256 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographyof State despite her complicity in the Bush Administration’s various false justifications for
going to war in Iraq. Why would he vote to make one of the architects of “Operation Iraqi
Liberation” the head of US foreign policy? Curiously, he lacked the courage of 13 of his
colleagues who voted against her confirmation. (Matt Gonzalez, “The Obama Craze,”
Counterpunch)^115
Then there is the little matter of civil liberties, where Obama is actually looking more and more
like a crypto-totalitarian. In any case, it is certain that Obama was a supporter of renewal of the
Patriot Act in midsummer 2005, a time when anti-Bush sentiment was clearly the wave of the
future: “Obama voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act in July 2005, easily the worse attack on civil
liberties in the last half-century. It allows for wholesale eavesdropping on American citizens under
the guise of anti-terrorism efforts.” (Matt Gonzalez, “The Obama Craze,” Counterpunch)
Now, in the 2008 primary season, we have had another cycle of promises and betrayals inflicted
on us by Obama, who strutted as an implacable enemy of the Iraq war during 2007, but who, by mid
2008, is signaling more and more that he is open to prolonging the Iraq war virtually indefinitely.
Recently, with anti-war sentiment on the rise, Obama declared he will get our combat troops out
of Iraq in 2009. But Obama isn’t actually saying he wants to get all of our troops out of Iraq. At
a September 2007 debate before the New Hampshire primary, moderated by Tim Russert,
Obama refused to commit to getting our troops out of Iraq by January 2013 and, on the
campaign trail, he has repeatedly stated his desire to add 100,000 combat troops to the military.’
(Matt Gonzalez, “The Obama Craze,” Counterpunch) ‘At the same event, Obama committed to
keeping enough soldiers in Iraq to “carry out our counter-terrorism activities there” which
includes “striking at al Qaeda in Iraq.” What he didn’t say is this continued warfare will require
an estimated 60,000 troops to remain in Iraq according to a May 2006 report prepared b y the
Center for American Progress. Moreover, it appears he intends to “redeploy” the troops he takes
out of the unpopular war in Iraq and send them to Afghanistan. So it appears that under
Obama’s plan the US will remain heavily engaged in war. This is hardly a position to get
excited about. (Matt Gonzalez, “The Obama Craze,” Counterpunch)
At some points during the 2007 debates, Obama spouted vaguely anti-imperialist rhetoric, but
this was clearly yet another hoax: when all is said and done, Obama, like Kerry, is basically
claiming to be a smarter imperialist than Bush, and that is nothing to write home about.
OBAMA VOTES AGAINST CLASS ACTION LAW SUITS
These days in Washington, when a lobbyist wants to take some important right away from the
American people, it is customary to cloak such operation under the edifying term of “reform.”
Obama’s own parlance is rich in many examples of this kind of doubletalk. A good case study is
Obama support of what the corporate lobbyists like to call “class action reform,” which is no reform
at all but rather a high-handed outrage by the malefactors of great wealth.
‘In 2005, Obama joined Republicans in passing a law dubiously called the Class Action
Fairness Act (CAFA) that would shut down state courts as a venue to hear many class action
lawsuits. Long a desired objective of large corporations and President George Bush, Obama in
effect voted to deny redress in many of the courts where these kinds of cases have the best
chance of surviving corporate legal challenges. Instead, it forces them into the backlogged
Republican-judge dominated federal courts. By contrast, Senators Clinton, Edwards and Kerry
joined 23 others to vote against CAFA, noting the “reform” was a thinly-veiled “special interest