The hallmark of President Obama's term in office continues to be his channeling of Neville Chamberlain, his ongoing caving and grovelling to the GOP and the wealthy few, the corporate oligarchy.  

This characteristic is invariably accompanied by the president's whining attack on those Democrats who have the audacity to speak the truth: that Obama is wrong, that the emperor has no clothes.  In his latest snit, his tax cut capitulation sell-out, he again blamed liberals for his health care bill's ongoing, steadily decreasing unpopularity.

As Blue Texan at Firedoglake explains the facts to the prez: "It’s unpopular because it forces people to become paying customers of Aetna and WellPoint without giving them the ability to fire them when they get screwed. And get screwed they will. Put another way, it does nothing to break up the pernicious cartel that is running our health industry like a criminal racket.

"Stop blaming liberals, Mr. President. You got the bill you wanted and the majority of Americans don’t like it.  And PS, complaining about how we just don’t appreciate the things you’ve done for us makes you sound weak."

Michael Hudson at Counterpunch writes the following about Obama's sell-out on taxes: ".....Contrary to his pretense of saving the economy, his action will intensify debt deflation and financial depression, paving the way for a long-term tax shift off wealth onto labor.

"In achieving a giveaway that Democrats never would have let George Bush or other Republicans enact, Obama has laid himself open to the campaign slogan that brought down British Prime Minister Tony Blair: “You can’t believe a word he says.” He has lost support not only personally, but also – as the Republicans anticipate – for much of his party in 2012.

"Yet Obama has only done what politicians do: He has delivered up his constituency to his campaign backers – the same Wall Street donors who back the Republicans. What’s the point of having a constituency, after all, if you can’t sell it?

"The problem is that it’s not going to stop here. Monday’s deal to re-instate the Bush era tax cuts for two more years sets up a 1-2-3 punch. First, many former Democratic and independent voters will “vote with their backsides” and simply stay home (or perhaps be tempted by a third-party candidate), enabling the Republicans to come in legislate the cuts in perpetuity in 2012 – an estimated $4 trillion to the rich over time.

"Second,  Obama’s Republican act (I hate to call it a compromise) “frees” income for the wealthiest classes to send abroad, to economies not yet wrecked by neoliberals. This paves the way for a foreign-exchange crisis. Such crises traditionally fall in the autumn – and as the 2012 election draws near, it will be attributed to “uncertainty” if voters do not throw the Democrats out. So to “save the dollar” the Republicans will propose to replace progressive income taxation with a uniform flat tax (the old Steve Forbes plan) falling on wage earners, not on wealth or on finance, insurance or real estate (FIRE sector) income. A VAT will be added as an excise tax to push up consumer prices.

"Third, the tax giveaway includes a $120 billion reduction in Social Security contributions by labor – reducing the FICA wage withholding from 6.2 per cent to 4.2 per cent. Obama has ingeniously designed the plan to dovetail neatly into his Bowles-Simpson commission pressing to reduce Social Security as a step toward its ultimate privatization and subsequent wipeout grab by Wall Street. This cutback will accelerate the point at which the program moves into supposed “negative equity” – a calculation that ignores the option of restoring pension funding to the government’s general budget, where it would be paid out of progressively levied income tax and hence borne mainly by the wealthy, not by lower-income wage earners as a “user fee.”

"So the game plan is not merely to free the income of the wealthiest class to “offshore” itself into assets denominated in harder currencies abroad. It is to scrap the progressive tax system altogether. The Democratic Congress is making only token handwringing protests against this plan, no doubt with an eye looking forward to the campaign contributors two years down the road.

"It is a travesty for Obama to trot out the long-term unemployed (who now get a year’s extension of benefits) like widows and orphans used to be. It’s not really “all for the poor.” It’s all for the rich. And it’s not to promote stability and recovery. How stable can a global situation be where the richest nation does not tax its population, but creates new public debt to hand out to its bankers? Future tax payers will spend generations paying off their heirs.

"The bottom line is that after the prolonged tax giveaway exacerbates the federal budget deficit – along with the balance-of-payments deficit – we can expect the next Republican or Democratic administration to step in and “save” the country from economic emergency by scaling back Social Security while turning its funding over, Pinochet-style, to Wall Street money managers to loot as they did in Chile. And one can forget rebuilding America’s infrastructure. It is being sold off by debt-strapped cities and states to cover their budget shortfalls resulting from un-taxing real estate and from foreclosures."

And, as for Obama's blatant lies that he has kept his campaign promises, Keith Olbermann accuses Obama of being "goddamned wrong" about the tax cut deal and betraying his base over and over again.

Unfortunately, as Michael Hudson observed: 

"I almost feel naïve for being so angry at President Obama’s betrayal of his campaign promises regarding taxes. I had never harbored much hope that he actually intended to enact the reforms that his supporters expected – not after he appointed the most right-wing of the Clintonomics gang, Larry Summers, then Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke and other Bush neoliberals.

"Barack Obama was trained as a lawyer. I’ve rarely met a lawyer who understands economics. That’s not their mind-set. They make deals to minimize the risk of surprises, often settling in the middle. That is legal pragmatism. When candidate Obama promised “change,” I don’t think he had any particular change in economic policy in mind. It was more a modus operandi. I suspect that he simply thought of the Presidency as being referee on “bringing people together.” Probably this personality trait was formed as a teenager, in the kind of popularity contest that teenagers engage in student council elections. Obama’s aim was to be accepted, even admired, by negotiating a compromise. He probably didn’t care much about the content.

"He did care about getting political campaign backing, of course, and the rules for this are clear enough in today’s world. He was given a policy to plead, and a set of experts to plead his case. There are always enough Junk Economics advisors to work on politicians to try and convince them that “doing the right thing” means helping Wall Street. It is not a matter simply of believing that “What’s good for Wall Street is good for the economy.” To hear Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke tell the story, the economy can’t function without a “solvent” banking system – meaning that no bank is to lose money. All gamblers on the winning side (such as Goldman Sachs) are to be made whole in cases where they cannot collect from bad casino-capitalist gamblers on the losing side (such as A.I.G. and Lehman Brothers)."

So we will continue to be betrayed by a Nevile Chamberlain-Reagan-Bush-Clintonite-DINO clone perfectly described by Garry Wills in a book review of an Obama biography: 'Remnick presents Obama as a perpetual outsider who wins acceptance in whatever new company he joins....when he taught at the University of Chicago Law School, he won the respect of conservative professors there, including Richard Posner — “especially,” as Posner tells Remnick, “after one of my clerks, who had worked with him at The Harvard Law Review, told me that he wasn’t even all that liberal.”

"Obama’s strategy everywhere before entering the White House was one of omnidirectional placation....Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril....Obama has stressed continuity. 

"He appointed as his vice president and secretary of state people who voted for the Iraq war, and as secretary of defense and presiding generals people who conducted or defended that war.

"To cope with the financial crisis, he turned to Messrs. Geithner, Summers and Bernanke, who were involved in fomenting the crisis. To launch reform of medical care, he huddled with the American Medical Association, big pharmaceutical companies and insurance firms, and announced that his effort had their backing (the best position to be in for stabbing purposes, which they did month after month). All these things speak to Obama’s concern with continuity and placation.

As one of my grandmother's favorite TV character's used to say: "What a revolting predicament this is."