Bombs Drop Around the World, as the Obama Lovefest Continues at Home

Antiwar - It’s springtime for Obama, and, ironically, the autumn of the authentic left, which is fast approaching extinction. A few of the old-fashioned liberals still persist – Glenn Greenwald comes to mind – but the sheer paucity of prominent examples underscores the shift that has taken place. As Ralph Nader – another survivor from the good old days – said at the Washington rally, the Obama administration has faithfully continued the Bushian foreign policy and the frontal assault on our civil liberties – and all, I might add, without any real rebellion in the “progressive” ranks. It’s like the Communist party after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact – brain dead hand-raisers without an ounce of life or intelligence among the lot of them.

If the antiwar movement is to grow, it must reach out to the real America: the great American middle class, or what’s left of it. Battered by a “recession” that is in fact the first stages of a depression, angry about their loss of status and the economic and social dislocation that seems to be enveloping the entire society, the bourgeoisie is a seething mass of quite justifiable resentment. Like most ordinary Americans, they are sick and tired of sending their tax dollars and their sons and daughters overseas to fight aimless wars that never turn out as advertised. Why isn’t the antiwar movement trying to reach these people – who, after all, make up the single largest “interest group” in America?

Antiwar sentiment – and just plain anti-Establishment sentiment – is rising on the right, and certainly Ron Paul has tapped into this vein. Instead of resenting the tea partiers – and many of the original tea partiers were and are Paulians – and envying them their energy, the anti-interventionist left should be trying to plug into that power source, a much-needed form of alternative energy. A real union of left and right over the single issue of foreign wars would revive the flagging antiwar movement and pose a real challenge to the War Party for the first time in many years. The two main obstacles to that worthy goal are the Obama cult and a sold-out “liberal” leadership that has reconciled itself to the joys of power. Read more.