Barak Obada, Much Ado About Nothing

Meet Senator Slither

To win in 2008, The Blue Dogs of the Democratic Party believe we need a candidate of substance not show. Obama is all show.

WASHINGTON (By Alexander Cockburn, Counter Punch Diary) December 12, 2006 — The slithery junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama is ensuring himself a steady political diet of publicity by refusing to take his name out of consideration as a possible candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. We're entering the time frame when all such aspirants have to make up their minds whether they can find the requisite money and political base. Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, the obvious peace and justice candidate, has already decided that he can't, which gives us a pretty revealing insight into the weakness of the left these days.

It's a no-brainer for Obama to excite the political commentators by waving a "maybe" flag. It keeps the spotlight on him, and piles up political capital, whatever he decides to do in the end.

It's depressing to think that we'll have to endure Obamaspeak for months, if not years to come: a pulp of boosterism about the American dream, interspersed with homilies about "putting factionalism and party divisions behind us and moving on". I used to think Senator Joe Lieberman was the man whose words I'd least like to be force fed top volume if I was chained next to a loudspeaker in Camp Gitmo, but I think Obama, who picked Lieberman as his mentor when he first entered the US Senate, is worse. I've never heard a politician so desperate not to offend conventional elite opinion while pretending to be fearless and forthright.

When Democrats fled Murtha's call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq a year ago, few with more transparent calculation than Obama who voyaged to the Council on Foreign Relations on November 22, 2005, to soothe the assembled elites with such balderdash as "The President could take the politics out of Iraq once and for all if he would simply go on television and say to the American people 'Yes, we made mistakes" or "we need to focus our attention on how to reduce the U.S. military footprint in Iraq. Notice that I say 'reduce,' and not 'fully withdraw' or "2006 should be the year that the various Iraqi factions must arrive at a fair political accommodation to defeat the insurgency; and three, the Administration must make available to Congress critical information on reality-based benchmarks that will help us succeed in Iraq."

Some Democrats working for Ned Lamont in the recent senate race in Connecticut eventually taken by Lieberman, running as an independent, are exceptionally bitter about the role played by Obama who made the calculation that Lieberman would win, and that he would not forfeit political capital by doing anything for his fellow Democrat, Lamont. By contrast, Hillary Clinton gets good reviews from such Lamont workers as a politician who did what she could for their man.

These hard feelings go back as far as the notorious political dinner in Connecticut in March of 2005, when Obama traveled to Connecticut to hail the pro-war Lieberman to the state's Democrats. Obama, who runs a huge political fund-raising operation in Washington, knows where the money is, in the the right-center segment of the political landscape inhabited by the Democratic Leadership Council.

It's why he picked Lieberman, a DLC icon, as his mentor. The new arrival in Washington wanted to send out a swift signal to the corporate powers and Party donors that here was no boat-rocker from Chicago, but a safe pair of hands and an obedient pair of heels.

There ere was another, more substantive signal, keenly savored by the corporate world, where Obama voted for "tort reform", thus making it far harder for people to get redress or compensation.

As I wrote about Obama last year, Sometimes people comfort themselves with variants on what's called the intentional fallacy: in other words, as only the fifth black senator in US history, Obama has to bob and weave, placate the Man, while positioning himself at the high table as the people's champion. But in his advance to the high table Obama is diligently divesting himself of all legitimate claims to be any sort of popular champion, as opposed to another safe black, like Condoleezza Rice whom Obama voted to confirm. The Empire relishes such servants.

And so, Obama, the constitutional law professor, voted to close off any filibuster of Alito, and fled Senator Russell Feingold's motion to censure the President, declaring "my and Senator Feingold's view is not unanimous. Some constitutional scholars and lower court opinions support the president's argument that he has inherent authority to go outside the bounds of the law in monitoring the activities of suspected terrorists. The question is whether the president understood the law and knowingly flaunted it." That's not the question at all. The question is whether the Constitution permits its violation by the President, and the answer is no.

Obama, a self proclaimed educator in constitutional law, voted Yes on March 2 to final passage of the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act, unlike ten of his Democratic colleagues.

A couple of weeks ago Obama unleashed another cloud of statesmanlike mush about Iraq to an upscale foreign policy crowd in Chicago. Trimming to new realities he's now talking about a four-to-six month time frame for beginning withdrawal from Iraq. Don't mistake this for any real agenda. It's a schedule that can be pulled in any direction, like a rubber mask from a Christmas stocking.

This week many Americans have stared aghast at the photos of Jose Padilla, manacled hand and foot, blinded by special goggles, being escorted by his US military jailers from his isolation cell to the dentist. His lawyers say that his horrible treatment , four years of total isolation and sensory deprivation, have rendered him incapable of defending himself.

The treatment of Padilla — classed as "an enemy combatant" until US government prosecutors were forced to reclassify him as a criminal defendant earlier this year — was obviously a diligent exercise in torture, akin to what has been meted out to "enemy combatants" held in the US concentration camp at Guantanamo. Last year Illinois' senior US senator, Dick Durbin, bravely got into trouble for likening conditions at Guantanamo to those in a Nazi or Stalin-era camp. This was one of Durbin's finer moments, as he read an FBI man's eyewitness describing how he had entered interview rooms "to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more."

"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners. It is not too late. I hope we will learn from history. I hope we will change course."

The right-wing mad-dog crowd jumped on Durbin, and eventually he paid the penalty of having to eat crow on the Senate floor. His fellow senator from Illinois, Obama, did not support him in any way. He said, "we have a tendency to demonize and jump on and make mockery of each other across the aisle and that is particularly pronounced when we make mistakes. Each and every one of us is going to make a mistake once in a while...and what we hope is that our track record of service, the scope of how we've operated and interacted with people, will override whatever particular mistake we make."

That's three uses of the word "mistake". Obama had his fingers stuck in the wind as always. He bends to every breeze, as soon as he identifies it as coming from a career threatening quarter. This man is no leader.