I am quite tired as I post this cartoon, being that it’s late in the night closing in on the twilight zone (or, as Chuck Berry called ‘em, the “wee-wee hours” – but that just makes me wanna pee), I will quote Roberto Lavato’s take on Obama’s Grand Tour: The American Idoling of Empire?

Simply voting for and electing Obama will not solve the crisis of the rapidly declining empire hidden behind mainstream media euphemisms like “superpower” or “leader of the free world”; He could simply become the darker-skinned, smarter, friendlier front man for the most massive military empire in history -and we its willing imperial citizens, as indicated by George W. Bush’s skyrocketing poll numbers immediately following the Iraq invasion in 2003. Given that numerous polls of world public opinion now tell us that militarism, military occupation and war have leveled love of the U.S. just about everywhere, a timely and critical question to ask Obama during and after his Grand Tour is, “How many of the 737 military bases the Pentagon maintains in over 130 foreign countries on every continent are you willing to close?”

And, given what economists like Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz tell us in thick books with startling titles like “The Three Trillion Dollar War” -that militarism is at the center of our growing national and global economic crises (ie; military spending busts budgets and increases debt, war decreases the amount available oil, war spending diminishes money for bridges, schools and health care, etc.) — we might also add the question, “And how quickly are you going to dismantle those bases?”

As Obama takes his charismatic calls for “change” global, neither he nor we can afford to continue turning a blind eye to the fact that all those bases, all those wars and all that imperial behavior have not just made us less safe in the world -and much poorer; they also unleashed domestic threats to the “civil society and rule of law” that Obama waxed patriotic about during his interview: unilateral decisions to go to war based on lies (lies accepted and repeated by most major institutions), a constitution shredded in the name of “protecting the homeland”, criminal corporations protected under cover of “national security” and an increasingly secretive executive branch accountable to no one.

Tags: barack obama, Dr. Mungo, imperialism, Unkle 800-lb Gorilla, war

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 12:09 am and is filed under In Contempt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.