More absurdity from Empire’s New Clothes Barack Orwell Obama this last week: telling freshman Democratic Congresspersons that the White House would sabotage those representatives’ next campaigns if they dared to vote against a $106 billion June 2009 supplemental funding bill to sustain U.S. wars (invasions) in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Obama administration (usually able to count on the G.O.P. to approve military spending) felt compelled to resort to this remarkable threat because congressional Republicans objected to the bill’s inclusion of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars for the International Monetary Fund to bail out global banks. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported on June 15, "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has been struggling for weeks to get to the 218 votes out of 256 House Democrats needed to pass the war bill, while the White House has threatened to pull support from Democratic freshmen who vote no."
See Carolyn Lochhead, "Pelosi Puts Pressure on Dems to Ok War Funding," San Francisco Chronicle, June 16, 2009, p. A1, read at http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/
Unsurprising but mind-blowing nonethless.
Last night at the International Socialist Organization’s "Socialism 2009" conference in Chicago, Jeremy Scahill of "Democracy Now" and The Nation said the following: "Obama is an incredibly Orwellian character. He can make people think that war is peace."
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