The Decline and Fall of Obama

I am increasingly unhappy with President Obama, who received my vote in 2008.  And that is probably an understatement, since I haven't been pleased with his actions since he began appointing his Cabinet and staff in Nov/Dec of 2008, before he was even sworn into office.  Anyone who has been reading this blog since then knows what I'm talking about.

Who's not to like?  Let me list the names (sorry if I mispell the names but I'm not looking each one up!).  For starters, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Peter Orzag, Laura Tyson, Ben Bernanke, and Rahm Emmanuel.  Obama's economic team was a swat team from Wall Street, if you ask me, ready to shoot down any real economic reforms measure.  This administration has been every bit as subservient to Big Finance as any Republicans ever were.  Instead of reform, we got the status quo of the last 30 years.  Which means that we're going to continue the patterns of the last 30 years, and that means further (and worse) economic disaster down the road.

And then we had the ramping up of the Afghanistan War, in all its inglorious ugliness.  Make no mistake, this is Obama's war.  He could have scaled down and gone counterterrorism, but instead he put the pedal to the metal and went counterinsurgency and nation-building.  And so we've invested untold billions of increasingly worthless American dollars, destroyed thousands of lives, families, and communities  on all sides, and FOR WHAT?!  To prove that our Democratic President is not a wimp?  To kill a few hundred Al Qaeda?  To try and determine the destiny of the Afghani people by 'defeating' the Taliban?  To keep our military-industrial complex in business?  For God's sake, what is worth all this treasure? 

And now we (along with our European partners) are invading Libya.  To protect the Libyan people?  Please, don't make me laugh!  These governments couldn't care less about the Libyan people.  Really, I mean that.  What they obviously care about is that nice pool of oil there in Libya, plus Ghaddafi's unwillingness to play along with the Anglo-American big boys and the threat he poses to the petro and dollar system as a result.

I think there is a real chance that Obama will be defeated in 2012, given that the economy is going nowhere fast.  Furthermore, many people who thought who was a true reformer have now been thoroughly disillusioned (like me), and they're either going to not participate, or they will look for another candidate to support.  That doesn't mean that things are going to go any better, of course.  Our path toward national (and maybe global) decline is pretty well set and will be hard to change.  There's going to be a lot of thrashing about in the coming years by the mortally wounded American shark, and it ain't going to be pretty.