Democrats and Liberals Give Obama a Pass on Closing Gitmo

"I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that"

-President Barack Obama

Liberals disgust me. With 2014 being an election year and the looming announcement from Queen Hillary the Inevitable that she is running for president in 2016 liberals and their beloved Democratic Party are closing ranks and circling the wagons to protect Team Blue Jackass from heretics unwilling to line up and salute the party flag. Obama is now well into his second term and the American torture and concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay is still open for business, a pox upon our once great country and one that along with the abominable practices there – namely torture and the prevention from it officially becoming a “death camp” only because the US government is force feeding prisoners who are attempting hunger strikes – continue and will continue because after all, it is an election year and God forbid if the Democrats make it any easier for their more overtly fascist opponents to call them “chicken”. 

Obama ran on closing this monstrous facility and to this day, five and a half years into his second term it has yet to be done. Oh, but the Democrats and the liberals blame those bad, bad Republicans for their ongoing obstructionism and preventing Barry from carrying out his agenda - horseshit! Obama had two years when his party controlled the Congress and the only thing of substance that managed to get accomplished was bailing out the criminals on Wall Street whose bad gambling bets wrecked the economy. Obama could have - and could still close the goddamned wretched place any time that he chooses, after all the Bush-Cheney regime firmly established the American version of the  Führerprinzip or as it is known in The Homeland: the Unitary Executive. This renders moot any Democrat whining that Obama is powerless - he does manage to get a lot done when it comes to unleashing the NSA Stasi against the public and having his ruthless underboss Eric Holder to use the arcane 1917 Espionage Act as a bludgeon to suppress whistleblowers and those who report on them. He also manages to do one hell of a job of conducting extrajudicial assassinations against American citizens, covering up torture and other high crimes of his predecessor and instigating hostilities with a nuclear armed Russia because he was insulted by President Putin.

Obama is far from the helpless, besieged by racists and obstructionists and teabaggers historic leader that he is made out to be and the same liberals who shrieked for Bush and Cheney's heads on pikes for far less than the loathsome Obama regime has pulled are falling into line and shuffling towards the Kool Aid vat just as they always do. Obama gave his much hyped foreign policy speech at West Point where he gave the commencement address to the future corporate cannon fodder of illegal wars of aggression and vowed to close the facility again. The speech was more of the same teleprompter drivel in which Obama laid out the proverbial line of bullshit long enough to fertilize the Sahara with his interventionist rhetoric and defense of that most obscene of concepts that is American exceptionalism. I excerpt the following from the transcript:

Think about it. Our military has no peer. The odds of a direct threat against us by any nation are low, and do not come close to the dangers we faced during the Cold War. Meanwhile, our economy remains the most dynamic on Earth, our businesses the most innovative. Each year, we grow more energy independent. From Europe to Asia, we are the hub of alliances unrivaled in the history of nations.

America continues to attract striving immigrants. The values of our founding inspire leaders in parliaments and new movements in public squares around the globe. And when a typhoon hits the Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help. (Applause.) So the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century past, and it will be true for the century to come.

 But the world is changing with accelerating speed. This presents opportunity, but also new dangers. We know all too well, after 9/11, just how technology and globalization has put power once reserved for states in the hands of individuals, raising the capacity of terrorists to do harm.

 Russia’s aggression towards former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors.

 AND

I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.

 And that’s why I will continue to push to close Gitmo, because American values and legal traditions do not permit the indefinite detention of people beyond our borders. (Applause.) That’s why we’re putting in place new restrictions on how America collects and uses intelligence -- because we will have fewer partners and be less effective if a perception takes hold that we’re conducting surveillance against ordinary citizens. (Applause.) America does not simply stand for stability or the absence of conflict, no matter what the cost; we stand for the more lasting peace that can only come through opportunity and freedom for people everywhere -- which brings me to the fourth and final element of American leadership: our willingness to act on behalf of human dignity.

America’s support for democracy and human rights goes beyond idealism; it is a matter of national security. Democracies are our closest friends and are far less likely to go to war. Economies based on free and open markets perform better and become markets for our goods. Respect for human rights is an antidote to instability and the grievances that fuel violence and terror.

At that point the commanders should have ordered the cadets to break ranks and get out the shovels. I mean for God's sake - can't we even manage to produce coherent bullshit in this country anymore? The neocons howled like dogs being castrated because it just wasn't Hitlerian enough for their tastes but the meat of the speech - on the continuation of US interventionism for vaguely defined humanitarian missions must have made the panties of both warmongering femme fatales Susan Rice and Samantha Powers get wet. Nothing quite sells like sending in the US special ops and hit teams to rescue a couple of hundred of hapless Nigerian schoolgirls who were kidnapped by Islamists largely empowered by the US destabilization of Africa and the Democrats are at the end of the day as bloodthirsty as their criminal cohorts across the aisle. Hillary will be perfect for the coming wave of American whip ass that will be unleashed for "humanitarian" or "Responsibility to Protect (P2P)" Team America style incursions and nothing could be more pleasing to the party base, fucking hypocrites that they all are.

In my daily online travels I frequent a number of progressive sites where I often voice my opinion in the comments sections for articles and I have noticed an alarming amount of what appear to be long dormant Hillary Clinton sleeper cells being activated. You can always tell these because first off the person making comments is asinine and secondly, many of the accounts show a creation date of 2008 and 2009 with minimal comments over five years until a recent spike of activity. There are also many pieces and articles popping up like toadstools out of piles of cow shit after a morning rain calling for unity behind a “far from perfect” candidate because the Republicans would be much, much worse.

The unenlightened always play to the silly pack of low information types – or much information that is no more than DNC propaganda – with their fear of the GOP war on the rights of some besieged and helpless identity based group. The good thing now is that thanks to the horrific track record of Barack Obama that a lot more people than before do not buy into that two-party hogwash this time around and it is causing a huge problem not only for Democrats but for the entire sham system itself.

Former New York Times foreign correspondent and author Chris Hedges, himself more of a socialist – calm down libertarians, he did sue Obama over the National Defense Authorization Act – called out liberals for the hypocrites that they are shortly after the election of the man of hope and change. From his December 7, 2009 column entitled “Liberals are Useless”:

Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.

 I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.

AND

 I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best way to “credentialize” yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these “revolutionaries” found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.

I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods like Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot washers. They worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better life, which few of them ever got. We used to run five miles after our nightly training, passing through the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Projects, and they would joke, “I hope we get mugged.” They knew precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with across the Charles River. They would have felt awkward, and would have been made to feel awkward, at the little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals at Harvard, but you could trust and rely on them.

I went on to spend two decades as a war correspondent. The qualities inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are qualities I admire—self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don’t. So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are.

Hedges of course was vilified by the liberal elitists and the Democrats after he nailed them so precisely and now as the cheer-leading and activism begins for the newest great liberal hope Hillary so will any who dare to speak such blasphemy. I have long advocated for an alliance between thinking progressives, leftists, libertarians and principled conservatives against our true enemy - the entire corrupt two party US political system itself and thanks to Obama the choir that I preach to is growing by the day.

Obama Worshippers Only Enable the Collapse

Having just finished reading a column from Patrick J. Buchanan entitled "A Left-Right Convergence?" in which the longtime paleoconservative mused about a coming alliance between anti-fascist elements of the left and the right I must admit that I have been pushing this idea for years and it is nice to see someone like the old warhorse himself bring it up. It has long been the ONLY logical way to seriously challenge the corrupt bipartisan warfare state and the rigged system of spoils to benefit an American oligarchy grown fat, arrogant and rotten beyond mere words that is protected by an omnipresent all-seeing eye of a gargantuan surveillance machine and enforced by paramilitary police forces and a weaponized judicial system. While I do not agree with Pat Buchanan on everything - or for that matter most things - he is onto something here and in his column he pays tribute to Ralph Nader whose new book "Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State" is as sensible as it is heretical to the so-called left in this country, a morally bankrupt gaggle of squabbling identity based groups clinging to the putrescent criminal enterprise that is the Democratic party like little piggies sucking on their mother's teats.

Having formerly been aligned with much of the left before I came to my senses and began to identify more with the more rational progressives and principled conservatives and libertarians I can speak from experience that it is a fool's errand to break through the cult like reverence for Barack Obama and his already crowned successor Hillary Rodham-Clinton. The MSNBC marinated liberals who have drank the Kool Aid of false hope and chump change are as unreachable as their less refined counterparts who have been lobotomized by Fox News and will always be lured out to dutifully goose-step to the polls come election time to take revenge against whatever demon that happens to be conjured up for them by Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove and Roger Ailes. They are flip sides of the same coin which like the proverbial bad penny just keeps turning up and serving the establishment by allowing the two-party racket to continue to function as though there is a nickle's worth of difference between the two, primarily that one is just more overtly fascist than the other.

Until there is a mass awakening from the lie that is our so-called "democracy" to unify in opposition to that red, white and blue jackboot that will be stomping on a human face forever we can only continue to defy the odds, fight the good fight and prolong the imminent and inevitable collapse. But it is is not as though there are not those out there offering alternatives, Pat Buchanan shows that and I excerpt the following from his piece:

Last summer, in this capital of gridlock, a miracle occurred.

The American people rose as one and told the government of the United States not to drag us into another Middle East war in Syria.

Barack Obama was ready to launch air and missile strikes when a national uproar forced him to go to Congress for authorization. Congress seemed receptive until some Hill offices were swarmed by phone calls and emails coming in at a rate of 100-1 against war.

Middle America stopped the government from taking us into what even the president now concedes is “somebody else’s civil war.”

This triumphal coming together of left and right was a rarity in national politics. But Ralph Nader, in “Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State,” believes that ad hoc alliances of left and right to achieve common goals can, should, and, indeed, shall be our political future.

To call this an optimistic book is serious understatement.

Certainly, left and right have come together before.

Two decades ago, Ross Perot and this writer joined Ralph and the head of the AFL-CIO to stop NAFTA, a trade deal backed by America’s corporate elite and its army of mercenaries on Capitol Hill.

Congress voted with corporate America — against the country.

This is why Ron Paul was so reviled by the establishment - he had crossover appeal and the stones to take a stand against the vicious forces of the neocon infested Bush administration back in the days when any deviation from the lockstep orgy of nationalistic patriotism and blood vengeance for 9/11 would have one smeared ruthlessly as a traitor or worse. It was during this period and Congressman Paul's courageous denouncing of the wanton crimes of the war machine while millions of Americans were learning to love torture and mass surveillance that I came to admire the man's message as did millions of non-conformists, non-party over country loyalist and people who were able to think for themselves did.

My real leftist friends get it but they are radicals, socialists and in a few cases avowed Marxists just as my libertarian non-interventionist, pro-Constitutional and in a few cases avowed anarchists do. The real enemy is a shared one that is targeting any and all dissent which will be crushed ruthlessly when the time comes. What in the hell does anyone think that all of these NSA programs exist for? Why is that massive data storage facility out in Utah there? It is all being done for the day when the US totalitarian state finally goes fully live and the machines start spitting out the pickup orders for troublemakers. More than a few of the sheep may be on those lists thanks to the miracle of the three-hop query but their blissful ignorance will only be shattered when they round the final bend in the steel chute to line up for their turn to experience the captive bolt pistol. I found the words of former NSA turned whistleblower William Binney to be as frank a warning as one could expect, I excerpt from the transcript of a podcast interview with Rob Kall of progressive website OpEd News:

R.K.: Anything that we haven't covered yet?  We have got to wrap this up.  Anything that we haven't covered that's really important that you would like the listeners to know about?

W.B.: Just that my major concern isn't with NSA having access to this data or having this data, it's the use of it and once they get it and store it, being used by law enforcement and our law enforcement is spreading that around the world to other law enforcement and so it's corrupting not just our democracy, we're becoming a police state because of this but it's also corrupting the countries around the world so it's really endangering the democratic process and the court systems that we have established.  That is really destroying our society.  We may not know it yet but eventually it'll get to all of us.

R.K.: Bad news.  So you told me that you're going to spend the rest of your life on this. 

W.B.: Yes.  Until my government basically starts to do the right thing, and that means become a constitutionally based operating government.

R.K.: Do you see any ideological or party differences in the way this is being handled?

W.B.: Actually no.  I think they're all basically the same.  They've been, I mean for example you know Bush would prefer to have acquired the terrorists, captured them, put them in to torture them to get information; whereas Obama would kill them with a drone.  So it's the same principle, I mean they're just doing whatever they want, there are no limits to what they want to do.  Especially the latest NDAA that talks about giving the president the power to declare anybody, any US Citizen even in this country a terrorist and have the military pick them up, take them off the street, incarcerate them indefinitely, and give them no due process. 

That to me is executing something very similar to what the Nazis did in 1933, Special Order 48, that did exactly the same thing.  And that's how they got rid of all of their opposition.  All the communists and anybody else that opposed them.  But I mean they sent them to the concentration camps.  So far we have not been sending them to the concentration camps but they'll do things like send the FBI after you or maybe attempt to put you in jail like they tried to do with a number of us. 

So they're not as radical yet but the problem is that when you give people that kind of power or they hold that kind of power, sooner or later, they're going to use it. One way or another.  

The seriousness of our dilemma when it comes to the liberal version of dancing with the dunces and their ongoing prostration for the Democratic party and the treacherous snake-oil salesman Barack Obama is evident in the way that investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald is treated. Per the blog Raw Story Greenwald's recent appearance on Democratic party propaganda machine MSNBC's "All in With Chris Hayes" highlights the the hostility of liberals to the truth, particularly on Obama's NSA Stasi as was written about by Greenwald in his just released book "No Place to Hide".  I excerpt the following from the Raw Story piece:

“There are lots of people who watch this show who hate you, frankly,” Hayes said.

“Really?” Greenwald joked. “Oh, my god, that’s so disturbing, I didn’t know that.”

“You have a way of making people very angry at you, and you have a way –– I think sometimes, if you don’t mind my saying –– of alienating possible allies,” Hayes continued.

Greenwald said that when he started writing about politics, he “didn’t have a big megaphone, I didn’t have a large corporation that gave me a camera or a newspaper that gave me a big platform.”

“I had to find a way to be heard,” he said. “You’ve got to be aggressive in terms of having your critique heard.”

“People feel like they have to choose between Barack Obama and Glenn Greenwald,” Hayes countered. “And there are millions of people in this country who are like, ‘If that is the choice, I choose Barack Obama. I like Barack Obama. Like, Barack Obama got a lot of people Medicaid.’”

Greenwald said that the same people who attack him now cheered for him when he was attacking the Bush administration.

I certainly can understand that, it makes me physically sick to see how many liberals now give Obama a free pass for things that they squealed for Bush's head on a pike for but that is the problem with party loyalists, particularly in a society where the two-party system is just a cover for criminality of whom the only real loyalty is against the very concept of a free and decent society. 

But all that is just my own personal opinion for what it's worth. Hell, after all I am a guy who is reviled by both sides and one who has been denounced on the Obama water carrying site Democratic Underground: "Donn Marten is just a blogger who hates Democrats" as well as by the filth over at the neocon racist sewer Front Page Magazine, a kind of Stormfront for anti-Muslim types: "For leftists like Martin, U.S.-EU policy is simply aimed at "making Ukraine safe for corporate vultures".  There is no greater badge of honor in being hated by both the Democrats and Republicans and their legions of losers, lackeys and lickspittles but that puts me in some pretty damned good company with Buchanan, Nader, Greenwald and Ron Paul.

Americans better wake up because an alliance that sets aside petty ideological differences to mount a unified and sustained defense against the fascist corporate warfare chance is the only chance that we have.