Obama in Berlin, 2008 vs. 2013.

[JackRiddler]

107. The interesting thing about talking points...

Is that no matter how often dealt with, the true believers will just keep lining up to sling them again.

And no, I am not kidding.

I didn't make up the photos. 2008, 250,000 people cheering.

2013, central Berlin on lockdown, 5000 establishment people invited, a wall erected to prevent demonstrations.

He had the glass. This wasn't about his safety. He made appearances before open-air live crowds during the 2012 campaign.

That was in the United States, where there is actual danger.

Hint: This is Berlin, where the danger to him is far less. Not a city of gun nuts and automatic rifles, last I looked.

This is about the reception Berlin would have given him if there had been an open crowd. The danger to his "safety" was the danger of bad PR from the little establishment crowd being dwarfed by an antiwar, antisurveillance protest.

Now we know the apologists for imperialism, for drone wars, for warrantless surveillance and indefinite detention, and for the illusion that All Is Peachy have no ammo left, because every post by them on DU goes straight to calling critics of the United States government "racists" and right-wingers.

People all around the world currently hate the symbols of the empire that murders primarily brown people and that, in Germany, has them (like us) under a worldwide total surveillance system.

That would apply to any CEO of the military-industrial-intelligence-surveillance beast. It wouldn't matter which team you imagined he was on.