What I can’t believe is that we’re going to do the “I can’t believe they’re going to take us into another war”-blather again.

What’s not to believe? It’s what they do. While we sit around and remain stuck in disbelief. It’s not as if it’s any surprise – Their game plan was laid out and has been talked about for years:

In October, 2007, Gen. Wesley Clark gave a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco (seven-minute excerpt in the video below) in which he denounced what he called “a policy coup” engineered by neocons in the wake of 9/11. After recounting how a Pentagon source had told him weeks after 9/11 of the Pentagon’s plan to attack Iraq notwithstanding its non-involvement in 9/11, this is how Clark described the aspirations of the “coup” being plotted by Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and what he called “a half dozen other collaborators from the Project for the New American Century”:

Six weeks later, I saw the same officer, and asked: “Why haven’t we attacked Iraq? Are we still going to attack Iraq?”

He said: “Sir, it’s worse than that. He said – he pulled up a piece of paper off his desk – he said: “I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office. It says we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years – we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”

Clark said the aim of this plot was this: “They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.” He then recounted a conversation he had had ten years earlier with Paul Wolfowitz — back in 1991 — in which the then-number-3-Pentagon-official, after criticizing Bush 41 for not toppling Saddam, told Clark: “But one thing we did learn [from the Persian Gulf War] is that we can use our military in the region – in the Middle East – and the Soviets won’t stop us. And we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet regimes – Syria, Iran [sic], Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.” Clark said he was shocked by Wolfowitz’s desires because, as Clark put it: “the purpose of the military is to start wars and change governments? It’s not to deter conflicts?”

Early this morning I had to listen, yet again, to the hosts and guests on Morning Joe speak of Obama as “a liberal”.

Until and unless we deal directly with correcting the language and definitions, we haven’t a prayer of real reform.

All that Obama’s been doing is trying to save unregulated capitalism and the lock that the 1% has on the other 99%.
He is in office to mellow-tal­k us into accepting that which we’d never stand still for if we had contentiou­s fire-in-th­e-belly Democratic politician­s actually fighting on our behalf. He’s in the White House to ease us into accepting the greatest heist in the history of the world, and never even think about trying to get back the money that was ripped off from the middle and poor classes.

What Obama’s doing is presiding over the end game of America, letting the ‘Haves’ pick the (our) bones clean. The more we see of Obama in action, the more ‘deals’ he makes, the more people realize that Obama’s a continuati­on of the cruel policies of BushCheney and Clinton before that, and BushReagan before that­.

We need another FDR.

How is it that any Democratic voter considers Hillary to be a liberal?

When politicians say that Social Security is “the third rail of politics”, they mean it with a hostility that should be reserved for their corporate masters. You don’t see politicians putting campaign finance and election reform on their agenda from year to year as you do their continuing assaults on social safety net programs for the people.

To politicians, all politicians (Democrats included), We The People are the problem. If only they didn’t have to deal with making us happy to get our votes to keep them employed. If only they didn’t have to serve us, they’d be able to give and give and give to Big Business (privatize national resources that belong collectively to us all, the people) and deregulate so that corporations wouldn’t be constrained by anything and could become profit-making machines on steroids, unobstructed by piddling voter concerns such as health, safety, environment, etc. And for accomplishing this, politicians would be amply rewarded, and perhaps would be able to join the ruling class themselves instead of merely serving the 1%.

You can choose to believe what you will about Democratic politicians, but the face is that the DLC/Third Way/No Labels controls the Democratic Party, and Democrats in Congress and the White House have signed on to privatize public resources and utilities and deregulate. Democrats in Congress, despite their campaign promises, have refused to regulate or perform their Constitutionally-required role of oversight, both in the Bush and Obama administrations. What little regulating they’ve put in legislation the last 4 years is ineffective for a whole array of sneaky reasons. As a result, wars are still being fought off-budget with defense contractors stealing us blind, insurance companies don’t have to comply with healthcare reform laws, banks can continue as huge profit-making machines for their officers, all leading the nation into one bubble and crash after another.

You can choose to think of Obama and his intentions in whatever way makes you happy. What you can’t do is explain how any of what Obama’s done these past 4 years has been in the people’s interests and not the corporations’.

We The People are being transformed, from sheep to sacrificial lambs.

On Twitter, Karl Rove ‏@KarlRove tweets:

Fix-It-First is $50B, almost as much as new revenues from raising taxes in fiscal cliff (that money was already spent on Sandy relief)

Sounds like we’re getting some more “shovel-ready” projects.

Head Start. It’s been a while since that’s been a political hot potato. Hillary must be running.

Greg Mitchell ‏@GregMitch
3 ties on podium in silent tribute to the Teletubbies.

As Occupy The Hood just said on Twitter, “Never feel like he is talking to my block”.

Is it just me or does it look like he’s gotten a fresh haircut (to highlight the gray)?

I’ve heard this speech many times. It’s cobbled together campaign speeches.

The nerve of this man. It’s his legislation that’s “bridging”, short term legislation, from “crisis to crisis”.

“Now is the best time to ____ (because you’re never going to get another Democratic president who can get so much past Democratic and Independent voters)”.

“We must keep the promises we’ve already made (to the Powers-That-Be)”.

Single payer now!

More austerity talk.

More “shared burden”.

For the record, I think it’s important for understanding the past few years that it didn’t take hindsight to see Obama’s intentions. Many people advocated in real time to be wary of certain proposals, to demand to see details, to put all options on the table. These voices were systematically shouted down by party loyalists or operatives or whatever term you want to use.

I think you’re absolutely correct, I being one of those advocates. I meant for those who didn’t see, who refused to believe their own lyin’ eyes, they should now see in hindsight just how deceitful Obama’s actions were. Unfortunately, many don’t (as we can see from his reelection numbers), and still hold out some hope, some belief that he’s really a good man, for the People. It’s these people, along with others, who think Hillary is different than Obama, and the One (for 2016).

What I was really trying to convey was something that never has been discussed: How a public option was never anything that Obama wanted, and that was the reason that he took single payer off the table before negotiations ever began – To make sure that a public option wouldn’t be the natural compromise position.

Once you get that, see just how deviously plotting Obama was, you can’t give him the benefit of any doubt.

Obama’s gotten where he is because of the likability factor. Those who keep making excuses for him do so because they see him as a nice guy, too nice, and that’s been the reason for his not taking Republicans on. In order to wake these people up, they’re going to have to see how both parties use each other for cover, and are taking their defenders for fools.

If we’re ever to get out of this mess, this oligarch one-party rule, we’re going to have to shake the ‘bot voters up and get them angry at the correct people – The politicians in both parties.

If ever there was a mandate from an election, reform of America’s health care system was the issue of the 2008 election.

This was the fight that Obama and Democrats were put into power to have. They were tasked to get affordable­, quality medical treatment for everyone and they pledged to do it. It couldn’t have come at a more opportune time — The economic meltdown and the massive number of jobs lost in America. It was an opportunit­y for Obama and Democrats to turn the conservati­ves’ privatizat­ion and deregulati­on tide of the last three decades. A perfect storm had aligned, with our need for alternativ­e clean and sustainabl­e energy, affordable quality medical care for all, education and job training and the creation of millions of new jobs in the US. It was an opportunit­y for Obama to combine it all into a New New Deal project, which could have solved all of the problems left to him by Bush-Cheney and usher us into the 21st century as a competitiv­e force to be reckoned with in a world economy.

Instead, Obama and Democrats did a masterful job of preserving the failed system, setting it in concrete actually, convincing the victims that it’s really a good thing (and hoping that by the time the People realize that it’s not a good thing, Obama and the Democrats who made it happen will have long since retired their offices).

I have to hand it to him, how he did it was masterful — In hindsight it’s really obvious that he had no intention of putting in a public option (what would keep insurance companies honest and costs down, if insurance companies were to remain in the equation). But in order to prevent a public option, he first had to get single payer off the table. Before negotiatio­ns began.

Obama took single payer off the table BEFORE negotiatio­ns ever began. Secretly. Clandestin­ely. Publicly he said he was staying out of the legislatin­g, saying that it was Congress’s job (that was the same gambit he used when it came to letting Bush’s tax cuts for the rich expire, and apparently Obama’s ‘most ardent fans’ keep falling for it).

Then Obama went and made a secret deal with the pharmaceut­ical, insurance, hospital industries­, the AMA, undercutti­ng all of the Congressio­nal committees working on legislatio­n except one — Baucus’s committee (the Senate Finance committee) which Obama disavowed for months. Baucus’s committee’s bill was written by the insurance industry.

When word came out about the deal, the White House Iied it.

Obama took single payer off the table before negotiatio­ns ever began. Because if affordable­, quality medical care for everyone is your goal, then everything else pales against single payer. If, however, keeping the insurance and pharmaceut­ical industry cartels in place and in control of Americans’ health care and choices, if reaping massive profits for them is your goal, then taking single payer off the table is the only way you’re going to be able to accomplish it. Because single payer had to be off the table before negotiations ever began so that a public option (the only method for keeping costs down) couldn’t be the “compromise” position.