Excellent, Mr. Fish.

He’s been in office for 8 days.

The following is a statement by MLK about the “white moderate.” It’s from his Letter from Birmingham Jail as found in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.

  “First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”

Best Cartoon Yet, Fish!

Politics is no place for cheerleading (PSmith!); this is a lot bigger than ‘yay my team’ vs ‘boo their team.’  I couldn’t stand Bush because he started two illegal wars, now Obama wants to escalate Afghanistan and keep 20,000 to 60,000 occupation troops in Iraq so I have to hate on him for the same reason I hated on Bush.  It took Obama a grand total of three days to start killing innocent people with predator drones in Pakistan!  Bush starts an criminal bailout, and Obama appoints one of those bailout architects (T. Geithner) to be Treasury secretary and supports continuing the bailout.  In fact, lots of Dems who worked hand in hand with the evil Phil Gramm and other Republicans to blow up are economy and repeal the Glass-Stegal act are now ascending to top positions in the new administration (Biden, Geithner, Summers).  Hell, Biden could have stopped the Iraq war if as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he had the balls to call Scott Ritter to testify that all the WMD claims were totally bogus.  But Biden was hell-bent on blowing up some brown people and putting permanent military bases in their midst (H Clinton & Rahm Emanuel too). 

So PSmith, do you hate civilians getting killed, or do you only think it’s evil when the guy you didn’t vote for does the killing?  Do you hate the criminal looting of the country, or is it only wrong when it’s done by people you don’t like?

mr. fish wielding a razor blade of a cartoon

Well said, Ed Harges, esp. about Obama’s willingness to assert his mandate anywhere Israel let’s him.  He has the freedom to do exactly as it pleases AIPAC.

NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s approximately the Bush position. He began by saying that Israel, like any democracy, has a right to defend itself. That’s true, but there’s a gap in the reasoning. It has a right to defend itself. It doesn’t follow that it has a right to defend itself by force. So we might agree, say, that, you know, the British army in the United States in the colonies in 1776 had a right to defend itself from the terror of George Washington’s armies, which was quite real, but it didn’t follow they had a right to defend themselves by force, because they had no right to be here. So, yes, they had a right to defend themselves, and they had a way to do it—namely, leave. Same with the Nazis defending themselves against the terror of the partisans. They have no right to do it by force. In the case of Israel, it’s exactly the same. They have a right to defend themselves, and they can easily do it. One, in a narrow sense, they could have done it by accepting the ceasefire that Hamas proposed right before the invasion—I won’t go through the details—a ceasefire that had been in place and that Israel violated and broke.

But in a broader sense—and this is a crucial omission in everything Obama said, and if you know who his advisers are, you understand why—Israel can defend itself by stopping its crimes. Gaza and the West Bank are a unit. Israel, with US backing, is carrying out constant crimes, not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, where it is moving systematically with US support to take over the parts of the West Bank that it wants and to leave Palestinians isolated in unviable cantons, Bantustans, as Sharon called them. Well, stop those crimes, and resistance to them will stop.

[...]

Now, that’s what Obama—if Israel—there’s no question that all of these acts are in total violation of the foundations of international humanitarian law. Israel knows it. Their own advisers have told each other—legal advisers have explained that to them back in ’67. The World Court ruled on it. So it’s all total criminality. But they want to be able to persist without any objection. And that’s the thrust of Obama’s remarks. Not a single word about US-backed Israeli crimes, settlement development, cantonization, a takeover in the West Bank. Rather, everyone should be quiet and let the United States and Israel continue with it. http://www.democracynow.org/2009/1/23/noam_chomsky_obamas_stance_on_gaza

ROBERT FISK: But for the people of the Middle East, the absence of the word “Gaza” – indeed, the word “Israel” as well – was the dark shadow over Obama’s inaugural address. Didn’t he care? Was he frightened? Did Obama’s young speech-writer not realise that talking about black rights – why a black man’s father might not have been served in a restaurant 60 years ago – would concentrate Arab minds on the fate of a people who gained the vote only three years ago but were then punished because they voted for the wrong people? It wasn’t a question of the elephant in the china shop. It was the sheer amount of corpses heaped up on the floor of the china shop.

[...]

Sure, give the man a chance. Maybe George Mitchell will talk to Hamas – he’s just the man to try – but what will the old failures such as Denis Ross have to say, and Rahm Emanuel and, indeed, Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton? More a sermon than an Obama inaugural, even the Palestinians in Damascus spotted the absence of those two words: Palestine and Israel. So hot to touch they were, and on a freezing Washington day, Obama wasn’t even wearing gloves. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-so-far-obamas-missed-the-point-on-gaza-1488632.html

Mr. Fish has it dead right, as usual.

Only on Israel and the Middle East and the general neocon/Israel-lobby war agenda is Obama utterly refusing to budge from right-wing polices, even though his PRIMARY mandate from the people who voted for him is to change those very policies.

Notice that Obama’s not afraid to assert his mandate for change on any other hot-button issue.

Look at the incendiary issue of abortion rights. Is he saying, “I won the election, but golly, so many people passionately disagree with me on abortion, I’m going to discuss new polices to make sure they’re OK with the anti-abortion people”? No. He’s free to adopt new policies on abortion without consulting his critics - because Israel doesn’t care about that one way or the other.

Who won the election? The same party that wins all our elections: Israel.