2012 President

By Dave Lindorff

If you are sitting in class taking a test, and you’ve chosen to sit
amongst your bone-headed, slacker friends, don’t turn to them for help
when you can’t figure out of any of the answers. They may all tell you
the same thing, but they’ll all be wrong.

By Dave Lindorff

With word being leaked out over the weekend that our Nobel Peace
Prize President is close to announcing plans to escalate the US troop
level in the Afghanistan War by 50%, we are about to have perhaps the
ultimate of ironies—a president announcing a big step-up in American
war-making on November 11, the day known around much of the Western
world as Armistice Day.

By Dave Lindorff

The way I see it, President Obama has a couple of months to turn his failing administration around.

The war in Afghanistan is going south, and within a couple of weeks,
his General William Westmoreland, Gen. Stanley McCrystal, will be
coming to him asking for more troops. Things are getting hairier in
Iraq too.

His signature health care initiative is foundering, with Republicans working in lockstep to see to it that it fails.

Pressure is mounting for an honest probe into the criminality of the
prior administration in its authorization and promotion of torture
against captives--most of them innocent--in the Bush/Cheney "war" on
terror.

By Dave Lindorff

President Barack Obama has staked his presidency on winning his “necessary” war in Afghanistan. Coming into office, one of his first acts, on Feb. 18, was to boost US troop levels in that country by 17,000, bringing the total number of soldiers and Marines in the country to about 57,000, to which one must also add 74,000 private contractors who are doing jobs normally done by uniformed military, and about 33,000 other soldiers from NATO countries and Australia. That’s 164,000 foreign soldiers fighting against Taliban fighters.

By Dave Lindorff

What’s the difference between a Blue Dog Democrat and a progressive
Democrat? One is a vertebrate with a spine and a willingness to bite.
The other is a jellyfish with no spine and no teeth.

This difference has been glaringly apparent in the current fight over health care reform.

The Blue Dogs in House and Senate have been giving the progressive
Democrats an object lesson in how a small group in Congress can get its
way. They have threatened to withhold their support for the Obama
Administration’s key policy objective of a health reform package, and
have managed, with just a handful of votes between them, to remove
almost all progressive content from that legislation by threatening to
walk if they don’t get their way.

By Dave Lindorff

The Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats are finally
hitting the inevitable wall that was bound to confront them because of
the president’s congenital inability to be a bold leader, and because
of the party’s toxic decades-old decision to betray its working class
New Deal base in favor of wholesale corporate whoredom.

The wall is health care reform, which both Barack Obama and the
Democratic Party had hoped would be the ticket for them to ride to
victory in the 2010 Congressional elections and the 2012 presidential
election.

But you cannot achieve the twin goals of reducing health care costs
and providing access to health care to 50 million uninsured people,
while leaving the profit centers of the current system—doctors,
hospitals and the health insurance industry—in charge and in a position
to continue to reap profits.