By Dennis Loo
It’s quite a sight in the following May
16, 2008 NYT story “Bush Assails Appeasement,
Touching Off Storm” to
see Bush calling anyone who would negotiate with Iran and Syria a Nazi
appeaser. In fact, there is truth to this, except in a very perverse,
reverse sort of way.
Certainly there are the Aryan Nation sorts that are Nazis.
But who has the power today and who has
demonstrated the power today of carrying out mass murder and, going
beyond what the Nazis themselves ever did under Hitler, dared to LEGALIZE
torture and use it as daily, official policy?
Who has systematically lied about the
grounds for carrying out unprovoked aggression on other peoples and
countries? Who is now systematically lying about the grounds to attack
yet another country that has not attacked them and does not pose a threat
to them?
Anyone who thinks that negotiating with
Bush and Cheney is worthwhile is in fact, the Nazi appeaser. Bush
is complaining about and criticizing those who would appease HIM.
He is, indeed, accurately describing
the Democratic Party here, as he intended, but not in the way he intended.
If you read through the following story
to the very end, you see Obama, about whom Bush’s remarks were aimed,
state in summary form his foreign policy: he likes Bush Sr.’s foreign
policy. He has no real complaints about Desert Storm, the first gulf
war, based on what in criminological terms would be called “entrapment”
– luring the other party into committing a crime.
“I have enormous sympathy for the foreign
policy of George H. W. Bush,” he said. “I don’t have a lot of
complaints about their handling of Desert Storm. I don’t have a lot
of complaints with their handling of the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
So there you have it: a vote for the
most liberal Democrat still in the race in 2008 will be a vote for the
foreign policy of the GOP president in the late 1980s.
Doesn’t that make you feel a whole lot
better? Isn’t that a relief off our collective backs?
You can either vote for the GOP of today
with McCain, or you can vote for the GOP of yesteryear with Obama or
Clinton.
Reminds me a little of the famous Henry
Ford comment about the Model T Ford: You can have any color you want,
as long as it’s black.
Isn’t American style electoral politics
a wonder?
Dennis Loo is an awards winning sociologist,
co-editor of Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney,
Cal Poly Pomona Associate Professor of Sociology, WCW National Steering
Committee Member, Declare It Now originator.
I’m glad Professor Loo and the World Can’t Wait organization can see Barack Obama for the spine-less, corporate charade he truly is. So many of the magazines and publications on the left have already gone ahead and endorsed Obama for president, even while many of their writers and editors have pointed out that he is hardly a true progressive.
What really turned me away from Obama was when he refused to support the impeachment of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush for war crimes and erosions of our civil liberties. The bottom-line, as I see it anyway, is if Senator Obama does not support impeachment for the most multiply impeach-able administration in modern history, than he does not support the Constitution. If Bush/Cheney are not impeached, whoever is elected (or selected) president next will be completely irrelevant. Now, I’ll likely be attacked by the Obama supporters for having written this, but that’s how I feel.
As it is, I agree with the commentor above that a vote for McCain is absolutely, out of the question. However, I really do not see what makes Barack Obama (or Hillary Clinton) so much more desireable. Having said that, I’ll certainly show up and vote in November, but it won’t be for a corporate Republican, or a Democrat.
Loo’s logic, and thus his analogy here, is so flawed it verges on clinical paranoia. Even if he were right, and we should all believe that Obama’s foreign policy will mirror GOP foreign policy of yesterday, simply because of this one sentence, in which he offers “sympathy” (yes, sympathy, not full-fledged agreement) to Old Bush’s foreign policy, then who the hell does he suggest we vote for in the upcoming general election? In times as messed up as these, you may pray for perfection, but if you have some sanity left, you vote for the best option that you have. Don’t vote McCain, but whatever you do, vote, despite what the paranoid critics like this one would have you think.