Obama's Curious Omissions

Recently I've been reading some of Obama's early rhetoric as President. When he was elected, it occurred to me that the euphoria was overdone. Just like when Gordon Brown became UK PM and was hailed as a messiah of the left for a brief honeymoon period. He turned out to be, as I posted at the time, a surrogate-Thatcherite cynic and a maladroit.There was nothing in Obama’s inaugural address about rising poverty and stunning socioeconomic inequality in the US “homeland.” Rising poverty was conspicuous by its absence from his speech. The new “antiwar” and “progressive” president was silent about the desperate need to roll back the $1 trillion annual “defence” ( of Empire) allotment and bring about the forgotten peace dividend that Martin Luther King knew was required to fund social uplift and avoid what he called America's “spiritual death.” Refusing to make any reference to horrific crimes against Palestinian humanity during the previous three weeks, Obama did not utter the word “Gaza” once during a speech that denounced “those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents.” The abundant warnings continued right up through his first day in office, two days before he ordered his first Predator drone attacks in South Asia (see drone posts passim).