He's never been a strong gun control advocate and stayed noticeably mute on guns and the gun lobby after the horrific Virginia Tech killings last year and after the terrible Northern Illinois University killings this year.
It's been clear since at least the middle of the primary season that if he won the Democratic nomination Obama would become the first major party presidential candidate to bypass the public financing system. It's also been obvious that he would justify that flip-flop by claiming that he was being funded by the American people and not the corporate elite - a claim that is loaded with no small measure of deception.
Consistent with his "categorical" March 2008 denunciation of "any statement that disparages our great country," the former "civil rights lawyer" Obama voted in July 2005 to reauthorize the Patriot Act, the worst assault on domestic U.S. civil liberties in the last half-century. That legislation permitted wholesale eavesdropping on "homeland" citizens under the guise of fighting terrorism.
Obama's recent Jerusalem comment was over the top and had to be partly rescinded but there's nothing new in his current conservative and imperial positions on Iraq, Iran, or Israel. He has been bending over backwards for four years to show that he is safe for the American Empire Project and our "staunch ally" Israel (and its criminal practices toward the Palestinians) in the Middle East.
He's long been announcing his fierce support for an aggressive U.S. imperialism in no uncertain terms before such bodies as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Wilson Center, and the Chicago Council on Global Relations and in the CFR's journal Foreign Affairs. His repeatedly declared eagerness to embrace unilateral interventionism and a giant military ready to "puts on the ground" in "situations beyond self-defense" and to ensure the global dominance of world's supposed "last and best hope" the United States won him praise from the neoconservative foreign policy intellectual (and John McCain adviser) Robert Kagan long before the end the primaries. During the long primary season, Obama has proclaimed is blindness to American criminality in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Proclaiming that "the American moment is not over, but it must be seized anew," he made no effort to hide his belief that "exceptional" (superior) America is entitled and duty-bound to impose its "leaders" twisted and self-interested concepts of freedom and democracy on the rest of the world [4].
His foreign policy team has been loaded with interventionist and imperial hawks from the start, including people like Anthony Lake (a former Henry Kissinger protégé and a leading strategist behind the bombing of Serbia), Susan Rice (a leading supporter of "humanitarian intervention"), Gregory Craig (who pushed the Clinton administration to embrace "regime change" in Iraq), Samantha Power (a celebrated academic air-brusher and deletion-specialist when it comes to the living history of U.S. global crimes), Dennis Ross (a leading Israel occupation apologist), Sarah Sewell (who helped top Iraq occupation commander Gen. David Petreaus update the U.S. Army's counter-terrorism manual), retired General Scott Gration (an Iraq invasion veteran), and retired General James Jones, who is being considered for the vice presidential role under Obama [5]
His imperial sentiments have hardly been restricted to the Middle East. Prior to his recent supposed "move to the center" from "the left," he endorsed U.S. client and death squad regime Columbia's right to attack "terrorists" in Ecuador and the application of the reactionary "Merida Initiative" (which combines the so-called "War on Drugs" with the so-called "war on terror" to increase repressive state power in Central America). He joined neoconservatives in warning about the ridiculous specter of Iranian - yes, Iranian - influence in South America. He has accused the Bush administration of "losing Latin America" and announced his intention to continue the vicious 47-year U.S. embargo on Cuba. He (in John Pilger's ominous and accurate words) "described the democratically elected governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua as a ‘vacuum' to be filled" [6].
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