Continued from Part One...
Hard to imagine any sane individual voting for this guy, right? Wrong. It is now public knowledge that President Obama embraced Uzbekistan's tyrannical president, Islam Karimov, in return for the opening of crucial supply lines into Afghanistan. Obama has since rewarded the central Asian republic with a 50% increase in financial aid for their compliance. For a man who preaches peace and diplomacy - lest we forget, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 - his willingness to negotiate with, and prop-up, a regime that regularly brnus dissenters alive and is fond of raping, electrocuting and suffocating its own citizens is highly perturbing.
If condoning the appalling acts of President Karimov were not bad enough, Obama's attempts to overturn the worldwide ban on cluster munitions last year ought to provide the cherry for this warped imperialistic cake. One must ask oneself, are these really the acts of an anti-war saviour? It was only in 2009 that the new president was being celebrated and congratulated on his, seemingly, well-intentioned decision to support a total ban on the lethally inaccurate weapon. But how things change. Cluster bombs scatter hundreds of bomblets across a wide area and have incessantly killed and maimed innocent civilians long after bloody conflicts end. Why Mr Obama saw fit to try and ignite a renaissance in the despicable armament is not wholly clear; but one suspects corporate profit had something to do with it.
Having spiralled your way through this tangled web of criminality, allow your hazy mind to take just one more horrifying revelation. Here goes. President Obama ordered the killing of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki on 30 September, 2011. Drones were sent to assassinate the radical cleric without due process; Awlaki's 16-year-old son also lost his life that day having been caught up in the deadly strike. But, as Antiwar.com commentator Jason Ditz points out, "Killing children with missiles isn't exactly new to the president". Moreover, the president actually takes pleasure in the murderous acts. In May 2010, at the Washington Formal Prom, Obama saw fit to distastefully share a joke, with what was clearly a small-minded crowd, about the existential threat posed by a predator drone.
Political writer Alex Pareene, of Salon, remarked: "The president is evincing a casual disregard for those lives he is responsible for ending by making a lighthearted joke". Of course, you would not know that the president had just produced a nauseating piece of rhetorical garbage judging by the way his listeners lapped it up like giggling little girls. As an aside, nobody even questioned the fact that his 'joke' was based around the notion of someone wanting to sleep with his underage daughters. Classy. The fact is, though, that President Obama has indiscriminately dropped unmanned planes on far-away regions without the slightest molecule of regret or concern. And the American public continue to gullibly regard him as a progressive.
Overwhelmingly, this imagined campaign has reeked of the worst excesses of right-wing jingoism and violence. Not even in Michele Bachmann's wildest of wildest dreams would she dare to run a parallel operation based on such sheer warmongering and destruction. Yet, what is palpably being misunderstood is the fact that this fails to be an abstract concept. It is the reality, the actuality and the phenomenon that is President Obama. Paul Krugman was being polite in July when he described the president as a "moderate conservative"; for he is clearly worse. And consequently, the Republican challengers to Obama's crown have had to manoeuvre even further towards the right; way out on the periphery.
Inevitably, this makes the Romney's, the Paul's and the Santorum's appear unelectable; which, it goes without saying, is true. But that is not, and should not be, the point. The GOP has been severely weakened as a result of the president's right-wing positioning, leaving Obama free to spread his lurid interpretation of liberalism and progressive politics; all with the backing of his wretched partisan bandwagon. It is political triangulation of the highest calibre; not witnessed since Clinton's tenure at the top. Wrongly, and to the detriment of democracy, Obama will face no real threat come November. The right are too segmented and the left continues to sit back silently, absorbing all the false promises and deceitful acts. If the Republican's want an irrational, trigger-happy right-winger in the White House they would do well to stick with what they currently have.