Counterpunch
July 17-19, 2009
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

http://bokertov.typepad.com/btb/images/2007/10/04/magician_disappear.jpg

"Watch what we do, not what we say,” was the famous advice Nixon’s first Attorney General, John Mitchell, gave the press at the onset of the Nixon presidency in 1969. It’s a handy piece of advice in the Age of Obama too, as we roll towards the end of his first six months in office. There’s the added difficulty that Obama likes to say two different things in the same speech, usually prefaced by his trade-mark “Let me be clear.”

“And let me be clear,” he told the Russians in Moscow, even as he presses forward with the Clinton/Bush policy of NATO expansion, ringing Russia with missile bases, “NATO seeks collaboration with Russia, not confrontation.”

You think “saying” and “doing” are far apart on that one? Try this gem, also delivered in Moscow: “Now let me be clear, America will not seek to impose any system of government on any other country, nor would we presume to choose which party or individual should run a country…. America will never impose a security arrangement on another country.”

The last guy in the White House to be that clear was in fact Nixon, who tossed in “perfectly” as a bonus.

Obama has been perfectly clear on so many pledges, such as restoring constitutional protections such as habeas corpus, respect for international treaties and covenants on torture and the treatment of prisoners, ending eavesdropping and, when you take even a quick glance at what he’s done, he’s been perfectly awful on so many fronts.

He was at his sermonizing worst in Ghana, telling Africans to shape up, a homily aimed at those same folks back home who thrilled to Obama’s strictures on the campaign trail, using Father’s Day a year ago to tell black dads—only black dads—to shape up, an act he just reprised to the NAACP’s 100th convention in New York.

>>>>> CLICK HERE TO READ FULL ARTICLE