So you really thought things would change?

What are the differences between a politician and a leader? Politicians seek power, while power seeks leaders. Also leaders will follow their higher principles, even when they are detrimental to personal ambitions or self-interest. Politicians, by contrast, will shed their principles (assuming they had any to begin with) without hesitation or compunction whenever they interfere with self-interest or the quest for reelection.

After the 2008 presidential election, many comparisons were drawn between Barack Obama and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But what was ignored is the fact that King was a leader, while Obama is a politician.

Numerous King biographers have pointed out that King had simply wanted to be a preacher, and did not initially seek to acquire a leadership role in the civil rights movement. But in Montgomery, Alabama, where King chose to settle after completing his education, there were two men vying for leadership of the African-American community. When demands for a “bus boycott” arose after the arrest of Rosa Parks, neither man wanted to lead the boycott, for fear it would fail. So King became the compromise choice.

Instead the success of the Montgomery bus boycott elevated King to national prominence. Once there he often took actions that were morally correct, even though he knew they could potentially harm his fundraising efforts or give his enemies ammunition to attack him.

At the behest of his friend Anne Braden he signed a petition supporting clemency for her husband Carl, who was imprisoned after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Later in his career, despite warnings that it could lose him the sympathetic ear of president Lyndon Johnson, King gave a speech criticizing the war in Vietnam. And shortly before his untimely death, he became even more vocal in his denunciations of the military-industrial complex and the economic disparities in America.

There is little doubt that King, if he were alive today, would be just as outspoken about the immorality of the war against Iraq and the torture policies of the Bush dictatorship.

In Obama’s world, however, moral arguments are apparently trumped by political ones.

The depths to which Obama has sunk can be measured by the fact that his decisions regarding the “war on terror” recently won him the praise of Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, a neo-fascist, warmongering coward who is often a fixture on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox “News” Channel.

Sadly, America is a land where two political parties serve one master. The Republican Party is venal, lawless, corrupt, mendacious, hatemongering and even treasonous. It impeached Bill Clinton for lying about a sexual affair, yet refused to impeach George W. Bush for more egregious crimes, including the theft of two elections, the illegal invasion of Iraq, the manipulation of intelligence information and the dissemination of outright lies to justify this invasion, the waste of billions of tax dollars and the sacrifice of thousands of lives to carry out this invasion, the shredding of the United States constitution, the use of torture, illegal detention and other human rights violations.

The Democratic Party, as Pelosi’s hypocrisy demonstrates, allowed one of its own to be impeached for the flimsiest of reasons, but turned a deaf ear to demands that George W. Bush and his minions be impeached. It too is venal, corrupt and mendacious. But it is also cowardly—afraid to speak out too forcefully against the hatemongers, the hypocrites and the right-wing pseudo-journalists who dominate the corporate-controlled media. Democrats may pay lip service to higher causes, but they, as Hamlet said, “lose the name of action.” And they are just as responsible for the shredding of the constitution, which makes them just as treasonous as the Republicans.

Finally there’s the CIA and the FBI—two agencies that can simply disregard the constitution, that exist beyond the reach of the so-called “check and balance” system, and whose mission is not to defend freedom, democracy and human rights, but to protect the interests and profits of the same master the Republican and Democratic parties serve—the corrupt plutocracy, fueled by the military industrial complex, that truly controls the government of the United States.

In a previous Pravda.Ru article entitled The Great Allure I explained that the reason mainstream Americans remain oblivious to the machinations of this plutocracy is because human nature tends to be more inclined to fascism than democracy.

Despite all their lamentations about the “liberal” media, the neo-fascists control the hearts and minds of America. Fascists have always understood that it is easier to reduce human beings to their lowest common denominator than to elevate them to their highest potential.

So everyday thousands of Americans mindlessly act against their own economic and social interests, myopically taking their marching orders from demagogic pseudo-journalists, right-wing “talk radio” hosts and hatemongers who deceptively wrap themselves in the American flag or the garments of “Christianity,” then count their riches while laughing at their audience’s gullibility.

Fascism works because being told what to think, who to like and—most importantly to neo-fascists—who to hate requires much less effort than thinking for oneself. Also blaming scapegoats for the nation’s ills is easier than analyzing and trying to solve the complex problems of a complex world.

Appeals to the basest of human emotions, like greed, hatred, fear, superstition, selfishness and bigotry are much more effective than appeals to reason. Logic and science can be disproven, but emotions require no factual basis, so nothing can refute them; consequently people emotionally vested in a belief are unlikely to change it, even when reason proves them wrong.