The Obama Is Lincoln Picture

January 17, 2009

Obama presents himself in the inauguration as Lincoln:

Barack Obama is borrowing a page from history even as he sets a new marker for America, boarding a train in sunny, icy Philadelphia for a ride to the city of presidents along the same route Abraham Lincoln took nearly 150 years ago.

and

Barack Obama, a self-professed follower of Abraham Lincoln, would not only take the oath of US presidency swearing in on the Bible
used by the former President, but will also have on his lunch menu that afternoon the food eaten by Lincoln after his inauguration.

Hmm – Lincoln:

At the outset of the Civil War, without Congressional authorization, Lincoln raised troops, appropriated funds, suspended habeas corpus in Maryland and ignored a ruling by Chief Justice Roger Taney ordering the release of a man arrested for aiding the rebellion. Later, Lincoln extended the suspension of habeas corpus to include the entire North. Under his authority as Commander in Chief, the military arrested thousands, most of them accused of actively aiding the Confederacy, but some of nothing more than criticizing Administration policies. The most notorious was Clement Vallandigham, a Congressman from Ohio, convicted by a military tribunal of disloyalty for a speech opposing the draft. Lincoln ordered him deported to the Confederacy.

Okay, Lincoln may have had good, higher reasons to do all that. But that is what everyone claims, be them Bush, bin Laden or Olmert. Usually the winner gets to write the history. He will always take care to let the deeds shine as just and necessary, even if alternative action might have provided a better outcome. Was what Lincoln did really necessary and just?

It could be that Obama will follow Lincoln's way not only in train riding and lunch choice but also in breaking the law for something more important. FDR did some nasty stuff like the supreme court packing plan that I would have supported even, as I believe, it would have been unconstitutional. I probably would support Obama in doing something similar.

But as Obama sets himself into the picture as another Lincoln, we should be aware that this might also include also the darker sides Lincoln had and that the tools of suppression are readily available.

Posted by b on January 17, 2009 at 19:02 UTC | Permalink

Comments

One thing to remember is that Lincoln was the president that started the civil war. Something to consider…

Posted by: David | Jan 17 2009 19:08 utc | 1

FDR also did something *really* nasty that I doubt b would wanna support: the internment of Japanese-Americans.

Posted by: Utpal | Jan 17 2009 19:45 utc | 2

Lincoln was assassinated too.

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jan 17 2009 19:47 utc | 3

Utpal – you are right on that.

Posted by: b | Jan 17 2009 20:29 utc | 4

wolf in sheep chlothing, false prophet etc.
I think Obama was elected to keep the “home front” happy, were as the rest of the world will continue to taste brutal foreign policy.
The US is bankrupt, it produces nothing but weapons, shitty movies and music (with the exeptions of very few), and junk food.
And i do believe that the world is waking up to it, and is starting to refuse the “Brand US of A” as it stands for nothing.
Global Warming, Financial Crisis, High Unemployment and such is not much appreciated worldwide, and the US of A with is most annoying attitude of nothing to see here until it hits me, has run its course.
Obama is feel good PR for USAmericans, and calculated to be good US PR (shiny beacon somewhere) for the Rest of the World. See hope, change, you can believe, after all first “black” president (as if that would make him less USAmerican, in fact his wife by that equation is “blacker” than him”
But with his stance on dumb wars (iraq) smart wars (afghanistan) and future smart wars (iran), the world is already weary of the second coming of the messiah.
With Gaza being destroyed, 1.5 million people traumatized and shocked and awed to the point of over 1000(certifiably) dead, and 4000+(certifiably) wounded, how many still believe in change and hope?
People don’t like to read, its complicated, they like to watch movies, eat popcorn and be entertained. He did that for the best part of the last year.
In the meantime, he has done what, thrown money at the institution that have caused the financial crisis, has nothing to say on I/P Conflict (one pres. at a time), gone on vacation,will close or not G-Bay (it might be usefull) talking about jobs (where is he taking the money/resources from) etc.
He is a blinder, a pretty boy to make us go all swoon, and soft in the knees.
My point is, if the economy/environment is as fucked as they admit, than it is much worse than that. If they admit we are fucked, it is because they can’t hide it anymore from even the most un/under educated joe/jane sixpack. But to actually change anything i believe it is to late.
So Mr. Change/Hope O.H.Barack wants to be Lincoln/FDR or the holy ghost of soelingen, let him be.
He has got to be something.

Posted by: sabine | Jan 17 2009 21:29 utc | 5

Obama is making himself ridiculous. it’s not a good move.
All politicians compare themselves to some great figure of the past, but normally it is only words in speeches. Go further, as Obama, and you run the risk in the future, that, if you don’t measure up, the ridicule heaped by commentators will be dangerous politically. Which would not have been the case, if the comparison had been limited to a few speech remarks.

Posted by: Alex | Jan 17 2009 21:43 utc | 6

b,
It seems to me that there’s a pretty big difference between declaring war on others whose firepower nearly matches yours, as was the case with Lincoln against the American Confederates, and declaring war on others whose firepower is far beneath yours, as was the case with Bush against the Iraqis and the Afghanis. So the former case, in my view, can be classified as a type of war, while the latter case is nothing more than a form of bullying!

Posted by: Cynthia | Jan 17 2009 22:05 utc | 7

What I do not quite understand, why is Obama hyphing Lincoln? Wasn’t Lincoln a Republican? And isn’t Obama supposed to be Democrat?

Posted by: Fran | Jan 17 2009 22:09 utc | 8

What I do not quite understand, why is Obama hyphing Lincoln?
Good question Fran…
But most here know my tired tune, but I’ll hum it anyway.
They are setting our collective unconscious up for the shock & awe, be it an attempt on his life, or other ideas they have ‘laying around’.
right on, sabine@5.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 17 2009 22:33 utc | 9

Fran @ #8–And isn’t Obama supposed to be Democrat?
Uh, nominally. At least it’s the party line he chose to run on. Probably only way to begin a political career in Chicago, IL. And blacks tend to vote Dem, breaking away only slightly for some Repub black candidates. So, Democrat by nature and beliefs? Or convenience? Opportunism? I don’t know. He seldom used the words “Democrat” or “Democratic” during his presidential debates.
He seems to see himself as the Great Middler or Fence Straddler, someone who will, somehow, embody both parties. No mention of how that relates to the principles of the two parties. Is a puzzlement to me–has been since I realized the guy had a chance to win the Dem nomination.

Posted by: jawbone | Jan 17 2009 22:46 utc | 10

Only in America is the war of secession being called, not a, but the civil war.
Admitting the will for secession of some states, and therefore partition of the country, was and still is, taboo in America.
A civil war is rarely geographic in nature.
Contrary to the legend describing the North as coming to the rescue of the South, the North attacked because the South was getting richer from a trade with foreigh countries.
We could see this pattern again recently when the Michigan attacked the South who was critisising the bailout of the North’s car industry. The South is today doing fine was its trade with foreign countries again, german BWM and Japanese car makers having established factories there.
Lincoln is on the record saying he had nothing against slavery and had no plan to put a stop to it.
Only after the difficulties encountered by the North against the armies of the South, did the North turn the war into an all out war, with anything civilian and social being destroyed in the South, and enlisting the some helpful stop-the-slave-trade-of-the-south ideology.

Posted by: Stephane | Jan 17 2009 23:23 utc | 11

Fran, Jawbone,
he is neither Dem or Rep. He is a Corporate Stooge. Profits first foremost and always.
I even doubt his views on Iraq, but with a good part of UsAmericans slowly starting to dis-like the great adventure in Mesopotamia, he can hardly campaign that it is a good war. That would have not been good for the ratings.
He knows that the US without the worlds resources is not just only on its knees but literally in the grave, the only way for the “american way of life” to continue, albeit on a smaller scale and for less people, he needs his enduring bases, his military might. How else to subdue those that don’t agree with having their lands plundered, their soil/water poisoned and their populations rendered into wage slaves.
Imagine the US would close every base outside US and bring them boys and girls home? What to do with these people that have no other skill than to follow orders, and kill? After all they get their College education after their military service.Plus the families, plus the civilian employees. What do to with them, put them on the official unemployment list?
What to do with the military industrial media complex, Just say NO………LOL.
Obama will do as told, or else he will be suffering the wrath of his “Donors”, and i do not mean the “Grassroots Donors”. They have him by the balls, and he knows it.
And I don’t need a Harvard degree to see and understand this system, it was such for all my life.
So let’s have a drink or two, enjoy the company of friends, family and other loved ones. Let’s look out for those that are weaker than us, let’s share what we have, and maybe we can stifle the hurt that will come our way a little bit.

Posted by: Sabine | Jan 17 2009 23:27 utc | 12

The proximate causes of both the Revolutionary War and the War Between the States were economic, not democratic. The average poor farmer served as cannon fodder in both, with the least to gain no matter which side won.
In fact, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves has been characterized as “cold, vindictive and entirely political”. The backlash from it set the condition of black civil rights back many decades. It was to be almost a century before a guarantee of civil rights became law.
In that at least, I hope that Obama does not take after Mr. Lincoln.

Posted by: Obelix | Jan 18 2009 1:23 utc | 13

We are advised that Obama should not take after Abe Lincoln, our greatest president. But any president ought to be judged by his ability to transcend his time and the element of his own conditioning and way of thinking. Lincoln did all this; and his writing and well known speeches are eloquent. Lincoln’s thought developed during the Civil War and he eventually saw the war itself, the blood that was shed, as an expiation of the sin of slavery.
Lincoln was a remakable amalgam of tenderness and toughness, of humor vying with depressive and morose temperment. He was saddened when he saw black people reduced in the state of slavery; but like many white Americans of his time he doubted that blacks were inherently capable of advancement.
Lincoln was initially willing to preserve slavery, if that was the unavoidable cost of preserving the Union; but when it was clear that the southern states were committed to leaving the Union, it provoked a step by step transformation in his thinking that led not merely to the Emancipation Proclamation, but to conclusions that led far beyond that measure of military necessity which was then significant. Slaves were only freed in particular places under Union military jurisdiction; but this was a template upon which Lincoln’s thought was evolving.
I can see a number of reasons why the imagery of Lincoln that Obama appropriates is good for the unity of the country; the symbolism is about binding up the wounds of the country and the slave past and the subsequent history of racism and second-class citizenship. People who suggest Obama’s time resonates with the extreme measures that Lincoln was compelled to take, should remember the unique circumstance of the Civil War, and the fact for instance, that the Constitution provides for suspension of habeas corpus, in times of insurrection and rebellion.
The symbolism of Obama’s affinity for Lincoln is not hard to miss. The US Capitol and the White House were built with the help of hundreds of slaves who were brought in from Maryland. The White House, built by slaves, is about to receive our first African-American president. Obama is swearing his oath of office on the Lincoln bible, and I hear he is to move in to the Lincoln bedroom. With the closing of this circle, and only with this kind of closure, is the original sin of slavery that was allowed to persist by our Founders, finally laid to rest.

Posted by: Copeland | Jan 18 2009 2:59 utc | 14

The O-man must be awfully full of himself to first write not one, but two books about himself after only serving a couple of years as an elected official and then he claims that he’s on par with Abe Lincoln even before taking the oath of office. The next thing we’ll be hearing him claim is that he’s Jesus Christ. But something tells me that he’ll stop short of claiming that he’s Prophet Muhammad.;~)

Posted by: Cynthia | Jan 18 2009 3:40 utc | 15

the only thing missing is the seance. seriously, whenever it gets poured on thick like this, i’m suspicious. traveling the same train route, using the same bible, eating the same food?
because the sustainability of the amerikan experiment is being called into question on so many fronts, it’s important to mythologize BO now, to infuse him with the mystique he’ll need when he makes all those “tough decisions” biden and others have not-so-subtly hinted he’ll have to make.
by the time people figure out they need to move beyond petitions and peace vigils the apparatus will be in place, and if you’re not head down, face forward, you’ll get noticed. the large scale immigrant arrests and army brigade(s) deployed domestically don’t bode well for citizens who don’t agree with the behavior of the state.
So let’s have a drink or two, enjoy the company of friends, family and other loved ones. Let’s look out for those that are weaker than us, let’s share what we have, and maybe we can stifle the hurt that will come our way a little bit.
yep.

Posted by: Lizard | Jan 18 2009 4:37 utc | 16

I suppose it would be snippy of me to mention that Honest Abe’s old room was “rented” to Clinton donors.

Posted by: David | Jan 18 2009 4:43 utc | 17

Enough of the historic parallels especially ones as strained as this. These types of parallels throw little light upon the horrible reality that an obama administration is likely to be and really only serve to confuse the issue.
I expect Obama will keep the war machine ticking along but for the Obama administration war will be a means not an end. shrub sociopathy needed war as an extension of his self hatred. With Obama war is but one of many tools to be used to make the rich richer.
Obama’s sociopathy requires that he becomes a better capitalist leader than anyone who has gone before. In his narrow view that means favouring the interests of the rich, ahead of anyone else. There will be no meaningful regulation of amerika’s capitalist class. The poor will be taxed to subsidize the rich, any of whom will have a better chance of collecting a whack of cash outta DC than a family on the verge of a home repossession.
It is no coincidence Obama is making his way thru Baltimore. Obama will ensure that there is a football stadium and convention center for every ghetto to watch moulder – long after the land speculators, money lenders and dodgy contractors have sailed off to the bahamas.
There will be a sweetener in the pot of every crooked dem party organiser and a $500 million turkey across the river from every slum.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jan 18 2009 5:38 utc | 18

Sabine, I’d have to side with Slothrup, that you, Malooga and r’giap are just way over into pure black pure white, like seeing the world only at night with a strobe light. “And I do believe that the world is waking up to it, and is starting to refuse the “Brand US of A” as it stands for nothing,” is psychobabble. We continue to lead in the world, even in that thing which we so loathe, the supreme vertical integration and resource extraction and franchise protection of any market sector. We are the champions, my friend. Unfortunately, that take no prisoners supremacy means US of A will abandon it’s crippled and mentally ill, cast off unfortunates, deny old people their thrift, the retirees their savings. It will shove our youth through whatever meat grinder they’ll fit into, and starve, rape and humiliate our women, no different than 3/4’s of the societies in the world right now. Make that 7/8’s. We are all Zimbabwean. There is no moral higher ground anymore. If you’re not packing nitrate and sugar into a rocket, you’re with the oppressor. So ease up a little on the “US without the world’s resources is not just only on its knees but literally in the grave.” It’s more about a rising threshold of pain, and there I’d have to agree with your closing sentiments,… but nothing’s gonna change that way. Obama is finessing his way, appeasing the right so we’re not saddled with Ronald Reagan II reruns under She Grizzly, zero capital gains, US of A Greater DubaiLand, and Total Nuclear War in Iran, Mayan Year 2012. This has to work the first time.

Posted by: polly περιπατητικός | Jan 18 2009 5:39 utc | 19

obama wants to channel lincoln? hmmm… [scratches chin, stares at wall] reminds me of something that frederick douglass said in 1876 at the dedication of the freedman’s monument…

It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.
He was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country.

yep. sounds like obama to me 😉
though i doubt obama is trying to find ways to rid the u.s. of ‘negroes’ like ole’ abe
(and i certainly hope he doesn’t try to top lincoln’s record in presiding over the largest public mass execution in this nation’s history, 38 santee dakotas in mankato, minnesota, late december 1862)

Posted by: b real | Jan 18 2009 6:03 utc | 20

It gives me the creeps a bit that Obama is playing on one of the biggest myths in the American pantheon.
I dreamed all night a couple of nights ago about Abe Lincoln and it kind of bothered me because it was all about them trying to “find the bullet”
But then, the inauguration is being hyped even here in the Happy Little Kingdom like the second coming of Jesus was getting married to Santa Claus.
That said, I think it was 6 states that had seceded before Lincoln took office — South Carolina was first, in December. The Confederate States had been formed. Northern governors were raising troops, federal troops had surrendered in Texas, and Fort Sumpter had been fired upon. The country was split.
@ Stephane, # 11 — the states you mention with foreign car plants are all those with union-busting “right to work” laws.

Posted by: Chuck Cliff | Jan 18 2009 6:11 utc | 21

thank you b real for mentioning the part of the civil war many don’t mention; preparing the west for expansion (subduing the natives)

Posted by: Lizard | Jan 18 2009 6:14 utc | 22

Honest Abe once took a train to Washington DC like
Honest O primed for the show on national TV
Honestly the heresy is the whole damn thing’s a joke
Honestly the pathology hinges on one word: hope.

Posted by: Lizard | Jan 18 2009 6:35 utc | 23

I’m waiting for the redux of the Liberty League of the 30s. When Obama does finally get around to making a few tepid reforms there will be an organization formed by real brown-shirts and financed by reactionary corporations and the rich.
That said, I think that these historical comparisons are pretty silly to shoehorn. Why not Andrew Jackson? Maybe he’ll abolish the Bank of the United States, a.k.a. the Fed, again.

Posted by: biklett | Jan 18 2009 6:54 utc | 24

link for @24

Posted by: biklett | Jan 18 2009 7:07 utc | 25

Forget any notion that there are two separate political parties atop America. Forget any notion that there is a political left of any kind in America. Forget any notion that a politician’s marketing persona means anything other than fluff.
One is left with a clear view of the economy as the genuine driver of of all the above.
And who drives the gigantic American economy that so straddles and commands the planet? Why, the owners of our Ownership Society, the 10% of the population that owns 80% of the assets and cash of the country. It’s literally their country, after all. They bought it with Wall Street monies, fair and square. They hold title.
They own and operate the government, which includes the policing agencies, and the military. So you understand, they intend to hold on to their title.
What the owners need now, Obama will deliver. The national Treasury, and everything it can print and borrow that passes for money, is at the utter service of the owners.
Obama will set up a National “Bad” Bank right away, and transfer all the gambling losses of the Ownership Society to us, to our children, and to our children’s children. All to no eventual avail, for those losses are huge, huge beyond the capacity of the entire world to ever repay.
Bush took the national debt from Four Thousand Billion to over Ten Thousand Billion.
Obama will need to take it to Twenty Thousand Billion, well before the end of 2010.
This economy is not big enough to pay that off, ever. And that’s just a drop in the bucket.
The new National “Bad” Bank will accept as its sole assets the Sixty Five Thousand Billion that the Ownership Society gambled away on Wall Street over the past 10 years. That is the size of the “decaying assets” the National “Bad” Bank will take over from the nation’s huge commercial banks and insurance funds and pension funds that — because of their extreme leveraging — are completely bankrupt anywhere from 50 to 130 times over.
All of Obama’s hope, and optimism, and pulling all together, and new declaration of independence is to get the 90% of the population who don’t own jack shit in this nation to go along with paying off the debts of the owners.
For generations to come.

Posted by: Antifa | Jan 18 2009 7:14 utc | 26

what new tactics will need to be imagined to oppose unopposed greed?

Posted by: Lizard | Jan 18 2009 7:28 utc | 27

Polly,
Fine tuning? Because the Dems have no spine, or because they are one of the two sides of the same coin, and hence have a problem with telling the R’s to just go cry a river?
Good Grief…..you are really hoping he is the Messiah and Savior to all?
Why because he gives a good speech?
And you call me dark because i believe in humanity, not in Obama who is bought and payed for. Sorry Polly, i truly believe that this man is going to disappoint a lot of people, to many maybe.
and with this i wish all a good night, it’s getting dark in my corner of the planet and monday is upon me tomorrow.
Peace to all

Posted by: sabine | Jan 18 2009 7:44 utc | 28

The childish reduction of Obama to a cardboard cut-out villian in some paranoid melodrama is outstanding theatre here at MoA. I’m beginning to think that the true action of evil in government, that we’ve endured for 8 years, has driven some of you mad. I don’t know how to react to so much nonsense. Deb’s theory that the Democratic Party will betray the social constituency that has been its social hallmark since FDR is by far the the most cracked theory of all, and shows scant appreciation of American history.
And b real mentions the push on the frontier against Native Americans, suggesting what I can’t say, with respect to Abraham Lincoln and Obama’s adoption of of Lincolnesque imagery. Lincoln’s honor as a human being is profound and just reading his words one is overwhelmed by the humanity and compassion of the young Illinois congressman who spoke out agaist the Mexican-American war. And Obama is being pilloried in the silliest and most purile fashion for wanting to emulate Abe.
It is approaching the point where I am sickened now by what I read here. The country is in deep trouble alright and what is needed is a new social contract. But in the view here every American public official is judged to be as evil as the ones who preceeded them. Attorney General nominee, Holder, will be as evil, one must suppose, as Gonzales, even though Holder has made crystal clear moral statements that the former republican official before him would never make.
I’m sorry but I just see warped fantasy and conjecture feeding on itself on this thread, and sadly this pathology just seem to grow worse.

Posted by: Copeland | Jan 18 2009 7:53 utc | 29

..mentions the push on the frontier against Native Americans, suggesting what I can’t say
?
i pointed out that lincoln presided “over the largest public mass execution in this nation’s history”. others drew attention to negative implications in associating ones self w/ the true lincoln — not the mythical creature of herndon or scholastic textbooks. lincoln’s dictatorial usurping of the constitution – suspending habeas corpus, bypassing congress in military matters, squelching dissenting media, ignoring the supreme court, wanting to send all blacks to either haiti or liberia so the united states could get on w/ the visions of its founders, etc..
those are things we’d rather not see in another administration
he made nice speeches, sure. if you want a martyr or saint, he’s probably your guy.

Posted by: b real | Jan 18 2009 8:54 utc | 30

Alright b real. But you know there were Copperheads and the Know Nothings and bigtime Southern evangelism that fully justified slavery. Lincoln was facing a real Fifth Column, and there is at least some justification for the measures. Plus you know that rebellion and insurrection are exceptions, and habeas corpus can be suspended in those circumstances under the Constitution.
Not many historians will justify all the things Lincoln felt compelled to do during the Civil War; but it cannot be certain that the Union would have survived if he had done otherwise.
But I think it’s weird to cherry-pick this part of Lincoln’s record from a time of such extreme domestic strife, against the fundamental domestic politics of slavery.
The imperial politics in the Mexican War, and the acquisition of new territory into which to expand slavery, were policies against which Lincoln rebelled.
There is a lot about the Lincoln legacy, not the narrow strata you seem focused on, that has positive implications and sends favorable signals about Obama’s view of his role as president.

Posted by: Copeland | Jan 18 2009 9:16 utc | 31

Obama seems to be manipulating symbols with a skill never seen before in US national politics. His ability to get so many to really believe in hot air speaks of a politician of simply extraordinary ability. But its already starting to wear thin and he is not even in office yet. He will not be able to deliver anything progressive with the exception of, perhaps, a few social issues ever. The symbols will only maintain his popularity for so long.
By 2016 Obama will be almost as unpopular as Bush is now.

Posted by: swio | Jan 18 2009 9:27 utc | 32

Anyone who takes the active marketing of a political persona as something real to discuss is eating a shit sandwich and grinning about it.
Lincoln is dead. He is not here, and Obama is not Lincoln any more than Bush is Truman. What Lincoln did has no more to do with Obama than what Britney Spears did last week.
Such puffery means nothing except that Obama has enough media savvy to put a cardboard cutout in front of his own human foibles, so that the press and the people do not spend all day picking him apart, picking at his speech, his stance, his words, his every aspect. He’s using Reagan’s formula, romancing politicians and the public on both sides of the aisle, walking out in public as if he was bigger than life, with a dream on his tongue, and a gleam in his eye, talking about hope and renewal and pulling all together. The media, and his shit-grinning admirers, will discuss his Lincolnesque cutout endlessly, while Obama does Chicago style politics behind the facade.
Let the days of 2009 go by, and follow the money. Follow the money as the days go by, and you will see the rich enriched, and the people asked to live on words of a dream that is denied to them. The nation is broke, robbed blind by the ongoing intention of its owners. Obama is in place to get everyone to like it, to eat a giant shit sandwich and grin about it.
It wouldn’t matter a great deal who the hell had been allowed to ‘win’ the Oval Office this time around — the job is restricted right now to getting Americans to go along with the owner’s program.
That will take someone larger than life. Hence the Lincoln cutout.

Posted by: Antifa | Jan 18 2009 10:11 utc | 33

What Polly says,“This has to work the first time” is the best reduction of what the O administration is up against, and explains much of his apparent capitulations shoring up his premier debut as the last great hope role as the magical “confidence man”. He’s banking on the perception that all those in the know, know that the country is in deep shit, and is extracting ever ounce of leverage from all available players both pro and con to participate in a national hypnosis, so that after the count of ten we all wake up to a restored nation. There could be something to the power of it all, or, we could end up like Art Linkletter’s daughter on a sidewalk. To fly or not to fly.

Posted by: anna missed | Jan 18 2009 10:28 utc | 34

Never mind the “warped fantasy” Coeland, lets just stick to the facts. Everything that most people on this board dislike about the Bush administration was supported by democrats. They voted for the invasion of Iraq, they voted to prolong the occupation when they got control of the House, they sat on all the COmmittees overseeing torture and spying and only claimed revulsion when it was made public, they voted for the starvation and blockade of Gaza, they regularly vote to give Israel carte blanche to bomb it’s neighbors, and I really don’t see any difference in thier policies towards Iran, Lebanon and Somalia do you?
And how about holy O himself? He voted to give the telecoms amnesty for spying, Hayden just came out and flatly stated their will be no torture investigations under an Obama administration. And yes I know he was against the invasion of Iraq but like Bill Clinton said that was before he voted to keep funding it, and since his election victory the 16 month withdrawal has changed to conditions on the ground. Sound familiar?
Would you like to hear some “crystal clear moral statements”, how about Bush the compassionate consevative or no more nation building and bridgeing partisan gaps. Do you remeber his criticism on Clinton for sending troops into Bosnia and Somalia? Yeah color me blind but I don’t really see much differnece in whether an Iraqi child is starved do death under a liberal Clinton or bombed to death under a conservative Bush.
I do agree that “what is needed is a new social contract” but don’t hold your breath. You live in a country that proclaims it can’t afford to give medical care to its own citizens but hundreds of billions in welfare to the banks no problem. Who controls the purse strings for that? Oh democrats.

Posted by: Sam | Jan 18 2009 10:29 utc | 35

banner on Larry King
Obama to adoring crowds: “I love you back”
the product has been successfully launched, now continual reinforcement is needed. whether it is a breakfast cereal or the POTUS, the procedure is the same.

Posted by: dan of steele | Jan 18 2009 10:52 utc | 36

Folks here are not bothered by the process of comparison as such–only by the choice of figures to be compared. As thus: don’t compare Obama to Lincoln, don’t compare “Obama” to Obama, don’t compare Lincoln to “Lincoln”, don’t compare “Obama” to Lincoln, don’t compare “Obama” to “Lincoln”. But do, by all means, compare Obama to Bush, or Lincoln to Bush. Or better yet: refuse to concede any difference between any of the figures mentioned above.
Refuse to differentiate. Period.
Don’t distinguish an eight-year-long record from a record that doesn’t exist, but speak with utter certainty about the ways things will turn out in 2010, or 2012, or 2016….
But what happened, exactly, in 1860?
A man from nowhere stood as the candidate for a party that had not existed six years earlier, and defeated the candidate of the party–the only party–surviving since the country’s creation.
Had Lincoln done nothing more than this, he would be still be remembered as a figure of political inventiveness and invention. After the election of 1860, business as usual was out of the question, and no one could know for sure what was coming down next.
Obama, by drawing a comparison between his own circumstances and Lincoln’s, gives us fair notice that a similar situation is in the works. He does not predict things yet to come. He leaves prediction to various folks in various bars.
Not that I’ve seen anyone hereabouts comparing Bush to Buchanan.

Posted by: alabama | Jan 18 2009 12:15 utc | 37

alabama@37
Don’t distinguish an eight-year-long record from a record that doesn’t exist
For Obama there is a record of what sort of political choices he’s made during the four years he was campaigning for president by playing a congressman.
Just the fact that he voted for TARP is enough proof his image will go poof!
Refuse to differentiate. Period.
As long as the politicians continue to vote the same (regardless of what they say), it’s going to be hard to differentiate the players.

Posted by: David | Jan 18 2009 14:18 utc | 38

Damn, I’m still learning how to format-
Most of the above was me, not quoting Alabama-sorry ‘bama

Posted by: David | Jan 18 2009 14:19 utc | 39

David, preview is your friend. also with html whenever you open you must also close so any italics must be followed with /italics

Posted by: dan of steele | Jan 18 2009 14:28 utc | 40

DoS
Thanks, I missed the backslash to END the damn italics. I think I might have figured it out.
Maybe I’m not the dumkoff I thought.

Posted by: David | Jan 18 2009 15:01 utc | 41

David, of course it’s going to be hard! For one thing, Obama has a knack for concealing things; for another, I have my doubts that a vote, any vote, can furnish proof that anything (like an “image”) will “go poof”–only proof, perhaps, that it has gone poof (votes being evaluative rather than predictive).

Posted by: alabama | Jan 18 2009 15:52 utc | 42

“I’m sorry but I just see warped fantasy and conjecture feeding on itself on this thread, and sadly this pathology just seem to grow worse.”
I think it is reality that seems to grow worse, and at last people are realizing the Demopublicans are one party with two
pretend factions who pretend to debate and who pretend to run against each other in political “races” that are decided before any votes are cast. We live under an unelected government that is very nearly %100 corrupt. A government that will do what those who own the government dictate it will do. Obama is a figurehead, a f*cking fountain of hope, all charged up with change. At least Bush didn’t pretend to have a conscience or claim not to be a soulless sociopath.

Posted by: James Crow | Jan 18 2009 16:07 utc | 43

Copeland,
Unless you’ve been living under a rock out in the middle of nowhere for the past several months or so, you should find it brutally obvious that Obama, The Anointed One, has been filling his war cabinet to the hilt with some of the most bloodthirsty hawks from the Washington establishment. So Obama has essentially done a snowjob on the peaceniks of the Democratic Party. He has snowed us into believing that he’ll be less of a war president than Bush was.
Obama has now felt the need to appoint a fighter pilot to head NASA. As to why he did this, my guess is that he’s paranoid as hell that if he doesn’t surround himself with enough warmongers, the neo-con heavyweights in the Republican Party will accuse him of being too soft on war. Then again, it might simply be the case that he’s in the back pockets of Lockheed and the like. So if this is true, don’t be too surprised that the new head of NASA will have those working under him go out and drop bombs on civilians in poor and oppressed regions across the world.
And now that it has come to light that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between McCain and Obama, America no longer needs to bother wasting its valuable time and money having presidential elections anymore. Now that choosing between a Democrat and a Republican is no different from choosing between a Pepsi and a Coke, it’s high time that America scrap its two-party system altogether, replacing it with a system that gives Democrats and Republicans a good run for their money! If America fails to do so, she’ll soon be looking in the mirror and seeing that her face has been badly burned by dictatorship.:~(

Posted by: Cynthia | Jan 18 2009 16:53 utc | 44

copeland says: It is approaching the point where I am sickened now by what I read here.
there are plenty of other watering holes where the comment threads are more palatable for folks who can’t handle reality, copeland.

Posted by: Lizard | Jan 18 2009 17:02 utc | 45

We now have government of emergency, by emergency, and for emergency. We, the people are along for the ride as our political class sets aside any norms necessary in order to service the current emergency, and save the status quo for the ownership class. It’s been like that for most of the past decade, and it’s the pillar and guiding principle of governance now. It’s the new normal.
Yeah . . . inalienable human rights, and our Constitution. Eff all that. We used to fight to save the American Dream. Now we fight to save the American State.
Citizen, you are a cog, a cipher, and a damned nuisance if you are not capable of paying down the debts of the ownership class.
Servicing the needs of the emergency is another way of making plain that the survival of the American State is holy above and beyond inalienable human rights or any other principles our State was originally founded upon. Nowadays, the State comes first. That’s not just patriotism, not just nationalism. That’s fascism, and it is here.
As Professor Carl Schmitt made clear back in the Twenties, whomsoever can declare an emergency, an interruption, a temporary departure from governance by the normal rules is the dictator, the true sovereign of the nation state that allows such emergency rule.
Rule by exception is the new norm, just as it was in Germany after 1933.
No matter who landed in the Oval Office this time around, the only job opening available is dictator. The only job available is Hurry Up Do Anything You Can Think Of To Save The State Aieee!
And fer Chrissake keep telling the people all about hope and patriotism and pulling through this thing together. We need the 90% who have not to pay down the gambling losses of the Haves and Have Mores.
Quick.
Aieeee!

Posted by: Antifa | Jan 18 2009 17:10 utc | 46

copeland is a valuable voice here & i think everyone knows that so muust always be welcome
but on the next administration – i am very many rivers apart & am convinced the proof of the pudding will be in the eating

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 18 2009 17:19 utc | 47

@Antifa – Rule by exception is the new norm, just as it was in Germany after 1933.
That is historically wrong:

The last years of the Weimar Republic were stamped by even more political instability than in the previous years and the administrations of Chancellors Brüning, Papen, Schleicher and Hitler (from 30 January to 23 March 1933) were all Presidentially-appointed dictatorships.

Rule by exception was the norm in Germany since 1930 (and even before often used through article 48, emergency power, of the Weimarer constitution.)
A lot of people forget this and see Hitler’s rise as a mysterium of that time.
That was not the case – Hitler was seen by some as a hope after some quite bad and very undemocratic times.
In November 1932 Hitler party got 33.1% in the elections and was only set up as chancellor by president Hindenburg after massive pressure from the war industrialists (Krupp, Thyssen) and some very rich bankers.
Hitler’s goons then initiated a ‘9/11’ event by burning down the Reichstag and blaming communists. Hitler initiated a new election round in March 1933 and Hitlers party got 43% while the blamed left lost. He then got additional vote in parliament from conservative parties (the Catholic Zentrum and others) for the Enabling Act, a ‘special power’ law that made him dictator.

Posted by: b | Jan 18 2009 18:09 utc | 48

Copeland @29:
Attorney General nominee, Holder, will be as evil, one must suppose, as Gonzales, even though Holder has made crystal clear moral statements that the former republican official before him would never make.

Eric Holder said at his confirmation hearing Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he supports renewing a section of the USA Patriot Act that allows FBI agents investigating international terrorism or espionage to seek records from businesses, libraries and bookstores.
..snip..
The searches must be authorized by a court that meets secretly and has approved the government’s requests in nearly all cases, according to congressional reports. The target of the search does not have to be suspected of terrorism or any other crime. A permanent gag order that accompanies each search prohibits the business or library from telling anyone about it.
..snip..
He didn’t elaborate on his support for the law, but said at another point in the hearing that his top priority would be to protect Americans from terrorism, using “every available tactic … within the letter and spirit of the Constitution.”

Under Obama, feds may still snoop library files

Posted by: Sam | Jan 18 2009 21:51 utc | 49

@b; Carl Schmitt wrote his texts on ‘rule by emergency’ in the 1920’s, and his ideas were as influential within the Weimar Republic as under the Third Reich.
You make my point for me by bringing in the entire Weimar Period, when a succession of hapless ‘leaders’ tried fruitlessly to stem the financial bloodshed caused by the Treaty of Versailles, and then the global Depression. They did so by trying anything they could think of to stop the collapse of the State, the street fighting, the hyperinflation. The one step they did not take was suspend the Constitution by vote. Hitler took that step.
It was only after the phony Reichstag Fire and its immediate Enabling Act farce that rule by emergency became the legally adopted norm.
America crossed that same Rubicon with the phony 9/11/01 attacks, and the Patriot Act(s) that immediately followed. Our Congress effectively suspended our Constitution at that point, just as Germany’s assembled lawmakers did.
The ideological Father Figure of the neoconservative movement in America is Leo Strauss, out of the University of Chicago. He was a great student of Carl Schmitt, and endlessly advised his students to find a way to rule by emergency.

Posted by: Antifa | Jan 18 2009 22:12 utc | 50

Wikipedia
Why bother with Schmitt and Strauss? Don’t we have our own tradition for handling “emergencies”?

Posted by: alabama | Jan 18 2009 22:36 utc | 51

strauss,schmitt are the intellectual fathers of a polluted political life. tho i know many would disagree with me i would add hannah arendt to that number. not only in the empire but in all its vassal states
it is not so odd that these intellectual thugs should find a kinship with that bavarian bore, heidegger
their students & the students of their students have made the possiblity of a political culture impoverished. in terms of political culture we have not moved very far from weimar except we have no alfred doblin nor any berliner alexanderplatz. unfortunately we have only cretins & the sons & daughters of cretins
we demonise arab & persian culture but as a culture it is infinitely more subtle, infinitely more nuanced & while their political practice might be authoritarian – the political culture itself is more multiple than wester scholarship or media would allow – even mr fisk & sometimes especially mr fisk

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 18 2009 22:43 utc | 52

Servicing the needs of the emergency is another way of making plain that the survival of the American State is holy above and beyond inalienable human rights or any other principles our State was originally founded upon. Nowadays, the State comes first. (@46)
This was the comment I had in mind, remembereringgiap, with my post @51.
If we Americans ever hope to go to the “source” of our misdeeds, we need to do some digging and some homework, archaeologically speaking.
The Alien and Sedition Act, prompted by the “emergency” posed by a “quasi-war” with France, and set in motion by John Quincy Adams–the second President and the original Bush–is one of the things that occurred in the very midst of those “inalienable rights and principles our State was originally founded upon”. Indeed, “the State comes first” would have served as an excellent slogan for the Federalists who engineered the whole thing.
No doubt they taught a few things to Schmitt and Strauss. I also happen to think that Americans, at this moment, are best engaged in a study of their own misdeeds and their own, homegrown “intellectual thugs”. Doing otherwise can serve as a kind of tourism that lets us get away from it all.

Posted by: alabama | Jan 19 2009 1:21 utc | 53

alabama
yes, i take your point
tho as a country the us has many singular sometimes breathtaking scholars but not a culture of scholarship & not a culture of real reflection except of the navel gazing kind & where substantial groups of intellectuals exist it is often in ‘interest’ groups like the american enterprise institute, rand corporation, heritage foundation or a hundred different schisms who in the end serve & enforce a dominant ideology

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 19 2009 1:38 utc | 54

Obama sells out to Wall Street

The president-elect’s support of the bank bailout is payback to his wealthy Wall Street supporters.

At the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton last November, John C. Hope III, the chairman of Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, stood before a ballroom full of Wall Street analysts and explained how his bank intended to use its $300 million in federal bailout money.

“Make more loans?” Mr. Hope said. “We’re not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans.”
Personal stories from the front lines of the American bailout.

The kleptocracy by our rulers continues, worst financial disaster since the Great Depression and apparently they ask nothing in return, no over site, no audit’s no nothing, your government gave them a barrel full of money with no strings attached. I don’t recall hearing anything about better mortgage policies, regulation of credit default swaps, nothing…
Fed and BOE Shell Games to Bailout Insolvent Banks
So it goes..

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 19 2009 5:52 utc | 55

Obama sure the hell isn’t a MLK…
Martin Luther King Jr on War and Poverty
Neither are his cohort’s..
Pelosi Puts Social Security, Medicare cuts on table

Herald Tribune: Pelosi and Obama appear to be on the same page when it comes to entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare. Obama announced last week that he would convene a “fiscal responsibility summit” in February to focus on long-term problems with the economy and the skyrocketing costs of benefit programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
“I support what he wants to do, to have a summit of that kind,” Pelosi said Sunday. “We will have our own initiatives in the Congress to work with him on that.”
Pelosi said everything should be on the table, including benefit cuts.
“The only thing we didn’t want to put on the table is eliminating Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid,” she said.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 19 2009 6:40 utc | 56

In December 1999 a jury returned a verdict that the U.S. government was responsible for a conspiracy to murder Martin Luther King Jr.
Transcripts here at the family’s King Center website-
How the US gov’t assassinated Martin Luther King Jr.

After hearing and reviewing the extensive testimony and evidence, which had never before been tested under oath in a court of law, it took the Memphis jury only 1½ hours to find that a conspiracy to kill Dr. King did exist. Most significantly, this conspiracy involved agents of the governments of the City of Memphis, the state of Tennessee and the United States of America. The overwhelming weight of the evidence also indicated that James Earl Ray was not the triggerman and, in fact, was an unknowing patsy.

A participant in the plot, Lloyd Jowers, and many fearful witnesses had finally come forward for a civil trial to piece together the evidence.
FBI, CIA, Pentagon, mob, and Memphis Police Department people all participated in a plot to murder Martin Luther King Jr. and frame up a patsy named James Earl Ray on April 4, 1968, exactly one year after MLK gave a speech condemning the Vietnam War and beginning the process of allying the black Civil Rights movement with the white anti-war movement.
Someone going by the name of “Raul” had for a year been giving the patsy, an escaped convict and petty criminal named James Earl Ray, smuggling jobs over the Mexican and Canadian borders and sent him to be across the street from MLK’s hotel with a rifle while others in the conspiracy:
switched MLK to a vulnerable hotel room
stripped him of his usual security detail
moved black firemen and black police away from him
shot him from bushes across the street
cut down those bushes early the next morning
murdered an eyewitness taxi driver
and, once he’d been caught, deceptively convinced James Earl Ray to ‘temporarily’ plead guilty thereby imprisoning him for life without so much as a trial of evidence such as ballistic testing of the alleged murder weapon.
Why? After the urban riots of Summer 1967 the Pentagon’s counterinsurgency experts were convinced that militant poor people in America’s cities would turn the US into a permanent Vietnam-like lost domestic war.
So all anti-government organizations were sabotaged and decapitated by the FBI’s COINTELPRO (counterintelligence program) and the CIA’s Operation CHAOS, just like the CIA’s Operation Phoenix in Vietnam and the CIA-backed Operation Condor in South America.
Best book on the US government’s big assassinations of the 1960s is a collection of articles from the online magazine called Probe, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease.
Here are some of them online-

Articles about the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
James Earl Ray maintained his innocence from nearly the moment after he entered a guilty plea under what he felt was the coercion of his lawyer. Read about the many controversies in this case and decide for yourself where the truth lies. Some of these articles are part of our new book, The Assassinations.
Probe V4N3: Is It Ever Too Late to Do the Right Thing?
Probe V4N4: King’s Son says Ray Not Guilty
Probe V4N5: Dexter King Pursues Justice
Probe V4N6: New Trial for Ray or New Judge for County?
Probe V5N2: Is the King Case Dead?
Probe V5N5: He’s Baaack! The Return of Gerald Posner
Probe V5N5: Judge Joe Brown Speaks out on Martin Luther King Case
Probe V7N4: The Martin Luther King Assassination Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis

Carthel Weeden, captain of Fire Station 2 in 1968, testified that he was on duty the
morning of April 4 when two U.S. Army officers approached him. The officers said
they wanted a lookout for the Lorraine Motel. Weeden said they carried briefcases and
indicated they had cameras. Weeden showed the officers to the roof of the fire station.
He left them at the edge of its northeast corner behind a parapet wall. From there the
Army officers had a bird’s-eye view of Dr. King’s balcony doorway and could also
look down on the brushy area adjacent to the fire station.
The testimony of writer Douglas Valentine filled in the background of the men Carthel
Weeden had taken up to the roof of Fire Station 2. While Valentine was researching
his book The Phoenix Program (1990), on the CIA’s notorious counterintelligence
program against Vietnamese villagers, he talked with veterans in military intelligence
who had been re-deployed from the Vietnam War to the sixties antiwar movement.
They told him that in 1968 the Army’s 111th Military Intelligence Group kept Martin
Luther King under 24-hour-a-day surveillance. Its agents were in Memphis April 4. As
Valentine wrote in The Phoenix Program, they “reportedly watched and took photos
while King’s assassin moved into position, took aim, fired, and walked away.”
Testimony which juror David Morphy later described as “awesome” was that of former
CIA operative Jack Terrell, a whistle-blower in the Iran-Contra scandal. Terrell, who
was dying of liver cancer in Florida, testified by videotape that his close friend J.D.
Hill had confessed to him that he had been a member of an Army sniper team in
Memphis assigned to shoot “an unknown target” on April 4. After training for a
triangular shooting, the snipers were on their way into Memphis to take up positions in
a watertower and two buildings when their mission was suddenly cancelled. Hill said
he realized, when he learned of King’s assassination the next day, that the team must
have been part of a contingency plan to kill King if another shooter failed.
Terrell said J.D. Hill was shot to death. His wife was charged with shooting Hill (in
response to his drinking), but she was not indicted. From the details of Hill’s death,
Terrell thought the story about Hill’s wife shooting him was a cover, and that his friend
had been assassinated. In an interview, Terrell said the CIA’s heavy censorship of his
book Disposable Patriot (1992) included changing the paragraph on J.D. Hill’s death,
so that it read as if Terrell thought Hill’s wife was responsible.

When you study the details of the big assassinations of the 1960s you also learn why and how the US government (Pentagon/CIA/FBI) compartmentalizes investigations and trials and reporting using government assets to hide their crimes against the people.
Very important to learn at a nuts and bolts level.
Oh, and happy Obama inauguration…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 20 2009 2:05 utc | 57

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