obama lies as cravenly as bush

Obama lies as cravenly, if not as crudely, as George W. Bush ... As a senator, Obama promised he would filibuster amendments to the FISA Reform Act that retroactively made legal the wiretapping and monitoring of millions of American citizens without warrant; instead he supported passage of the loathsome legislation. He told us he would withdraw American troops from Iraq, close the detention facility at Guantánamo, end torture, restore civil liberties such as habeas corpus and create new jobs. None of this has happened.

He is shoving a health care bill down our throats that would give hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to the private health insurance industry in the form of subsidies, and force millions of uninsured Americans to buy insurers' defective products ... Obama did nothing to halt the collapse of the Copenhagen climate conference, after promising meaningful environmental reform, and has left us at the mercy of corporations such as ExxonMobil. He empowers Israel's brutal apartheid state. He has expanded the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where hundreds of civilians, including entire families, have been slaughtered by sophisticated weapons systems such as the Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of victims' lungs. And he is delivering war and death to Yemen, Somalia and perhaps Iran.

From Chris Hedges' Ralph Nader was right about Barack Obama

Is this enough to take our idol off the wall? No, no! He would have done so if he could (and didn't, so he obviously couldn't).

What does it take to take an idol off the wall? It takes another idol to replace him. Until that happens, and unless an idol loses his good looks, his ease, smooth charm and eloquence, he can smooth-charm his way through just as many lies as there are pores to let them out of his athletic body. He isn't there to lead us out of trouble: he's there for us to make-believe the trouble isn't there while he's in charge. And the smoother and more porous his athletic body is, the more we pin it on our walls to gaze at; the more we blame the things he said he'd do, and didn't do, on everyone, except for him.

Until the wall falls down. And even then, the wall fell down despite him, not because of him.

It's easier, more comforting, to cope with walls come tumbling down than it is to have our superheroes falling of their own accord. It's easier to have a superhero who we vote for every 4 or 5 years, and who will do the job of Change for us, mend everything, put things to rights. It's hard and most unsettling to think that superheroes don't exist and we have no-one else to put up on the wall. Or at least - no-one who has the powers of superheroes: the power to do for us what we need to do for ourselves.

I am not blaming Obama for not being super-human. I am blaming humans for believing in those who make-believe that they are superhuman - and cannot see, as Hedges says, that

Social change does not come through voting. It is delivered through activism