A Democrat president does not lose Massachusetts without so dispiriting liberals they can longer be bothered to turn out for him. Inattentive foreigners have been slow to spot the demoralisation because their relief at Obama’s inauguration has stopped them realising that his failure to tackle unemployment and his unconscionable delay in punishing the bankers have induced despair among his natural supporters. As has the vacuity of his foreign policy.
I accept that readers may find this a hard sentence to swallow, but when it comes to promoting democracy, the emancipation of women and the liberation of the oppressed, Barack Obama has been the most reactionary American president since Richard Nixon.
Take the undeservedly neglected case of Nyi Nyi Aung. The reason you have never heard of the Burmese-American is that his arrest is an embarrassment to an Obama administration that wants to “engage” with Burma’s military regime. The junta is holding the democracy activist in solitary confinement. If he is receiving the same treatment as its previous inmates, the guards will be forcing him to crawl on all fours, bark instead of talk and eat from a dog bowl. American senators wrote to Hillary Clinton demanding that she intervene and received no concrete commitments. Nyi Nyi’s disgusted American fiancee says that the message America sends the generals is that they can do what they want.
Carry on reading
5 Comments
January 28, 2010 at 12:27 pm
Hi Nick
Hope you are well.
You do know that Obama dedicated a whole section of his speech to womens rights…which can be found at the link below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html?_r=2&pagewanted=7
January 28, 2010 at 4:25 pm
what do you mean by ‘reactionary’ here, Nick?
January 30, 2010 at 6:00 pm
Organic Cheeseboard: he means a supporter of oppressors and fiends of all kinds. Which the man who bowed before the King of Saudi “kill the girls before a man sees them” Arabia richly deserves to be called.
February 1, 2010 at 5:06 pm
If that’s the case then Obama is clearly no worse than Bush (who also bowed to the King of Saudi as well as propping up the dictator Musharaff in Pakistan), or any other post-WW2 US president in fact.
Nick must have meant something else – I’d like to know what.
February 5, 2010 at 12:21 pm
The following correction was printed in the Observer’s For the record column, Sunday January 31 2010
This Comment piece said: “In his Cairo speech to Muslim countries [Obama]… did not mention the oppression of women.” In fact, he dedicated several paragraphs of his speech to women’s rights, condemning those who would deny women equality through education and offering US aid to support expanded literacy for girls in any Muslim-majority country