Brzezinski Clan
Color Revolution
Vs Diebold Vote Fraud
In New Hampshire

By Webster G. Tarpley
1-19-8
 
 
"The Bush operation in Iowa had all the smell of a CIA covert operation."  --William Loeb, Manchester Union Leader, February 24, 1980.

The New Hampshire Democratic primary was no exercise in grass roots retail politics, but rather a clash between two cynical covert operations run by contending factions of intelligence community professionals. On the one side was an attempt to replicate here in the United States on behalf of Obama the sort of "color revolution" or "CIA people power coup" which the National Endowment for Democracy and the Brzezinski intelligence faction have carried out in such countries as Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. On the other hand, an opposed intelligence faction was able to win the day by a more traditional type of Diebold voting machine pattern fraud in favor of Mrs. Clinton. The people power coup in particular was designed to abort the entire Democratic primary season, prevent further radicalization of the Democratic base on economic issues, and submerge the issues raised by John Edwards, the wild card in this race and the Democratic candidate Wall Street organized money hates for his introduction of the rhetoric of economic populism into the campaigns of both parties.

Mrs. Clinton came into New Hampshire as the candidate of the machine bosses of what remains of the Democratic Party, the Shaheen machine of New Hampshire, of much of the trade union bureaucracy, of Washington lobbyists, and of large sectors of Wall Street. Barack Obama came in as the candidate of the Brzezinski-Soros machine, overwhelmingly focused on the need to assert Anglo-American world domination over Russia and smash the Shanghai Cooperation Organization during the next presidential term. Obama's appeal was primarily to independents, many of them well-heeled elitists and good government types of the chablis and brie set. Edwards represented a new variable, with significant trade union backing and a broad potential appeal to the traditional "Joe Sixpack" blue collar Democratic base.

The outstanding lesson of the Iowa caucuses had been the ascendancy of anti-Wall Street economic populism, a theme pioneered by Edwards. This had been shown by Obama's tendency to appropriate as his own the basic themes of the Edwards campaign: poverty, the Two Americas of rich and poor, the horrors faced by 50 million people who lack medical insurance, and the criminal practices of insurance companies and pharmaceutical firms. This approach had been successfully copied on the Republican side by the clever evangelical demagogue Mike Huckabee, who had used it to defeat the most plutocratic Republican, the stockjobber and asset-stripper Mitt Romney, a man who wanted to conquer Iowa with his all-powerful checkbook. Many reactionary commentators, including the Wall Street Journal and George Will, had savagely attacked Huckabee and Edwards for their verbal attacks on the finance oligarchs.

 

BEHIND OBAMA, THE BRZEZINSKI CLAN OF RUSSIA HATERS

George Bush had no foreign policy background, so it turned out to be his advisors who called the shots: these were the neocon fascist madmen, who have created a disaster. Obama has no knowledge and no experience of foreign policy, so it is reasonable to examine who his top advisers in this field are. We immediately find that Obama's foreign policy is made by the Russia-hater Zbigniew Brzezinski of the Washington Center for Strategic and International Studies and the gray eminence of the Democratic Party foreign policy establishment. Brzezinski's enthusiastic endorsement of Obama and scornful rejection of Mrs. Clinton last summer was a turning point in the rise of the Illinois senator. But Zbigniew is not just an individual; he is the gruff patriarch of an extended clan of intelligence operatives around which an entire coterie of the intelligence community is grouped. One is his son Mark Brzezinski, who served in the National Security Council during the Clinton era. Zbigniew and Mark jointly directed the infamous orange revolution in the Ukraine in November and December 2004, which brought a pro-NATO puppet regime of kleptocrats and oligarchs to power deep into the former Soviet territory. At one point in this operation, it looked like the pro-Russian eastern Ukraine might secede, leading to possible civil war within that country. If Russian troops had come into such a war on one side, and Polish NATO troops had intervened in support of Brzezinski's puppets, the result might have been a general European and world war. The Brzezinskis are happy to take such risks, sure in the knowledge that it is the Appalachian poor and black ghetto victims who will pay the price, and not their own circles of the cosmopolitan decadent émigré nobility.

It is plausible, although not yet proven, that Obama was discovered by the Brzezinskis and created from the ground up starting in the early 1980s. Zbig taught at Columbia University from 1960 to 1989, and was the head of the Institute for Communist Affairs, a nest of anti-Soviet ideologues. After two years at Occidental College in California, Obama transferred to Columbia for his junior and senior years, majoring in political science with a specialization in international relations ­ Brzezinski's own bailiwick ­ and receiving a B.A. degree in 1983.

Zbigniew Brzezinski's brand of lunatic geopolitics would obviously dominate a future Obama administration, but that is only the beginning. Zbigniew's most recent book is Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower (New York: Basic Books, 2007). Here Brzezinski argues that there is a global political awakening going on, and that the US is missing the boat. The goal of this global awakening is, in Zbig's opinion, "dignity." Not economic development, not the alleviation of poverty, not national sovereignty against the IMF and World Bank, but just dignity, with strong overtones of small-state particularism, parochialism, and local control. Obama's alleged global approach and trans-ethnic, trans-racial allure are right out of Zbig's cosmopolitan prescription. Many have pointed to Second Chance as the manual or printout for the entire Obama campaign, starting with the cultural and ideological profile assumed by the candidate. The entire Obama operation may be regarded as a cloak for Brzezinski's resurgent ambition to go out in one great blaze of revanchist glory. Obama did not choose these advisers; it is a safe guess that the advisers chose Obama. The outlines of Zbigniew's plan are also clear: he considers himself the man who shattered the Warsaw Pact, and who then brought on the collpase of the entire Soviet Union. Now he wants to dismember the Russian Federation itself, with the option of carving up the Russian heartland. Perhaps Zbig is dreaming of a Greater Poland with the dimensions it had about 1600: from the Black Sea to the Baltic, all controlled by petty szlachta aristocrats like the Brzezinskis. Brzezinski's lunatic vendetta against Moscow cannot be worth a single American life.

It is widely recognized that Zbig has provided the playbook for Obama. David Ignatius made this relationship clear enough in his review of Second Chance in the Washington Post when he wrote: "The most intriguing part of Brzezinski's book is what I would describe as the Obama manifesto. (He doesn't call it that, but I don't think he would quarrel with that characterization, either.) Brzezinski argues that the world is undergoing a "global political awakening," which is apparent in radically different forms from Iraq to Indonesia, from Bolivia to Tibet. Though America has focused on its notion of what people want (democracy and the wealth created by free trade and open markets), Brzezinski points in a different direction: It's about dignity." (March 14, 2007) Zbig's brand of dignity is the kind attained through secession, balkanization, and the creation of a weak petty state for each ethnic minority ­ starting with Kosovo and Chechenia. This is the mine of neo-Wilsonian demagogy that an Obama administration will exploit ­in the service not of peace but of US world domination and encirclement of Russia.

Zbig said in endorsing Obama: "What makes Obama attractive to me is that he understands that we live in a very different world where we have to relate to a variety of cultures and peoples." This may sound edifying, but the real meaning is to put a trendy multi-cultural mantel over a revanchism inherited from World War II and its aftermath. ( http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/09/12/358475.aspx )

 

LONDON ECONOMIST: ZBIG IS OBAMA'S BRAIN

The London Economist recently revealed to its readers that Zbigniew is Obama's brain in much the same way that Karl Rove or the neocons in general have been considered as Bush's brain. The Economist blog enthused: "A NEW brain for Barack Obama! It's 78 years old and it still works perfectly. It belongs to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the peppery ex-national security adviser to Jimmy Carter." (March 14, 2007)

Working under this brain are numerous subsidiary ganglions. As already noted, Zbigniew Brzezinski's son Mark Brzezinski served in the National Security Council as Director of Russian and Eurasian Affairs under President Clinton. Mark Brzezinski was in his own right one of the prime movers of the November/December 2004 people power coup or color revolution in Ukraine. He is also prominently listed as an adviser to the Obama campaign. In a recent op-ed, Mark Brzezinski gushed in praise of his family's standard bearer: "Mr. Obama's early opposition to the war in Iraq is well known. But his opposition to the war in Iraq is related to his more general concern that America is bungling it in global leadership. His candidacy gives America an opportunity to redefine itself in relationship with the world precisely because he takes a global approach to our challenges rather than a more conventional approach. That global approach comes from a man who at an early age lived abroad, learned a foreign language and was raised by parents who themselves were foreign or desired to live in a foreign country." (Mark Brzezinski, "Obama's Global Approach," Washington Times, Oct 26, 2007) Reality is much uglier: as the Voltaire Network wrote during the 2004 election, on the eve of the Kiev coup: "Zbigniew Brzezinski recommends how Russia should be militarily weakened and intimidated. He is convinced that the best way to achieve it is by destabilizing its border regions, a political strategy that aroused the interest of former presidential candidate John Kerry's team who recruited his son Mark Brzezinski as its foreign policy adviser." (Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Empire's Adviser: The Outrageous Strategy to Destroy Russia, Voltaire, October 22, 2004)

Another of Zbigniew's sons is Ian Brzezinski, currently the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and NATO affairs and a backer of NATO expansion into Ukraine and Georgia. This project means that Americans will be committed to fight and die for a gangster regime in the Caucasus, at the far end of the Black Sea. Ian is also pushing the installation of US ABM missiles in Poland and radars in the Czech Republic. He is also a protagonist of the independence of Kosovo, to be accomplished under the gun-running, drug-running KLA terrorist organization.

Zbigniew Brzezinski's daughter is Mika Brzezinski, who holds forth every morning as the sidekick of former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough on MSNBC. NBC and MSNBC were at the leading edge of the attempt to stampede the New Hampshire vote in favor of Obama. The most hysterical partisan for Obama in this context was of course the mentally unbalanced Chris Matthews, who acted as an open partisan and cheerleader for Obama, quite possibly violating Federal Elections Commission rules in the process. Other pro-Obama propagandists at NBC/MSNBC included Andrea Mitchell, the wife of Alan Greenspan, Tim Russert, and Scarborough himself. Mika Brzezinski was slightly more discreet, skewing the coverage in favor of Obama without the same level of bombastic excess exhibited by Russert. Mika Brzezinski's major interview with Michele Obama of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, the wife of the candidate, was a significant contribution to the general media swoon in favor of the newcomer. Mika's mother and Zbigniew's wife is a Benes, a relative of the President of Czechoslovakia at the time of the Chamberlain's Munich sellout of September 1938, who was later the head of the London-sponsored Czech government in exile. Such anti-Russian, anti-Austro-Hungarian, and anti-German political figures in eastern Europe are often descendants of the old 1848-1870 Mazzini pro-terrorist networks, and this tradition of British subversion is alive and well with the Brzezinskis today.

Finally, there is Matthew Brzezinski, who reported in the Washington Post Magazine of March, 2005 about his amicable discussions with Ilyas Akhmadov, "foreign minister" and US envoy of the Chechen terrorist opposition, who is living high on the hog with a comfortable apartment in the Woodley Park area of Washington, a Reagan-Fascell stipend, an office at the National Endowment for Democracy, a secretary, a travel budget, and a public relations expense account ­ all to rehabilitate the public image of the Chechen terrorists, all paid for by the US taxpayers with checks signed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and all courtesy of the lobbying efforts of Zbigniew Brzezinski. Matthew Brzezinski, quite possibly a Canadian citizen, went out to have a few beers with Akhmadov. Hobnobbing with a spokesman for terrorists, provided that he is anti-Russian, is typical of the Brzezinskis. The group Akhmadov represents specializes in killing defenseless women and children in the hospitals and schools of southern Russia. Russia has repeatedly demanded the extradition of Achmadov as a terrorist, but the Bush regime has refused.

 

A COLOR REVOLUTION ATTEMPTED IN NEW HAMPSHIRE

The model of the orange revolution run by Zbig and Mark Brzezinski in Ukraine is the key to understanding what was attempted in New Hampshire. Methods that the Brzezinskis, the George Soros Open Society Foundation and their helpers at the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED, also known as Project Democracy) have perfected overseas are now being brought home to promote the Brzezinski agenda and continue the line of stolen elections from 2000, 2002, and 2004.

Mob rule, what the Greeks called ochlocracy, is the essence of the color revolution or people power coup. The modern theoretical basis of these mob coups has been provided by the writings of a certain Gene Sharp. In order to carry out a color revolution, large sums of money are required to pay bribes and buy support. Beyond that, the following ingredients are necessary:

1. Media.

It is essential to control the key television channels, or at least one major network. In less developed societies, a well-known radio station might suffice, but here in the US it takes a broadcast network and one or more cable networks, backed up by news magazines, daily newspapers, and various internet sites. These organs must attempt to create a collective hysteria or mania in the whole society in favor of the people power coup. In Iowa and New Hampshire, the media swoon was led by NBC/MSNBC, but included most of the networks, plus Newsweek, the Boston and New York tabloids, and many others. Obama was fawned over by George Will, David Broder, Robert Novak, and many other columnists, including those with markedly right wing profiles.

2. Rent-a-mobs.

This term became widespread during Brzezinski's 1978 overthrow of the Shah of Iran in favor of Ayatollah Khomeini. No self-respecting anti-Shah politician in Teheran could venture outdoors without a numerous rent-a-mob. In Kiev, large numbers of young people camped out in the central square of the city to drive home their demand that the pro-Moscow government be replaced with Brzezinski's pro-NATO puppets, although many of them were too naïve to realize that this was the issue. In more prosperous countries, such as the US, the dupe-a-mob offers a more economical equivalent. In any case, the mobs must be big enough to be shown on television, thus creating the illusion that the coup leader is riding a wave of overwhelming popular support and truly represents the Collective Will in Rousseau's sense. The large crowds of well-meaning but ignorant and poorly informed young people who stood in long lines outside Obama's events on the Sunday and Monday before the New Hampshire primary are examples of such dupe-a-mobs. One modish technical term for these procedures is swarming, but the idea is as old as the mob itself. As Bill Engdahl has noted, "The Pentagon and US intelligence have refined the art of such soft coups to a fine level. RAND planners call it 'swarming,' referring to the swarms of youth, typically linked by short message services and weblogs, who can be mobilized on command to destabilize a target regime."

3. Symbols and slogans.

Ukraine had the orange revolution; Georgia had the rose revolution. The Prague velvet revolution was an earlier pilot project for the same thing. The cedars revolution in Lebanon did not fare so well; here the groups of well-heeled and privileged young people could not match the actual organized power of the Hezbollah mass base. A similar attempt in Byelorussia also collapsed in failure. Jeans, tulips, the colors blue and purple, and even bulldozers have been mobilized as mindless symbols. In addition to the catchy color or symbol, an effective slogan is also required. In Belgrade, at the start of the current series, that was "Gotov je" ­ "he is finished," meaning that Milosevic had to go.  Other slogans have included "It's enough" and "It's time!" For Obama, the solution in this regard was "Change We Can Believe in."

4. Fake polling.

Since the color revolution usually takes place under the cover of an election, faked polling for mass manipulation purposes is indispensable. In Ukraine, the pro-Moscow candidate Yanukovich was declared the winner by the official government vote count, but the rent-a-mobs and dupe-a-mobs in the streets began yelling that this was vote fraud. How could they prove it? Project Democracy had thought of everything: the polling firm of Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates was on the scene, and had carried out an exit poll of voters leaving the polling places. The results of this faked and doctored exit poll, a masterpiece of NATO intelligence, were the basis of the accusation of vote fraud, which was then endorsed by international observers from the European Union, the NED, and the Helsinki CSCE watchdog groups. Who was Brzezinski's pollster? It was none other than Mark Penn, currently the much-hated boss of the entire Hillary Clinton campaign, for which he is top strategist and top pollster at the same time. There are many indications that Mark Penn, the former partner of Clinton's Svengali Dick Morris, is not really interested in Mrs. Clinton's victory, but is rather dancing to the tune of the Brzezinski machine. Mark Penn's probable role will be described shortly.

5. A suitable demagogue.

In Serbia and Georgia, these were young and attractive oligarchical politicians, often western trained, and always on the make. In Ukraine, the coup candidate was Yushchenko, something of a tired retread and therefore not entirely plausible for the purpose at hand. To drum up sympathy for Yushchenko, he was apparently submitted to some form of disfiguring chemical or biological attack, and this was blamed on the Russians. Demagogue in chief is the role assigned to Obama, an ambitious and unprincipled politician who had been thoroughly vetted by the Soros apparatus, in addition to being groomed by the Brzezinskis.

The net effect of these elements, orchestrated together in ruthlessly coordinated fashion, is to create an atmosphere of mob hysteria which can grip an entire nation, or at least the capital and certain other selected areas, and when amplified by controlled media for long enough can bring down a government and replace it with the protagonists of the coup. In this case, the various components of the coup were designed to converge on Monday, January 7, and on Tuesday, January 8, primary election day in New Hampshire.

 

INSIDE THE PEOPLE POWER COUP: MARK PENN'S DIVIDED LOYALTIES

The serious weakness of the Hillary Clinton campaign was its adoption of a rhetorical profile suitable at best to a presidential general election in calm times. Instead, in 2007-2008 Hillary was attempting to win over radicalized antiwar Democratic primary voters in the midst of a Big Change or party re-alignment election along the lines of 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932, and 1968. On the surface it might have been argued that this was because no member of the Clinton inner circle had fought a contested primary since 1992, ages ago in political terms. But it appears increasingly that this confusion between general and primary voting was willful, the result of a hidden agenda on the part of Brzezinski's man Mark Penn.

On January 3, 2007 Robert Novak wrote in the Washington Post that Mark Penn had been guilty of "premature triangulation," advising Mrs. Clinton to pose (in the Dick Morris tradition) as a third force halfway between the leftists and right-wingers long before it was the suitable time to do so. Mrs. Clinton repeatedly exposed the warmongering nature of her campaign, leaving little doubt that she would keep at least 75,000 US troops in Iraq during her entire presidency, as she told the New York Times last March, and that she would act as an eager cheerleader for an attack on Iran, which had almost occurred with the new staged Gulf of Tonkin incident near Hormuz on the Saturday night before the voting in New Hampshire. Before the caucuses, published Iowa polls were showing that Obama and Edwards were pulling ahead of Mrs. Clinton. Novak gloated that this was "white knuckle time" for the New York senator, and threatened her with the specter of Howard Dean's debacle in Iowa in 2004.

Mark Penn purported in public not to believe the last-minute polls which showed Mrs. Clinton losing. According to one blogger, "based on everything I've heard and read, Penn genuinely didn't believe the Des Moines Register poll showing Obama up big prior to the caucuses." (Noam Scheiber, "Can Someone Explain Mark Penn To Me?") According to other sources, Mark Penn was telling Mrs. Clinton that his own private internal campaign polls were showing her on the way to victory. The guess here is that Penn knew better, but was stringing Hillary along, counting on the notorious tin ear that helped her to bungle her 1993-94 health care campaign. Penn's argument was reportedly that the upbeat internal polls could not be wrong, and so the traingulation and trimming strategy that was producing them could not be wrong either. In reality, both polls and strategy were disastrous, and Zbigniew's friend Mark Penn must have known it. Clinton lost to Obama in Iowa by 9 points, and to Edwards by 1 point. Did Penn give wretched political advice, and then cook his polls to hide the damage done to Mrs. Clinton by her right-wing posturing?

 

A CYNICALLY ORCHESTRATED MEDIA SWOON FOR OBAMA

The shock of this thoroughly unexpected Iowa defeat explains the stunned disorientation of the Clinton forces when they arrived in New Hampshire on Friday, January 4. The feeding frenzy of the corporate media, doubtless stirred up by intelligence operatives favoring the Brzezinski-Obama project larded through the various news and polling organizations, took an increasing toll. Penn made matters worse by claiming that there would be no Iowa bounce for Obama in New Hampshire, presumably on the basis of his internal polling, but more likely to keep the Clinton campaign totally disoriented and confused. "What I don't understand is why Penn, having been proven completely, disastrously wrong in his reading of the Iowa numbers, would then go out on another limb yesterday, claiming Obama would get no bounce from Iowa based on a very early set of polls," wrote blogger Noam Scheiber.

A FOX News/Opinion Dynamics poll conducted from January 4 to 6 had Obama at 32 and Clinton at 28. A Marist College poll conducted January 5 to 6 showed Obama at 34% and Clinton at 28%. A USA Today/Gallup poll conducted from January 4 to 6 showed Obama 13 points ahead of Clinton. The thesis here is that these polling organizations, especially in acutely sensitive points like Iowa and New Hampshire, are regarded by the ruling circles as critical components of political control, and are thoroughly compromised and penetrated by the intelligence community. This has been the case for many decades. We will have to wait for a new Church Committee and a new Pike Committee to provide the details, but the general outlines are clear: the Obama vote totals were inflated in an effort ot produce a people power stampede in favor of Obama as the Brzezinski candidate, while deflating both Edwards and Hillary. This hypothesis presumes the plausible presence of intelligence community representatives in most of the leading polling organizations, something that no student of the 9/11 events would venture to deny. The Republican primary was left to vegetate away on its own, apart from stealing votes from Ron Paul, as far as can be determined.

The critical time arrived on Monday afternoon, when the merciless pounding of the Chris Matthews storm troopers of the controlled corporate media and the barbs of the Boston and New York tabloids converged on the New Hampshire voters and the Clinton campaign. Through the afternoon rumors swirled that Mrs. Clinton was going to drop out even before the voting started, or, failing that, as soon as the dimensions of her humiliation became evident on primary night. The sooner she dropped out, the better, in any case. Edwards was given even less attention, but was also informed that his campaign was hopeless. The poetry of Obama had outclassed the prose of Hillary, crowed the New York Times, flagship of the Wall Street financier oligarchy. The Washington Post, which had been supporting Hillary, began to signal a turn against her. The watchword of the color revolution forces had become the slogan that Obama was no longer just a candidate ­ he had become "a movement." This was the hype emanating from millions of television sets. The goal was to stampede the voters onto the Obama bandwagon, make Obama the Democratic nominee by the acclamation of a virtual dupe-a-mob, force Hillary and Edwards to go home, and shut down the entire undesirable primary process. The media were offering Obama the crown.

On Tuesday, January 8, primary day, the shameless and naked media hype for Obama continued. Exit pollsters sent by the media consortium appeared at the polling places, and one politics professor from St. Anselm College remarked later on MSNBC that the exit pollsters she had seen were feckless and callow youths, wildly flailing in their task, not knowing whom they should interview, not understanding voter profiles, and all in all thoroughly unprofessional. But the exit polling did not have to be accurate, and there was no point in hiring experienced professionals: this time the field data would be supplanted and overriden by cooked and massaged figures coming from the computers controlled by the coup ­ perhaps those of the National Endowment for Democracy, which has carried out this routine so many times abroad.

Chris Matthews stated on MSNBC that he was provided polling data that afternoon showing that Obama was winning big. Shawn Hannity of Fox News confirmed that the data he was given showed the same thing ­ Obama way ahead. Novack's post-election column suggested the same thing. Once again, the ochlocrats of the Brzezinski networks are the prime suspects. The results of the exit polls kept most of the television talking heads firmly committed to an Obama victory until the polls closed.

 

THE CLINTON MACHINE STRIKES BACK

But the Clinton machine, the Democratic Party bureaucracy, their trade union allies, and the relevant intelligence community factions were far from defenseless. They relied on more traditional methods of manipulating election outcomes. There are persistent reports that the Clinton forces brought in large numbers of out-of-state voters on buses in observance of Walter Mondale's famous 1976 dictum of "Vote early, vote often." Reports allege that voting is possible in New Hampshire on the basis of a verbal declaration of residence and intent to remain in the state. More important were the Diebold machines, which were used in by 80% of New Hampshire voters. Where the votes were counted by Diebold, Mrs. Clinton had an advantage of about 3 %. In the 20% of the state where there were paper ballots, Obama was ahead by a similar amount. The result was not the will of the people but rather a vector sum of two competing covert operations, each one cynically created by factions of the US intelligence community.

Congressman Kucinich has attempted to secure a recount of the paper trail left behind by the Diebold system used in New Hampshire, and this enterprise should be supported by others, such as Ron Paul. But Kucinich should not thereby gain sympathy for his foolhardy instruction to his supporters in Iowa to transfer their support to Obama on the second round of the caucuses there. Obama is the most right wing Democratic candidate, to the right of Hillary and far to the right of Edwards on all the major economic issues. He wants to expand the US military by almost 100,000 soldiers. Obama has also called explicitly for the bombing of Pakistan, a nation of 160,000,000 people armed with nuclear bombs. Obama is doubtless being instructed by his handlers, just as Jerry Ford was in November 1976, that his work of healing and reconciliation is not compatible with a challenge that is likely to uncover some serious vote fraud. Given Obama's apolitical apathy and rejection of any form of struggle, it is possible that the real story of the 2008 New Hampshire primary may not be known for a long time. But in order to understand the whole picture of what did occur, it is necessary to take unto account both people power coup/color revolution side of things, which leftists have a very hard time understanding, as well as the Diebold voting machine fraud aspect, which leftists are better equipped to comprehend because of the experience of 2000 and 2004.

 

AN ENCORE FOR THE BRZEZINSKI DOCTRINE OF REVANCHISM

The Obama campaign deserves the closest sustained scrutiny; its Messianic qualities have not been seen since the days of Jimmy Carter, the president who promised that he would never lie. Obama, like the Carter of 1976, is a highly artificial product. Carter turned his foreign policy over to Brzezinski and his clique of Russia-hating eastern European émigrés and their children. Brzezinski's entire adult life has been dedicated to what might be called revanchism ­ the obsessive desire to obtain revenge from the Russian people for the events of the Second World War and the Cold War. It was in the service of that anti-Russian monomania that Brzezinski decided in 1976 to foment the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, which he touted as the greatest single bulwark against Soviet communism. As part of this insane project, Brzezinski was the prime mover in the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, and was then instrumental in installing the Ayatollah Khomeini in power in Tehran. Brzezinski cared less about the Middle East and its oil than he did about the need for a center from which Islamic fundamentalism of the most retrograde type could radiate out into the soft southern underbelly of the USSR. For Brzezinski, the space between the southern frontier of the Soviet and the Indian Ocean littoral became an "arc of crisis," and his handiwork is with us until this day. The 1980 Carter Doctrine, which announced that the United States was determined to dominate the Persian Gulf against all comers, is at the root of the first Gulf War, of the present Iraq war, and of the clash with Iran which could come at any moment, as the most recent Gulf of Tonkin stunt near Hormuz has demonstrated.

Brzezinski, as he himself boasted ten years ago in then pages of the Nouvel Observateur, ordered US subversion teams into Afghanistan in the summer of 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, with the clear object of provoking Moscow to intervene. To this day, Brzezinski takes diabolical pride in having unleashed the decade-long Afghan War, which he touts as the Soviets' Vietnam debacle, which restored the world balance during the 1980s. Brzezinski was very much a part of the effort that led to the creation of al Qaeda as a wholly owned subsidiary of US and UK intelligence, with an initial tasking of bleeding the Russians white north of the Khyber Pass. Brzezinski was eager to go to the brink with the USSR over Poland, even though this meant running a risk of general nuclear war with Moscow. "Brzezinski, acting under a < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lame_duck >lame duck Carter presidency, but encouraged that Solidarity in Poland had vindicated his preference for engagement and evolution in Eastern Europe, took a hard-line stance against what seemed like an imminent Soviet invasion of Poland. He even made a midnight phone call to Pope John Paul II-whose visit to Poland in 1979 had foreshadowed the emergence of Solidarity-warning him in advance. The U.S. stance was a significant change from previous reactions to Soviet repression in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968." (Wikipedia, "Zbigniew Brzezinski") In other words, Brzezinski was more of a lunatic adventurer than John Foster Dulles or Dean Rusk.

The current tensions in US-Russian relations are the merest hint of what things would look like under a Brzezinski-controlled Obama foreign policy: the US might soon find itself locked in combat with the most formidable foreign power in today's world, the resurgent Russian Federation of Vladimir Putin. In this sense, the "post-partisan" rhetoric of Obama could be the overture to World War III.

 

FOR OPEN CONVENTIONS AND ROBUST PLATFORM DEBATES

The US financier elite does not like the idea of a long primary election campaign leading up to national political party conventions in late summer -- August 25-28, 2008 in Denver for the Democrats, and September 1-4, 2008 in Minneapolis-St. Paul for the GOP. Since they come so late, these conventions are likely to be conducted after a long spell of deepening economic and financial breakdown crisis, increasingly bad news from the Iraq and Afghanistan war fronts, and incessant political radicalization. Even more than they wanted the acclamation of the apolitical and "post-partisan" Obama, the financiers wanted to bring the primary process to a rapid end, especially on the Democratic side. It is already a good thing that the financiers have not succeeded so far in doing this.

In every state in which there is a primary election, the level of politicization is raised, and local concerns, especially economic breakdown and economic insecurity, are highlighted. If the clever populist demagogue Huckabee, who talks to Wal-Mart Republicans and attacks Wall Street Republicans, can gain against the lavishly funded plutocrat takeover artist and asset stripper Romney, the warmonger McCain, and the would-be il Duce Giuliani, that will indicate which way the political wind is blowing. The same goes for South Carolina, for all the states who will vote on February 5, Super Tuesday, and for states further down the road like Maryland, which votes on February 12. Pennsylvania votes on April 22. All these states have a right to a real primary with real contending candidates. The primaries and caucuses should go on through all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the territories, no matter how much the Rumpelstiltskin Chris Matthews may scream and bluster. We have all had enough of pollsters, push polling, pundits, propagandists, perception-mongers, consultants, and the K Street-Madison Avenue axis of evil generally.

Many of the later primaries, unlike the New Hampshire paradise of petty-bourgeois independents, are strictly limited to the registered voters of each party. Independents are not allowed to vote unless they change their registration. Among such straight party line voters, the bland platitudes of bi-partisanship have far less appeal. Joe Sixpack may want to vote for a Democrat or for a Republican, but he seldom wants to vote for the bipartisan party. The results in these states may thus promote a more pronounced radicalization.

At traditional party conventions, the candidates were chosen by delegate votes, not brainwashing media hype and attempts to stampede the voters by idiotic hyperbole. The last truly open and contested party convention was the 1952 Republican convention, marked by the clash between the Eisenhower and Taft forces. Conventions were also the scene of real political clashes, quite often in the form of battles over issue planks for the party platforms. An example of this was the protracted fight over the Vietnam war plank at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August of 1968. If the current campaigns can breathe new life into the party conventions of the existing parties, that will be a sign of the realignment of the 40-year old party system going back to Nixon that is finally in progress this year.

Forget the pundits, forget the commentators, forget the pollsters. Ignore the hysterical demands of the controlled corporate media that certain candidates whom Wall Street does not like should immediately drop out of contention and go home. Instead of paying attention to this babbling, watch the delegate count. After the New Hampshire primary, the approximate delegate count was Obama 26, Hillary 25, and Edwards 18. (There are of course the 800 or so Democratic superdelegates, party hacks who will try to go with the winner.) This still indicates a much closer race than the raving pundits of TV land are willing to concede. Above all, we must be on guard to prevent the Brzezinski clan from manipulating and stampeding the electorate through the use of new color revolutions or CIA people power coups here on the home front.

 

BEWARE OF MESSIANIC PLATITUDES

In 1976, the Carter candidacy was plausible because of the Republican debacle of Watergate, the prolonged war followed by defeat in Vietnam, and economic downturn after August 15, 1971. Carter made utopian promises ­ "I'll never lie to you." He was mellifluous and ambiguous. But he turned economic policy over to Volcker, and foreign policy over to the Russophobe Brzezinski, who used the lofty rhetoric of human rights to begin systematic meddling in Soviet internal affairs, and created the Khomeini regime in Iran. Brzezinski's grandiose schemes of world transformation caused a renewal of the Cold War, and without Soviet restraint the results could easily have been far more tragic than they in fact turned out to be. By 1980, disillusionment was great, Carter went down to defeat, and the nightmare of the Reagan regime began.

In 2000, another obscure southern governor, George W. Bush, came forward with an array of utopian platitudes. He would be a uniter and not a divider, he promised. He would practice a compassionate conservatism. He would initiate a foreign policy of humility, and would restore the honor of the presidency. Deluded independent voters chose to believe these assurances. But since Bush knew nothing of the world, he called in his neocon advisors, the Vulcans, carefully chosen by George Shultz, just as Bush and Cheney themselves had been. The Vulcans were Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Scooter Libby, and the rest of the neocon cabal, who had their own utopian fantasy of re-ordering world affairs and giving US world domination a new lease on life. But their fantasy reflected an obsession with the security needs of Israel in the Middle East and a pathological hatred of Arabs and Moslems. The resulting disaster is all around us today in the form of lost wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, all predicated on the 9/11 myth.

In 2008, we have an obscure Illinois senator, a neophyte with no legislative achievements to speak of and no track record of courage or principle, who has evidently been groomed by the deans of the Democratic Party establishment. A new raft of utopian promises are floated: the race problem in America and its attendant collective guilt will be expunged with a single vote. The clash of contending interests in Washington DC will be replaced by a magically harmonious bi-partisan and non-partisan cooperation. The bitterness of the clash derives from real conditions, and especially from the fact that the economic pie has shrunk to such a point that the traditional demands of the various ruling class factions can no longer be fulfilled, leading to life boat ethics in the elite itself, as some groups must necessarily be shut out completely. But no matter: a golden age and the earthly paradise are proclaimed by the pundits to be at hand, thanks to the magnetic personality of the new purveyor of platitudes. Even on the surface, the new leader caters to the overclass and exhibits a studied indifference to the concerns of black ghetto victims and the oppressed poor of all races, but this callousness is re-defined as post-partisan, trans-racial, and global. But since he knows nothing of foreign policy, these matters will be managed by the Brzezinski cabal, which brings with it yet another set of fantasies of world renovation and social engineering, but still directed at preserving US-UK world domination. At the heart of the new fantasies is the desire to eliminate Russia and Putin as a factor capable of contesting Anglo-American hegemony. The potential for catastrophe here is if anything even greater than the perils of neocon meddling among the Arabs and Moslems.

If they are to survive much longer, the American people need to become far more skeptical and critical in their evaluation of political candidates. They need to finally invalidate P.T. Barnum's famous dictum about suckers and how there is one born every minute. They need to radically reform their own set of political criteria of judgment. Have they learned anything from their disastrous choices of recent decades? Many of them voted for Nixon, Carter, and the Bushes, to name just a few failed presidents. Have they learned anything from their own colossal folly? Are they ready to repeat their own tragic gullibility with Obama, or with some other demagogue? The failure of the New Hampshire people power coup gives them an opportunity to reflect and hopefully learn something.

The Republicans have their neocons, obsessed with war with Iran, a danger that is far from being over. Any Republican can be relied on to continue the bankrupt Bush-Cheney neocon line for four more years, including a wider war with Iran. That is bad enough. But the entire foreign policy establishment of the Democratic Party is infected with raving hatred of Russia. If Mrs. Clinton wins out, her secretary of state will most likely be Richard Holbrooke or Wesley Clark, both mad bombers of Serbia in the spring of 1999, a piece of vandalism whose real goal was to deliver a warning to Moscow. Holbrooke and Clark come in at about 80% insanity due to hallucinatory Russophobia. But Obama's Brzezinski clan handlers come in at 125% insanity on the same scale, which is worse. As for Edwards, he co-authored a "get tough with Russia" op-ed with Jack Kemp, among other sallies, but the guess here is that his Russophobic insanity index is on the whole lower.

This is a dismal situation, although it is still possible to distinguish better and worse outcomes. If the 9/11 truth movement had been able to maintain its cohesion, and resisted the temptation to divide between two candidates (Ron Paul and Kucinich) who have absolutely no interest in 9/11 truth, things might be somewhat better. If the networks of September criminals in the US government had been exposed and eradicated, we might not have the New Hampshire primary being decided as the vector sum of two contending covert operations, as has just happened. The task now falls to the people's candidates' movement, which is focusing on candidacies for House and Senate in November 2008, and beyond. No matter what the presidential contests may bring, it is these outsider candidates for federal office who will represent the leading edge of political progress over the coming months. Those who are rightly horrified by the likely presidential choices have no alternative but to support these people's candidates.

 

Article Reproduced From www.Rense.com

http://www.rense.com/general80/die.htm

Pictures added by Gnostic Liberation Front

 

 

 

A Barack-star no more

Ian Williams

March 6, 2007 9:05 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ian_williams/2007/03/obama_in_knots.html

Last week Barack Obama performed an inadvertent public service by taking two of my favorite hobbyhorses for a ride round the electoral ring. One was the corrupting power of money in presidential primaries, and the second was demonstrating that the Israel lobby was every bit as powerful as it has traditionally claimed on its website, even as it denounces anyone else who says so.

Hitherto Barack Obama has been a superficially attractive Presidential candidate, compared with the rest of the pack. The inane accusation that he was educated in a Wahabi madrasa led to a reflexive sympathy, as did his unequivocal opposition to the war in Iraq.

But as Ali Abunima, demonstrated yesterday, he has fallen at the first hurdle.

Just like Hillary Clinton, who was stalked for years by conservative pro-Israeli groups for expressing some mild sympathy but is now probably on the hawkish end of Israeli politics, Obama has been to burn incense on the altar of AIPAC.

"No Israeli prime minister should ever feel dragged to or blocked from the negotiating table by the United States," he declared. Not Shamir, not Sharon, no matter who is invaded - the aid cheques and cluster bombs must get through? Sorry, Barack, this gives pandering a bad name.

It is embarrassing to see the contortions that Obama is reduced to. His position for AIPAC on the Iraq war is now within a cheque's thickness of Clinton's.
He advocates that a phased redeployment of US troops out of Iraq begin no later than May 1, with the goal of removing all combat forces from Iraq by March 2008. However, he says, "My plan also allows for a limited number of US troops to remain and prevent Iraq from becoming a haven for international terrorism and reduce the risk of all-out chaos. In addition, we will redeploy our troops to other locations in the region, reassuring our allies that we will stay engaged in the Middle East".

That is not so far from the position of the NeoCons. Redeployment and maintaining an imperial garrison in Iraq and in the region is not what most people think of when they call for pulling out the troops.

On Iran, his coded wording is from Mars rather than Venus - but just as out-there. While calling for "diplomacy" and "tough sanctions", he adds what is basically a commitment to a future war, even as he hedges on his commitment to end the present one. "We should take no option, including military action, off the table". That is precisely the language that John Edwards used addressing a conference in Israel - for exactly the same reason that Obama has been tying himself in knots. It is probably the formulation that AIPAC is insisting on from all candidates.

So the only candidates getting any media attention have to pledge, however they hedge, support for potential war on Iran. Not bad work from a lobby for which it's a thoughtcrime to suggest has influence over American foreign policy! And, of course, it's a testament to how much more important donors' cheques are than voters' concerns at this stage of the primaries.

Obama's big advantage over Hillary has been his consistent opposition to the Iraq war, a position that is in line with most voters, most Democrats - and indeed the overwhelming majority of American Jews, who are maintaining their traditional liberal postures despite the donor-driven politics of their "official" organizations.

A Gallup meta-poll found that 77% of American Jews think the Iraq War was a mistake, compared with 52% of the general American public. Gallup's poll found that 89% of Jewish Democrats think the war was a mistake, and even among non-Democratic Jews, 65% thought so.

Indeed the official organizations are hedging over Iran: not only does their own nominal Jewish constituency not support them, but they are worried that the Jews as a whole may be seen as the cause of another unpopular war.

Thus, in addition to thanking Barack for revealing the plutocratic perils of primaries, perhaps we should also be thanking him for inadvertently helping to show that AIPAC does not represent American Jews.

 

 

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama 

As Prepared for Delivery 

AIPAC Policy Forum


Friday March 2, 4:35 pm ET
 
CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Thank you so much for your kind introduction and the invitation to meet with you this morning.
Last week, this event was described to me as a small gathering of friends. Looking at all of you here today; seeing so many of you who care about peace in this world; who care about a strong and lasting friendship between Israel and the United States, and who care about what's on the next page of our shared futures, I think "a small gathering of friends" fits this crowd just right.
I want to begin today by telling you a story.
Back in January of 2006, I made my first trip to the Holy Land. It is a place unlike any other on this earth - a place filled with so much promise of what we truly can be as people; a place where we've learned how in a flash, violence and hatred and intolerance can turn that promise to rubble and send too many lives to their early graves.
Most will travel to the holy sites: the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Dome of the Rock or the Western Wall. They make a journey to be humbled before God. I too am blessed to have seen Israel this way, up close and on the ground.
But I am also fortunate to have seen Israel from the air.
On my journey that January day, I flew on an IDF helicopter to the border zone. The helicopter took us over the most troubled and dangerous areas and that narrow strip between the West Bank and the Mediterranean Sea. At that height, I could see the hills and the terrain that generations have walked across. I could truly see how close everything is and why peace through security is the only way for Israel.
Our helicopter landed in the town of Kiryat Shmona on the border. What struck me first about the village was how familiar it looked. The houses and streets looked like ones you might find in a suburb in America. I could imagine young children riding their bikes down the streets. I could imagine the sounds of their joyful play just like my own daughters. There were cars in the driveway. The shrubs were trimmed. The families were living their lives.
Then, I saw a house that had been hit with one of Hezbollah's Katyusha rockets.
The family who lived in the house was lucky to be alive. They had been asleep in another part when the rocket hit. They described the explosion. They talked about the fire and the shrapnel. They spoke about what might have been if the rocket had come screaming into their home at another time when they weren't asleep but sitting peacefully in the now destroyed part of the house.
It is an experience I keep close to my heart. Not because it is unique, but because we know that too many others have seen the same kind of destruction, have lost their loved ones to suicide bombers and live in fear of when the next attack might hit. Just six months after I visited, Hezbollah launched four thousand rocket attacks just like the one that destroyed the home in Kiryat Shmona, and kidnapped Israeli service members. And we pray for all of the service members who have been kidnapped: Gilad Shalit, Eldad Regev, and Ehud Goldwasser, and I met with his family this week. I offered to help in any way I can.
It is important to remember this history--that Israel had unilaterally withdrawn from Lebanon only to have Iran supply Hezbollah with thousands of rockets.
Our job is to never forget that the threat of violence is real. Our job is to renew the United States' efforts to help Israel achieve peace with its neighbors while remaining vigilant against those who do not share this vision. Our job is to do more than lay out another road map; our job is to rebuild the road to real peace and lasting security throughout the region.
That effort begins with a clear and strong commitment to the security of Israel: our strongest ally in the region and its only established democracy. That will always be my starting point. And when we see all of the growing threats in the region: from Iran to Iraq to the resurgence of al-Qaeda to the reinvigoration of Hamas and Hezbollah, that loyalty and that friendship will guide me as we begin to lay the stones that will build the road that takes us from the current instability to lasting peace and security.
It won't be easy. Some of those stones will be heavy and tough for the United States to carry. Others with be heavy and tough for Israel to carry. And even more will be difficult for the world. But together, we will begin again.
One of the heavy stones that currently rest at the United States' feet is Iraq. Until we lift this burden from our foreign policy, we cannot rally the world to our values and vision.
As many of you know, I opposed this war from the beginning - in part because I believed that giving this President the open-ended authority to invade Iraq would lead to the open-ended occupation we find ourselves in today.
Now our soldiers find themselves in the crossfire of someone else's civil war. More than 3,100 have given the last full measure of devotion to their country. This war has fueled terrorism and helped galvanize terrorist organizations. And it has made the world less safe.
That is why I advocate a phased redeployment of U.S. troops out of Iraq to begin no later than May first with the goal of removing all combat forces from Iraq by March 2008. In a civil war where no military solution exists, this redeployment remains our best leverage to pressure the Iraqi government to achieve the political settlement between its warring factions that can slow the bloodshed and promote stability.
My plan also allows for a limited number of U.S. troops to remain and prevent Iraq from becoming a haven for international terrorism and reduce the risk of all-out chaos. In addition, we will redeploy our troops to other locations in the region, reassuring our allies that we will stay engaged in the Middle East. And my plan includes a robust regional diplomatic strategy that includes talking to Syria and Iran - something this Administration has finally embraced.
The U.S. military has performed valiantly and brilliantly in Iraq. Our troops have done all that we have asked them to do and more. But a consequence of the Administration's failed strategy in Iraq has been to strengthen Iran's strategic position; reduce U.S. credibility and influence in the region; and place Israel and other nations friendly to the United States in greater peril. These are not the signs of a well-paved road. It is time for profound change.
As the U.S. redeploys from Iraq, we can recapture lost influence in the Middle East. We can refocus our efforts to critical, yet neglected priorities, such as combating international terrorism and winning the war in Afghanistan. And we can, then, more effectively deal with one of the greatest threats to the United States, Israel and world peace: Iran.
Iran's President Ahmadinejad's regime is a threat to all of us. His words contain a chilling echo of some of the world's most tragic history.
Unfortunately, history has a terrible way of repeating itself. President Ahmadinejad has denied the Holocaust. He held a conference in his country, claiming it was a myth. But we know the Holocaust was as real as the 6 million who died in mass graves at Buchenwald, or the cattle cars to Dachau or whose ashes clouded the sky at Auschwitz. We have seen the pictures. We have walked the halls of the Holocaust museum in Washington and Yad Vashem. We have touched the tattoos on loved-ones arms. After 60 years, it is time to deny the deniers.
In the 21st century, it is unacceptable that a member state of the United Nations would openly call for the elimination of another member state. But that is exactly what he has done. Neither Israel nor the United States has the luxury of dismissing these outrages as mere rhetoric.
The world must work to stop Iran's uranium enrichment program and prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. It is far too dangerous to have nuclear weapons in the hands of a radical theocracy. And while we should take no option, including military action, off the table, sustained and aggressive diplomacy combined with tough sanctions should be our primary means to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons.
Iranian nuclear weapons would destabilize the region and could set off a new arms race. Some nations in the region, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, could fall away from restraint and rush into a nuclear contest that could fuel greater instability in the region--that's not just bad for the Middle East, but bad for the world, making it a vastly more dangerous and unpredictable place. Other nations would feel great pressure to accommodate Iranian demands. Terrorist groups with Iran's backing would feel emboldened to act even more brazenly under an Iranian nuclear umbrella. And as the A.Q. Kahn network in Pakistan demonstrated, Iran could spread this technology around the world.
To prevent this worst-case scenario, we need the United States to lead tough-minded diplomacy.
This includes direct engagement with Iran similar to the meetings we conducted with the Soviets at the height of the Cold War, laying out in clear terms our principles and interests. Tough-minded diplomacy would include real leverage through stronger sanctions. It would mean more determined U.S diplomacy at the United Nations. It would mean harnessing the collective power of our friends in Europe who are Iran's major trading partners. It would mean a cooperative strategy with Gulf States who supply Iran with much of the energy resources it needs. It would mean unifying those states to recognize the threat of Iran and increase pressure on Iran to suspend uranium enrichment. It would mean full implementation of U.S. sanctions laws. And over the long term, it would mean a focused approach from us to finally end the tyranny of oil, and develop our own alternative sources of energy to drive the price of oil down.
We must also persuade other nations such as Saudi Arabia to recognize common interests with Israel in dealing with Iran. We should stress to the Egyptians that they help the Iranians and do themselves no favors by failing to adequately prevent the smuggling of weapons and cash by Iran into Gaza.
The United States' leverage is strengthened when we have many nations with us. It puts us in a place where sanctions could actually have a profound impact on Iran's economy. Iran is highly dependent on imports and foreign investment, credit and technology. And an environment where our allies see that these types of investments in Iran are not in the world's best interests, could help bring Iran to the table.
We have no quarrel with the Iranian people. They know that President Ahamadinejad is reckless, irresponsible, and inattentive to their day-to-day needs which is why they sent him a rebuke at the ballot box this fall. And we hope more of them will speak out. There is great hope in their ability to see his hatred for what it is: hatred and a threat to peace in the region.
At the same time, we must preserve our total commitment to our unique defense relationship with Israel by fully funding military assistance and continuing work on the Arrow and related missile defense programs. This would help Israel maintain its military edge and deter and repel attacks from as far as Tehran and as close as Gaza.
And when Israel is attacked, we must stand up for Israel's legitimate right to defend itself. Last summer, Hezbollah attacked Israel. By using Lebanon as an outpost for terrorism, and innocent people as shields, Hezbollah has also engulfed that entire nation in violence and conflict, and threatened the fledgling movement for democracy there. That's why we have to press for enforcement of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which demands the cessation of arms shipments to Hezbollah, a resolution which Syria and Iran continue to disregard. Their support and shipment of weapons to Hezbollah and Hamas, which threatens the peace and security in the region, must end.
These are great challenges that we face. And in moments like these, true allies do not walk away. For six years, the administration has missed opportunities to increase the United States' influence in the region and help Israel achieve the peace she wants and the security she needs. The time has come for us to seize those opportunities.
The Israeli people, and Prime Minister Olmert, have made clear that they are more than willing to negotiate an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that will result in two states living side by side in peace and security. But the Israelis must trust that they have a true Palestinian partner for peace. That is why we must strengthen the hands of Palestinian moderates who seek peace and that is why we must maintain the isolation of Hamas and other extremists who are committed to Israel's destruction.
The U.S. and our partners have put before Hamas three very simple conditions to end this isolation: recognize Israel's right to exist; renounce the use of violence; and abide by past agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
We should all be concerned about the agreement negotiated among Palestinians in Mecca last month. The reports of this agreement suggest that Hamas, Fatah, and independent ministers would sit in a government together, under a Hamas Prime Minister, without any recognition of Israel, without a renunciation of violence, and with only an ambiguous promise to "respect" previous agreements.
This should concern us all because it suggests that Mahmoud Abbas, who is a Palestinian leader I believe is committed to peace, felt forced to compromise with Hamas. However, if we are serious about the Quartet's conditions, we must tell the Palestinians this is not good enough.
But as I said at the outset, Israel will have some heavy stones to carry as well. Its history has been full of tough choices in search of peace and security.
Yitzhak Rabin had the vision to reach out to longtime enemies. Ariel Sharon had the determination to lead Israel out of Gaza. These were difficult, painful decisions that went to the heart of Israel's identity as a nation.
Many Israelis I talked to during my visit last year told me that they were prepared to make sacrifices to give their children a chance to know peace. These were people of courage who wanted a better life. And I know these are difficult times and it can be easy to lose hope. But we owe it to our sons and daughters, our mothers and fathers, and to all those who have fallen, to keep searching for peace and security -- even though it can seem distant. This search is in the best interests of Israel. It is in the best interests of the United States. It is in the best interests of all of us.
We can and we should help Israelis and Palestinians both fulfill their national goals: two states living side by side in peace and security. Both the Israeli and Palestinian people have suffered from the failure to achieve this goal. The United States should leave no stone unturned in working to make that goal a reality.
But in the end, we also know that we should never seek to dictate what is best for the Israelis and their security interests. No Israeli Prime Minister should ever feel dragged to or blocked from the negotiating table by the United States.
We must be partners - we must be active partners. Diplomacy in the Middle East cannot be done on the cheap. Diplomacy is measured by patience and effort. We cannot continue to have trips consisting of little more than photo-ops with little movement in between. Neither Israel nor the U.S. is served by this approach.
Peace with security. That is the Israeli people's overriding wish.
It is what I saw in the town of Fassouta on the border with Lebanon.
There are 3,000 residents of different faiths and histories. There is a community center supported by Chicago's own Roman Catholic Archdiocese and the Jewish Federation of Metro Chicago. It is where the education of the next generation has begun: in a small village, all faiths and nationalities, living together with mutual respect.
I met with the people from the village and they gave me a tour of this wonderful place. There was a moment when the young girls came in and they played music and began to dance.
After a few moments, I thought about my own daughters, Sasha and Malia and how they too could dream and dance in a place like this: a place of renewal and restoration. Proof, that in the heart of so much peril, there were signs of life and hope and promise--that the universal song for peace plays on.
Thank you.

Contact:
Obama for President
 

 

 

 

Who Is This Wonder Boy?


He was born in Hawaii to an African father (Barack Obama), and a white mother (Anne Dunham), who finally divorce. He is raised by Dunham's parents in Hawaii.
Somehow he winds up at Columbia University, works in Chicago, attends Harvard Law. In 1991 he works for a Chicago Law firm, then becomes a professor at the University of Chicago. In 2004 he is elected to the US Senate.
The Invisible Hand
If you went into a detailed look you would see the 'Invisible Hand' of Judaism as the guiding factor in his career.
No one just appears, and runs for President!
 

 

 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Barack Obama.)

 


Jump to: navigation, search
"Obama" redirects here. For the city in Japan, see Obama, Fukui.
Barack Obama



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Junior U.S. Senator, Illinois
Incumbent
Assumed office
January 3, 2005–
Serving with Richard Durbin
Preceded by Peter Fitzgerald
Succeeded by Incumbent (2011)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Born August 4, 1961 (age 45)
Honolulu, Hawaii
Political party Democratic
Spouse Michelle Obama
Religion United Church of Christ
Barack Hussein Obama (born August 4, 1961) is the junior United States Senator from Illinois. According to the U.S. Senate Historical Office, he is the fifth African American Senator in U.S. history and the only African American presently serving in the U.S. Senate.[1]

After graduating from law school, Obama moved to Illinois, where he was elected to the state senate in 1996 as a Democrat. Four years later, he made an unsuccessful run for the U.S. House of Representatives. After rededicating his efforts to the state senate and winning reelection in 2002, Obama ran for an open seat in the U.S. Senate two years later. Midway through the campaign, Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, raising his national stature.

Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2004. Though he has not announced that he is running for any higher office, he has been identified in recent opinion polls as the second most popular choice among Democratic voters for their party's nomination in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, behind New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.[2]

 
Early life and career
See also: Dreams from My Father
Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. of Alego, a village in Nyanza Province, Kenya, and Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas.[3] His parents met while both were attending the East-West Center of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was enrolled as a foreign student. When Obama was two years old, his parents divorced and his father returned to Kenya. His mother married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian foreign student, moving to Jakarta with Obama when he was six years old. Four years later, Obama returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents.[4] He was enrolled in the fifth grade at Punahou School, where he continued studies through high school and graduated in 1979.[5]

In his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama describes his experiences growing up in his mother's white American middle class family. His knowledge about his absent black Kenyan father came mainly through family stories and photographs. Of his early childhood, Obama wrote: "That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind."[6] As a young adult, he struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage. Obama writes about smoking marijuana and trying cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind".[7]

After high school, Obama studied for two years at Occidental College in California and then transferred to Columbia College in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations. After receiving his Bachelors of Arts degree in 1983, Obama worked for one year at Business International Corporation. In 1985, he moved to Chicago to direct a non-profit project assisting local churches to organize job training programs for residents of poor neighborhoods.[8][9]

Obama entered Harvard Law School in 1988. In February 1990, he gained national recognition for becoming the first African American to be elected president of the Harvard Law Review.[10][11] He obtained his Juris Doctor degree magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991.[9] On returning to Chicago, Obama directed a voter registration drive, then worked for the civil rights law firm Miner, Barnhill & Galland, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1993 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004.[9]


State legislature
In 1996, Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate from Chicago's 13th District in the south-side neighborhood of Hyde Park. In January 2003, when Democrats regained control of the chamber, he was named chairman of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee.[12] Among his legislative initiatives, Obama helped to author an Illinois Earned Income Tax Credit that provided benefits to lower income families, worked for legislation that would support residents who could not afford health insurance, and helped pass bills to increase funding for AIDS prevention and care programs.[13]

In 2000, Obama made an unsuccessful Democratic primary run for the U.S. House of Representatives seat held by four-term incumbent candidate Bobby Rush. Rush, a former Black Panther and community activist, charged that Obama had not "been around the first congressional district long enough to really see what's going on".[14] Rush received 61% of the vote to Obama's 30%.[15]

After the loss, Obama focused his efforts on the state Senate, authoring a law requiring police to videotape interrogations for crimes punishable by the death penalty[4] and supporting legislation that required insurance companies to cover routine mammograms.[16][17] He ran unopposed in 2002.

Reviewing Obama's career in the Illinois Senate, commentators noted his ability to work effectively with both Democrats and Republicans, and to build coalitions.[18][19] In his subsequent campaign for the U.S. Senate, Obama won the endorsement of the Illinois Fraternal Order of Police, whose officials cited his "longtime support of gun control measures and his willingness to negotiate compromises", despite his support for some bills that the police union had opposed.[20]


Keynote address
See also: 2004 Democratic National Convention
Midway through his campaign for U.S. Senator, Obama wrote and delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts.[21]

After describing his maternal grandfather's experiences as a World War II veteran and a beneficiary of the New Deal's FHA and GI Bill programs, Obama said:

No, people don't expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all. They know we can do better. And they want that choice.

Questioning the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War, Obama spoke of an enlisted Marine, Corporal Seamus Ahern from East Moline, Illinois, asking, "Are we serving Seamus as well as he is serving us?" He continued:

When we send our young men and women into harm's way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they're going, to care for their families while they're gone, to tend to the soldiers upon their return, and to never, ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace, and earn the respect of the world.

Finally he spoke for national unity:

The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.


Senate campaign

A campaign banner used by Obama supporters during his 2004 bid for the Senate.Main article: Illinois United States Senate election, 2004
In 2004, Obama ran for the U.S. Senate open seat vacated by Peter Fitzgerald. In early opinion polls leading up to the Democratic primary, Obama trailed multimillionaire businessman Blair Hull and Illinois Comptroller Dan Hynes. However, Hull's popularity declined following allegations of domestic abuse.[22]

Obama's candidacy was boosted by an advertising campaign featuring images of the late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington and the late U.S. Senator Paul Simon; the support of Simon's daughter; and political endorsements by the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times.[23][24] From a crowded field of seven candidates, Obama received over 52% of the vote in the March 16, 2004 primary, emerging well ahead of his Democratic rivals.[25]

Obama was then matched in the general election against Republican primary winner Jack Ryan. However, Ryan withdrew from the race on June 25, 2004 following public disclosure of child custody divorce records containing embarrassing sexual allegations by Ryan's ex-wife.[26] On August 8, 2004, with less than three months to go before election day, Alan Keyes accepted the Illinois Republican Party's nomination to replace Ryan.[27] A long-time resident of Maryland, Keyes established legal residency in Illinois with the nomination.[28] Through three televised debates, Obama and Keyes expressed opposing views on stem cell research, abortion, gun control, school vouchers, and tax cuts.[29] In the general election held November 2, 2004, Obama received 70% of the popular vote to Keyes' 27%.[30]


Senate career
Obama was sworn in as a Senator on January 4, 2005. During his first year in office Obama drew praise for his perceived attempts to avoid the limelight.[31] Nonetheless, Obama's public profile continued to climb through 2005 and 2006. TIME magazine named him one of "the world's most influential people," listing him among twenty "Leaders and Revolutionaries" for his high-profile entrance to federal politics and his popularity within the Democratic Party.[32] An October 2005 article in the British journal New Statesman listed Obama as one of "10 people who could change the world."[33] During his first two years in the Senate, Obama received Honorary Doctorates of Law from Knox College,[34] University of Massachusetts Boston,[35] Northwestern University,[36] and Xavier University of Louisiana.[37] He is a member of the following Senate committees: Foreign Relations; Health, Education, Labor and Pensions; Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs; and Veterans' Affairs.[38]


Legislation

109th Congress

President Bush signing the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act as bill sponsors Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Obama look on.[39]Obama sponsored 152 bills and resolutions brought before the 109th Congress in 2005 and 2006, and cosponsored another 427.[40][41] His first bill was the "Higher Education Opportunity through Pell Grant Expansion Act".[42] Entered in fulfillment of a campaign promise, the bill proposed increasing the maximum amount of Pell Grant awards to help needy students pay their college tuitions.[43] The bill did not progress beyond committee and was never voted on by the Senate.

Obama took an active role in the Senate's drive for improved border security and immigration reform. Beginning in 2005, he co-sponsored the "Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act" introduced by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).[44] Obama later added three amendments to S. 2611, the "Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act", sponsored by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA).[45][46] S. 2611 passed the Senate in May 2006, but failed to gain majority support in the U.S. House of Representatives.[47] In September 2006, Obama supported a related bill, the Secure Fence Act, authorizing construction of fencing and other security improvements along the United States–Mexico border.[48] President Bush signed the Secure Fence Act into law in October 2006, calling it "an important step toward immigration reform."[49]

Partnering first with Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), and then with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Obama successfully introduced two initiatives bearing his name. "Lugar-Obama" expands the Nunn-Lugar cooperative threat reduction concept to conventional weapons, including shoulder-fired missiles and anti-personnel mines.[50][51][52] The "Coburn-Obama Transparency Act" provides for a website, managed by the Office of Management and Budget, listing all organizations receiving Federal funds from 2007 onward, and providing breakdowns by the agency allocating the funds, the dollar amount given, and the purpose of the grant or contract.[53][54] On December 22, 2006, President Bush signed into law the "Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act", marking the first federal legislation to be enacted with Obama as its primary sponsor.[55]


110th Congress
This section is a stub. You can help by expanding it.

During the first two weeks of the Democrat-controlled 110th Congress, Obama sponsored six bills and resolutions and cosponsored another 24.[56][57] His legislative activities during the current session's first days focused primarily on ethics and energy-related bills.[58][59][60][61][62]


Official travel

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar (R-IN) and Committee member Barack Obama at a Russian base where mobile launch missiles are being destroyed by the Nunn-Lugar program.During the August recess of 2005, Obama traveled with Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan. The trip focused on strategies to control the world's supply of conventional weapons, biological weapons, and weapons of mass destruction as a strategic first defense against the threat of future terrorist attacks.[63] Lugar and Obama inspected a Nunn-Lugar program-supported nuclear warhead destruction facility at Saratov, in southern European Russia.[64] In Ukraine, they toured a disease control and prevention facility and witnessed the signing of a bilateral pact to secure biological pathogens and combat risks of infectious disease outbreaks from natural causes or bioterrorism.[65]

In January 2006 Obama joined a Congressional delegation for meetings with U.S. military in Kuwait and Iraq. After the visits, Obama traveled to Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories. While in Israel, Obama met with Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom.[66] Obama also met with a group of Palestinian students two weeks before Hamas won the January 2006 Palestinian legislative election. ABC News 7 (Chicago) reported Obama telling the students that "the US will never recognize winning Hamas candidates unless the group renounces its fundamental mission to eliminate Israel", and that he had conveyed the same message in his meeting with Palestinian authority President Mahmoud Abbas.[67]

Obama left for his third official trip in August 2006, traveling to South Africa and Kenya, and making stops in Djibouti, Ethiopia and Chad. Obama flew his wife and two daughters from Chicago to join him in a visit to his father's birthplace, a village near Kisumu in Kenya's rural west.[68] Newspapers reported enthusiastic crowds at Obama's public appearances.[69] In a public gesture aimed to capitalize on his celebrity and encourage more Kenyans to undergo voluntary HIV testing, Obama and his wife took HIV tests at a Kenyan clinic.[70] In a nationally televised speech at the University of Nairobi, Obama spoke forcefully on the influence of ethnic rivalries in Kenyan politics.[71] The speech touched off a public debate among rival leaders, some formally challenging Obama's remarks as unfair and improper, others defending his positions.[72][73]


Political advocacy
On the role of government in economic affairs, Obama has written: "we should be asking ourselves what mix of policies will lead to a dynamic free market and widespread economic security, entrepreneurial innovation and upward mobility [...] we should be guided by what works."[74] Speaking before the National Press Club in April 2005, Obama defended the New Deal social welfare policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, associating Republican proposals to establish private accounts for Social Security with Social Darwinism.[75] In a May 2006 letter to President Bush, he joined four other midwest farming state Senators in calling for the preservation of a $0.54 per gallon tariff on imported ethanol.[76] Obama spoke out in June 2006 against making recent, temporary estate tax cuts permanent, calling the cuts a "Paris Hilton" tax break for "billionaire heirs and heiresses".[77] Speaking in November 2006 to members of Wake Up Wal-Mart, a union-backed campaign group, Obama said: "You gotta pay your workers enough that they can actually not only shop at Wal-Mart, but ultimately send their kids to college and save for retirement."[78][79]

Obama is among the first national politicians to engage the public through new Internet communication tools. He began podcasting from his U.S. Senate web site in late 2005. He has responded to and personally participated in online discussions hosted on politically-oriented blogosphere sites.[80] Obama has expressed support for telecommunications legislation to protect network neutrality on the internet: "It is because the Internet is a neutral platform that I can put out this podcast and transmit it over the Internet without having to go through any corporate media middleman. I can say what I want without censorship or without having to pay a special charge. But the big telephone and cable companies want to change the Internet as we know it."[81]

He was an early opponent of Bush administration policies on Iraq. In the fall of 2002, Obama stated: "I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars. [...] You want a fight, President Bush? Let's finish the fight with Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, through effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings."[82] Speaking before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in November 2006, he said: "The days of using the war on terror as a political football are over. [...] It is time to give Iraqis their country back, and it is time to refocus America's efforts on the wider struggle yet to be won." He is calling for a phased withdrawal of American troops to begin in 2007.[83]

During his first year as a U.S. senator, in a move more typically taken after several years of holding high political office, Obama established a leadership political action committee, Hopefund, for channeling financial support to Democratic candidates. Obama participated in 38 fundraising events in 2005, helping to pull in $6.55 million for candidates he supports and his own 2010 re-election fund.[84] The New York Times described Obama as "the prize catch of the midterm campaign" because of his campaigning for fellow Democratic Party members running for election in the 2006 midterm elections.[85] Hopefund gave $374,000 to federal candidates in the 2006 election cycle, making it one of the top donors to federal candidates for the year.[85]

Obama has encouraged Democrats to reach out to evangelicals and other church-going people, saying, "if we truly hope to speak to people where they’re at—to communicate our hopes and values in a way that’s relevant to their own—we cannot abandon the field of religious discourse."[86][87] In December 2006, Obama joined Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) at the "Global Summit on AIDS and the Church" organized by church leaders Kay and Rick Warren.[88] Together with Warren and Brownback, Obama took an HIV test, as he had done in Kenya less than four months earlier. Obama encouraged "others in public life to do the same" to show "there is no shame in going for an HIV test".[89] Before the conference, pro-life groups called on Warren to rescind the invitation, saying: "If Senator Obama cannot defend the most helpless citizens in our country, he has nothing to say to the AIDS crisis."[90]


2008 presidential election
This section documents a current event.
Information may change rapidly as the event progresses.

Newsweek magazine cover story, "Is America Ready?", December 25, 2006 - January 1, 2007[91]Obama's keynote speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention sparked expectations that he would eventually run for U.S. President.[92] Speculation on a 2008 presidential run intensified after Obama's decisive U.S. Senate election win in November 2004, prompting him to tell reporters: "I can unequivocally say I will not be running for national office in four years".[93] But in an October 2006 interview on the television program Meet the Press, Obama appeared to open the possibility of a 2008 presidential bid.[94] Following Obama's statement, opinion polling organizations added his name to surveyed lists of Democratic candidates. The first such poll ranked Obama in second place with 17% support among Democrats after Hillary Clinton who placed first with 28% of the responses.[95]

Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Illinois State Comptroller Daniel Hynes were early advocates for a 2008 Obama presidential run.[96][97] Celebrity television show host Oprah Winfrey and actors George Clooney, Kristin Chenoweth, and Matt Damon have also expressed support for Obama entering the 2008 presidential race.[98][99][100][101]

Commentators have suggested that Obama's chances to be elected president would be better in 2008 than in 2012 or later. In an October 2006 editorial published in the Chicago Tribune, Newton Minow compared prospects for a 2008 Obama presidential bid to John F. Kennedy's successful 1960 presidential campaign.[102] A December 2006 op-ed by conservative columnist George Will detailed four reasons why he thinks now is a good time for Obama to run for president.[103]

Recent speaking engagements and other actions by Obama suggest he is preparing for a presidential run. In September 2006, Obama was the featured speaker at Iowa Senator Tom Harkin's annual steak fry, a political event traditionally attended by presidential hopefuls in the lead-up to the Iowa caucus.[104] In December 2006, Obama spoke at a New Hampshire event celebrating Democratic Party midterm election victories in the first-in-the-nation U.S. presidential primary state.[105][106] On January 14, 2007, the Chicago Tribune reported that Obama has begun assembling his team for a 2008 presidential campaign to be headquartered in Chicago [107] and will be announcing a Presidential Exploratory Committee within a week. [108]


Controversy
On November 1, 2006 the Chicago Tribune reported that on the same day that Obama's home in a South Side neighborhood of Chicago was purchased an adjoining vacant lot was bought by the wife of Antoin Rezko, an Illinois businessman charged with political influence peddling. Obama later bought a ten-foot-wide strip of lawn from Rezko.[109] Two days after the report, the same newspaper ran an editorial calling on Obama to explain why he would "allow himself any connection" to a developer who "notoriously attaches himself to political figures, often parlaying friendships into business dealings that have attracted official suspicions for several years."[110] The following day the Chicago Tribune reported Obama's statement that it was a mistake to have engaged "in this or any other personal business dealing that would allow [Rezko], or anyone else, to believe that he had done me a favor. For that reason, I consider this a mistake on my part and I regret it."[111] On December 24, Obama's spokesman confirmed that one of Obama's 2005 summer interns also had ties to Rezko, although he denied any favoritism. The Obama office had nearly 100 interns that summer.[112]

The Tribune's report does not accuse the Senator of any wrongdoing or unethical conduct and no evidence to the contrary has been uncovered. A December 2006 article posted to The New Republic online site criticized follow-up reporting in the Chicago Tribune, Slate, and Washington Post for failing to add value to the story: "The role of the press in all this should be to put perceptions in line with the facts as they stand, not inflate the perceptions and raise the distant possibility that the facts might line up behind them."[113]


Personal life
While working at the corporate law firm Sidley Austin LLP in the summer of 1989, Obama met Michelle Robinson, then an associate attorney at the firm. They married in 1992, and have two daughters, Malia (born 1999) and Sasha (born 2001). The Obamas are members of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ.[114][115] Of his religious affiliation, Obama has written:

I was drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change. [...] In the history of these struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in the world. [...] It was because of these newfound understandings–that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved–that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.[116]


Works
Before entering politics, Obama wrote Dreams from My Father, a memoir of his youth and early career. The book was published in 1995, then reprinted in 2004 with a new preface and an annex containing the text of his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote speech. The audio book edition earned Obama the 2006 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.[117]

In December 2004, Obama made a $1.9 million deal for three books.[118] The first, The Audacity of Hope, was published in October 2006, and discusses Obama's political convictions.[119] The book has remained at or near the top of the New York Times Best Seller list since its publication.[120] The second book covered under the publishing contract is a children's book to be co-written with his wife Michelle and their two young daughters, with profits going to charity. The content of the third book has yet to be announced.[118]


Popular culture
Supporters describe Obama's broad appeal as a cultural rorschach test, an ink spot on which his fans can project their personal histories and aspirations.[121][122] Obama's self-narrative helps encourage diverse multiethnic affinities. In Dreams from My Father, he links his maternal family history to possible Native American ancestors and distant relatives of Jefferson Davis, president of the southern Confederacy during the American Civil War.[123] Speaking before an elderly Jewish audience during his 2004 campaign for U.S. Senate, Obama likened the linguistic roots of his East African first name Barack to the Hebrew word baruch, meaning blessed.[124]

Media sources have mirrored and amplified his everyman image. An October 2006 interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show highlighted the ethnic diversity of Obama's extended family. Noting that his half-Indonesian half-sister is married to a Chinese-Canadian, the program cited descriptions by Obama's African American wife of family holiday gatherings as a "mini-United Nations."[125] A headline in The Nation magazine invited comparisons between Obama's first year as U.S. Senator and the popular 1939 movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where actor James Stewart stars as an underdog small-town hero standing up to political corruption in the U.S. Congress.[126] Another article in The Nation analyzed Obama's ability to "transcend race" with predominantly white audiences.[127] Conversely, New York Daily News syndicated columnist Stanley Crouch has questioned perceptions from within the African American community of Obama as "one of us".[128]


TIME magazine cover story, October 23, 2006[129]A New York Times op-ed by David Brooks, published during Obama's promotion of his bestselling book The Audacity of Hope and campaigns for Democratic candidates before the 2006 midterm election, was noted by an article in the online magazine Slate as evidence of Obama's potential popularity among moderate Republicans and independents.[130] Both folk rock musician Neil Young and urban hip hop artist Common have referenced Obama's presidential prospects in popular song lyrics.[131][132]

In his October 2006 Time magazine cover story, Primary Colors author Joe Klein compared the cultural sources of Obama's rapid rise and crossover appeal to those of U.S. celebrity icons Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan. Asked to comment, Obama said: "Figures like Oprah, Tiger, Michael Jordan give people a shortcut to express their better instincts [...] I think it's healthy, a good instinct. I just don't want it to stop with Oprah. I'd rather say, If you feel good about me, there's a whole lot of young men out there who could be me if given the chance."[129]

In December 2006, Obama taped a television commercial for ESPN's Monday Night Football game between his hometown Chicago Bears and the St. Louis Rams. The commercial mocked the political frenzy surrounding him and his possible presidential candidacy. "So tonight I'd like to put all the doubts to rest," he said. "And tonight, after a lot of thought and a good deal of soul-searching, I would like to announce to my hometown of Chicago and all of America that I'm ready...for the Bears to go all the way, baby!"[133]

Reproduced from: http://judicial-inc.biz/O_bama.htm

 

Baracknophobia
by Edgar J. Steele
June 27, 2008  
Even the most ardent of Barack Obama's supporters
generally will confess to a small, nagging
(dare I say niggling?) doubt about the object of their ardor. 
Similarly, even Obama's most vocal opposition stops
and stares just a bit overlong when they see him speaking. 
What an odd situation.

 

The Old Guy Perspective
DEALING WITH IT.

Thursday, March 20, 2008
Obama says we should talk about race.
He thinks that will help him. It won't.
Most of us have spent a lifetime
absorbing the lesson that seeing
what we see automatically makes us racist.
Do you want to talk about it? Do you? Really?

 

"Washington Post" Columnist
Trashes Buchanan
But Reveals Only His Own Biblical Illiteracy

By John Lofton, Editor

 

THE GREAT SLAVE REVOLT OF 2008
by H. Millard © 2008
 

Obama’s Former Pastor
Getting $1.6M Home in Retirement

by FOXNews.com
Thursday, March 27, 2008

 

A drunk and a bigot
- what the US Presidental hopeful
HASN'T said
about his father...

By SHARON CHURCHER
Daily Mail, UK.

 

Race, class and the politics
of the Obama campaign

WSWS
By Patrick Martin
20 March 2008

Elitist Obama Broken
By Blue Collar Vote
In TX, OH, RI

By Webster G. Tarpley
3-11-8

 

Obama's Plan To
Privatize Social Security

Jeffrey Liebman Of Harvard,
Top Economics Advisor To Obama,
Wants To Privatize Social Security
- Just Like The Sinister Bush Plan Americans
Resoundingly Rejected In 2005.  
Benefits Cuts And Higher Payroll
Taxes Are Also On Obama's Agenda.
By Webster Tarpley
2-6-8

The Chicago boys
and the Chilean 'economic miracle'

By Steve Kangas

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Revised: May 18, 2008 .   Communication:   discoverer73(at symbol)hotmail.com     Go to Home Page     Go to Index of All Articles Pages       
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