By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
Fox News barked an order at the United States president a couple of days ago, and, of course, Barack Obama complied.
Ever since being elected president, Obama has constantly and consistently gone out of his way to win the approval of the dangerous right-wing lunatics and fraudsters who litter the American landscape.
The American president seems to forget that he is an African-American. He seems to forget that he is a Democrat. And he seems to forget that he was swept to power on the oft-repeated mantras of “Change we need” and “Change we can count on.”
Instead, Barack Obama has in every instance sucked up to the purveyors of racism, bigotry, inequality and war who preceded him in office – the sorry, sordid Republican regime of George W. Bush.
Nothing has “changed.” Instead, Obama has steered his country further down the road of degeneracy and decline.
In this latest incident, Obama was obeying the order of Fox talk jock Bill O’Reilly, an unrepentant proponent of racist, mysogynist, war-mongering and extremist bullshit.
O’Reilly showed a highly misleading snippet of video of Shirley Sherrod, a United States Department of Agricultural employee whohas strived throughout her civil service career to help all poor Americans, regardless of race, colour or creed.
But the snippet of distortion forwarded to him by right-wing nutbar and media manipulator Brian Breitbart alleging to prove Sherrod was an African-American racist was fraud, pure and simple, just like all his past media missives.
That Breitbart still has any credibility whatsoever even with the network of news distortion, Fox News, is a sad commentary on the state of America’s corporate mass media.
But that Barack Obama would instantly act on O’Reilly’s shrill demand that Sherrod be fired proves that Barack Obama is a creature not of the left but of the right.
He calls himself an African-American and a Democrat. But he is neither.
Brack Obama is the first Oreo-American president – black on the surface but white beneath the facade and attuned not to the desperate needs of African-Americans and other poor Americans but to the unbridled greed and selfishness of an extremely right-wing, predominantly white, socioeconomic elite.
Barack Obama calls himself a Democrat but seems far more interested in fulfilling the warped wishes of right-wing Republican reactionaries than the humane desires of so-called “liberal” or “progressive” Democrats.
Just look at his record. After 18 months as president, with total conof the U.S. senate and house of representatives, Obama has bailed out corporate capitalism, expanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, presided over the worst recession since the Great Depression of the Dirty Thirties and responded avidly and favourably to every demand of the right-wing lunatic fringe.
He has done nothing for African-Americans or other poor and working-class Americans. He has done nothing to address the obscene gap between rich and poor which is growing dangerously wide under his presidency.
He has done nothing to create jobs for the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs and are losing their homes. He has done absolutely nothing to implement the “change” he fervently promised and which Republican opponent John McCain characterized as a redistribution of wealth and which a majority of American voted for. And he has done nothing to end America’s perpetual war-mongering.
Instead, he has merely danced to Fox News’ sadly off-key tune.