"In the week Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, he ordered bombing attacks on Yemen, killing a reported 63 people, 28 of them children. When Obama recently announced he supported same-sex marriage, American planes had not long blown 14 Afghan civilians to bits. In both cases, the mass murder was barely news. What mattered were the cynical vacuities of a political celebrity, the product of a zeitgeist driven by the forces of consumerism and the media with the aim of diverting the struggle for social and economic justice.
The award of the Nobel Prize to the first black president because he "offered hope" was both absurd and an authentic expression of the lifestyle liberalism that controls much of political debate in the west. Same-sex marriage is one such distraction."
Pilger is one of my favorite writers. Read here to see why. I love his term "lifestyle liberalism." It explains so much of what I hate about the gay marriage and war on women debates. Obama wouldn't be president unless he promised to continue the multiple front wars on human rights around the world. He won't stop mass incarceration, or drone strikes, or bailouts to wall street. So no, it doesn't matter that he is black. He does what presidents do, and that is bad news for the entire world.
