By Bernard Jenkins
It doesn't matter a damn where Barack Hussein Obama was born. Hawaii (true). Kenya (false). Indonesia (false). Bosnia-Herzegovina (false). Or Krypton (false). The question is: Where was he born again?? In the mailroom of Goldman Sachs? In Saudi Arabia? Or both?
Obama has, so far, pulled off the greatest “trick what nobody cannot do”. He has sold out almost every single political position he pretended to believe in during the 2008 election. It is a stunning record of betrayal. It should retire the trophy once held by Aaron Burr and Benedict Arnold.
Among the not-so-short list: The health insurance/pharmaceutical companies care and protection bill. The millionaires/billionaires/zillionaires tax cut bill. The never-ending-until-there's-no-more-money-to-be-made-from-them Iraq/Afghanistan wars. Continuing the spying on US citizens. Keeping open the Guantanamo torture facility. Increasing the role and multi-billion dollar revenue stream of the terror/industrial complex. Saving all the bankrupt criminal banks of the world with trillion$ of the tax payers' money. Radio silence on the GOP/Nutbag outlaws'war on public labor unions, teachers, cops, firefighters, health workers, etc. The let-them-eat-hedge-funds public school "reform" movement. Failing to support or even speak about anything whatsoever (outside the NBA) that has anything to do with improving the political/social/economic position of America’s hard pressed black population. The list of indictments goes on and on and on...
His squeamishness, fecklessness, political cowardice and Rodney (can't we all get along?) King gene is epic. His negotiating style is to punt on 1st down. If he were president in 1861 instead of the giant Abe Lincoln, half the country would probably still be slave states today. If his knack for depressing and suppressing his once-upon-a-time constituency's desire to vote due to their serious disappointment and despair at his performance as president continues to 2012 and the seditionist Koch Bros./GOP/Teabag Party succeed in their nefarious plans, we will all be slaves working for $1 a day and no benefits before too long.
Obama’s latest 3-Card Monte con trick pulled on America and the world is the “is-it-or-isn’t-it-no-fly-zone war” on Libya.
In cahoots with the repugnant and repressive Saudis, the repulsive and rapacious global vuIture capitalists and el-Qaeda of Wall Street, it is looking more and more likely that the Obamaniacs are succeeding in betraying the efforts and desires of the Freedom Caravan that has been roiling the criminal and corrupt regimes of the Middle East and North Africa all year.
The Obama administration did not have a clue about the revolt in Tunisia until it succeeded. It dithered over the fate of the pharaoh Mubarak in Egypt during the Tahrir Square Revolution until about a minute before the pharaoh toppled over from his own dead weight and a shove from the Egyptian military (much to the displeasure of the Saudis who were rooting for Mubarak). Obama has been as silent as Marcel Marceau while the tyrannical (and sometime US antiterrorism ally)Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh's thugs shoot freedom protesters like fish in a barrel. He has been seriously disengaged as Syria’s Bashar al-Assad turns his gunmen on peaceful protesters in Damascus, Dera’a and Latakia, killing dozens of them so far. And he has been absolutely mum as the contemptible little Sunni king of Bahrain’s goons brutally bully, beat and murder that pipsqueak island country’s oppressed Shiite majority, while 2,000 invading Saudi troops aid and abet and cheer on this make-believe monarch’s inexcusable display of bloody force.
So why is Libya, where much the same has been going on, suddenly so special as to require all this heavy breathing by the US (and NATO) after weeks of do-nothingism on their part?
Obama’s recent speech on the no-fly-zone was not exactly the Gettysburg Address, but a word salad of patriotic tub-thumping and humanitarian claptrap that might have been left over from the collected utterings of the previous dishonest “decider” George W. Bush. Less than thrilling and mostly humbug, the speech was most notable for the absence of the alibi that dare not speak its name: Oil!
The wily Saudis, our longtime oily allies and puppet masters, have always hated Qaddafi, the erratic and frequently unreliable Libyan dictator, who doubtless has always hated them. To America, Qaddafi has been a handy cartoon villain for decades. On the surface, Libya is a giant sand trap, hardly a country at all but a collection of tribes bribed into obedience by Qaddafi for 40 years. Beneath the sandy surface, however, it has the largest proven oil reserves on the African continent. It is Europe’s largest oil supplier. Africa’s 2nd largest oil producer. And dominates the petroleum sector in the southern Mediterranean region. We are now talking real money not democratic revolution.
The future fate of Libya is looking more and more like a kind of twisted triple bank-shot.
Saudi Arabia “invades” Bahrain in support of the hapless Sunni king who is thumping the despised Shi’ite majority there, while also securing the US 5th Fleet's big Bahrain naval base. At the same time this "invasion" is intended to send a chilling message to Saudi Arabia's own restive and repressed Shi’ite minority and the Saudi and American bogeyman and arch-enemy Iran.
In exchange for these Saudi efforts, the American military and its French and British allies muscle into Libya’s civil war, ostensibly to “save” innocent civilians and “support” the rebel side of the fight (whoever they are), at the same time “degrading” (one of those military terms of art) and destroying a good chunk of Qaddafi’s military machine and, perhaps, inadvertently dropping a bomb or two on Qaddafi’s head.
Hopefully, the mullahs in Iran are also watching all these fireworks on their TV news.
Once chaos has been restored in Libya (as George W. Bush might say), and Freedom’s Caravan stopped in its tracks in the Gulf and along the Mediterranean, the Shock Doctrine corporate vultures and cannibals, already drooling at the prospects, will swoop in to pillage, plunder and privatize everything worth anything in this oil & gas rich crypto-country with its miles and miles of exploitable Mediterranean coastline.
If all goes according to this twisted trickeration, the thrilling and promising 2011 Arab Freedom and Democracy Revolt against decades of repression and tyranny at the hands of the tin-pot dictators, tin-foil crown monarchs and psycho presidents-for-life of the Middle East and North Africa will have been nipped in the bud. And the region will once again be ripe for the terror/industrial complex to flourish. Qaddafi will have been cowed (or killed). Only to be replaced by some Ahmed Chalabi-like toady of the Masters of the Universe. The Shi’ites of the Gulf (and, not coincidently, Iran) will have been smacked down and (hopefully) taught a lesson. The Saudis will have reinforced their position as perhaps the world’s most devious manipulators of oppressive power. The greed heads of corporate globalization will be laughing all the way to the bank. And Barack Obama can take a victory lap for his heroic part in holding back the future and get ready to focus like a laser on his next trick: Selling out Social Security and Medicare.
Missions Accomplished.
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