Last Straw

Think again (think Tony Blair):

Tim Bald­win:

I shut my eyes when I listen to [Obama] and it could be Tony. He is doing the same thing that we did in 1997.

Mat­thew Par­ris:

Here we have a hand­some, dash­ing and intel­li­gent man, a man with gen­er­ous instincts and a sil­ver tongue; but a man with no dis­tinct­ive plan for gov­ern­ment that he has seen fit to share with us; a dar­ing oppor­tun­ist; some­body we may one day judge as a sort of Tony Blair with brains. And here we go again, all over again, hook, line and sinker.

Jon Snow:

Even after so many months of speech-making it’s still not clear what are the con­crete changes that may now ensue and in par­tic­u­lar, there are some big for­eign policy areas where Obama is not prom­ising a hugely dif­fer­ent tack from Bush …

Tariq Ali:

As for what the policies are going to be, the situ­ation is pretty depress­ing. I mean, Obama, dur­ing his cam­paign, didn’t prom­ise very much, basic­ally talked in cliches and syn­thetic slo­gans like “change we can believe in.” No one knows what that change is. In for­eign policy terms, dur­ing the debates, his — what he said was basic­ally a con­tinu­ation of the Bush-Cheney policies. And in rela­tion to Afgh­anistan, what he said was worse than McCain …

Ralph Nader:

He doesn’t like to take on power … I think his record in the state sen­ate in Illinois and in the US Sen­ate is that he doesn’t like to take on power. And if you don’t take on power, you know, the cor­por­ate power that dom­in­ates every depart­ment in our gov­ern­ment, you’re going nowhere, because they con­trol the budget, they con­trol the pri­or­it­ies, they have heavy con­trol on the media.

Jonathan Steele:

… his pos­i­tion con­tains massive incon­sist­en­cies … he has not repu­di­ated the war on ter­ror. Rather, he insists that by focus­ing excess­ively on Iraq, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion “took its eye off the ball”. The real tar­get must be Afgh­anistan and if Osama bin Laden is spot­ted in Pakistan, bomb­ing must be used there too.

John Pil­ger (who was right about Blair back in 1997):

Like all ser­i­ous pres­id­en­tial can­did­ates, past and present, Obama is a hawk and an expan­sion­ist. He comes from an unbroken Demo­cratic tra­di­tion, as the war-making of pres­id­ents Tru­man, Kennedy, John­son, Carter and Clin­ton demon­strates. Obama’s dif­fer­ence may be that he feels an even greater need to show how tough he is.

Michael Albert:

My guess is, sadly, that within one week, lit­er­ally one week, Obama’s staff and cab­inet choices will make decis­ively evid­ent that without mass act­iv­ism for­cing new out­comes, change will stop at the sur­face. I fer­vently hope I am wrong.

Vice President-elect, Joe Biden, is a pro-war Zion­ist. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, helped push through NAFTA and favoured the war on Iraq. 

Alex­an­der Cock­burn on Rahm Emanuel:

He’s a former Israeli cit­izen, who volun­teered to serve in Israel in 1991 and who made brisk mil­lions in Wall Street. He is a super-Likudnik hawk, whose father was in the fas­cist Irgun in the late Forties, respons­ible for cold-blooded mas­sacres of Palestinians.

Nader on Obama’s record:

Far more than Sen­ator McCain, you have received enorm­ous, unpre­ced­en­ted con­tri­bu­tions from cor­por­ate interests, Wall Street interests and, most inter­est­ingly, big cor­por­ate law firm attor­neys… Why, apart from your uncon­di­tional vote for the $700 bil­lion Wall Street bail­out, are these large cor­por­ate interests invest­ing so much in Sen­ator Obama? Could it be that in your state Sen­ate record, your U.S. Sen­ate record and your pres­id­en­tial cam­paign record (favor­ing nuc­lear power, coal plants, off­shore oil drilling, cor­por­ate sub­sidies includ­ing the 1872 Min­ing Act and avoid­ing any com­pre­hens­ive pro­gram to crack down on the cor­por­ate crime wave and the bloated, waste­ful mil­it­ary budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man?

Obama: bought and paid for.

(thanks to Media Lens for this post)