Obama believes Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Libby, and Wolfowitz are noble, patriotic souls?

[draft_mario_cuomo]

This explains his alliance with war criminal Colin Powell. :eyes: I found this in a leftist analysis of his book. It is an eye-opener, although I do not agree with the entire article. We need to move beyond the smallness of our politics, move past flashy consultant massaged rhetoric and start discussing what candidates actually believe and stand for.

==From his friendly remarks about Bush, including an anecdote in which he shares a joke with the president and his passing (but significant) remark that “I assume he and members of his Administration are trying to do what they think is best for the country,” to his attack on the Democratic Party for running away “from a debate about values,” to his convoluted support for the attacks on constitutional rights since September 11, 2001 (“I acknowledge that even the wisest president and most prudent Congress would struggle to balance the critical demands of our collective security against the equally compelling need to uphold civil liberties”), to his endorsement of the death penalty, Obama tacks most consistently toward the right.==

More about the Mystery Candidate in his own words:

==A few pages later, he criticizes the “smallness of our politics,” observing that, “In distilled form, though, the explanations of both the right and the left have become mirror images of each other. They are stories of conspiracy, of America being hijacked by an evil cabal...==

Psst...he means the progressives who think PNAC hijacked our foreign policy under Bush. Yes ladies and gentlemen. Who means YOU. The netroots!

==Unpleasantly enough, in The Audacity of Hope, Obama’s ideological attack on New Deal liberalism takes the form of a rejection of his own mother’s outlook. He first explains his own “curious relationship to the sixties” and goes on to refer condescendingly to his mother as “an unreconstructed liberal” and to “her incorrigible, sweet-natured romanticism...her heart a time capsule filled with images of the space program, the Peace Corps and Freedom Rides, Mahalia Jackson and Joan Baez.”==

==Just so there will be no misunderstanding, Obama continues, using the code words of the extreme right: Reagan’s message “spoke to the failure of liberal government,” government at every level had become “too cavalier about spending taxpayer money.... A lot of liberal rhetoric did seem to value rights and entitlements over duties and responsibilities.... Reagan offered Americans a sense of common purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster,” etc.==

==A conversation with Robert Rubin, the former Goldman Sachs executive and treasury secretary under Clinton, convinces him that “We can try to slow globalization, but we can’t stop it.”==

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/feb2007/obam-f14.shtml

Obama's base is very opposed to Clintoism. Well, one illuminating quote from the book that was not included in this article praised Clinton's Third Way thinking (pg. 34). If you look past the rhetoric, past the mythology, and to his platform you can see why he thinks the DLC's Third Way was great.