Unlike the toadies and eunuchs of the American media, Australia’s leftie colossus John Pilger is declining to get with the program. This is the Aussie reprint of his Independence Day lecture to the good burghers of San Francisco – although I must admit the headline lacks the brio of The New Statesman’s version:

Mourn On The 4th Of July
With his government of warmongers, Wall Street cronies and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, Barack Obama is merely upholding the myths of a divine America.

It gets better:

The new “ism” was Americanism, an ideology whose distinction is its denial that it is an ideology… Barack Obama is the embodiment of the “ism”. From his early political days, Obama’s unerring theme has been not “change”, the slogan of his presidential campaign, but America’s right to rule and order the world…
The hearts and minds farce I witnessed in Vietnam is today repeated in villages in Afghanistan and, by proxy, Pakistan, which are Obama’s wars… As Obama has sent drones to kill (since January) some 700 civilians, distinguished liberals have rejoiced that America is once again a “nation of moral ideals”, as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times.

Splendid! Krugman and the Times op-ed page, not to mention the Huffers and Kossacks and other partisan shills, are merely the useful idiots du jour of American imperialism.