"A candidate’s choice of advisors reveals their intentions with respect to policy, even when the candidate himself won’t say much about it.  Wary commentators of every strip keep noticing how Obama’s rhetoric is totally empty, fluffy, meaningless.  This is the art of the demagogue, so we have to look behind the scenes, at the advisors who will be in charge of setting policy, in order to find out what is Obama’s real agenda, if of course he even has one.   His primary ambition may simply be to live in the White House."

Leland discusses some of the analysis.

"Ambassador Wilson’s essay, “Battle Tested” was published in the Baltimore Sun and then appeared online in the Huffington Post.  In keeping with his increasingly bold and feisty style, he pulls no punches.

     After noting Hilary Clinton’s willingness to fight the Republican attack machine, Wilson asks, “But will Mr. Obama fight?  His brief time on the national scene gives little comfort.  Consider a February 2006 exchange of letters with Mr. McCain on the subject of ethics reform.  The wrathful Mr. McCain accused Mr. Obama of being “disingenuous,” to which Mr. Obama meekly replied, “The fact that you have now questioned my sincerity  and my desire to put aside politics for the public interest is regrettable but does not in any way diminish my deep respect for you.”  Then one of McCain’s aides said of Obama, “Obama wouldn’t know the difference between an RPG and a bong.”

     Mr. McCain was insultingly dismissive but successful in intimidating his inexperienced colleague.  Thus, in his one face-to-face encounter with Mr. McCain, Mr. Obama failed to stand his ground.

     What gives us confidence Mr. Obama will be stronger the next time he faces Mr. McCain, a seasoned political fighter with extensive national security credentials?  Even more important, what special disadvantages does Mr. Obama carry into this contest on questions of national security?

     How will Mr. Obama answer Mr. McCain about his careless remark about unilaterally bombing Pakistan—perhaps blowing up an already difficult relationship with a nuclear state threatened by Islamic extremists?

     Of course, I’m more interested in what the hell Obama was talking about at all when he mentioned bombing Pakistan.  I thought we were going to get some “Change” out of him.  No such luck I’m afraid.

When Webster Tarpley weighs in, he brings forty or so years of geopolitical and intelligence history to bear on a subject.  To him, (and my wife) Obama is the Manchurian Candidate, the useful tool in the hands of the color-coded Revolutionaries, paving the way for globalization under the guise of “Freedom and Democracy...” just now it’s happening in America.  Here’s Tarpley on Obama:"

“If Senator Obama possessed truly exceptional qualities of leadership or morality, it would not be necessary to make this argument against him.  But he possesses no such superiority.  Quite the contrary.  He has called very explicitly for the bombing of Pakistan, a country 2 ½ times larger than Iran.  Obama spoke against the Iraq war in 2003 when he was not required to vote on the issue, but he has also voted for every Iraq military appropriations bill in the Congress, until this year.  Most important, he is a Manchurian candidate, reminiscent in the many ways of the disastrous Jimmy Carter of 1976.  Jimmy Carter had been chosen and groomed for the presidency by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew  Brzezinski, the leaders of the Trilateral Commission.  When Carter reached the White House, he turned US foreign policy over to Brzezinski.  The results were the seizure of power by the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the founding of Al Qaeda by the CIA (Brzezinski’s strategy) as an Arab Legion to fight the Soviets in that country.

He discusses Paul Volcker of the Federal Reserve and the infamous 22 percent interest rate also making the rare presidential endorsement-of Obama. And discusses how Zbig Brzezinski (the overall image consultant for Obama)has been joined by his son Mark and daughter Mika who has been leading the charge on MSNBC.

Zbig is also Obama’s foreign policy controller.  Zbigniew Brzezinski’s entire life has been dominated by his consuming, fanatical hatred of Russia.  As he approaches 80 years of age, Brzezinski feels that he has one last chance to dismember the Russian federation and to partition European Russia.  This will be the great foreign policy project of a future Obama administration.  It is certain that Zbigniew Brzezinski will join Napolean and Hitler in failure, but what will become of our country?  The Bush neocons have been addicted to aggressive war, but they were at least cunning enough to pick countries which had no ability to strike against the continental United States.  Brzezinski lacks this cunning.  He proposes to court confrontation with Russia, the one country, which maintains the capacity to incinerate the United States several times over.  The Brzezinski project to be carried out under an Obama regime is a project of incalculable folly, tailored to the obsessions of a clique of old central European revanchists left over from the 1930’s, not to the needs of the United States in the twenty-first century.

and

Obama Would Privatize Social Security

In the area of economics, Obama’s handlers and advisers are a group of right wing thinkers.  The first is Austan Goolsbee, a 1991 member of Skull and Bones at Yale.  Goolsbee is a member of the monetarist Chicago school founded by Milton Friedman, he is a free trade ideologue.  Another Obama advisor in economics is Jeffrey Liebman of Harvard, who has proposed the partial privatization of the Social Security system, in addition to the increasing the regressive payroll tax, while lowering and delaying Social Security benefits.  This is not materially different from the proposals of George Bush in 2005.  Then we have David Cutler, who thinks that high health care costs are a stimulus to the overall economy.  He has proposed more financial incentives in the healthcare field, meaning that he wants to transfer more and more money into the hands of the insurance companies and pharmaceutical firms.  Is this politics of hope?”

You can read the full article here: