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A Hopeful Sign?

I would love nothing more than to have any of my exceptions with President Obama and his policies be proven wrong.

I said the same of George W. Bush, but with absolutely zero expectations from get-go.

With Obama I sincerely still hold out for hope.

If he gets foreign policy right...and I mean real change...I think I could easily forgive many domestic policy excesses, at least during his tenure.

Jimmy Carter failed because backfiring middle-east interventionist policies, that he was too much of a lightweight to reverse, blew up in his face. At the same time the U.S. economy hit the rocks and hard. He was finished by these dual failures.

The biggest imperialist fantasy is being able to have both guns and butter. If Obama is serious about domestic prosperity, he will end our trillions in spending on empire building and policing the world.

Given his choices of DC-insidery neocon interventionists Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton as his top foreign policy voices, at least nominally, the outlook is not good for Obama.

The type of serious policy foreign policy changes required here are not about fixing our status or standing, but about ending how we try to project power through armed force and direct interventions, including our worldwide presence through military bases in compliant countries, whether friendly or not so.

This would be the only real change in our foreign policy.

It will require immediate action bold, swift and sustained to have any hope of seeing just the beginnings of such a change, one aimed at real peace rather than militarist-minded "peacemaking" or "peacekeeping".

In short, Obama has a very small window of opportunity.

Rather than be somewhat-obsessed with Abe Lincoln (great as he was) perhaps Obama should take time to listen to some of Robert Kennedy's speeches from 1968, as well as Martin Luther King's speeches on war, particularly in VietNam.

Today I read that there may be hope after all. I am hoping for it :

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