism that allows Obama effortlessly to affect the earnestness of a man taking the moral high road while executing a cynical program of electioneering-by-assassination.
Cynical but effective. The Republicans are in a state of total confusion and have no plausible candidate to run against Obama. The progressives are solidly behind their man.

Rupert Murdoch’s Watergate

What began in Britain in 2005 as “a third-rate burglary” of voicemails, supposedly limited to a criminal invasion of privacy by a News of the World reporter and a private investigator, has flowered beautifully into a Level 7 scandal that threatens the careers of two of Rupert Murdoch’s top executives, not to mention the heir apparent to the News Corp. empire, James Murdoch. It even laps at the ankles of the 80-year-old magnate, threatening the final financial triumph that was scheduled to usher him into Valhalla.

In years gone by Murdoch used his newspaper empire as a bludgeon to crush regulatory obstructions. He has forged strategic alliances with Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Republican administrations on this side of the Atlantic. Rebekah Brooks, editor of News of the World between 2000 and 2003 and now chief executive of News Corp. subsidiary News International, is a regular informal visitor to Cameron at Chequers, the official country residence of Britain’s prime ministers.

But these days their private colloquies may be marred by a certain apprehension. Cameron was scarcely installed in 10 Downing Street before he summoned Andy Coulson as his media adviser. It was a flagrant declaration of interest, since Coulson was a notably grimy character in the Murdoch archipelago, having served as editor of News of the World—a job akin to supervising the efficient distribution of raw sewage into the prurient hands of about 3 million Britons every Sunday.

Amid the first stages of the phone-hacking scandal, Coulson resigned as editor when NoW reporter Clive Goodman, who ran the royal beat, and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire were convicted of hacking into the phone messages of members of the royal family. With Goodman and Mulcaire sent to jail and Coulson stepping down, Murdoch’s senior executives no doubt hoped that a lid had been clamped down on the scandal.

But it was already too late. News of the World, like Murdoch’s Sun, has always been in the business of peddling sex scandals and true confessions. Just as the FBI and big-city police departments teamed up with gossip columnists such as Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons here, Scotland Yard and the scandal sheets worked together in harmonious relations greased by payoffs. The papers would get the stories and the cops would get favorable publicity, plus some cash. Peter Burden, a British journalist who has written extensively about News of the World, remarked to me recently that somewhere in the mid-’90s Murdoch realized that celebrity gossip had become an important and profitable international commodity. The snooping industry burgeoned.

The first line of defense—that Goodman and Mulcaire were unlicensed freebooters operating outside decorous guidelines—swiftly fell apart under the weight of palpable absurdity. As Nigel Horne, executive editor of the UK-based online daily The First Post, emphasizes, “The idea of rogue reporters blowing money without the knowledge of their bosses is a joke.” The paper paid Mulcaire £2,000 a week.

Scandals reach critical mass when containment breaks down and the various players begin to ponder charges of criminal conspiracy and perjury, not to mention the prospect of jail time. This is what has been transpiring in Murdochland, aided by pertinacious reporting by the Guardian and the New York Times, which was happy to remind the world at huge length in September that its rival, the Wall Street Journal, is part of an empire stained by criminal conduct.

On January 21 of this year Coulson quit his job as Cameron’s media advisor, saying that the hacking scandal was taking up most of his time.

Last Christmas the actor Hugh Grant broke down while motoring in Kent. A man stopped, photographed him and then came over, offering to help. He was a former News of the World reporter, Paul McMullan, who now runs a pub in Dover. He invited the actor to drop by. Grant duly honored the invitation, armed with a hidden mike. He recently published his chat with McMullan in The New Statesman, guest-edited by his former girlfriend Jemima Khan. In the transcript, McMullan says Brooks knew about phone hacking at the paper. He also claims that Prime Minister Cameron probably knew as well.

As Burden speculates on his blog, “If Ian Edmondson [a former NoW editor] was involved, so was Andy Coulson. If Andy Coulson was involved, so was Rebekah Brooks. If Rebekah Brooks was involved, so was Master James [Murdoch]. And if they were, it’s very likely that Les Hinton, CEO of [Dow Jones and Company] (the brightest bird in Rupert Murdoch’s bush), was involved, too, because he was Executive Chairman of News International at the time.”

On April 8, in an effort to keep incriminating documents from being disclosed, News International said it would settle with a select number of victims, out of a £20 million fund. This supposedly last and final offer will crumble too in the face of hundreds of other claimants. Last week the News of the World paid Siena Miller $165,000 in damages for hacking into her messages.

On April 10 Guardian columnist Steven Barnett expressed sentiments widely shared in Britain, writing in favor of a full review of the BSkyB deal: “The issue is that every aspect of Sky’s output will be driven by the same uncompromising corporate culture which has given us the News of the World’s criminality.”

In late May Jeremy Hunt, culture secretary in the coalition government led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, will rule on whether News Corp.’s $20 billion bid for full control of the enormously profitable BSkyB network (News Corp. holds about 40 percent) should go through. The probable  deal, according to recent predictions, will be familiar to anyone following Murdoch’s career, with each acquisition accompanied by  earnest guarantees, the installation of “outside directors” and similar ludicrous pretenses that RM’s slimy paws weren’t inside the pram.  In the words of the Financial Times, “The remedy, designed to address regulators’ concerns that News Corp’s taking full control of BSkyB would reduce the diversity of voices in UK news involves spinning off Sky News into a separate company, known as Newco.” Of course Newco will be just as much a Murdoch operation as any other in his stable.
Will Rupert himself be enmeshed? Bruce Page, author of a fine book on Murdoch, suggests to me that what could drag the Digger into the swamp would be the disclosure of any deal he may have made to stem the scandal when Gordon Brown was still PM. Brown won’t confirm or deny that Murdoch approached him.

Only a Week To Go!

We’ve only got a week. Then, as I reported in this Diary two weeks ago, it’s all over. May 21 at around 6pm Pacific Time. Swig that martini down quickly for that’s the hour when the Rev Harold Camping, the preacher from Oakland, California, is predicting the Second Coming. At about 6pm, he estimates 2 per cent of the world’s population will be immediately “raptured” to Heaven, with the 98 per cent bustled off to the Inferno, doomed to listen to broadcasts of Thomas Friedman’s columns for all eternity. “We’re not talking about a ball game, or a marriage, or graduating from college,” Camping emphasizes,  “We’re talking about the end of the world, a matter of being eternally dead, or being eternally alive, and it’s all coming to a head right now.”

Mind you, Camping has screwed up in the past on the Big One, predicting that September 6, 1994,  would spell FINIS for humanity. All that happened was a local political earthquake in the form of Clinton’s disastrous midterm elections, probably not presaged in the Old Testament, from which Camping draws his projections.  “At that time there was a lot of the Bible I had not really researched very carefully,” he told the Independent earlier this year. “But now, we’ve had the chance to do just an enormous amount of additional study and God has given us outstanding proofs that it really is going to happen.”

Kickstart Them

CounterPunchers who’ve been following my coeditor Jeffrey St. Clair’s terrific series here on the site, “How Green Became the Color of Money,” should know that he has been working with Josh Frank for two years on Green Scare – all about the US Government’s new war on environmentalism. “Both of us,” Jeffrey says, “ have traveled around the country uncovering the events that rocked the enviro community since 9/11. We filed FOIA requests, interviewed dozens of underground activists and discovered frightening new policies and tactics that were intended to destroy the radical environmental movement from the ground up.”  An very important enterprise, as I’m sure you’ll agree. But guess what? As the old journalistic rule goes, “Comment is free, facts are expensive.” It costs money to investigate. Jeffrey and Josh could do with some help, right now.  Here’s the link to what you can do.

Notice how Fukushima has dropped out of the headlines again?  What to know what’s actually going on? In this latest newsletter  Richard Wilcox in Tokyo supplies a full update on the fall-out, the resistance to nuclear power, the maneuvers of the nuclear industry.

I also urge you strongly to click over to our Books page, most particularly for our latest release, Jason Hribal’s truly extraordinary Fear of the Animal Planet – introduced by Jeffrey St. Clair and already hailed by Peter Linebaugh, Ingrid Newkirk (president and co-founder of PETA), and Susan Davis, the historian of Sea World, who writes that “Jason Hribal stacks up the evidence, and the conclusions are inescapable. Zoos, circuses and theme parks are the strategic hamlets of Americans’ long war against nature itself.”

Alexander Cockburn—founder of Counterpunch, can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

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ARCHIVES: The Stealthy Rise of Pseudo Democracy

And how fake democracy is paving the way to “reasonable fascism”

PATRICE GREANVILLE Jan. 20, 2011
Revised and expanded 5/12/11

The perfect pseudoleader.

PROGRESSIVE ACTIVISTS are duly concerned about the evaporation of [the remants of] American democracy. Never as perfect or strong as our ceaseless narcissistic propaganda would have it, the whole scheme has been on a suicidal dive during the last four decades, particularly since that ludicrously revered mountebank, Ronald Reagan, assumed the titular helm of the empire in 1980. Now, the dilapidated structure is in danger of winning the dubious world historical prize for the widest chasm between rhetoric and reality—ever. In other words, the US is becoming the foremost example of what political scientists aptly call a “formal democracy.” Below an excerpt from the Wiki entry on the topic:


who have to work to keep from falling through the myriad cracks in our Darwinian system, and not the billionaires that run this rigged game from their globule of privilege at the top of the social pyramid.
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Apparently half disbelieving, Noah probed deeper, this time marshalling an impecable source:
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–

The incredibly shrinking democracy

Reflecting apparently upon the recent unexpected turn of events in Tunisia, the New York Times commented on the extremely fragile situation in the Middle East, predicting doom for western-backed Arab nations:


Obstinate nonresponsiveness and repeated, suspicious incompetence by the top elected officials in the face of clear and pressing needs (especially in a nation as rich as America) is the ultimate tipoff that something is awfully rotten at the center of the national covenant, and that the American democracy we grew up with (despite being badly flawed) is melting as fast as the neglected polar caps.
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nothing. (The standing gallery of paid establishment pundits and apologists will naturally paint a different picture, tell you otherwise. It will be the usual murky picture pointing at irrelevancies, superficialities, false leads, scapegoats, and dead-ends. Pay no heed to it. This time simply tell them to piss off.)
In the way of evidence
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Christina Green’s Civics Lesson, he states unequivocally:
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Serving the interests of the plutocracy is no longer merely American government’s bias or even its mission. That function has in our time now become its full-on raison d’être, and the government is therefore capable of anything in pursuit of that purpose.
  • It has created a gigantic military machine, completely out of proportion to any actual national security need.
  • It has launched an endless series of wars, based on lie after lie.
  • It has shifted ever greater tax burdens onto the middle, working and under classes, and onto future generations – without, of course, their acquiescence.
  • It has created and defends a health care system that condemns tens of millions of its citizens – including children – to a lack of health, and to shortened lives.
  • It built a massive for-profit prison industry, incarcerating more of its citizens than any other country in the world.
  • It allowed its financiers to deploy every manner of crooked scam imaginable, in a context of almost completely absent regulation, wrecking an entire global economy in the process as these bunkster banksters enriched themselves before, during and after the meltdown they created. Then it covered their losses one hundred cents on the dollar, using taxpayer funds, even as these private sector privateers continued to flog that very same government as public enemy number one.
  • It gave corporations tax credits for shipping American jobs overseas, decimating the middle class on the altar of free trade.
  • It stood by silently, permitting banks to throw people out of their homes en masse, based on foreclosure documents that are utter garbage.
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Cyrano’s Journal Today.


Killing Gaddafi’s Grandbabies

By BAR executive editor Glen Ford

When the U.S. and Europeans needed a way to get on the “right” side of the Arab Awakening – and thereby crush it – they chose to re-demonize Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi as the evil from which the Euro-Americans would rescue North Africa. “Gaddafi was perfect, having long existed in cartoon form for western consumption.” Killing Gaddafi’s son and three grandchildren was no crime, since “in American eyes they are no more than satanic versions of Daffy Duck’s cartoon nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie.”

“These modern Crusaders require ritual bloodletting before expropriating the lands and goods of their victims.”

The ceremonial slaughter of Moammar Gaddafi and his family lurches forward like some savage white cult ritual. Death to the demon and his seed! shout the priests, banshees and ice-smile oracles of the U.S. corporate media. The American (or “western”) manifest mission must be sanctified in the blood of caricatures. Like the Christ-crazed hordes that surged out of Europe’s far western dankness to annihilate whole cities of strangers – including tens of thousands of fellow Christians that did not speak, eat or smell as the French and English did – these modern Crusaders require ritual bloodletting before expropriating the lands and goods of their victims.

When the Arab world awoke at the beginning of the year, the highly paid presenters and rapid-vapid quippers of CNN and competing reality-creation companies were caught pitifully mission-less. Absent direction from the official scenario-producers at the White House and the State Department, there could be no coherent newsreader script, no simple theme for quipping. But direction would not be forthcoming from the Obama administration until a way could be found to put the U.S. on the “right” side of the Arab Awakening.

“Where was the consummate Arab evil?”

In the first days of the Egyptian rebellion, CNN and its ilk were largely on their own and visibly confused – reflecting the confusion and desperation in Washington. Then, after the White House, having no other choice, pretended to empathize with the young demonstrators at Tahrir Square, the corporate media commenced its love affair with the “new” Arab. But where was the consummate Arab evil, in the battle against which the corporate media could fulfill its role as chronicler of America’s glorious, civilizing saga in the world? Who is the caricature, to be ritually tormented and slain?

Moammar Gaddafi became the foil for the Euro-American military response to the Arab Awakening. Instantaneously, CNN got its mission back. Gaddafi was perfect, having long existed in cartoon form for western consumption. With Gaddafi’s gradual accommodation with the West, in the early 2000s, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein became the Great Cartoon Satan, even appearing as the Devil in Comedy Central’sSouth Park cartoon show. Gaddafi, the vintage cartoon, inevitably became conflated with Saddam (all Arab strongman cartoons look alike).

A general on CNN’s retainer repeatedly named the long dead Saddam as the ghoul to be obliterated by righteous American firepower. More than once, the general apologized to the audience, but he needn’t have since, to the mass of CNN’s viewers, Gaddafi has no more claim to his own life, history and death than did Saddam Hussein. The are both little voodoo dolls to be stuck with needles and burned and torn to pieces, along with their children.

“Vaunted American “compassion” does not extend to the grandbabies of evil Arab cartoon-men.”

Americans, who consume packaged lies like hot dogs, and then revere these items of consumption as sacred culture (as “American” as hot dogs), have been ready to kill Gaddafi’s sons ever since Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay were gunned down in 2003. In American eyes, these Arab strongmen’s sons are no more than satanic versions of Daffy Duck’s cartoon nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie. In Gaddafi’s case, two of his sons were named Saif. If Col. Gaddafi didn’t distinguish sufficiently between them, why should NATO bombers? As it turned out, the Saif that died along with three of Gaddafi’s grandchildren, Saif al-Arab, the youngest of the brothers, was also the least political. The grandkids, ages 6 months to two years, were, of course, totally apolitical and, presumably, quite cute. But vaunted American “compassion” does not extend to the grandbabies of evil Arab cartoon-men. CNN and other U.S. corporate outlets, all of which have reporters in Tripoli, chose to quote rebel leaders in Benghazi who cast doubt on whether the children of Gaddifi sons Mohammed and Hannibal and daughter Aisha were really dead. The rebels advised that it was likely a trick, and U.S. corporate media treated the vile slander as simply another competing factoid.

The killer couple in the White House offered no condolences or apologies, presumably on the assumption that the elder Gaddafi had invited his family to his residence to act as human shields, and was therefore responsible for their deaths.

It would not occur to most Americans that Gaddafi and his family were entitled to feel safe under international law and American law, which bar assassinations of heads of state, and that United Nations resolution 1973 does not authorize NATO to hunt down the Libyan leader or kill those around him. But he’s only a cartoon, and cartoons have no rights. Neither do the countries these cartoons come from, as every American knows.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com [5].

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/killing-gaddafis-grandbabies

Links:
[1] http://blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/attack-libya
[2] http://blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/gaddafi-grandchildren-killed
[3] http://blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/gaddafi-son-killed
[4] http://blackagendareport.com/sites/www.blackagendareport.com/files/killing_khadaffis_children.jpg
[5] mailto:Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
[6] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fblackagendareport.com%2Fcontent%2Fkilling-gaddafis-grandbabies&linkname=Killing%20Gaddafi%27s%20Grandbabies

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4/ Why you can’t (and shouldn’t) trust liberals: CHRIS MATTHEWS

Stenographers to power series—

Matthews: “Obama did what America needed!”

By Chris Matthews, Hardball host | May 2, 2011
MSNBC HARDBALL

Prefatory Note:

Chris Matthews

FOR A LONG TIME NOW MSNBC’S CHRIS MATTHEWS has been pretty much unwatchable. Someone should do everyone a big favor and tell Chris that he needs to tone it down, that his position as bloviator extraordinaire, establishment wag, obnoxious self-promoting narcissistic browbeater, and Olympic-class motormouth is secure. Solid.  No competition, compadre.  Indeed, the latter trait is so pronounced that his guests often scramble to finish a single sentence.  For Matthews, the cynical showman, it’s clear that guests are not really sparring partners in an honest dialogue of ideas, but mere props allowing him to show off in front of the whole wide world what a bright guy he is.

Of late, in keeping with his combative born-again liberalism,  the former Catholic schoolboy has apparently transmogrified himself into  a Hitler Youth bully, compulsively  patrolling the corridors of opinion looking for those injudicious enough to doubt the wisdom of the Great New Leader. Since Obama critics, including a considerable number of idiots and corruptos from the right, abound, Matthews has his work literally cut out or him. 

Such attitudes confirm what we have mentioned elsewhere in this series.  Matthews—like many liberals—is indisputably sharp, on a good day even amusing (those days are rare) but his mind exhibits a huge fracture down the middle, the great contradiction that makes American liberals unsteady if not treacherous partners in any important struggle—the constantly shifting marriage of intelligence and rank stupidity, of principle and expediency (or is it just opportunism?).  It would seem that, at least in America, to be a liberal is by definition to be a sucker for official narratives.  Or to pretend to be.  If so, ignoring reality is the price of admission to the privileged inner circle. That’s why Matthews, in his hosana to Obama below, betrays no sense of shame when he proclaims—solely on the strength of a dubious military operation—(and like many other sycophantic court jesters before him), that the nation —at last—has indeed found its leader, and that while we all teeter on the brink of  plutocratic tyranny, “democracy works.”  —P. Greanville

TRANSCRIPT

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Let me finish tonight with the Commander-in-Chief.

We want our presidents to be all things: to have the oratory of JFK, the confidence of FDR, the resonant patriotism of Reagan, the common-sense toughness of Harry Truman, the military temperament and restraint of Ike, the human feel of Bill Clinton.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Well, the more you pay attention, the more you learn that you can’t have it all.  You give here to get there. You accept this so you can keep on cheering that. You grow up and realize not all kinds of greatness comes even with a great man.

And so we look at our leader tonight. Less than a week ago, he was showing us his birth certificate to prove to some that he’s for real, not some imposter shipped in here from East Africa intent on our destruction. Yes, our democracy requires that even the political babies out there deserve attention, deserve to be talked to, to be given their pacifiers when they cry too loud.

But what of the man who kept cool through all the clatter and nonsense knowing he had other work to do, he and Leon Panetta and the other grown-ups. They were doing what Americans wanted, needed, knew had to be done for humanity – get Bin Laden, get him so that people would know that the victims – and that’s an awful lot of people in this time of terrorism – have their tough guys too, who can do the good work of this planet.

I like competence. I like the dentist, the doctor, the airplane pilot, the police officer, the accountant, the lawyer, the guy who fixes window screens, the guy who fixes the escalator when it breaks, the people in uniform you walk by on the way to work and get there because of them.

The competent people, not the sideshow barkers, the showmen, the pretenders.

Politics, too, is a profession.  It’s the profession that gives us our leaders in this form of government.  Tonight we know we have a president who could thrill us as a candidate and also direct a complicated, deadly-serious operation like getting the killer of 9/11.  So democracy works. (sic)

I’ve said that on the couple times I’ve been down the table from the president at briefings, I believed, listening to him explain issues, and parry with serious reporters, that he should be the president, that he is right for this job.

Tonight the country knows what I’m talking about.

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Why Obama Will Get Second Term in White House: Ralph Nader

By Ralph Nader – Apr 27, 2011

Bloomberg Opinion

The wave of workers protests may soon abate, leaving—as in Egypt—the system basically untouched.

The stars are aligned for Barack Obama’s re-election in November 2012. He won’t join Jimmy Carter to be the second Democrat in 120 years to lose a second term.

Five things are playing in Obama’s favor.

First, the Republicans — driven by their most conservative members in Congress — will face a primary with many candidates who will advance harsh ideological positions. Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Donald Trump and others might as well be on the Democratic National Committee payroll. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s reverse Robin Hood plan to cut more than $6 trillion in spending over a decade will provide the outrage, stoked by a sitting president possessed of verbal discipline.

The field of Republican weaklings is already getting smaller. This week, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour dropped out of the race for the presidency.

Second, the Republican governors’ attacks on unions are turning off the swing voters and Reagan Democrats in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Imagine the voter reaction if millions of workers lose their right to collective bargaining, and the impact that cuts in benefits and wages will have on their lives.

Democratic governors, such as Jerry Brown of California, Pat Quinn of Illinois and Andrew Cuomo of New York, are cutting — but not taking away — workers’ bargaining rights. This is a politically useful contrast for Obama. Reagan Democrats, who have won many elections for the Republicans, are a big plus for Obama in the contested states.

No Challenge

Third, no candidates are emerging to challenge Obama in the primaries. A discussion of Obama’s forgotten campaign promises and record would have public support among Democrats. Even so, the liberal base has nowhere to go to send a message about war, free-trade agreements, raising the minimum wage or union membership.

Nor does a third party or independent candidacy pose a threat, given the winner-take-all, two-party system.

Fourth, Obama has neutered much of the big corporate lobby’s zeal to defeat him. He decided from the beginning not to prosecute executives from Wall Street banking, brokerage and rating firms. Multinational companies are pleased with Obama’s position on trade, on not disturbing the many corporate subsidies, handouts and giveaways, such as the corn-ethanol subsidy.

Shelters for Wealthy

By 2014, Obamacare will deliver some 30 million subsidized customers to health-insurance companies. The auto industry is forever grateful for its bailout. Obama hasn’t moved on corporate-tax reform, tax shelters for the wealthy, or the preferential capital-gains tax treatment on the 20 percent service fees of hedge fund managers. Don’t forget last December when Obama agreed to extended tax cuts for the rich while the budget deficit gets larger.

The military-industrial complex about which President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his farewell address 50 years ago, is still uncontrollable, leading departing Defense Secretary Robert Gates to express serious concerns. Obama has even surprised George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and his cohort of neocons, who can scarcely believe how militarily aggressive Obama has been on just about every move that liberals used to call impeachable offenses by former President George W. Bush.

Big Business

Then there’s Jeffrey Immelt, the chairman and chief executive officer of General Electric Co., who can attest to Obama’s outreach to big business. GE Capital was bailed out. The company effectively paid no federal income taxes on $14.2 billion in 2010 profit and received a $3.2 billion benefit. Immelt got a $15.5 million pay raise. And in January, Obama appointed him chairman of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness while letting him stay as head of a company receiving many government contracts and having regulation problems with the federal authorities. The corporate state doesn’t get much better than that.

Fifth, since the Republicans have little to offer by way of creating jobs, Obama need only show improvement in macroeconomic indicators, as Ronald Reagan did in 1983-1984, and proceed to showcase all the tax breaks he has signed into law for big and small businesses. Poor Americans who continue to bear the brunt of the recession are hardly going to vote Republican. It will be easy for Obama, with his oratorical skills, to paint the Republican-controlled House of Representatives as obstructionist, especially as he develops an economic plan for his second term.

Black Swans

There remain the Black Swans, events that defy prediction as those in Japan and the Middle East have shown. Handling them with firmness and calmness from the White House is what most people expect of a president. Obama will surely not repeat Bush’s mistakes after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Obama is averse to conflict with corporate power and disarmingly expedient in compromising with Republicans, leaving the latter to argue largely among themselves. The political duopoly lets the tactical Obama use the Bully Pulpit to his political advantage, even if his principles perish. Obama can look forward to four more years in 2012.

(Ralph Nader is the founder of Public Citizen and author of the book “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the author of this column: Ralph Nader at info@nader.org

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