Some disappointed supporters of President Obama have come right up to the edge of disowning the president; but have pulled back from the brink to reconstruct support for him, because they think the alternative is worse.
There are other ways I could express this dilemma; but it will probably be for the best, insofar as the best is also appalling, when the Obama team is out of the White House.
Chris Hedges has expressed our problem more elegantly; but the political system is so compromised, especially at the national level of presidential elections, that the candidates of either party are pre-screened and vetted by the corporate powers that run this country.
Obama is pliable alright and almost perfectly malleable; but not by us, the people.
The republican suits, Mitt Romney and Herman Cain, will fit the bill in their own way, and express the same malleability if they are nominated and elected. But our improvement as a nation lies elsewhere. Our dooms, the ones that are threatening us, are multi-headed to be sure; but there is more people power or constructive energy on the streets of New York, in the Occupy Movement. Our answers and the torch of activism is firmly placed in the hands of the young generation and those who can lend a hand to them.
The re-election of Obama--if possible-- is a muddle, a waste of time, and a complete political train wreck.
For the Democratic Party (if it can be salvaged) it is far more important for it to survive President Obama, than to become entangled in his re-election. This Obama administration's corruption, its failure to prosecute criminals, and its coziness with the corrupt elements of this society, are all things that will bury us deeper in the muddle we are already in.
Mitt gave a scary speech a couple of weeks ago, in front of some kids in uniform. It was all about our American religion of being the biggest hombre among nations, strutting our stuff forever, as we have every right to do, adopting as our holy writ, the notion that no nation or group of nations, should ever be allowed to grow so powerful as to even balance us. And this, of course, is the death head's dogma that leads directly to Apocalypse.
But Obama, whose administration now has its tarry fingerprints all over the Keystone Pipeline, has shown with equal and dreadful portent where our dooms gather and how they grow. The president withdraws from Iraq, since it is a dead loss, and squares off toward bloodier patches in Pakistan, flailing away in Afghanistan, menacing Iran, pacifying Libya into a failed state or a broiling civil war.
The US foreign policy is the same, the underlying belief system is the same, no matter the party in the White House. And if we as citizens keep churning up the same hopeless Faustian bargain, we are lost. The forces in our country of environmental destruction, economic war waged against us, and runaway militarism and aggression are sure to destroy us; if we don't help change this country in a fundamental way.
It's time that we join hands and go on to organize.
