Obama in full bluster mode on China

Barfy Obambi went to Australia with a few thousand troops and announced that the US is relevant in the Asia-Pacific region.

Countering China, Obama Asserts U.S. a Pacific Power - TIME: "(CANBERRA, Australia) — Signaling a determination to counter a rising China, President Barack Obama vowed Thursday to expand U.S. influence in the Asia-Pacific region and "project power and deter threats to peace" in that part of the world even as he reduces defense spending and winds down two wars.
"The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay," he declared in a speech to the Australian Parliament, sending an unmistakable message to Beijing."

You might almost be convinced that this is serious, except for the fact that the US is a used-up, limp dishrag of an imperial power.

Sure, it's muscle-bound and stubborn as a jackass, but that hardly is sufficient in a world of vigorous and energetic rising states on the other side of the globe, a group of upcoming world powers that will soon show up the US as the sclerotic and empty shell it truly is.

US presidents and their minions like to travel around and claim the moral high ground, as if the US is a beacon of freedom and human rights. When it comes down to it, however, the empty ritual of going into the voting booth every couple of years to select on of two corporate-vetted clowns that further the prerogatives of the oligarchic-corporate state hardly qualifies as meaningful citizen involvement in the direction of the country.

The US is simply posturing on the world stage, and so far nations like China are tolerating this erratic and juvenile behavior as though it's the antics of an eccentric and irrational elderly relative at Thanksgiving. They countenance it with a knowing wink it its peers in the banquet of geopolitical relations.

They -- and we all, if we're honest -- know that the game can't go on much longer. No one wants to say it out loud, but everyone knows that such displays a empty bravado mask the exhausted and ineffectual nature of the beast.

If only thinking might make it so, but it can't. Obama's protestations notwithstanding.