Belated Reflections on Obama's FISA Failure

You can search this blog's archives to know that I've never been a fan of Barack Obama. He's an establishment Democrat politician, a player within a sick system and an elitist, disconnected party. From his speech at the 2004 party convention, to his choosing uber-idjit Joe Lieberman as his "mentor" in the Senate, he's shown himself quite willing to play the game. Therefore, it's no huge shock to my system to hear that Obama's vote on the FISA "compromise" was on the side of the devils. The president will apparently have vast new spying programs and the telecom giants will have a precedent to violate US-American citizens' rights to privacy if their glorious leader tells them they should. Plus there will be amnesty for past law-breaking.

What's disappointing is that underneath all of that corrupt, establishment garbage is an inherently classy guy. A guy who you can tell is nauseated by a political culture that squeezes months of life out of ridiculous controversies about flag-pins. At least that's the impression that I get. While the end results are just as monstrous, I think Obama's choices are the result of infection from the Washington establishment and not from any inherent fascism. Like Pham Binh says in "The Mendacity of Hope":

Rather, it's because Obama has made a series of political choices, the cumulative effect of which is real change we can believein because we can see it before our very eyes. He might have set out to change the system, to change the way politics is done in this country, but it is the political system that has changed him.

Well if you want to change that obviously stupid culture, you have to start big. FISA could have been a place to make a big stand and find out that the culture you despise isn't so powerful, that the people are behind you (aside from the bottom 25% who reveal their contemptible uselessness by clinging to their faith in miserable rotten failure bush II), and that what you perceive as "the center"is really just some arbitary intellectual point between the thoroughly deluded and discredited system and reality.

Unless of course, Barack wants those powers for himself. Unless he really is as sick as the system he inhabits, totally, without deviation.

The time for electoral politics in the USA is past. It ended in 2004. Americans with their heads outside their asses are going to have to come up with something else.

I've been busy, and this post as stayed semi-edited for three or four days now, and I might as well just post it as it is and toss in these two links that I don't remember the relevance of anymore!

http://www.counterpunch.org/reed06242008.html http://www.counterpunch.org/reichel06262008.html