Three years ago, when Barack Obama was merely a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, I began to encounter some troubling signs that he was not what he appeared to be. Several columnists whom I trust were warning, even then, that this man was a conservative in progressives' clothing and that was evident from his voting record as a senator if anyone would bother to check, and from some of the speeches he gave before the Chicago Council On Global Affairs, speeches in which his militaristic adventurism was on full display. Many of his campaign team policy advisers were neoconservatives, most hired out of the Bush administration. It didn't look good, but when I mentioned this to my progressive friends, I was uniformly shouted down - so fervent was the desire for real change from the horror of the Bush years. So I shut up, and like them, voted for the man, however reluctantly. Then I moved to a home in a place where Internet service was not available, and my ability to research was largely cut off for several months. I was unable to do much research.
When my access to the Internet was finally restored, just days before he was inagurated as president, I was finally able to sit down and do some serious research on this man. And what I discovered was nothing short of appalling. He had been a CIA asset fresh out of college (which is why his Columbia transcript has never been released, and professors there have been forbidden from talking about him - and why the details of his post-college employment at a CIA front company have been kept very sketchy), and he had been trained in propaganda and disinformation, which is what he practiced on that job. The Washington Post reported the very day my Internet was turned on, that he had reassured conservatives just the day before that he had every intention of "reforming" Social Security and Medicare, but had to wait until the economy was in better shape before he could do so.
So it came as no surprise to me at all when I began to see that he was indeed a Manchurian Candidate, designed to appear to be a refreshing progressive, but a man with a hidden agenda, largely implemented out of sight, that it is hard to describe as anything other than hard-core neoconservative, in some ways, even more so than his predecessor. Over time, a lot of my progressive friends have slowly come around to recognizing that what I tried to warn them of was true. But alas, it is too late. We were stuck with yet another neoconservative, this one with a winning smile, a slick, smooth manner and a whole lot of political capital to spend on nefarious projects. So the big question now facing the progressive community is what to do about it next year. Do we vote for Obama and watch ourselves be betrayed for another four years? Do we vote for a third-party candidate and throw our votes away? And watch some Republican wingnut take the helm of the Ship of State? Our dilemma was very arrogantly summed up by Obama's sleazy chief of staff at the time, Rahm Emmanuel, who, when asked about Obama's betrayal of the progressives that put him in office, said, "So what? Where they gonna go?"
Veritas Et Ratio - Truth And Reason