Tag: norman solomon

After more than twenty months of White House insistence that the only useful role for progressive canaries is to keep singing the president’s tune, the electoral coal mine is filled with the political equivalent of carbon monoxide and methane.

On the last night of August, the president used an Oval Office speech to boost a policy of perpetual war. With his commitment to war in Afghanistan, President Obama is not only on the wrong side of history. He is also now propagating an exculpatory view of any and all U.S. war efforts.

Every week, billions of dollars and uncounted lives are sacrificed in the service of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” While history is not exactly repeating, it is rhyming. Like a dirge.

In the current stage of denial, administration spinners are acutely eager to distinguish Obama’s “new policy” from events as recent as last year—as though we’re supposed to believe it’s no longer the case that the Taliban is “gaining strength.”

In the Senate of 2010, the baseline of conscience and courage is at an abysmally low level.

President Obama has taken a further plunge into the kind of war abyss that consumed predecessors named Johnson, Nixon and Bush.

You can’t keep a war in a box any more than you can deliver a government in a box.

Many in Congress who say they don’t support the war keep voting to fund it—and keep their voices muffled.

No shortage of bombs in Afghanistan; a lethal shortage of tents in Haiti. Such priorities—actual, not rhetorical—are routine.

For the United States, an epitaph on the horizon says: “We had to destroy our country in order to defend it.”

Mobilization of progressive movements to pressurize Obama in the White House and Democrats on Capitol Hill has always been essential. It hasn’t happened. Instead, among Democratic loyalists, reflexive support for the latest line from the administration has made it easier for Obama to move rightward.

“Escalation” is a word for a methodical process of acclimating people at home to the idea of more military intervention abroad — nothing too sudden, just a step-by-step process of turning even more war into media wallpaper.

By the time the star-spangled cover reached Sunday breakfast tables, NATO air attacks on Yugoslavia were underway; the U.S.-led bombing campaign would last for seventy-eight straight days.