The Obama presidency is turning into an extended metaphorical demonstration of a sports technique called the “head fake.” A basketball or football player will move his head briefly in a direction opposite to where he intends to go so as to fool his adversary into making the wrong moves. A sports head fake only works for a fraction of a second, because the real direction of motion must be revealed.
Obama has mastered the art of the political head fake to the degree that his fakes last for months. During his campaign, he faked an anti-war move, an anti-torture move, and an anti-corporate corruption move. In office, he has cranked up the Afghanistan war, provided blanket immunity for CIA torturers, and fed hundreds of billions of public funds into crooked financial corporations.
When Obama is criticized for not carrying out his campaign promises, his defenders insist that the head fakes are the reality and the actual policies of the administration should be ignored. It is this stubborn insistence that the fantasy Obama is real that shows the power of Obama’s fakery.
Americans should be demonstrating in the streets against a president who shields torturers, feeds a perpetual war machine, and engineers massive transfers of wealth from taxpayers to rogue corporations. Instead, they are fooled by one head fake after another. We are being faked out of our democracy and our prosperity by the slickest front man the American plutocracy has ever produced: Barak (Head Fake) Obama.
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Fake left, aw fuck left, fake middle, go right.
when we get people showing up here head faking themselves and admitting bluntly that “honestly, I don’t follow his actions that closely anyway as I don’t have that kind of time” while in the same sentence saying amazing things like “I see the bigger picture, not just every little action he takes“.
Cue Bill Maher with a quizzically raised eyebrow, sideways glance at the audience, and slight smile turning up the corners of his lips.
Heh! Good thing there is some humor in the situation. 😉
Of all the power centers of our Banana Republic the one most overlooked is not Wall Street, the MIC, but Madison Avenue. This nation invented mass advertising, perfected it, and if Obama didn’t exist he would have had to be invented! What am I saying? he was invented!