so then should Obama. If artifice amounts to anything, if grandiloquent gestures garner gratitude, if peace means talking about peace while actually making war, if protecting torturers and allowing torture to continue while decrying torture counts, then of course Obama is deserving.

How dare anyone think otherwise!

Susan Wood wrote: "Oh, the horror, the horror, the idea that everyone should be insured! They're so terrified of it that they think threats of Presidential assassination and violent insurrection are an appropriate response. Waterboarding is a peccadillo, threatened rape is just a prank, locking a man in a box for 24 hours with insects or slamming him hard into a wall is just a firm way of asking a question -- but -- health insurance for my neighbor who lost his job last week? ARRRRRGGGGGHHH! Tyranny! Tyranny! Oppression! Oppression!"

Taliesan wrote: "Hell, they will torture someone for cutting them off in traffic. Torture is not about extracting information for the rightwing. It isn't prevention, it isn't punishment, it is just that need to do violence to something, and being too cowardly to do it to something that can fight back. It is pretty much like hunting."

Ditto. Ditto. Ditto.

In reading the comments I am alternately affirmed and appalled. What is evident is how big a gulf separates us from one another. Does providing reasons and evidence matter?

If you say to someone who justifies torture or one who couldn't find torture unless and until it was done to them: torture promotes anti-state terrorism, not reduces it, do they listen?

If you cite the comments of ex-Navy Gen'l Counsel Alberto Mora's comments to the Senate in 6/08: "[T]here are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq — as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat — are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo," does it matter to the Cheney lovers?

If you point out that at least a hundred people have been tortured to death by our government, do they care?

If you patiently explain that some 1.3 million Iraqis have died because of our invasion of their country and that Iraqis had NOTHING to do with 9/11, do they scream that you are torturing them with facts?

The depravity and willful ignorance of those who countenance torture and murder is testimony to the impact of the right-wing media empire and the GOP on this country. There is today a constituency for torture and that is even more disturbing in some ways than the fact that this government openly adopted a torture policy and that the current president refuses to prosecute the torture architects and is retaining rendition and has allowed conditions to actually worsen at Gitmo.

I agree with mattwa - A lot of people don't get Lind's piece at all because a) they can't think outside the box of GOP v. Dems and b) they don't understand political economy at all and at least some of them probably never even heard the term.

I was pleasantly surprised to see this in Salon and for Lind to use the term neoliberalism which is poorly understood and rarely used in the US. Outside the US it's very common, but here in the states, the very idea that there is a doctrine that undergirds both major parties' policies and outlooks, well, that's just crazy in many people's minds.

One of the obvious symptoms of some people being unable to see outside of partisan politics is their celebration of the fact that at least Obama's not Bush or McCain. We needn't go back very far in time to the 1980s to compare Bush I and Obama, or Reagan and Obama. Do people forget so easily and quickly that during the campaign Obama lauded both for their foreign policies and war policies? Nixon, as one of the comments note, would be considered too liberal for the GOP today and he's more liberal than Obama. Today's Democratic Party is essentially the 1980s GOP.

Another sign of trouble people have in understanding what's going on (and calling Lind's piece poorly written or too abstract) is the mistaken notion that because Obama's smart, articulate and has traveled the world some that somehow this adds up to the US being on the right path. Individual leaders can't undo or overcome institutional forces, even if Obama wanted to, which he doesn't. Personality doesn't run government. These are epiphenomenal factors, not fundamental ones. That's one of the virtues of Lind's piece: he's addressing fundamental factors, at least to some degree. You need a movement, not some individual "saviour."

So those who are still so enamored of Obama think that they're doing great because he's to the "left" of McCain? Ramoncreager's right about Obama's actual positions on critical issues. Indeed, if you're paying attention, Obama's actually to the right of Bush and Cheney on certain issues: 1) Declaring that he'll hold detainees indefinitely on the basis of what they MIGHT do and even if they've been ACQUITTED by a tribunal or criminal court; 2) Asserting sovereign immunity such that the government can snoop and not be held accountable for anything they do unless they can be shown to have willfully released private info on you that damages you; 3) escalating the Pakistan war through drone attacks (ridiculed by Bush in 2008 and then actually adopted by Bush), war crimes, incidentally. Those who say Obama's wonderful because he's not McCain or Bush are like a woman who thinks she's saved because her second husband only beats her every other day instead of daily like her first husband did.

There isn't even space here to get into my disagreements with Lind. Let me leave it on just one point: the notion that Obama's been hypnotized and needs deprogramming assumes that Obama might have otherwise adopted a different perspective. No such luck. And even if it were true, then he'd never have been adopted by the Democrats as "viable." He'd have been written off like Kucinich and Gravel.