The other reason Oprah's lusty public cheer of Obama won't work is Oprah.

She‘s fabulously bankable, and much beloved, but she’s also an African-American. And so is Obama.

Oprah hasn’t given the faintest hint that her tout and bankroll of Obama has anything to do with race, and is careful to make it clear that it’s based solely on her belief that his competence and qualifications make him the right presidential stuff.

However, an underlying suspicion is that there’s more to it than that and that she’s just as thrilled as many other blacks at the thought that an African-American can actually bag the presidency.   more »

George Bush and his close advisers want to keep a substantial number of US troops in Iraq until the end of the presidency in January 2009.

This is so President Bush can blame the inevitable retreat on the cowardice or incompetence of his successor, giving him at least some basis for defending his presidency in the eyes of history.

The surge was never truly about stabilising Iraq. The US had already lost the ability to control events on the ground when the troops began to pour in earlier this year.

Its primary purpose was to stave off demands from Democrats and some Republicans for a timetable for a US troop withdrawal. This is cynical and disgraceful.

But what else can we expect from a military adventure that was formed in a spirit of hubris and carried out in an atmosphere of crashing incompetence and reckless arrogance?

The US-led occupation of Iraq is unravelling in the same morally compromised manner in which it began.   more »

I tuned in to the MTV Video Music Awards last night for two reasons -- to see Britney Spears screw up her much-talked-about opening number (I'm sooooo mean! God! What's my ish? What did Britney ever do to me?) and to hear what Sarah Silverman would say about it.

And man was the show's opener worth the price of admission (that is to say, free).

Britney's performance can be described in two words: Hot mess. I can't say I was surprised -- I didn't expect her to rock it -- except that I was. It sucked that much.

Where were her people, the ones who made sure she knew the words to her own stupid songs well enough to lip-sync them? Where was her personal trainer? Her stylist?   more »

It evokes a tragedy that marks an epoch. From the outset, the warfare state has exploited "9/11," a label at once too facile and too laden with historic weight -- giving further power to the tacit political axiom that perception is reality.

Often it seems that media coverage is all about perception, especially when the underlying agendas are wired into huge profits and geopolitical leverage.

If you associate a Big Mac or a Whopper with a happy meal or some other kind of great time, you're more likely to buy it.

If you connect 9/11 with a need for taking military action and curtailing civil liberties, you're more likely to buy what the purveyors of war and authoritarian government have been selling for the past half-dozen years.   more »

As Monday’s hearing underscored, the entire framework of the official debate on Iraq is determined by the imperialist aims of the American ruling elite and excludes a genuine debate on the war.

The parameters are the best tactics for resolving the US crisis in Iraq in the interests of the American corporate oligarchy, at the expense of the people of both Iraq and the United States.

Its inevitable trajectory is an intensification of US military violence in Iraq and an expansion of the war beyond Iraq’s borders.

Even within this framework, however, Petraeus’s picture of the “success” of the surge and the situation in Iraq is a gross falsification of reality.   more »