Obama Fiddles in Afghanistan, by Sean Fenley

by Sean Fenley
Dandelion Salad
The Anything and Everything
April 4, 2010

Obama showed up in Afghanistan recently — Bush esque — in a flight jacket, to reassure the troops that the foreign quagmire that they’re involved in isn’t all for naught. It seems that this country has not only ‘gotten over’ our Vietnam syndrome, but we are destined to relive it (Vietnam) at increments of every five to ten years or so. Apparently it’s more profitable for the controllers of this country to wantonly destroy third world nations, hold sham elections, and back an authoritarian strongman, then to invest frugally and prudently in initiatives here at home. Such initiatives could make this country more so emulate the rest of the industrialized world, than the deindustrial, consumeristic miasma that we’ve devolved into.

Obama is a globalist, however, he’s not an American; so none of that, of course, will ever be allowed to occur. Obama has played the Republican-lite songbook like a virtuoso, thus far into his first couple of years in office; so I guess we should begin to assume that these are the only arias and two steps that the ‘grand orator’ has ever planned to carry out. It’s going to be back to the days of triangulation, ketchup as a vegetable, and hamburgers as an item that it’s critical for this country to manufacture, sooner than many of us ever would have thought.

The point we are at, however, reminds me of an old saying of the old Iron Lady, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher. And that saying was the acronym, that a lot of us might recall; which was, of course, TINA (There is No Alternative). And Maggie meant this in the same sense that Ronnie meant it, “Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Of course, in my humble opinion, Reagan, and Thatcher were decidedly wrong about economic principles, but as an analogy to the contemporary American political system I think that they are both quite correct! Maybe, I’m just a glass half empty sort of person, but I don’t see any other way around the idea that the two party system is not any solution to our current state.

Call me a hopeless dreamer, who’s looking for some divine intervention from above; but the political slicksters, and tricksters of every stripe — and/or party — aren’t selling much of anything, that one can put much of any faith in at all. And they are adept at making their sales pitches also, by perpetually telling the Sunday faithful, that should the other guy ever get back into power, “Oh me! Oh my! Are things ever going to get rough!” In absence of any movement or real threat to their stranglehold on authority it’s hard to know precisely where to look — or to know exactly what sort of remedy to pursue, but if there’s any veracity to the ‘fact’ that the truth is a means toward freedom; then I think that that’s more than a worthwhile thing to hold on to than the virulent propaganda, and mis- and disinformation, that either side of the political coin spits out.

Sean Fenley is an independent progressive who would like to see the end of the dictatorial duopoly of the so-called two party adversarial system. He would also like to see some sanity brought to the creation and implementation of current and future U.S. military, economic, foreign and domestic policies. He has been published by such websites as Pravda.ru, Countercurrents.org, Online Journal, Dandelion Salad and Global Research.

From the archives:

Dear President Obama: Easter Has Nothing To Do With War

Out-Republicaning the Republicans By Ted Rall