single dream and it's hard to figure out whether Obama believes this dangerous bullshit or if, as with most everything else (like letting Wall Street bankers walk), he was simply willing to go along with (and front for anyone) who could feather his nest and make him a very very rich man.

Wes Clark and the neocon dream

In October, 2007, Gen. Wesley Clark gave a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco (seven-minute excerpt in the video below) in which he denounced what he called “a policy coup” engineered by neocons in the wake of 9/11. After recounting how a Pentagon source had told him weeks after 9/11 of the Pentagon’s plan to attack Iraq notwithstanding its non-involvement in 9/11, this is how Clark described the aspirations of the “coup” being plotted by Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and what he called “a half dozen other collaborators from the Project for the New American Century”:

Six weeks later, I saw the same officer, and asked: “Why haven’t we attacked Iraq? Are we still going to attack Iraq?”

He said: “Sir, it’s worse than that. He said – he pulled up a piece of paper off his desk – he said: “I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office. It says we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years – we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran."t

http://www.salon.com/2011/11/26/wes_clark_and_the_neocon_dream/

Looking back over his 'illustrious' career IMO he was picked because 1) he was willing to do anything to further himself (see his history with the Pritzker family); and, 2) he was uniquely qualified to play a part that would be irresistible to all us idiot lefties who desperately wanted social chamge and the opposite of the vicious bastids in the bush** administration. But we got played. The first 'black' president was actually a guy who also had a white mother and was raised in his white BANKER grandmother's house. He never had to do without a fucking thing in his life. But he was MARKETED as the guy who was going to help the black community because he could relate to its suffering. He was going to help those dispossessed by Wall Street. He was going to end our wars. He was a progressive wet dream. That was a brilliant, albeit remarkably cynical, marketing campaign and it worked perfectly. But this guy was really chosen by TPTB because like the Clintons the only people he really cared about were the ones who could guarantee him and his a life of luxury after he was done playing his part.

He was the perfect 'ringer' to lead us to disaster for everyone but his patrons and himself.

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Didn't you get the memo?

From the Nation:

Max Fisher, now at Vox, learned well during his apprenticeship under Marty Peretz at The New Republic. This week, he was among the first to try to smear Seymour Hersh’s piece in the London Review of Books, which argued that pretty much everything we were told about the killing of Osama bin Laden was a lie. Most importantly, Hersh’s report questions the claim that Washington learned of OBL’s whereabouts thanks to torture—a claim popularized in the film Zero Dark Thirty.

There’s a standard boiler plate now when it comes to going after Hersh, and all Fisher, in “The Many Problems with Seymour Hersh’s Osama bin Laden Conspiracy Theory,” did was fill out the form: establish Hersh’s “legendary” status (which Fisher does in the first sentence); invoke his reporting in My Lai and Abu Ghraib; then say that a number of Hersh’s recent stories—such as his 2012 New Yorker piece that the United States was training Iranian terrorists in Nevada—have been “unsubstantiated” (of course, other reporters never “substantiated” Hersh’s claim that Henry Kissinger was directly involved in organizing the cover-up of the fire-bombing of Cambodia for years—but that claim was true); question Hersh’s sources; and then, finally, suggest that Hersh has gone “off the rails” to embrace “conspiracy theories.”

The only thing that allows the US to spend trillions of dollars on its war machine is the fact that the US$ is the world's reserve currency. Up to now, the US can simply print whatever money it requires on its massive military to ensure it remains the world hegemon. These days are coming to an end.

The questions is, will be with a whimper or with a bang.

America's Death Throes

China and Russia have already ditched the US dollar in their vast energy trade. Now China is leveraging Saudi Arabia to also abandon the greenback for oil sales. No wonder, it seems, that US policies are increasingly lashing out.

US global power depends on its presumed economic prowess and military force. With its economy in long-term decline, precipitated by the teetering dollar, the US rulers are relying increasingly on militarism to project power. That tendency is pushing the world to war.

The challenge is to somehow steer the American military monster into a safe berth without eliciting a world war.

The US decline is of historic proportions – on par with the demise of other past empires – and it stems from the looming collapse of the petrodollar system, which has given the US unprecedented privileges over the past decades since the Second World War
...
The emergence of a multipolar world seems not only inevitable. It is desirable in terms of establishing a more democratic global order. A unipolar world as seen under US hegemony is a formula for tyranny and lawlessness.

The good news is that US hegemony is crumbling. The demise of the petrodollar is the telltale sign of another empire sunsetting. But that transition to a more reasonable and sustainable world order is akin to negotiating a way out of a minefield.

Fortunately, Russia and China may have sufficient military power to deter the desperate, waning American empire from trying to incite catastrophic war. However, death throes are seldom rational events.