Noam Chomsky blasts Obama: He has no moral center

[Lydia Leftcoast]

134. He's only saying what many of us have suspected

Back during the Clinton administration, one of my friends explained Bill Clinton's tendency to cave in for the Republicans (which he did quite a lot in his first term) by the fact that Clinton grew up as an outsider and desperately wanted to be an insider. He therefore tried to please the "big boys" in hopes of becoming one of them. Unfortunately, as many of us learned in high school, 1) the insiders are usually a bunch of brainless moral midgets, and 2) once they have pegged you as an outsider, they will respect you less and less the more you try to get them to like you.

I see Obama as having some of the same problem. He runs as a Democrat, does a reasonably good (although not perfect) imitation of a center-left liberal while campaigning, but once he's in office, he expands the Afghan War, browbeats the Progressive Caucus into accepting a Heritage Foundation insurance plan (instead of browbeating the much smaller number of Blue Dogs into accepting a public option), widens the Afghan War (with its constantly moving goalposts and inhumane drone policy), appoints a torture-advocate as director of the CIA and two banksters (one in each term) as Secretary of the Treasury. He buys into the notion that the deficit is America's biggest problem, sufficiently so to raise the notion of cutting future Social Security benefits,when the real threats are actually long-term unemployment, lack of job opportunities for youth, global climate change, and deteriorating infrastructure.

I'm coming to the conclusion that it's all theater. We get a "choice" between someone who would be considered conservative in any other Western country and someone who would be off the right end of the charts in any other Western country. Either way, the Establishment wins, quickly or slowly, and the people lose.