I was convinced that it would be George W. Bush who would benefit from the incredible political leverage the death of Osama Bin Laden would provide. Before the election of 2004, I was convinced that Bin Laden would stumble out of a CIA spider hole somewhere, just in time for the Iowa polls. President DwB and Vice President Chixon would ride in on an F-16 and blow him to kingdom come.
NeO was destined to be one of the most unpopular presidents of all time. Not only was he a brother, but the high and low swings are just a part of governance. You earn political capital and then you spend it. Along the way you have to break some promises and call in some favors. Perhaps bury some bodies. But the key is to have an ace in the hole. And wouldn't you know it, he sho nuff did. One suspects that the same interests who put Bin Laden off limits nearly ten years ago gave the green light for NeO to drop him in May.
It was perfect. It played right into NeO's invincible narrative. In the clutch, the man doesn't lose. He lion-strutted up to the podium and told everybody that he had killed the ghost, with two helicopters and a couple dozen SEALS. Driveright. Rightfootplantlefthandsweep. Perfunctory crossover. Rise up. Wristflick. Game.
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But why do I not get a good feeling about NeO in his second term?
Well, there's the fact that the gap between rich and poor is wider than it's ever been.
Or the fact that more immigrants have been deported under NeO than any previous president.
Or the fact that the Justice department was involved in the selling of illegal weapons to Mexican drug cartels.
Or the ongoing race to sell public education to private corporations.
Or more secret wars in Africa.
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| 60% of the world's uncultivated land is in Africa. What does this emblem look like to you? |
Or that as people were concentrating on their New Year's celebrations, the president just signed a law permitting the indefinite detention of American citizens. That's right, the son of slaves just alienated the citizens of this country from their inalienable rights. Of course those rights were only really supposed to apply to White males, but even they are getting screwed on this deal.
NeO, as much as I want to love him, is just a card dealer for the elite, working at a casino where the house always wins.
2 comments:
You might be interested in this article (http://www.salon.com/2011/12/31/progressives_and_the_ron_paul_fallacies/singleton/): "The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.
He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.
Most of all, America’s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before. The nation suffers from what National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh just christened “Obama’s Romance with the CIA.” He has created what The Washington Post just dubbed “a vast drone/killing operation,” all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obama’s steadfast devotion to what Dana Priest and William Arkin called “Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well, building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.
The parallel reality — the undeniable fact — is that all of these listed heinous views and actions from Barack Obama have been vehemently opposed and condemned by Ron Paul: and among the major GOP candidates, only by Ron Paul."
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