Barack Obama's homie, David Brooks

Alex Cockburn recently penned some thoughts on Obama's supposed shift to the right:

"...one of the New York Times’s extensive stable of neo-conservative columnists, David Brooks, was fretting that a statement Obama had made after Bush’s Knesset speech did indeed constitute “appeasement”, indicating he had drifted off into “Noam Chomskyland”. Obama’s sin had been to say that “it’s time to engage in diplomatic efforts to build a new Lebanese consensus,” focusing on electoral reform, an end to a corrupt patronage system and the promotion of an equitable economy.

So anguished was Brooks by these dread prospects that he phoned Obama who promptly furnished answers resoundingly mollifying the columnist’s suspicions. According to Brooks, Obama said that “in some ways he’d be tougher than the Bush administration”, doing more, to take one specific example, to arm the Lebanese military. (This schedules a bloodbath in Lebanon in Year One or Two of the Obama administration.) Obama’s bottom line to Brooks was straight-up Caesarism: “The [U.S.] generals are light-years ahead of the civilians. They are trying to get the job done rather than look tough.”

Representin', y'all

Those few dissenting anti-B.O. voices on KOS (now mostly moderated, banned, deleted) do not appear to be so off-the-mark after all. Obama's response to Bush's Knesset speech featured other interesting allusions which Cockburn neglected to mention, including a positive reference to those two GOP hepcats, Reagan and Nixon: "Instead of tough talk and no action, we need to do what Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan did and use all elements of American power - including tough, principled, and direct diplomacy - to pressure countries like Iran and Syria." Contingencies doesn't really trip on that, but it would seem that many an old-school Demo might.

Americans should expect General Obama to appear a few weeks after his electoral victory in 11/2008. (insta-qualification: though one might object to Cockburn's occasional Leninist aspects {tho' Cockburn seems une petite romantique for marxist orthodoxy), A.C. did, with assistance from quite a few respected scientists, point out corp-shill Al Gore's shoddy research in regards to global warming. Of course that hasn't stopped Obama from embracing Gore's pop-green agenda....(sponsored by Chevy, Chevron, Occi, and many others)