As Glenn Greenwald pointed out in a recent article, there is very little to differentiate the two candidates, the idea being to take minor and incidental differences that have little or no significant consequence and exaggerate them, inflate them beyond any recognition to instill a sort of passion and deeply infected partisanship within the culture of debate while skirting the central issues. You can say its a sophisticated and well oiled version of Muslims going haywire and ape crap over a stupid movie while they lack basic social justice, education and health care at home doled out by “revolutionary” governments that are almost carbon copy replicas of what was discarded. Americans follow the same beaten path with outrage over the 47%, Big Bird, Obama hoops, slicing and hooking, and whatever else the cult of personality can permit without getting into the fine print and nitty gritty.
—You never know who might show up at your local phone bank.—-Obama 2012—I”m In? —-Very sophisticated marketing here. The volunteer who looks like a sitcom celebrity type. Goldie Hawn screen shot has a) Just seen God b) The President asked her back to his room c) She had sex with the president, but she is sure she is imagining it, although she vaguely remembers he touched her thigh and she recalls her blouse was buttoned up at least another notch….
This Obama campaign is the most sophisticated electoral machine yet. This photo is a bit on the premise of Sidney Poitier in Guess Who’se Coming to Dinner which works on the Obamster’s leverage issue all the time which is the “other” ; a representative of. The Republicans are her parents of course. Uptight. Conservative. Generic liberals who have “strayed” into the forbidden zone. The “volunteer” looks like the stereotype and troped to exhaustion middle-class white woman, liberal, progressive and vaguely Jewish or parts thereof. But how can she be part of the unwashed when you are that white? Bleached. She doesn’t know a drone from a droid from the draculas that have drained any vital essence out of her.
—the daughter of a prominent diplomat — had lived in the country at the same time.
As the night wore on, they sat close together on an orange beanbag in the hall while Cook swigged Baileys Irish Cream straight from the bottle.
They were amazed at how much they had in common: both were children of divorced parents, both had lived all over the world and had never felt truly at home anywhere.
They exchanged phone numbers and the self-assured Obama didn’t waste time. Within days, he was cooking her dinner at his apartment.
‘Then we went and talked in his bedroom,’ Cook recalled. ‘And then I spent the night with him.
‘It all felt very inevitable.’
The U.S. president and his First Lady sometimes seem so well-suited to each other that it’s hard to imagine there ever having been any woman in his life other than the formidable Michelle, whom he met while working for a Chicago law firm in 1989.
Obama has reinforced this notion by making only fleeting mention of ex-girlfriends in his carefully calibrated memoirs, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
‘Lithe and mysterious': Obama developed a serious crush on fellow student Alexandra McNear while at Occidental College in Los Angeles
‘Lithe and mysterious': Obama developed a serious crush on fellow student Alexandra McNear while at Occidental College in Los Angeles
He gives the impression of a man in such a hurry to save the world that he had no time for such distractions as romance.
But now, in a blistering new biography, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist David Maraniss has pulled his exes out of the shadows.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2163468/Barack-Obama-The-white-girlfriends-US-President-erased-past.html#ixzz29W8DmerM
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You could say the Obama “love interest” in the call center, could fall under the Gail Simone term, “Women in Refigerators, WIR, which began as a comic book terms but has seeped into the larger culture to describe women as enablers that help fuel stories of men and in the process they become de-powered, used, and even murdered, dispatched, and put on chill in the fridge….
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)This is an argument that has been oft expressed by Chomsky among others, but like an old classic, it never tires… Glenn Greenwald:The issue is not what separates Romney and Obama, but how much they agree. This hidden consensus has to be exposed
Wednesday night’s debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney underscored a core truth about America’s presidential election season: the vast majority of the most consequential policy questions are completely excluded from the process. This fact is squarely at odds with a primary claim made about the two parties – that they represent radically different political philosophies – and illustrates how narrow the range of acceptable mainstream political debate is in the country.
In part this is because presidential elections are now conducted almost entirely like a tawdry TV reality show. Personality quirks and trivialities about the candidates dominate coverage, and voter choices, leaving little room for substantive debates.
But in larger part, this exclusion is due to the fact that, despite frequent complaints that America is plagued by a lack of bipartisanship, the two major party candidates are in full-scale agreement on many of the nation’s most pressing political issues. As a result these are virtually ignored, drowned out by a handful of disputes that the parties relentlessly exploit to galvanise their support base and heighten fear of the other side.
Most of what matters in American political life is nowhere to be found in its national election debates. Penal policies vividly illustrate this point. …Even worse, these policies are applied, and arguably designed, with mass racial disparities. One in every four African-American men is likely to be imprisoned. Black and Latino drug users are arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned at far higher rates than whites, even though usage among all groups is relatively equal.
…California now spends more on its prison system than it does on higher education, a warped trend repeated around the country.
Yet none of these issues will even be mentioned, let alone debated, by Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. …
This same dynamic repeats itself in other crucial realms. President Obama’s dramatically escalated drone attacks in numerous countries have generated massive anger in the Muslim world, continuously kill civilians, and are of dubious legality at best. His claimed right to target even American citizens for extrajudicial assassinations, without a whiff of transparency or oversight, is as radical a power as any seized by George Bush and Dick Cheney.
Yet Americans whose political perceptions are shaped by attentiveness to the presidential campaign would hardly know that such radical and consequential policies even exist. That is because here too there is absolute consensus between the two parties.
A long list of highly debatable and profoundly significant policies will be similarly excluded due to bipartisan agreement. The list includes a rapidly growing domestic surveillance state that now monitors and records even the most innocuous activities of all Americans; job-killing free trade agreements; climate change policies; and the Obama justice department’s refusal to prosecute the Wall Street criminals who precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.
…The harm from this process is not merely the loss of what could be a valuable opportunity to engage in a real national debate. Worse, it is propagandistic: by emphasising the few issues on which there is real disagreement between the parties, the election process ends up sustaining the appearance that there is far more difference between the two parties, and far more choice for citizens, than is really offered by America’s political system…. Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/04/third-party-us-presidential-debate-deceit
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