About half of Lynch’s points boil down to, “Obama is for x, because he makes speeches talking about x all the time.” He starts out with the best one of all:

“Unlike the many presidents who preceded him, he cares about what is best for the greater good. He truly does represent The People. His actions have always been motivated by a sincere desire to do what is best for the majority, even if it meant losing ground with the wealthy, influential or powerful minority.”

Um, yeah. That’s why he adopted a Republican “universal healthcare” proposal to require everybody to buy private health insurance — and give taxpayer money to the ones who can’t afford it. That should be popular with “The People,” all right — at least those who own stock in insurance companies. That’s why he quietly promised the drug companies he wouldn’t use Medicare’s bargaining power to negotiate lower drug prices. That’s why Joe Biden conducts copyright enforcement policy out of Disney’s corporate headquarters and the administration backs draconian copyright legislation dictated in secret by proprietary content industries.

Among my favorite other howlers:

“2. He is for civil rights. He has consistently spoken on behalf of the disenfranchised, the underdog and the most controversial members of society …”

Yeah, I know he said a lot of stuff about gay marriage and ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. But he refused to actually stop prosecuting gays in the military before the law was repealed, or to put enforcement on the back burner, even when he was fully capable of using his executive authority to do so.

And notice Lynch doesn’t say “civil liberties.” Obama said a lot of stuff about them, too — back in 2008. Since then he’s expanded unconstitutional wiretapping, run interference for the telecoms that help out with it and given amnesty to people who systematically ordered and engaged in torture. Holding war criminals accountable would be “divisive,” you see. He owes the late Nuremberg defendants an apology — they were only following orders, too.

4. Healthcare. I think we already covered that.

“5. He is for the middle class. Here are just a few of the comments made by President Barack Obama in recent months …”

A lot of presidents were for a lot of stuff, if you stick to reading their collected speeches. In practice, Obama’s farm policies are written by ADM and Monsanto, and the office of Secretary of the Treasury is permanently reserved for Goldman-Sachs alumni, just as under his predecessors.

Obama’s actual economic policy is classic Hamiltonianism: Responding to technologies of abundance that reduce the need for capital and labor by using Rube Goldberg mechanisms to artificially prop up the demand for those inputs — even if it means giving people tax breaks for throwing stuff away and replacing it. The stomach-churning irony is that most of the same greenwashed Whole Foods liberals who applaud this also condemn planned obsolescence and the Military-Industrial Complex, which were designed to accomplish exactly the same result. The proper approach to technologies of abundance is to make sure their benefits are fully internalized by workers and consumers, by ceasing to enforce monopolies, artificial scarcities and rents of all kind. If it takes only fifteen hours of labor a week to produce our standard of living, it should only take fifteen hours of labor to enjoy that standard of living. But that would annoy Obama’s Big Business friends.

My favorite, though, is this:

“10. He is for peace. Let us never forget that Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 …”

Yeah, he uses that Peace Prize as a paperweight to hold down his drone kill list. Obama didn’t end the war in Afghanistan — he  transformed it into a remote-control video game war in which wedding parties can be massacred at the push of a button. And of course, Lynch can’t resist throwing in a mention of the Zero Dark Thirty crap about killing Bin Laden.

I can’t help picturing someone fifty years ago breathlessly gushing “I love JFK because he’s the Peace President” — while ignoring the Bay of Pigs, the Diem assassination and Green Berets in Vietnam.

Lynch’s points, edited for substance, are basically on the same level as a guy in a bar decked out in Full Cleveland thirty years ago saying “I feel comfortable with Reagan.”  Obama’s the Reagan of moderate center-left NPR liberals who shop at Whole Foods. If you’re satisfied with the image of peace and social justice, while government in substance continues to serve the same powerful interests, keep right on voting — that’s what it’ll get you.

Krugman’s September 19th op-ed riffed on Forbes magazine’s excerpt of Dinesh D’Souza’s argument that Obama is an anti-colonialist with an unfair bias against the rich.  Neo-, anti-, and plain ol’ vanilla colonialism aside, the attitudes espoused by these writers regarding how we should view the wealthy tragically miss the most salient point.

Warren Buffett was brilliantly candid a few years ago: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Americans live in a system of endless market intervention for the benefit of the wealthy — corporate personhood, limited liability, eminent domain abuse, intellectual property protection, unhealthful subsidies, licensing requirements, zoning mandates, prohibitions and tariffs of rival goods, asymmetric trade barriers, favorable tax codes, restrictive labor laws, et. al. which marginalize economic opportunities globally for working people.

Shielding the world’s economic titans from criticism today isn’t, as per D’Souza, a noble act in defense of the honest and exceptionally productive who are under siege from usurpers. They are virtually all people who have benefited unjustly through the help of the American government’s unfair anti-market policies.

This is not to say that all of them share the same culpability for receiving these benefits.  The great majority of individuals, wealthy and poor, react to the market they’re born into, seizing the best opportunities they can for themselves without deeply analyzing the economic and moral landscape they’ve inherited from their forebears.  Average businesspeople should be treated far more gently than those who actively seek special favors from government to aid them at the expense of wage earners, consumers, and their competitors without political muscle.

So when D’Souza states that “the anticolonialist believes that since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth doesn’t really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just,” he is omitting the fact that this debate isn’t purely about the legitimate sort of productivity which he is ostensibly championing.  If it were, D’Souza would have a strong point.

If President “Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America,” he’d actually be onto something, but sadly, both Obama and Paul Krugman recoil past the correct position of freedom from state-granted market privileges and frustratingly meander in the wrong direction.

“[A]mong the undeniably rich, a belligerent sense of entitlement has taken hold: it’s their money, and they have the right to keep it.”  If they earned it by working and peacefully producing, yes, Dr. Krugman, that’s exactly right.  If they used the force of government to stack the economic deck in their odds, their sense of entitlement is unjustified, criminal even, and I would concur with your statement.

We, as Americans, need to confront our system of false political choices: Our authorized options are to either expand the power of the organization which created our problems by working for the benefit of corporations, or to keep the corporatist economy we have now while jettisoning any protections for the poor. They don’t make binaries much more unsavory than this.

Those who utilize aggressive state power to bolster their checking accounts are no true friends to freedom or markets, despite Dinesh D’Souza’s tired endorsement and the common “free market” rhetoric we’re all used to. You don’t mean it, or you’d spend your time arguing against the government giving corporations special treatment in the marketplace rather than lower taxes for the wealthiest of investors.

And for those like Dr. Krugman who seek to use the state against peaceful and legitimate market producers, even for well-intentioned reasons, I don’t believe it can lead to anything but injustice.  I probably want a lot of the same ends as he does, but the means used by the state I cannot ethically support.  It is too bad for me then, as fake free markets or morally corrupt state power are the only two credible political avenues available in mainstream American discourse.

Beyond that, there supposedly exists only a tundra populated by clammy radicals and moon-faced kooks who often both agree and disagree with each side of the debate, which is forever ricocheting off the point dying to be made against corporate privilege and in favor of an actually free marketplace.

Those most upset about the religious center are neoconservatives. Would the neocons agree if Democrats accused all Christians of endorsing violence and aggression because a few refuse to condemn the murders innocent gay men like Matthew Shepard for their peaceful sexual and gender preferences?

President Obama came out on August 13th to correctly explain that America’s respect for freedom of religion “must be unshakable.”

Both the Holy Bible and the Quran at times endorse forms of violent retribution for now liberalized behaviors, but most modern followers of these faiths have discarded or theologized their way around textual support for such outmoded forms of “justice.” Using inductive logic from scripture to paint all Muslims or all Christians the same color due to the actions of the fringe is treacherous.

Unless one takes a consistent anti-theistic objection to all creeds with (often rejected) canonized anti-liberal positions, these monolithic and simplistic views of religious demographics tend to miss all nuance and feed individual moral virtue into the sausage grinder without making society any more peaceful or free. In addition, one can only assume that this scandal will end in yet another law to expand the power of the state over us all. In other words, no good can come of politicizing any of these engagements.

Politicians are driving another incredibly boring wedge between people to distract them from the major issues. The longer we talk about whether Muslims have basic individual property rights, as well as whether queer people can marry each other in the context of Prop 8, the more we think of each other as members of groups instead of as individuals, and the less time there is to talk about the state’s murder of people abroad and its criminal mercantilist manipulations of the economy and intrusions into our personal lives.