At the time, Bush, John McCain and the other Democratic presidential hopefuls including Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton derided Obama for offering such a bellicose proposal. Bush said:" target="_blank">click here "he's going to attack Pakistan" in disbelief.
As Reuters reported on August 1, 2007: "Obama said if elected in November, 2008, he would be willing to attack inside Pakistan with or without approval from the Pakistani government, a move that would likely cause anxiety in the already troubled region. 'If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will,' Obama said."
So there you have it: the reactionary Bush White House has now adopted a plan that it previously publicly described as overly aggressive – can you imagine this White House thinking anything is too aggressive? – a plan offered up by the Democratic Party's standard bearer, Obama, the man that many progressives pin their hopes on.
This reminds me of the line from a comic who wondered what the world is coming to when the world's best golfer is black and the best rapper is white.
What is the world coming to? The labels certainly don't tell you the story. You have to look carefully and critically at what people are actually saying and what they are doing. And you have to examine carefully how political policy is actually made, not how you might have learned about it in civics class. Certainly not how it is presented everyday in the news.
Obama himself has said – correctly so - that people should pay attention to what he's saying. He does not oppose all wars, just "dumb wars." He approves of the war on terror. His differences are over tactics and whether the goals of the "war on terror" are being best pursued. In other words, is the US imperialist empire doing what is in its best interests?
This is like campaigning for Godfather and saying that the existing Godfather isn't being efficient enough in his extortion, racketeering, drug running, torture, brutality and death dealing.
If the city that may be second only to Berkeley in the degree to which progressives hold political office colludes, conspires and cooperates with the police state, even while some of the progressives make fine sounding speeches but vote with the gendarmes when push comes to shove, and if the one "realistic" choice on the national level that the people are being given to oppose the Bush regime's reign of terror is a man whose foreign policy is now being adopted by the very same hated Bush regime that Obama says he is a "change" from, then what's realistic now? What good does your vote do? Just what kind of democracy is this?
The only ones we can trust are the people themselves acting independently of the political parties and the normal, acceptable political channels. You must speak out, protest, show how you feel and call on others to do the same. A movement of the people that becomes a mass movement that must be reckoned with by public officials and the media and that does not subordinate itself to either public officials or corporate media must come into being. What is more democratic than that?
It is the ONLY realistic path. It is also the only moral stance possible. Participating in the existing structures and channels is a fool's errand and worse: it amounts to collusion in crimes against humanity.
Stand up for those who have stood up such as the RNC 8. Wear orange daily and spread the resistance. Don't kick yourself after the November, 2008, election and say, why the hell didn't I recognize the signs? Why did I allow myself to be sucked in once again? Why didn't I fight the burgeoning police state when we still had a chance?
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