The Cynic and Senator Obama

http://www.esquire.com/features/barack-obama-0608

(or click on sig.)

Thank you for that, too, HappyHouse!

"The cynic will admit that it’s all great politics. Tell America that it is a great country that simply has lost its way for a spell. Tell the American people that they are a great people who are better than those hucksters who come to divide us. It has a marvelous anesthetic appeal. Swirl down through the clouds of memory and forget that the country allowed itself to follow George Bush over the cliff not merely because it was shocked by the attacks of September 11, 2001, but because it was too pissing-down-the-shoes scared to do anything else. Forget about how eagerly the American people cheered the brutish and the nasty, how simple it was to sell raw animal vengeance dressed up as geopolitical wisdom, and how dumbly everyone followed until well after it was revealed that the people selling it didn’t know enough about the world to throw to a cat. This was the era of complicity. Can Obama end it, thought the cynic, without admitting it ever existed?

We have not been a great country for a very long time, the cynic believes, and it does us no good to claim otherwise. We are not an honest and decent people in our politics, in the way we deal with one another as a political commonwealth. We will trade away our most precious rights in exchange for a bag of magic charms, and even when we find out that these include the black prison, the waterboard, and the secret microphone, we’ll think we got the better of the deal. We’ll swap our obligation to intelligent self-government for any huckster’s trick that makes us laugh or keeps us entertained in our cars for the evening drive-time shift. We hold this truth to be self-evident -- that all men are out to get what’s ours."

Please read the Esquire The Cynic and Senator Obama.

http://www.esquire.com/features/barack-obama-0608

The reason is to step back a bit and look at the wider picture.

Namely, the behavior of Obama and the Democrats are another symptom of the disease; not the disease itself. Perhaps we've been trying to suppress the symptoms only; we need to also attack the disease.

Thank you for all you've done so far!

Let's put civil liberties, and the President's breaking of the law aside, and agree that there are many other issues.

But whatever those are - starting from being a better informed citizen (by the media companies), voting (on machines made by corporations), health care (provided by corporations), having no digital divide (telcos), disaster insurance for future Katrinas and mid-West floods (insurance cos), having my savings, investment, pension safe(banks and financial companies) - all these issues involve large and powerful corporations --

-- which just demonstrated that they can buy immunity from the law by purchasing Republican and Democratic members of Congress. Senator Obama went tamely along.

Where is our protection when corporate interests are opposed to those of us people? We've just seen that Senator Obama and his movement cannot provide it. All the promises are worth no more than a two-dollar bill.

What change can Obama bring about on any of those other issues?

Had Bush not been a homicidal maniac (nobody knew that back then) there would have been no problem.

Actually, we could have known. We did not pay enough attention to just who all were behind Bush. Specifically, the PNAC (Project for the Next American Century) folks; and they had made their intentions crystal clear in 1998 or thereabouts.

That is why, I would like us to spend some time examining the folks behind Obama and the folks behind McCain.

My correspondent in India writes that Obama's heart is in the right place and that Obama presents a challenge to entrenched interests from the US to beyond US shores, such as GHQ, Rawalpindi. (i.e., we should be looking at the entire war, not just one battlefield).

Your thoughts?

Perhaps you folks should approach issues with honesty rather than trying to twist them into weapons for injuring opponents. The hate is impossible to hide. As the signature paragraph demonstrates the "evisceration" to the fourth is considerably less important than injuring Bush and telecomms.

Yes, just as important as the Fourth Amendment is the issue of war crimes; the violation of the Geneva Conventions and more particularly, US Code Title 18

http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/2441.html

(click on signature).

Major General Antonio Taguba:

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account…The commander-in-chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture."

With so much to execrate about this President, fixating on the Fourth Amendment seems so, so petty.

The good news is that unlike the pusillanimous Americans, we are told by a commenter on turcopolier that some magistrates in various European locales are preparing to indict and try should any of a various list of US officials land up in their jurisdictions. To which my main reaction is "Hallelujah!".