Politicians do the opposite of what they promise more often than not. So before you vote, plug your ears to their speeches, and see what policies their advisers advocate.

In "Obama: the Postmodern Coup," Tarpley gets a giant scoop as the first to delve behind the screen into the forces behind Obama: his policy advisors are far right-wingers! Zbigniew Brzezinski is CEO of the BHO show. For the economy, regressive Skull & Bones and Wall Street figures. In military affairs, it's Gen. McPeak, the perpetrator of genocidal civilian bombing tactics.

Obama's backers make a laundry-list of the elite: the Rockefellers, Rand Corp., Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Chicago School of Economics, Bilderbergers - and the Ford Foundation six ways to Sunday. No wonder he gets the lion's share of the campaign financing from the corporations and a free ride from the corporate media.

All unawares, the United States slipped into the grip of a soft coup last fall, the Brzezinski faction has won over the power elite, and the neo-cons are already lame ducks. Tarpley finds that "Zbig" also controls two of the three front runners for the presidency -- Barack Obama and John McCain, but that Obama is the elitist favorite for a facelift to the tottering empire.

Obama is a Brzezinski protegé, scripted in the lofty role of savior, a required figure in the planned hysteria of the "people power" coups perfected by the CIA and NGO's in Eastern Europe. The recipe has now been brought home to short-circuit America's political process.

Tarpley should be dean of social sciences in a prestigious university, if they aren't all funded by Rockefeller and Ford foundations! I have a poli sci degree, but almost all of "Postmodern Coup" was new to me:

- American political history is marked by cycles or "party realignments" of about 36 or 40 years, such as FDR's 1932 landslide or the upheavals of 1968. A few right-wing strategists like Samuel Huntington know this. They began planning around 1980 to subvert our current cycle shift, first by the War on Terror, now with the synthetic, pseudo-leftist Obama movement, to set the nation on a course they will determine until around 2050.

- The Democrats repeatedly nominate losing presidential candidates with their caucus system, favoring "Volvo-driving" Democrats who decide the primaries in red states, which the Dems don't win in the GE. Obama continues this tradition of Mondale, Dukakis, McGovern etc., folks who won't play in Peoria.

- Fascism doesn't start out as a right-wing, top-down system. How to recognize it in the bud? It begins as a youth movement, often leftist, idealist, mystical, with stirring slogans, euphoria, and a theme of national regeneration. Like Obamania. Mussolini and Hitler both got their start with outwardly leftist laborite parties.

- Why does Obama want to attack Pakistan, the world's 6th largest country, with almost 3 times more people than Iran, and 6 times more than Iraq? It's a Chinese ally, and to get at Russia, Brzezinski wants to isolate China, forcing it to attack Russia to get oil. A madcap scheme that will only isolate the US even more.

"Postmodern Coup" is a book with a mission: to stave off the looming world-historical tragedy Tarpley foresees. Yet it's about much more than "Manchurian candidate" Obama, or even Brzezinski and his earlier puppet, Jimmy Carter. Historian Tarpley draws on an unparalleled store of erudition, past precedents and inside knowledge of today's political players, and distills it in this book for our up-to-the-minute situation.

It's a crash course in the essentials you need to know about US and world politics, but the media never wanted you to.