Barack Obama’s performance today only highlighted the mass of contradictions one can only be when one’s entire raison d’être is to hoodwink and bamboozle, to sell ice to Eskimos, snake oil to snake charmers, and yet more treaties to Natives. “Now you see it, now you don’t. I don’t think I said what you think you heard, and if I did, you know I thought I meant it, sometimes. Hello, I must be going.”That's how he won the office, and that's how he'll lose. Double-talk is a good starter, but a bad finisher.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Just war
Cinie has a brilliant piece up -- the best thing I've read so far on the Nobel Peace Prize going to Obama at the very moment when he is ramping up our military presence in Afghanistan.
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3 comments:
And how about the sheer classiness of using your Nobel acceptance speech as a chance to justify your latest escalation?
Cinie: "If the man had any integrity, was a true leader and not a self-serving, pretentious blowhard..."
... he’d have, when the prize was announced, politely thanked the committee and politely declined the award.
Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com
OSLO: US president gets the Nobel Peace Prize, having been nominated for it a few days after taking office, and uses the occasion to sing a hymn to US war efforts.
MEANWHILE ON PLANET EARTH: capitalism has always been about war.
COPENHAGEN: the pseudo-left holds a mass protest and a riot, calling for the international community of national 'governments' to do more to 'stop climate change'. Yes indeed! Give us more of what you say you want to give us, your lordships! Faster, please!
It reminds me of fawning journalists asking government ministers, "But are you sure you're doing enough?"
MEANWHILE ON PLANET EARTH: the climate has always fucking changed. In the 15th and 19th centuries there were frost fairs on the Thames. And the climate always will change.
What mad shit is next? Should we all pull together to stop the Earth rotating on its axis?
Never mind the foreign saboteurs with their sympathisers and partisans all over Britain, who are supposed to be the reason why we're watched by so many cameras and so much information is gathered about every fucking thing we do and every fucking place we go.
It's even worse! "Climate deniers" want to rob you of everything you hold dear!
Meanwhile, household rubbish (US:garbage) is collected fortnightly rather than weekly, and the rat population has soared. (But what do you expect when a country deindustrialises?) Ah, ecology!
In some places, it's been made unlawful to burn a few sticks in your garden. Instead, you've got to take them to the local council and pay some money so that they can do it for you. If you can't afford it...well, didn't the secure and sensible middle classes always know the poor were dirty and anti-social? When it comes down to it, aren't those dirty bastards the big problem?
The whole 'green' and 'ecological' discourse must be approached in a completely hostile way from the beginning - as propaganda and only propaganda. Not in Chomsky's mindfuck waste-of-time sense, but in the sense of Hitler or, even apter, in the sense of his teacher, Bernays.
Of course capitalism, if allowed to continue, will make life more unliveable than it already is. The mistake is to seek a position, however critical it may be, within the shitty propaganda discourse the rulers have put into place.
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