Pogo Revisited: We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us

In an interesting article about modern and earlier responses to Fascism, John Pilger said this: 

According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 alone Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day.  He bombed the poorest people on earth, in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.

Every Tuesday — reported the New York Times — he personally selected those who would be murdered by mostly hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the “terrorist target”. A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones killed 4,700 people. “Sometimes you hit innocent people and I hate that,” he said, "but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.”

Like the fascism of the 1930s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent media whose description now fits that of the Nuremberg prosecutor: “Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically … In the propaganda system … it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.

Pilger's point is that Obama, and Clinton too, are not liberals. I suppose it depends on what your definition of is is. 

This argument also risks committing the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.  

The use of the term was advanced by British philosopher Antony Flew:

Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the "Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again". Hamish is shocked and declares that "No Scotsman would do such a thing". The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again; and, this time, finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, " No true Scotsman would do such a thing".^[2]

When the statement "all A are B" is qualified like this to exclude those A which are not B, this is a form of begging the question; the conclusion is assumed by the definition of "true A".

So I would disagree with my friends who think Obama is a conservative. It is instead that liberals have adopted the conservative view of Foreign Policy, and the conservatives have adopted the liberal view of Foreign Policy—at least Trump has. So it is that conservatives who have not made the switch will say that Trump is not a "true" conservative, and liberals who have not switched either will say that Obama is not a "true" liberal. This is actually a return to the traditional views of liberals and conservatives from the 30's. 

So we live in a weird world where Obama is more "conservative" than Trump. Or as Weird Al said in song, "Everything You Know Is Wrong."