Obama: Murder he wrote

so-called Republican-Democrat divide, the two are like peas in a pod for the US presidency is a straitjacket.
Any aspiring president must pay homage to Israel and make it clear that he will prioritise the profits of the so-called Military Industrial Complex over human life. This is why our man Hussein Obama launched his re-election campaign by glorifying his role in giving the order for the killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
In speeches, interviews and a seven-minute web video narrated by former President Bill Clinton, the Obama campaign has hailed his decision to order the commando raid one year ago today on bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, while suggesting that Republican Mitt Romney would not have made that choice.
The campaign began last Thursday with a speech by Obama’s deputy Joe Biden at New York University, in which he declared that the bumper sticker slogan for Obama’s re-election could be: “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive,” while claiming that for Romney, the opposite would be the case.
Last week, the Obama campaign released a web video titled “One Chance,” in which former president Bill Clinton praised Obama as the “decider-in-chief” for ordering the raid in which a team of Navy Seals gunned down bin Laden and several members of his family. The ad then asks, “Which path would Mitt Romney have taken?”
Now if killing Bin Laden and Gaddafi is all Obama has on his list of achievements, he has been a shame to his forebears and Africa, the land of his ancestors.
What is most striking about this campaign appeal is its brazenly right-wing character. The Bill Clinton video, for example, plagiarises one of the most notorious statements of George W. Bush, when he dismissed mounting public opposition to the war in Iraq by declaring that on such issues, “I’m the decider.”
As for the bumper sticker —“Bin Laden dead and GM alive” — this could indeed be used to summarise the record of an administration whose principal actions have been increasingly reckless military violence abroad, mainly in Africa, and bailing out the banks and corporations at the expense of poor Afro-Americans and other working people in the US.
When the operation to kill bin Laden was accomplished a year ago, the Obama administration seized on this “success” as the defining event of his presidency. This act of state killing has become the template for increasingly monstrous and aggressive actions by American imperialism, going well beyond anything attempted by the Bush administration. In his State of the Union speech in January, Obama cited the Navy Seals as a model for the operations of the US government in every sphere.
The raid on Abbottabad came just as the US-Nato bombing of Libya was building up, eventually culminating in the imperialist-backed overthrow and lynch mob murder of Muammar Gaddafi. Islamist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen, was incinerated by a drone-fired missile in Yemen. Now the US is fomenting civil war in Syria and deploying warships and bombers to strike against Iran.
In the midst of the first anniversary celebration of the Osama bin Laden “kill,” White House terrorism czar John Brennan gave a speech defending the ever-wider use of remote-controlled drone missile attacks and claimed the US government had the absolute right under international law to target anyone it saw fit.
There is something particularly degrading about the use of a state killing — in which dozens of heavily armed special ops troops mowed down the fugitive in front of his wives and children — to promote a political campaign. Obama presents himself, not so much even as commander-in-chief, but as “hitman-in-chief,” appealing to the worst social instincts. There is no doubt that such appeals have touched a chord among the well-heeled sections of the upper middle class who are Obama’s key constituency.
In backing the Democratic president, this social layer has embraced US militarism and imperialism. This finds clear expression in the liberal and left-liberal media.
These layers are rallying to the Obama reelection campaign encouraging him to resort to ever-increasing levels of state violence, against those targeted by American imperialism around the world, and against the working class at home, when it moves into struggles against corporate America and its political representatives like Obama.
The entire episode demonstrates the utterly reactionary state of bourgeois liberalism in America. There is not a single significant figure in the Democratic Party or among the liberal pundits who feels any revulsion over this celebration of state killing, or who is prepared to speak out against it. Anyone who did would be quickly silenced or politically destroyed.
The attempt by Obama to run to the right of his Republican rivals, as the candidate most prepared to order murder and military violence, is symptomatic of the utterly degraded character of American politics and the government of the United States.
The Obama administration and the Democratic Party are making it abundantly clear that they have absolutely nothing to offer not only African Americans but other people in the developing world confronting the worst economic disaster in generations engineered on Uncle Sam’s shores.