Barack Obama makes me sick.

Here he is, on my TV, condemning his former pastor for the allegedly “appalling” and “outrageous” remarks said pastor has made in public. According to Obama, “They offend me. They rightly offend all Americans.”

It’s bad enough that the US is the kind of place where a politician feels compelled to defend or distance himself from remarks made by someone only vaguely connected with him, but when that politician does succumb to the urge to prevent further damage to his image caused by such a vague association, he should not be so arrogant as to profess to have gauged the feelings of an entire nation, such that he may now speak on their behalf.

Sarah, for one, does not feel insulted by the Rev. Wright’s remarks. Nor, for what it’s worth, even though I’m not an American, do I.

Amongst other things, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has said he believed the 11th September attacks were retribution for years of malevolent U.S. foreign policy that has caused huge numbers of deaths overseas.

Hmm, what is “outrageous” or “appalling” here? The only thing that’s outrageous about this remark is that it’s patently true. Obama’s dismissal of the remark is what I find appalling.

Obama goes on to say that the Rev. Wright’s remarks are “divisive and destructive” and that they “give comfort to those who prey on hate”. Clearly, Obama needs a better speech-writer to convey the pretence of eloquence, since “those who prey on hate” are presumably those who do good in the world; or so I would have thought.

Now, make no mistake, the Rev. Wright has said a few things that are, at best, hard to prove. More probably, they are simply untrue. Take, for example, the assertion that the US government has spread AIDS in order to wipe out black people. The spread of AIDS amongst certain groups of the American population may, at one time or another, have raised cheers behind closed doors in Washington, but that’s a far cry from their having deliberately propagated and spread the virus.

Nevertheless, Wright’s entitled to his views and Obama should be defending his right to make them, even if he doesn’t agree with the views themselves. Similarly, if he feels that guilt by association is damaging to him with the judgemental electorate, he should merely distance himself from Wright’s remarks, rather than condemn the man himself.

Let’s get one thing straight here. The attacks on American targets on 11th September 2001 were unquestionably the result of the US’s ruthless foreign policy over the last few decades. The terrorists have even said as much. Does Obama perhaps think the US was picked at random and that there’s no rationale behind the attacks? Why is the idea of looking inward to seek the motivation for the attacks anathema to him?

Another thing, Obama said that Wright was equating America’s “wartime efforts” with terrorism, but Wright referred explicitly to foreign policy, not wartime efforts. Of course, you could argue that American foreign policy effectively amounts to war in many territories, but one can’t help but think that Obama wasn’t acknowledging that. rather, he was twisting Wright’s words to be more worthy of the condemnation that was about to follow.

So long as the US continues to take no responsibility for its actions on distant shores, it shall surely know no peace. We all suffer as a result of America’s tragically myopic, unsustainable and pathologically self-serving foreign policy. In fact, I might even go so far as to call such policy “appalling” and “outrageous”, “divisive and destructive”.

I’m glad I can’t vote in American elections. What a responsibility to have to pick the next leader of the most powerful nation on Earth from the pitifully lamentable stable of wankers on offer at the moment.

Between Obama’s spineless and transparent attempts at voter salvage and Clinton’s sublimely ill-conceived decision to lie that she had been under sniper fire during a visit to the former Yugoslavia in the nineties (not to mention her camp’s distasteful negative campaigning against Obama), you could be forgiven for being driven into the arms of McCain. Well, almost.

As usual, it’s all about the public image. In America, sound-bite politics are served to a fast-food culture, and every serious candidate will say or do anything to get elected. Obama is not one iota different in this regard.

Jason sent me this excellent article by Noam Chomsky on how Iran’s nuclear programme is a direct response to the historical danger posed in the region by the US, and how the answer to the issue may lie in promoting democracy back on American soil.

It’s an extremely eloquent and incisive piece of prose.

You’ve got to hand it to the American Democratic party, when it comes to backbone, they don’t have a vertebra between them.

Tens of thousands of people marched in Washington yesterday against Bush’s illegal war in Iraq. Guess how many of them were Democratic politicians. Any idea? The answer is: one. That’s right, only one of them had the balls to stand up and be counted.

Why not more? you may be wondering. Well, the answer is as simple as it is depressing.

You see, many of those involved with yesterday’s march are calling for Bush to be impeached. After all, he lied to the world in an attempt to morally justify an illegal and bloody war against the people of Iraq, selling it to the gullible American public and his reluctant European allies under the monicker of freedom and democracy, when really it was a quest to secure oil supplies.

That’s pretty despicable, I think, and pretty much everyone I know seems to agree. So, given that this man has disgraced his nation worldwide and contributed to the image of America as a greed-ridden playground bully with more brawn than brain, you’d think his political opposition would be making the most of a demonstration against his continued pursuance of oil for blood, wouldn’t you?

But they’re not. The Democrats don’t want to burn their fingers on calls for Bush’s impeachment. No-one wants to bite off that much political commotion to chew. Perhaps it’s a case of people in glasshouses not wanting to throw stones, but I can’t see it as anything other than what it appears to be at face value: rampant cowardice.

So, whilst the Republicans went all-out to impeach Clinton for the actions of his penis and his lies concerning those actions, the Democrats are not prepared to return the favour for Bush, whose actions have left more than 3000 American soldiers and more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead. Whose is the greater crime? I ask you. A man with an errant penis who lied under oath, or a man whose actions have left more than a hundred thousand dead in their wake and rendered the entire world a less safe place to live for all of us?

Don’t get me wrong. I have no respect for Bill Clinton, but the damage he did whilst in office pales into insignificance next to the war crimes perpetrated by Bush and his puppet-masters.

Whilst raging against the Democrats, an honourary mention must, however, be made of Dennis J. Kucinich, the Democratic representative for Ohio, who was the sole Democrat to turn up and even speak out against the bloodshed. Good for him.

But where was Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton?

And where was Senator Barack Obama?

Both of the above are presidential hopefuls for the next general election and yet neither of them has the backbone to stand up for what is right. No, there might be too much of a political backlash to such a gesture. The cynical Democrats know that concepts such as the truth and justice are double-edged swords. They can be used to further one’s own career or, if wielded clumsily or in the wrong situation, can impede that same career. As such, noble concepts become political expedients, just more weapons in the arsenal of hollow rhetoric to which we’ve become so accustomed. Fortitude and integrity are nowhere to be seen.

When you apply this knowledge to the Democratic party as a whole, you quickly realise how the current American government obtained carte blanche for their rampage of terror, torture and bloodshed from the deserts of Afghanistan through the plains of Iraq to the bunkers of Guantanamo Bay.

Sometimes, it’s difficult to know who I despise more, the Republicans or the Democrats. Are the accessories to the crimes not just as guilty as those who perpetrate them?

As Israel continues with its latest criminal rampage, I’ve been noting how Israeli government officials interviewed on television love to cite UN resolution 1559 and allege that the Lebanese government has failed to comply with it. This, then, supposedly forms some kind of implicit justification for the ongoing collective punishment of the Lebanese people.

Why do the reporters doing the interviewing not bring up the fact that Israel, too, has had a washing list of UN resolutions issued against it, each of which it has arrogantly flouted? Indeed, most recently, Kofi Annan himself condemned Israel for its disproportionate response to the Hezbollah kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers.

Why do the Israelis believe that all countries except Israel must comply with UN resolutions? Why does the spineless international community allow Israel to get away with incident after incident of collective punishment of other peoples, including Palestinian and Lebanese civilians? Why aren’t all countries subject to and held accountable under international law?

The picture wouldn’t be complete, of course, without a dishonourable mention of the US. Whilst channelling billions of dollars in military aid to Israel with the left hand, the right hand now adopts the pretence of intending to broker peace in the Middle East. And yet, Condoleezza Rice rejects the idea of an immediate ceasefire. What kind of diplomat doesn’t want the fighting to stop, so that the parties in question can sit around the negotiating table and hammer out some kind of enduring agreement? As if a short-term ceasefire precludes some more sustainable agreement for the long term.

And so it’s really just business as usual, isn’t it? The US protectorate of Israel does whatever it pleases, US hegemony intimidates other nations into shrugging their shoulders and looking the other way, the UN issues perfunctory condemnations that no-one heeds, and another Lebanese child loses her parents and her eyesight.

I started this entry by talking of UN resolutions directed at Israel. You may be interested to know that there are no fewer than 65 such resolutions in existence.