The Obama Deception

To get the economy back on track, will President Barack Obama have to break his pledge not to raise taxes on 95 percent of Americans? In a “This Week” exclusive, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told me, "We’re going to have to do what’s necessary.”

Geithner was clear that he believes a key component of economic recovery is deficit reduction. When I gave him several opportunities to rule out a middle class tax hike, he wouldn’t do it.

“We have to bring these deficits down very dramatically,” Geithner told me. “And that’s going to require some very hard choices."

George Stephanopoulos Aug 2, 2009

Back on November 1, 2008, I published my endorsement of Barack Obama for President. To say I have been disappointed would be a gross understatement. My previous political cynicism, which I thought was slayed and erased by Obama’s candidacy, has returned with a vengeance. Like a Swine Flu virus temporarily muted by the vaccine of the moment, my political atheism has mutated once again and this time the result is a complete obliteration of faith in political leadership.

It’s not that I retract my endorsement, or that I would now have voted for John McCain, electing Obama was good for our country in narrowly defined ways, good for the global community as well, but he has revealed himself to be just one more in a long line of lying, deceiving, incompetent political hacks.

Obama ran on the promise to end the war in Iraq and bring our troops home in 16 months after he took office, by May 20, 2010. Instead, he has acted to just bring some of the troops home by August 31, 2010. Not a big deal? Say that to the soldiers who are slain or maimed between May and August of 2010, or to those who will be part of Obama’s "residual force" of 50,000 troops who will be staying until December, 2011.

In Afghanistan Obama has embraced George Bush’s indefinite occupation policy as well as the extension of that war into Pakistan.

Similarly, Obama is defending and even expanding the Bush administration’s war-on-terrorism powers, which have constituted among the greatest infringements on civil liberties and privacy in our nation’s history.

Obama ran on a clearly anti-Washington establishment platform, promising an administration of new names and faces, non-Washington insiders who have not already been corrupted by an incestuous political system. What the country got instead was a rehash of past administrations, heavily weighted toward Bill Clinton’s political machine and leading off with the Secretary of State of Lies and Deceit, Hillary Clinton.

On the domestic side of the ledger, Obama has carried over the Goldman Sachs cartel to run our economy. He has rubber-stamped an unprecedented transfer of wealth, not from the rich to the poor, but from the rich, the poor, the middle class, i.e. everyone, to a handful of both visible and invisible financial institutions across the globe, e.g. The Bilderberg Group.

Which brings me back to the opening quote above from George Stephanopoulos. During the campaign, Obama’s two most visible and persuasive promises were to end the war in Iraq and in his read my lips no new taxes mantra, a tax cut for 95% of American taxpayers.

Now this morning we have his Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, a former Bush hack, golden boy of Henry Kissenger, Robert Rubin, Lawrence Sommers, The Council on Foreign Relations, The Bilderberg Group, The Federal Reserve and everybody’s favorite scumbag, Henry Paulson, opening the door to raise taxes on everything and everybody with or without a pulse.

"We’re going to have to do what’s necessary."

"Some very hard choices."

In other words, assume the position.

I ‘m attaching a video that is making the rounds on the Internet, starting out on the kooky conspiracy sites and is now slowing gaining access to mainstream commentary.  [The video, The Obama Deception, is a "conspiracy theory" movie, and as this post by Allan reflects, it is gaining an audience of people who only a few years ago would have dismissed it as lunatic fringe propaganda. – Ilene]

It’s thesis:

Is Obama just a puppet for Wall Street interests? What is his agenda if it isn’t the one he claims to have? If the president isn’t directing the country, then who’s in the driver’s seat?

The Obama Deception is a video that looks into these questions, and claims that the ones who are actually in power are people who avoid the spotlight. Obama himself is nothing more than a pretty face to put on an ugly agenda.

I don’t know how far I am willing to go with this kind of paranoia. Where is the line between delusion and insight? Is there a thread between November 22, 1963 and September 11, 2001? Does the Patriot Act rise to the level of a Constitutional Amendment?

Is Barack Obama a global phenonomom of a freedom and change, or just another brick in the wall?