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With his State of the Union address showing more division than unity, President Barack Obama marked more than the passing of his first year in office. It marked the passing of a great opportunity, as his party lost a signal seat in the Senate, and with it the ability to forestall filibusters, or the spectacle of endless debate on various issues, among them health care and climate change legislation.
It also marked something else; how an administration, armed with and overwhelming majority, could not achieve its goals, and faces serious challenges ahead.
Those challenges aren't all domestic.
Overseas, the administration pursues a policy of continuity of the Bush regime, with heightened bombings via predator drones, continued secret prisons, legal defense of torture, continued renditions (to countries that torture), permanent detentions without trial, and the erection of frameworks that look a lot like more wars abroad.
In a number of off-the-record interviews, many former Bush officials are quietly impressed with how similar new officials are to the old.
That's because the imperial idea permeates both parties, and how a party runs is no indication of how it will govern. And both parties are held tightly in the grip of the military industrial complex.
In Greek mythology, Hercules fought the many headed Hydra. In America, the major political parties are but heads attached to a vast corporate body, which funds both sides so that it can profit from each.
The media, itself an arm of mega corporate power, feeds the fear industry, so that people are primed like pumps to support wars on rumor, innuendo, legends and lies.
In Britain, at least, there has been a parliamentary inquiry into the events that led up to the Iraq War. Some members of parliament, like Sir Menzies Campbell (Lib. Dem), have called the Iraq War and "illegal war", while others have called it "war crimes".
In the U.S. such issues (like single payer for health care, for instance), are off the table. And how could they be on the table if the administration is continuing the war, and intensifying another?
Millions of Americans voted, not just against former Pres. Bush's legacy, but against war itself.
They've no doubt learned, a year later, that you often don't get what you've voted for.
Perhaps they've also learned that voting for 'change' in this corporate controlled system, can give you the same old thing.
--(c) '10 maj
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