Tarpley's Warning: The Bad News About Obama

By Kevin Barrett 

“As for the truth-concealers, it is the same to them whether you warn them or not; they will not believe.”

-Qur’an 2:6 

The good news is that the Bush Administration, the worst gaggle of war criminals since the Third Reich, is about to get tossed, like an old worn-out shoe, into the proverbial dustbin of history. 

The bad news is that the new regime might be even worse. 

Such a possibility seems unthinkable to most reasonable people, who rightly see Bush as a shoe-in for Worst President Ever. How could a new administration led by a seemingly pleasant, intelligent, eloquent, left-leaning African-American who opposed the Iraq war, and who stands for “hope” and “change,” possibly not be a radical turn for the better? 

To answer that question, we must turn to Webster Tarpley’s two-book series on Obama. Even those unconvinced by Tarpley’s jeremiad against Obama, and out of sympathy with some of the quirks of the Tarpleyan worldview, will be dazzled by the author’s formidable erudition. More importantly, readers of all political persuasions need to be exposed to Tarpley’s acerbic take on how power really operates in today’s USA. That take, in a nutshell, is that we have become a plutocracy, a dictatorship of the financiers, who rule from behind the scenes by applying their inexhaustible wealth not just to the political process per se, but also the ideological apparatus behind it. That is, they don’t just buy up the politicians, but also the corporate monopoly media, the intelligence community, and the CIA-linked foundations that fund PBS as well as most of the supposedly left-leaning “independent” media. Obama, according to Tarpley, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the left wing of the financier elite (the Soros-Brzezinski axis) and was probably recruited as an intelligence asset by Zbig guy himself when they were both in political science at Columbia University. 

According to Tarpley, the Obama administration is a disaster waiting to happen. The plutocracy behind Obama — that loose confederation of top anglo-American financiers that Barrie Zwicker calls “the diabologarchy” — is hell-bent on world takeover by whatever means necessary. They’ve already played their neocon card, in the form of the Bush-Cheney regime, and now they need to refurbish their global domination project by hiring a more likeable front-man. Obama, Tarpley warns us, may con us into accepting even bigger, more destructive wars than Bush ever dreamed of, beginning with ever-escalating attacks on Pakistan (a nuclear power twice as large as Iraq and with five times Iraq’s population) and moving on to a possible world war designed to take down Russia and China, the two main impediments to the incipient financial dictatorship of the anglo-american New World Order. By targeting nuclear powers, the global domination project will be courting nuclear war. And by tranquilizing and deceiving the natural opponents of war and empire, Obama, that tool of the financier elite, will be paving the road to thermonuclear armageddon. 

Alongside the looming disaster of Obama’s move-the-war-to-Pakistan foreign policy, Tarpley sees a parallel catastrophe being visited on the US economy, especially on that great majority of Americans who consider themselves members of the middle class. Obama, Tarpley argues, will provide left cover for an accelerated transfer of resources from the middle classes to the oligarchs, under the guise of the engineered economic crisis. Tarpley foresees that Obama will use his inspirational rhetoric to convince Americans to accept a brutal regime of austerity whose beneficiaries will be the super-rich elites and their global takeover attempt. 

Together, these two projects — expanding the war and impoverishing the middle class — are setting the stage for fascism. Obama, Tarpley warns us, has many signs of a fascist dictator in the making. Fascism usually begins as a mass movement of young, left-leaning, idealistic followers of a charismatic orator, and goes downhill from there. When a hypnotic speaker with a tinge of megalomania calls for universal national service for young people, in the teeth of an ever-deepening recession while elites plot world war, the stage is set for a disaster even worse than the one Bush and Cheney brought us…or so Tarpley would have us believe. The silver-tongued Obama might even be able to take us into full-fledged fascism in the wake of a 9/11-style false-flag attack…or so Tarpley would have us believe. 

But should we believe him?   

The prophets of the Judeo-Christo-Islamic tradition were not just the tellers of concealed, unpopular truths–they were also warners. Today’s heirs to the prophets combine the same functions. If David Ray Griffin is the premiere teller of the biggest concealed unpopular truth of our time, Webster Tarpley is our number one warner.  

Back in 1992, Tarpley’s George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography warned us that the almost unimaginably corrupt Bush family was muscling its way into power. In 2004, leading political analyst Kevin Phillips, a closet David Ray Griffin fan, published a Bush biography that leaned heavily on Tarpley’s earlier groundbreaking work. Phillips’ book was an implicit acknowledgment that Tarpley had been ahead of his time. 

But even as Phillips was publishing his Tarpley pastiche on Bush the elder, Tarpley himself had moved on to a new subject: the 9/11 inside job. Tarpley warned the 9/11 truth movement that it had better face the facts: 9/11 was obviously a complete false-flag inside job, not just a bunch of unanswered questions or a case of “let it happen on purpose.” By confidently professing MIHOP (“made it happen on purpose”), Tarpley argued, the 9/11 truth movement would affect public opinion far more powerfully than it ever could by pussyfooting around with LIHOP (“let it happen on purpose”). The go-slowers, LIHOPers and agnostics, Tarpley warned us, were not doing 9/11 truth any favors.  

Even as he warned us against the perils of LIHOP, Tarpley was issuing a brilliant series of warnings about false-flag terror–especially the likelihood of a false-flag event designed to trigger war with Iran. His 9/11 Synthetic Terror laid the groundwork for the future academic discipline of False-Flag Studies. And the Kennebunkport Warning he inspired may have helped stop a nuclear false-flag targeting Iran in early September, 2007, as evidenced by the stymied theft of several advanced nuclear warheads from the US arsenal just days after the warning was published.

What are we to make of this track record? Tarpley’s detractors see him as an overconfident alarmist, a Chicken Little who repeatedly predicted an attack on Iran that never happened. In their view, his warnings about Obama may turn out to be equally groundless.

Tarpley, who is neither especially modest nor inclined to turn the other cheek, has lashed out at his harshest critics, calling them mediocrities, dupes, perhaps even provocateurs or professional wreckers. While this is not the best way to win friends and influence people, it must be admitted that here, as elsewhere, Tarpley may be right. Dr. Bob Bowman, the ex-fighter pilot and former Space Weapons chief, has credited the 9/11 truth movement with preventing subsequent mega-false-flags that would have otherwise occurred. And Webster Tarpley, with his insistence on calling an inside job an inside job, and his series of false-flag alerts, has probably done more to stop 9112B than anyone else with the possible exception of David Ray Griffin. Those who have worked overtime to smear Tarpley and impede his effectiveness, one might surmise, are either very stupid or working for the other side. Since Tarpley’s harshest critics are keyboard warriors who conspicuously lack historical sophistication, real-world accomplishments, and intellectual integrity, and in some cases hide their true identities behind internet pseudonyms, there are clearly grounds for suspicion. 

Given the strength of his track record, Tarpley’s warning about Obama deserves to be taken seriously. And given Obama’s appointments of corrupt New World Order hacks to key positions in his administration, I fear that Tarpley is already being proven right. If so, it won’t be the first time.