Loaded Dice

They're not just any dice.

Get It Try It

As people from afar watch the travesty of the Democrat nomination campaign they can't help but remember the words of Bill Clinton about an Obama presidency. It would be a roll of the dice, said Bill Clinton. Yes but not quite: it'd be a roll of the dice but they wouldn't be ordinary dice. It'd be a roll of loaded dice.

The messiah's a mystery. He has no campaign. He has only rhetoric. And with the US already gone to the dogs with eight years of W and Halliburton things promise to only get worse.

Again as stated so many times before: people in the US are really bad at picking leaders.

They picked W in 2000 and again in 2004 and if that doesn't say all watch how they flock to the mystery messiah in 2008. A man without platform, a shiny object with nothing of his own to show - and deliberately so. A preacher. A southern preacher. And good old US: do they look at their situation and assess it cooly and objectively? They're incapable of it. They want a leader to outsource their problems away.

That's a known tack. Borrowed from Benito Mussolini and later perfected by others. Get the people to sublimate their erotic natures into love of a leader; channel their frustrations into a hate for a user defined enemy. It's the recipe for George Orwell's 1984.

And guess what? It works. At least in the US. As if the people in the US never learned the lessons of the two great wars of the last century. They have no blocks against the dangerous trends that can lead a people - and a world - back down the slippery slope. Right now the people of the US are skiing down that slope.

There's a certain virtue in seeing W in the White House. After all these years people have become numb. They know what to expect. Everyone sees through W. But see through Obama? He's much more difficult.

And there's a crucial distinction here: W never took the whole thing seriously. He never once believed in his own image. He was just along for the ride. But Obama is swept up by his own hype. And that makes him way more dangerous.

Were W to try another trick today - such as again plan for an invasion or bombing of Iran - the world would come down on him. Even the people in the US would come down on him. Polls show the people in the US are sick and tired of war and of W.

But if Obama were to tell people he had to bomb Iran? Would they object in the same fashion? Hardly. What W lacks in rhetoric and charisma Obama has. What makes W falter and look foolish and clumsy - Obama doesn't do that. He can convince people to roll over and fetch the newspaper. And he's already convinced himself.

He's every bit as dangerous as that. Both because he believes in the hype himself; because he has powerful backers who have worked and planned for years to get him where they want him; and because he ostensibly has the ability to convince the people in the US of anything. And he's a man without honour or mercy.

After all: if you can run such a successful campaign on nothing but hot air you're capable of anything.

Change? CHANGE? The people in Massachusetts didn't buy change. Not this time. Not again. Despite the endorsement of Ted Kennedy Obama lost by almost as wide a margin as he did in New York. Why? Because the people of Massachusetts had already seen what those 'change' campaigns were worth.

Nothing.

Two years earlier David Axelrod put the current governor into power in Massachusetts. He'd used the same template he'd used to put Barack Obama in the Senate two years before that. A couple of monosyllabic words. 'Hope' and 'change'. That's it. It works.

The biggest change the current lacklustre governor of hope and change in Massachusetts has come up with is a proposal to build three casinos. Yawn. So much for 'we are the ones we've been waiting for'.

David Axelrod is now again managing Obama in the Democrat runoff. 'Hope' and 'change' - sound familiar?

The worst thing the governor of Massachusetts has attempted so far is build three casinos. He doesn't have a foreign policy. He doesn't have nuclear missiles. He doesn't have armed forces.

But the president of the US does.