Check out this story from the AP: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_obama_notre_dame. It’s about the big protest that occurred at Notre Dame over Preisdent Obama’s commencement address there earlier today. He got hit with a campus protest (admittedly mainly conducted mainly by right wingers from outside the campus) from the right over abortion, not from the left over sustaining the occupation in Iraq, expanding imperial violence in South Asia, increasing "defense" (empire) spending, butchering innocents (including more than 130 civilians recently bombed to pieces by the U.S. Air Force in western Afghanistan) in "Af-Pak," threatening England into preventing a Guantanamo victim from having his day in court on the Bush administration’s torture practices, sustaining the Bush administration’s abrogation of habeas corpus rights in regard to enemy combatants sent to the Bagram Air Force prison, making bogus moral and political arguments to prevent the investigation of Bush administration crimes, suppressing photographic evidence of the American Empire’s torture methods, advancing a fake-progressive health care reform agenda that leaves the leading parasitic insurance corporations (major campaign sponsors of his) in power, retaining the military tribunals system he denounced during the campaign, failing to seriously advance an elementary and overdue labor law reform (the Employee Free Choice Act), failing to advance a moratorium on foreclosures or appropriate levels of support for working class homeowners, or for…fill in the blank.
Just another day in the life of American proto- (if not now fully) totalitarian "corporate-managed democracy." (And the president’s never been an especially ardent advocate of women’s abortion rights anyway, for what that’s worth).
Meanwhile across campus town/university America, much of the "progressive" community and its reigning AcaDemocrats seem hopelessly stuck in an apparently permanent position of pining estrus for His Holiness the Dali Obama. Their ardor for Empire’s New Clothes (who has so graciously forgotten and forgiven their white privilege) is truly impressive. A reckless few of them dare to occasionally express "disappointment" and "surprise" at certain Obama excesses (particularly those relating to civil liberties…interesting how little "liberal" middle class Dems seem to really care about questions of economic justice, institutional racism, and military imperialism as such)… as if they have any right to be surprised or disappointed in light of all the repeated and insistent warnings that numerous Left observers (myself included…since late July 2004!) and Obama himself gave of Obama’s deeply conservative commitment to dominant domestic and global hierarchies and doctrines. And so it goes, as Kurth Vonnegut used to say.
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