So, remind me again why I'm supposed to be so excited about Mr. Obama's presidency?
Just to recap the last couple of months in which Obama:
-tried to court the Evangelicals with a proposed extension/expansion of Bush’s faith-based initiatives program. Oh, but he wants to put in anti-discrimination policies for anybody using federal funds. Yeah, that’s tenable. “Faith-based”-organizations, mainly churches, are already tax-free entities. Let them raise their own funds. Why my tax dollars should go towards organizations whose policies/beliefs I disagree with is beyond me.
-delivered a hawkish speech to AIPAC; back in May he gave a very thoughtful and somewhat nuanced interview with Jeffery Goldberg over at Atlantic Monthly. Sure there was some overt pandering which makes sense given the apparent uncertainty Jewish-American voters have about him, but he came across as fair-minded and willing to engage in actual debate. In contrast, the speech he gave at AIPAC would make you think he had a double-jointed spine.
Alright, he’s a politician and, as Crazy Uncle Wright said, he does what politicians do. I get that. However, if you compare this to how he engages with his black constituency, it makes a fellow feel a bit uneasy. Obama feels comfortable addressing our collective shortcomings (obviously to the chagrin of Jesse "Castrate'em" Jackson") as fathers, brothers and sons, yet he can't do the same when speaking about Israel’s missteps vis-à-vis the Palestinians? He goes so far as to say "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided." Is he campaigning for president of the United States or membership in Likud?
-voted for the FISA "compromise" - exactly what was the compromise here? I defy anyone to explain it. Anyone who sees this bill as a compromise seems disingenuous or uninformed. If you have the time, I’d highly recommend reading some of Glenn Greenwald’s extensive dissection and analysis of what this new FISA amendment actually entails.
Let's be clear: this “compromise” leaves the 4th amendment riddled with buckshot. It doesn’t curtail the executive branch’s snooping power; to the contrary: it legitimizes it and expands its breadth. As explained in this article, it's not as if the government (read: NSA) has a room full of guys with headphones on monitoring calls. Nah, this is more like something out of The Matrix. They have supercomputers that are able to snag and sift through terabytes of information and flag keywords and phrases in a nanosecond. They take this culled data and archive it indefinitely in a database. The telecoms who provide unfettered access in clear violation of our rights as private citizens then stand up and say: “Hey we were just doing our patriotic duty when called upon by the President.” Bull. Does anyone believe for a second that these companies didn't do what was in the best interest of the shareholders and the bottom line? How much in government contracts does AT&T have? How big is their K Street office? This isn't conspiracy theory, just an acknowledgment of the quid pro quo ethos of our political system.
So our brave Democrat-controlled Congress just voted retroactive immunity for crimes (and make no mistake, these were felony acts) that we will neither know nor ever be allowed to know the full extent of. Not only that but we're saying: hey, you broke the law and you can continue to do so into the indefinite future. We just got sold out. It’s so egregious, yet this seems to be eliciting at most a shoulder shrug from most corners, and anybody who calls attention to it is being branded a left-wing extremist. I don’t think the people of Wisconsin are in the habit of electing extremists though, so maybe you’ll listen to this guy:
Understand the extent of this: the White House-directed NSA has the authority and capability to warehouse all forms of electronic communication between the U.S. and any foreign location; email, text-messages, phone calls, faxes, voicemails--you name it, they can access it. They can do this whether or not it is demonstrably related to terrorism. They can do this whether or not there is a demonstrable threat to national security. Yeah, no room for abuse there.
Seriously, who am I voting for? If he can't stand up for something so obvious, what will he stand up for? This is the type of leadership that will reform our nightmarish market driven healthcare system? Hey, we might not stand up to the telecomm lobby, but we'll stand up to the AMA and Insurance lobby? This is the administration that will rein in Wall Street? Give me a f#$#ing break. To borrow a quote from Bubba: “This whole thing is the biggest fairytale I’ve ever seen.”
But Obama gets us out of Iraq! Right. Just from a logistic point of view, it seems we'd be out of there regardless of who was in charge. The war is too costly and our army is stretched to its limits. We have 160K troops currently deployed in Iraq plus an additional 25K in Afghanistan. Both candidates will withdraw troops and both will leave a sizable U.S. presence. You can bank on that.
I was never an Obama-maniac, but I was enthusiastic about the prospect of his presidency. Right now, I’m finding it more difficult to call up such enthusiasm. All’s I wanted was a guy who was going to adhere to principle and not allow special interest and the Republicans to bully him. This was the big difference between Clinton and Obama. He seemed rooted in something that went beyond calculating how well a decision would poll. His stance against a gas tax holiday seemed to be further proof of this. He's not the other guy, and I’ll still punch his name come November. It’s just sad to realize that right now, that’s all I can look forward to: him not being the other guy (BTW isn't this the same murky platform that lost Kerry the election in '04? Well, that and those lunatic Swift-boat vets and that goofy wind-surfing photo). It falls so short of what seemed possible just a few months ago.
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4 comments:
I want to give Obama room for political maneuver. I want to give him room to pander. And, really, give him room to not be exactly the pol I want him to be. I've defended him thus before: I don't expect, viz. Samantha Power, that an express withdrawal may be possible, but that he needs to throw red meat to his base.
But the FISA thing is incredible. One of the most damaging traits in modern American politics is that the wicked go unpunished. This started, at least, with Ford's pardon of Nixon. What rubbish! It would heal the nation? No, it will lead directly to Iran-Contra, and the lack of prosecutions in that case lead directly to the cooked intelligence for the Iraq War.
There should be no such thing as 'retroactive immunity' in our politics. What a massively damaging thing that is.
Getting close to a blogspot journal, by the way. Let you know. My desires for a name (wickerman.blogspot...) were put off so I'm in the market for inspiration.
Yes indeed. It's interesting to me that the New Yorker generated such full-throated outrage while the Democrat's collective cave on FISA only managed a "meh" in most corners. The common refrain is "it's just not that important." I think that attitude is not only cynical, but it also makes me wonder
No one will be prosecuted over what amounted to repeated violations of our Constitutional rights, just as no one will be prosecuted for the fiasco that is Gitmo. It's as if once you reach a certain level of power, the law is just some theoretical constraint to be haggled over.
I was listening to Talk of the Nation on NPR this afternoon and the host was interviewing a former interpreter who visited Gitmo on a few occasions and was writing a book about her experiences. She recounted some of the horrible treatment the detainees were subjected to regularly. A caller asked her why we should care about a bunch of terrorists. She calmly explained that a significant percentage of the detainees were most likely not guilty of any crime (as per CIA analysis) and that in fact the gov't had been quietly letting detainees go over the past year or so. The caller still didn't get what the big deal was; they were still terrorist in his eyes. I think his feelings are representative of a large part of the American public. Sure the genesis of these feelings goes back to 9/11, but we've lived under an administration that has fostered these irrational beliefs and used them to subvert the checks and balances inherent in our political system.
I don't expect Obama to be a character off of "The West Wing," but I do expect him to stand-up when it really counts. When you have AT&T, a huge benefactor from the FISA "compromise", acting as a corporate sponsor for the Democratic Nat'l Convention, it goes beyond being unseemly. Yet no one wants to call a spade a spade for fear of being branded a hysteric left-wing nut. How about we let defendants pay for their judges' vacations before trial? It's just ridiculous.
Your arrival in the bloggerverse is anxiously awaited.
I'm constantly at the edge of my seat, endlessly rocking, trying to tab the moment when Napoleon takes the throne as emperor. When Republican Rome gets used to the emperor idea. That moment won't happen for us literally, but the course of patronage and peerage has clearly infected the body politic.
It goes fairly deep and long: one only has to glance through OSS/CIA projects since their inception... but perhaps that's another thing than the corruption entailed in inviting corporations into those secluded gardens where decisions are made. At what point is the frog boiled?
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