Roger, you seem to be committed to pontificating and enflaming fear (of Obama) through ethereal and vaguely philosophical devices which would indict Obama as a socialist (and by your unreasoned extension, a communist tyrant, or czar of an empire).

But if we talk rationally about the history of nations since the end of WWII (the second war of modern empires, and the first imperial oil-war) all former empire nations (in Europe and Japan) which expunged empire, and empire-thinking, and successfully developed as anything close to representative democracies, and progressed toward genuinely serving the interests of their people, with equitable GINI coefficients, ‘universal’ health care, absence of willful wars, and a dozen other characteristics that the vast, vast majority of average Americans pray for, took the very same (and only proven) path out of empire —- ‘social democracy’.

Why, pray tell, would you not consider Obama’s helmsmanship of the American political economy quite pragmatic, and defensible as being pragmatic (rather than the ideological bent that you ascribe) given purely the evidence and this existence proof that only ‘social democracies’ have proven to be a successful model to exit the state of unsustainable empire and enter the state of ‘free world’ democracies?

Perhaps, you would not mind dealing in such mundane terms as what ‘social democracies’ have been able to do for their citizens in the real world, and I would be glad to take the reverse role of showing what this ruling-elite ‘corporate financial Empire’ controlling our country behind the facade of its two-party, ‘Vichy’ sham of democracy has been able to do for our people over the last three decades — wherein we could have a rational discourse and public debate, rather than what passes here for discussion, eh?