Job #1 of all US presidents is to make the world safe for corrupt, crony, predatory, monopolistic capitalism while destroying all alternatives at every opportunity... that, and expanding upon the crimes of their predecessors. As such, Obama has been successful beyond all comprehension...

Who can disagree?

All lamentably true. I love the bit re "when they smirk about what incompetent fools our elites are, how they’re so stupid that they can’t even see that they’re shooting ourselves in the foot over and over" ... that's so much what passes for dissent: the presumption of noble intent and innocence. Over and over again, it is demonstrated that the govt's actions produce further violence and terrorism and this is taken (always) as incompetence rather than intent.

They're like Little Red Riding Hood—"O grandmother, what big data collection centers you have! O grandmother, what indiscriminate drone strikes you have!"
The difference being that Little Red Riding Hood was actually fooled by the wolf, not just getting paid to pretend she was.

I don't think Obama 'hand-picked' anyone that anything to do with "national security." Gates and Panetta, for example, are players and part of the permanent gov't. Obama, should not be demonized, he is as was noted by Jeff, a manager, hired to do a job and making policy is not one of the jobs he was hired for, as far as I can tell. Obama have the decency to drag his feet--and this is pissing off some in the power-structure.

We have to see Washington as an interlocking series of plots and plots within plots as well as long-term conspiracies and cliques clashing over turf and booty. The situation is very complex and not easily dumbed down to "good vs. evil."

Obama, should not be demonized...Obama have[has] the decency to drag his feet

you mean 'cause he's only bombed seven countries in six years?

ah yes, the nonsensical masquerading as reason. more crony apologetics for today's most formidable war criminal. way to go, pal.

this comment my be the one that "dumbed [it] down to good vs. evil"

Obama had choices - if even to get shot for making them.

He never had any intentions to challenge power or make real change.

That is obvious. Even to the Obama cheerleaders.

The scary thing is that it is not obvious to the Obama cheerleaders. You rattle off the names of all the creeps he has hired to run his Administration, the money he as taken and from whom, the ways in which his actions have paralleled those of George W., and they look at you incredulously and blame the Republicans. Obama, they imagine, is hopelessly caught in a web not of his making. He is "forced" to nominate these people because the Republicans won't confirm anyone else; he is "forced" to have this foreign policy or the Establishment will howl; he is "forced" not to fight for "what he really believes" because that would be "divisive" and hurt the country. So why elect him in the first place? He is a "symbol" of our American commitment to a multiracial, color-blind future of inclusion!!! Thus politics becomes semiotics. Don't expect decency or policies that actually help people--just feast on the symbolic power of a black man being President. Who could ask for anything more?

Thus politics becomes semiotics. Don't expect decency or policies that actually help people--just feast on the symbolic power of a black man being President.

word. in the land of racism(milk) and misogyny(honey) they'll no doubt bestow the pushing of THE BUTTON on our first lesbian president.

oh my, I think you are right on this - "Thus politics becomes semiotics"

But deep down, some of them surely must reflect at times and know that this is just a rationalization.

They're like Little Red Riding Hood―"O grandmother, what big data collection centers you have! O grandmother, what frightful drones you have!"

The difference being that Little Red Riding Hood was actually fooled by the wolf, not just getting paid to pretend that she was.

Come on, Duwayne, we need your comments too.

We are facing Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide in Detroit and in Africa. In New Orleans and Liberia. In St. Louis and in Haiti. But We have aided in our own demise by Our vanity and naiveté. We have Our Jackie Robinson in the White House not realizing it was Our consent which was needed for the moves the USA would have to make in Africa.

Africa is the single most important reason for the creation of the Android called Barak Obama. Its not the only reason, its the most important reason. Why?
Because it became very clear after WW2 that.the USA could not pretend that Africa was the property of the British, French, Portuguese and Belgian colonial empires. It tried its best to prop these empires up the most notable embarrassment being trying to preserve Indochina for France with the so called Vietnam War. But now had to deal with new Black activism in the USA and Black independence movements throughout Sub Sahara Africa. Pan Africanism was.always a real threat to the African treasure house and was now happening as the American Civil Rights struggle turned into Black Power reaching out to African liberation and South American-Caribbean conscious movements. The US stinktanks such as HARVARD and RAND foreseen this day coming and the need to take up the White Man's Burden in Africa from a tired Europe. How? With a new kind of missionary the CIA NGOs charged with the task of finding brilliant young Africans who could be indoctrinated with Americanism and form a cadre of operatives loyal to US Corporate interests. Offer these 'Stephen Scholars' with an US education, residency and most important access to White Women and wait.

Enter Barak Obama Sr. Please note the similarity with Clarence Thomas. Does this sound like.science-fiction? My own version of a 'birther' theory?
Obama is using the Ebola epidemic as a pretext for sending ground troops into Africa! What are these Marines going to do? Fight a virus which suspiciously looks like a genocidal biological warfare weapon? Who is being demonized? Blacks and Africa. Sound familiar? Revisit HIV and the African origin and Haitian issue. HIV was so big in Haiti that it seemed to be a national trait and reason to fear contact. My question is why so big in Haiti and not the Dominican Republic? They share the same small island of Hispaniola. Did HIV refuse to cross the border?

I am not saying there is no HIV in the Dominican Republic but.it is not associated with HIV-AIDs. Haiti was. Why? The answer requires a study of Haitian history and why its revolution frightened all White supremacist racist states and why these banded together to insure it would be eternally punished for daring to challenge and win their freedom. Haiti won its freedom on the battlefield not with guerilla tactics but with an understanding of European warfare. Haiti was the first army to defeat Napoleon though he was not on the field it was his army. What the White supremacists feared was that other Black slaves in the Americas would be inspired to do the same. Now what has this so called Black POTUS done in Haiti? With Our consent the Android Obama has essentially ended Haitian independence with permanent occupation and manipulation of its politics with US puppets. To do this requires US Black consent in the form of a Black Android and other Stephen class enablers like Al Sharpton and Michael Dyson.

The lost of Haiti's independence parallels the disenfranchisement of Detroit. It is the legacy of a Black POTUS and the consent of the US Black electorate.
Neither Bush nor McCain nor Romney could have accomplished this and they know it. These past 2 Presidential elections were bigger shams than Bush vs Gore. Obama is a planned event.

Now CNN is looping non stop about Ebola and ISIS. This is a war against Africa and Black people waged in Blackface with Black consent!
An African disease. Brought to America by a Black man from Liberia.

Where was HIV and Ebola 40 years ago?
What was going on in Africa that would motivate the creation of biological agents for ethnic cleansing and genocide? The struggles of Apartheid South Africa. Which was this nation's most faithful allies as world opinion turned against South Africa? Israel and the USA. How come files can be found concerning Zionist Israel and Apartheid South Africa's collaboration on atomic WMDs but not of any biological or chemical?

Apartheid South Africa had a Final Solution for the Indigenous Peoples of Southern Africa and the morbidity rates of HIV in nations like Botswana and Lesotho suggest this. The actions of Zionist Israel against Palestinians suggests this mindset. The Bible is the guide. It calls for the invasion, conquest, ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Canaanites which has been the history of the USA, South Africa and Israel.

I do not throw these charges of genocide carelessly and am not the first or only one to do so. Paul Robeson hand delivered such a charge to the UN against the USA 60 years ago. Genocide is what's happening in Ferguson. Ethnic cleansing is what's happening in Detroit. In Haiti. In Africa with the consent of the targeted group in the Artificial Person of Barak Obama as the first Black POTUS. Imagine the genius of this move because if the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Africans and Arabs in Africa, the Middle East and the Americas is to much for you to consider then how about tricking the victims of White supremacy and imperialism into supporting the Manifest Destiny of the White Man's Burden?

I think Its super important to support Duwayne's message in his last paragraph. IT IS a genocide and ethnic cleansing throughout the black population in the US.

The very definition of genocide is purposely open, and has a variety of forms that make genocide claims inclusive, because there are many ways to achieve the destruction of peoples other than mass killings or concentration camps. I think that if R. Lemkin, if true to his coining of genocide, would do a quick survey, and shout ' obviously so '. A slow death bias against a whole groups of people is zero defence against claims of geocode. That wasn't true when the term was invented - to protect against that method of destruction - and it will never be true.

Obama has driven the hegemonic, self slavery applauding, empathy collapse, fear frenzy, mass murder/torture expanding and WW 3 kindling index to absurd levels that leaves no doubt about our short term future, and who Obama really is and what he stands for.
Sure he is a manager in some ways, but no manager gets hundreds of millions of self lying cowardly imbeciles to vote and cheer themselves to economic, political and social ruin. That takes a special kind of agent to work from an underling base already in existence in most of the people as self harming, self deluding, self destructive and self annihilating, no political memory dimwits, who seemingly endlessly repeat the horror of their errors as soon as the next commercial break has ended. Free to then deny and reject everything needed for us to be relatively free ( I'm a realist ) form the evil elites worst implementation of their wicked dominance. Oops I guess that the short term future I mentioned.

Of Course just like Chris said, it's quite natural of course, quite natural for a dominationist Empire for endless war, that in itself proves the case that the US government really is an empire.

"The system can’t “fail” in its goals, because there are no “goals,” no endpoints. There is only the process..."

Bingo... a self perpetuating, self replicating paradigm which is very successful at what it does....

Note to self..
1. Pay close attention to Praxis.

2. Keep AK-47 close at hand.

3. Keep buying ammo.

I thought the faux innocence argument was over after Nieburh's "The Irony of American History".

Important point on the premises of the snarking classes.

So far, this new and old war on terr...IS, or just TerrIS, has been mostly war crimes, failure and propaganda ( khorasan ), Syrian gas plant and grain silos destruction ( although collective suffering and death to root out some IS guys is war crime policy in the open ) and now this: http://news.antiwar.com/201...
Those Killer Clowns in the skies just keep proving their evil incompetence.

As an Aussie, this bootlicking government here, will obviously be receiving the same ' what targets to strike ' intel ' by the US, that has already been a sure fire war crime festival. I'm sure the bargain with the murderously corrupt Shia dominated Iraqi government, gave the immunity green light for ongoing atrocities, which was the final negotiation to start the slaughter show called ' rivers of sinew and blood '.

As well as an obviously clear sigal that Iraq is broken up for realziez, since the corrupt Shia dominated governments green light for atrocities against Sunnis, is now policy and sought after through foreign powers, targeting whole swathes of Sunni area's which is the perfect IS recruiting tool for resisting the US empire. The killer clown show is the propaganda IS wants desperately. As well as since the Shia government couldn't achieve oppression by themselves. If your an innocent Sunni living in these parts of Iraq and Syria, what are you supposed to do and think.

"We" are not at war. That is not what "we" do, unless we are active participants in it. "They" do war, and "they" have no need to listen to "us."
The masters of war must be even happier when the lowly nobody opposition intuits some form of massive guilt by association, as if "we" are the ones being consulted, or that "we" are the ones with the social capital to decide upon genocide or ice cream. I'll plead guilty, if the charge is futility, but let the other label of war-monger or hedge fund criminal or horrible human being apply to those who so richly earn the distinction.

Yea I caught that too, the word "we", and wondered if it was the right word to use. It's conventional speech of course to refer to the U.S. government as "we", a government of the people hahaha (I sometimes don't even like to refer to the war machine as the "U.S. government" but rather to refer to it as the U.S. military. YMMV on that one, but I'm not going to blame some government clerk in the social security administration for it).

However, as far as our Diebold voting machines (still some paper ballots some places though seldom in swing states) and the polls tell us someone is voting for these people, very badly set up electoral system that it is. Though it is not me, it could easily be a full decade since I've voted any duopoly person (though I don't mind it as a strategy to throw existing bums out and replace them with new bums). I don't even vote for them! And yet endless war whether we want it or not.

"Until that very moment when she was killed I believed we had still a chance of getting away," he said. "All through the night and morning that we sailed across the sea from Capri to Salerno, we talked of escape. We were full of hope, and it clung about us to the end, hope for the life together we should lead, out of it all, out of the battle and struggle, the wild and empty passions, the empty arbitrary 'thou shalt' and 'thou shalt not' of the world. We were uplifted, as though our quest was a holy thing, as though love for another was a mission . . . .

(from A Dream of Armageddon, by H.G.Wells)

I requested, I wished; I lost.
2014

January 1; a day of choices of what to bring forward, leave behind as memories, what is possible to start and what to discard and not even as a memory; if that is possible.
My choice of what to bring forward always is: Love; the love of the Creator, even if there is no or little belief here; it matters not because, we, as part of the Creator, if we care for our own selves the feelings become a conundrum. Family and friends are here and neighbors, with the world as neighbors.
Leave behind hate, desire; these 2 are what is behind whatever strife is in a family, and up to and including races and nation states, Why? Because it is always about things.
Since it is not here- yet… PEACE: So much could be accomplished: Gaia could be saved, and just think of sooo many other possibilities.
Discard: in one word, war.
For all who read this; make your choices wisely.
Sandy and Tony