horribly exciting/worrying words...

obama on letterman last night...

check out the rest of the interview, it is all over youtube...

As you may have already noticed, the mention of obama kinda gives me a boner. I don't truly believe that he is going to change the world anywhere near the amount that it needs to change in order for to the human race to feel okay about the way we conduct ourselves. The system will still be the system. I just feel that he may steer the system in a slightly more humane direction.

It's amazing to see an American leader who, at least at face value, seems to care about the plight and suffering of the "lower" echelons of American society. Hearing an American president denounce Washington's obesession with maintaining the status quo; stating that "the status quo is unacceptable", and that "I will not accept the status quo as a solution", is pretty exciting stuff.

Much of the rhetoric Obama espoused on Letterman was ideologically driven; there was alot of talk of "the left", "the centre-left", the "centre-right", and so on. The above quotes signalling his intent to create "change" came as a defence of his "socialist" healthcare reforms. He certainly doesn't seem to be afraid of aligning himself with the liberal, humanist ideologies of "the left".

While all this talk of steering the ship to the left may seem to be a reason for the liberally minded population to celebrate, I'm not sure that it is the sanest political philosophy.

As Bush demonstrated, the American electorate is massively susceptible to a good old fashioned political scare campaign, and as I have written before, the conservatives are already beggining to paint Obama as a communist who is going to steal from the rich and eat their babies.

In addition to the healthcare reforms, the administration is changing the way it deals with national defence policy. Where previously America has generally adopted the ideology of force-and-threats-over-diplomacy, Obama is attempting to push a far more negotiations-based approach for America's influence in the sphere of international diplomatic relations.

The administration last week took a drastic diplomatic measure of scrapping plans for a missle defence system that was planned for construction in eastern Europe, pretty much on Russia's doorstep. The Russian's were massively agrravated by the plans, which were supposedly designed to protect the western world from missile attack from rogue states such as Iran and North Korea.

In another more rationally-minded parallel dimension, this might be seen as an effort to reduce the perception of America as an overly-aggressive nation of war-mongers in the international consciousness.

But on this planet..

Withdrawing plans to build so-called "national defence" sytems, especially after being pressured by Russia to do so, seems to me to be giving the conservatives perfect ammunition to carpet bomb the American public with "Obama is a weakling and a communist" propaganda.

Schwarzenegger-Palin 2012?

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Bonus Bush:

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UPDATE 24/09/09:
I woke up this morning to find this article; apparently Obama is deadly serious about eliminating the threat of nuclear war: 

"Obama has this week demanded that the Pentagon conduct a radical review of the US nuclear weapons doctrine with the explicit aim of slashing its nuclear arsenal. The President rejected the first draft of the Pentagon's Nuclear Posture Review on the grounds that it was too timid in advancing his aim of eventually ridding the world of nuclear weapons."

Again, Obama is expressing some amazing ambitions, but is he professing too much peace-and-love too soon to an American people who surely still uphold a passion for guns, xenophobia, and holy-wars? The world hasn't changed that drastically with the election of a black president has it? Obama  seems to hang his hat on the fact that he was elected in the first place as sign that the times they are a-changin'. As his plummeting approval rate amongst the wealthy white population seems to indicate, it won't take very much for the American public to swing back very hard in the direction of a conservative political doctrine if they fear for their money and national security...