Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Obama Channeling Bill?

In Ruth Marcus's column, today, she compares Bill Clinton with Barrack Obama and contrasts them thusly;

It's hard to name a prominent moment when, like Clinton pushing welfare reform, he (Obama) deviated from party orthodoxy. Sorry, senator, but voting for class action lawsuit reform doesn't cut it. Obama's book features an erudite discussion of the folly, and futility, of resisting globalization -- at which point he summarily announces that he voted against the Central American Free Trade Agreement nonetheless. His signature divergence from the other leading candidates in the Democratic field comes from the left: He opposed the Iraq war from the start.

Ms Marcus, like many others, attempts to define the Iraq war issue as a matter of being Left or Right. She deliberately confuses the process of Democracy with the process of Free Market Capitalism. The only way in which this war has had anything to with economic policy was when the "post-war" occupation and "reconstruction" was executed by people selected solely on the basis of right wing ideological purity. Their attempts to revolutionize the Iraqi economic system to an utopian free market capitalist model proved disastrous for the Iraqi people and laid bare the greed and corruption at the heart of the neocon agenda. But it says nothing about those who opposed the war or have since come to oppose it.

Self-described "Paleo-cons" from the Goldwater era, led by Pat Buchannon, strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq. Would Ruth have us believe these folks are a bunch of pinkos and libtards?

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