JFK was relatively young, agile, telegenic

and articulate, with little record of substantive

policy accomplishment but a taste for lofty rhetoric

He inhabited much the same power-serving faux-progressive

ideological space as Obama does today.

Brand Obama is an openly (for those able and willing to look beneath the marketing campaign) imperial and corporate-neoliberal symbol and agent of business rule, Superpower hegemony, and racial accommodation and denial.

Obama has consistently lined up on the conservative, that is, power-friendly side of each of what Martin Luther King King called "the triple evils that are interrelated":

Racism (deeply and institutionally understood), economic exploitation (capitalism), and U.S. militarism.

One aspect of the Obama mystique [marketing] I do NOT question is his campaign's effort, largely successful, to link its candidate to the record and "Camelot" legacy of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK).

It's a reasonable linkage, I think, but not for admirable reasons.

Besides also being a relatively young, agile, telegenic, and articulate, Harvard-educated U.S. Senator with little record of substantive policy accomplishment and taste for lofty rhetoric and outwardly idealistic, JFK inhabited much the same power-serving faux-progressive ideological space in his time as Obama does today.

Also worshipped by many liberals and enjoying a strong following with academics and intellectuals, the proto-neoliberal President Kennedy spent much of his time on the cunning, right (starboard), and power-serving side of King's "triple evils."

This hardly prevented him from being adored as a man of peace and justice by millions at home and abroad - something worth recalling as Obama returns from his explicitly Kennedy-esque tour of Europe and the Middle East.

And as preparations continue for Obama to accept his presidential nomination before 70,000 plus chanting fans in a mile-high football stadium that will have to suffice since Mount Sinai is unavailable.

From JFK to Obama: Hoodwinked Again [Source]

OBAMA'S EMPIRE: "THE AMERICAN MOMENT MUST BE SEIZED ANEW"

JFK's foreign policy record is militantly imperial and militarist, contrary to his subsequent hagiographers' laughable efforts to re-invent him as some sort of Sixties peacenik.

That record includes the Kennedy administration's decision to dramatically and dangerously escalate the international arms race after Kennedy campaigned on the deceptive claim that the U.S. was on the wrong side of a mythical Soviet-American "missile gap."

Kennedy's nuclear machismo helped bring the world to the brink of annihilation on at least two occasions.

Referring arrogantly to the U.S. as "watchtower on the walls of [global] freedom," JFK undertook numerous provocative actions meant to overthrow the popular revolutionary government of Cuba.

He supported numerous Latin-American dictatorships and oligarchies in the name of "progress" and "democracy."

He "raised the level of [U.S.] attack [on Indochina] from international terrorism to outright aggression in 1961-62" (Noam Chomsky), justifying the use of U.S. airpower to napalm social revolutionaries, defoliate Vietnamese countryside.

He "killed a lot of innocent peasants" (Roger Hillsman) with the false claims that "we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless [Soviet-Marxist] conspiracy" and that failure to stop "Communism" in Vietnam would open the gates to Soviet world domination.

Contrary to subsequent myths trumpeted by JFK-worshippers like Oliver Stone (who needed to do a movie on the execution" of Dr. King) and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Kennedy had no intent of pulling back from his mass-murderous assault until "victory" was attained.

Kennedy epitomized the strictly conditional nature of "democracy" as a U.S. foreign policy objective when he remarked that while the U.S. would prefer democratic regimes abroad, it will choose "a [pro-American dictator] Trujillo" over "a ["anti-American" dictator] Castro" if those were the only choices.

"It is necessary only to add," Noam Chomsky noted in 1991, that Kennedy's "concept of ‘a Castro' was very broad, extending to anyone who raises problems for the ‘rich men dwelling at peace with their habitations,' who are to rule the world according to [Winston] Churchill's aphorism, while enjoying the benefits of its human and material resources."

Walking in JFK's imperial footsteps, Obama has advanced mealy-mouthed and ever-shifting positions on Iraq, clearly (however) indicating that an Obama White House will maintain the criminal occupation of oil-rich Mesopotamia for an indefinite period of time.

He takes brazenly imperial positions on Israel/Palestine, Columbia, Cuba, Afghanistan, Iran, the "defense" (Empire) budget, and the broad role of the United States (which Obama absurdly calls the "last and best hope of the world") in the world.

Here is an interesting formulation from an essay Obama published in the U.S. Council of Foreign Relations' journal Foreign Affairs in the summer of 2007:

"The American moment is not over, but it must be seized anew... A strong military is, more than anything, necessary to sustain peace.... we must become better prepared to put boots on the ground in order to take on foes that fight asymmetrical and highly adaptive campaigns on a global scale...I will not hesitate to use force unilaterally, if necessary, to protect the American people or our vital interests ...

"We must also consider using military force in circumstances beyond self-defense, in order to provide for the common security that underpins global stability - to support friends, participate in stability and reconstruction operations, or confront mass atrocities."

The article in which these words appeared was published while liberal and left peaceniks all over my home town (Iowa City) were putting up Obama signs next to peace posters quoting Dr. King on how "War is Not the Answer."

Ronald Reagan or JFK couldn't have given more brash forewarnings of imperial adventurism to come!

In the openly imperial foreign policy chapter of his Kennedy-esque campaign book "The Audacity of Hope," Obama criticized "left-leaning populists" like "Venezuela's Hugo Chavez" for thinking that developing nations "should resist America's efforts to expand its hegemony" and for daring (imagine!) to "follow their own path to development."

Such dysfunctional "reject[ion] [of] the ideals of free markets and liberal democracy" along with "American" ideas like "the rule of law" and "democratic elections" - interesting terms for the heavily state-sponsored U.S. effort to impose authoritarian and corporate-state capitalist policy imperatives on impoverished nations - will only worsen the situation of the global poor, Obama claimed.

Obama's bestselling book and supposed proclamation of "progressive" faith (the candidate used that word to describe himself on numerous occasions in the volume) ignored a preponderance of evidence showing that the imposition of the "free market" corporate-neoliberal "Washington Consensus" has deepened poverty across the world in recent decades.

Billions are forced to live in ever-more extreme poverty as Obama's book audaciously instructed poor and exploited states that "the system of free markets and liberal democracy" is "constantly subject to change and improvement."

Obama did not comment in "Audacity" on the remarkable respect the U.S. showed for "democratic elections" and "the rule of law" when it supported an attempted military coup to overthrow the democratically elected Chavez government (because of his opposition to the U.S neoliberal agenda) in April of 2002.

It is doubtful that Obama's concept of the democratically elected Chavez is much different than "Kennedy's concept of a Castro."

Those who have the time and energy to examine the overwork-plagued U.S. "homeland" might want to note the ever-escalating inequality of U.S. society and the related, ever-deepening insecurity experienced by American working people.

Such is the ugly reality of "life," even in the U.S. - home to what Obama's book obsequiously called "a prosperity that's unmatched in history" - under the rule of the neoliberal doctrine that big business upholds and which Kennedy helped advance before the last embers of the social democratic and New Deal traditions had died out in U.S. political culture.

Those traditions were snuffed out with no small help from the criminal Vietnam War that Kennedy did so much to escalate.

Obama can have the Kennedy mantle that he craves and hopes to don for the world to see after his rock-star appearance in Berlin and the US media drooling over the event.

Look for Obama to be crowned the new King of Camelot by the last dead [almost] Kennedy brother on the centrist 50-yard line in Denver next month.

A sight to be anticipated with trembling souls by hopeful and dreamy masses at home and abroad.

The cunning, corporate and imperial Kennedy legacy is actually what Obama is all about, morally and ideologically speaking, something that would cause trepidation in a western political culture that hadn't been subjected to the relentless Orwellian erasure of the richly bipartisan crimes of American Empire and Inequality.