With all respect, it seems to me that the tendency in all too many quarters at the moment is to see Obama as a kind of cypher, a blank slate as it were, onto which everyone else is writing their themes. In this way Obama is never held to account for anything; its Summers and Geithner when it comes to the economy, Clinton, Holbrooke and Mitchell for Middle East policy, questa o quella for whatever else. The man is President of the United States, for God’s sake, his isn’t a kind of regency where everyone dotes on and takes responsibility for him in anticipation of his emergence at some future time as an adult. He chose those that serve him and he has responsibility for them as though they were his own offspring. And in the myriad instances where he’s elected to dawdle when to act would have been the moral thing to do – say the Gaza episode – or where he’s seen fit to act where dawdling might have been well advised – say the Afghanistan/Pakistan drone atrocities – he’s shown the Obama that’s hidden under the the bull-crap, and that’s not a very pretty Obama at all.

Any way you see it, Obama is surrounded with representatives of the status quo and that will lead to more of the same in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts10092009.html

We’ve got a stockmarket that goes into a power move with even the slightest suggestion that unemployment is worsening, a ruling clique that serves only its lobbyist financiers, a reincarnation of Douglas B. MacArthur now asking for – just announced – 65,000 more troops for Afghanistan and likely to get them, and now this mind numbing paen to world psychosis, a Nobel Peace Prize to Oberstgruppenfuhrer Obama.

We’re the most war-mongering nation in the world. Why would any U.S. politician win a Nobel prize? This makes no sense, but continues the tradition of U.S. Presidents winning who in no way deserve the prize.