Obama Unveils His Inner Cheney
In this passage of Obama's speech yesterday he lays out a system of indefinite detention of innocents that is illegal, against basic human rights and against all morals. It is Cheney at his worst simply clad in new cloth.
Now, finally, there remains the question of detainees at Guantanamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people. And I have to be honest here—this is the toughest single issue that we will face. We’re going to exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at Guantanamo who pose a danger to our country. But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States. Examples of that threat include people who’ve received extensive explosives training at al Qaeda training camps, or commanded Taliban troops in battle, or expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans. These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.
Let me repeat: I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture—like other prisoners of war—must be prevented from attacking us again. Having said that, we must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded. They can’t be based simply on what I or the executive branch decide alone. That’s why my administration has begun to reshape the standards that apply to ensure that they are in line with the rule of law. We must have clear, defensible, and lawful standards for those who fall into this category. We must have fair procedures so that we don’t make mistakes. We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified.
This is all terribly wrong.
- Someone got explosive trainings? So what - most soldiers on this world have received such.
- Someone led the Taliban in battle? So what - the Taliban ain't al-Qaeda and had a right to defend their country against invaders.
- Someone expressed allegiance to Osama bin Laden? So what - pledging allegiance is not harming anyone.
- Someone wants to kill Americans? So what - first they may have a good reason and second if they try, the police and the court system can take care of them. How many Americans say each day "I am going to kill that sucker." Will they now all be indefinitely imprisoned without trial and without being found guilty of something?
Posted by b on May 22, 2009 at 11:01 UTC | Permalink
Obama broke his promise ? I thought it was the Senate.
Posted by: Parviz | May 22 2009 14:03 utc | 2
How many Americans say each day "I am going to kill that sucker." Will they now all be indefinitely imprisoned without trial and without being found guilty of something?
Not yet...but it's in the pipeline. Ever see Minority Report? Build it....and they will come.
Posted by: Obamageddon | May 22 2009 14:21 utc | 3
Obamageddon: minority report was based on a short story by Philip K. Dick. if you haven't read any of his works, i would highly recommend doing so. imho he is not just a science-fiction writer, but one of america's most important philosophers of the latter half of the 20th century.
as for the O morph, Paul Craig Roberts says the same.
In a signing statement this month, Obama abandoned his promise to protect whislte-blowers who give information of executive branch illegality to Congress.Obama is making even more expansive claims of executive power than Bush. As Bruce Fine puts it: “In principle, President Obama is maintaining that victims of constitutional wrongdoing by the U.S. government should be denied a remedy in order to prevent the American people and the world at large from learning of the lawlessness perpetrated in the name of national security and exacting political and legal accountability.”
Obama, in other words, is committed to covering up the Bush regime’s crimes and to ensuring that his own regime can continue to operate in the same illegal and unconstitutional ways.
the real question is how much power does the prez actually have?
Posted by: Lizard | May 22 2009 14:50 utc | 4
Obama: We've imprisoned people under harsh and even torturous conditions, people who have done nothing and so can't be prosecuted. Many of these people, I'm told, were provided to us merely to receive a bounty, to settle a personal grudge or for other petty reasons. Now if we turn these people loose then what can we expect them to do, forgive and forget? Of course not. Would you?
It's an understandable fact that many of these wrongly treated people will seek revenge against the United States for their unwarranted treatment. We have already seen that this is the case with people we have released. Therefore, we can never free these remaining prisoners whom we have converted to potential terrorists. While they are innocent of any wrongdoing, allowing them to seek revenge for the terrible way we have treated them is not an option.
Obama's a moral coward and a political snake in the grass.
His message is that we should close Guantanamo because it compromises our security instead of closing Guantanamo because we want to send a message to the world that what we did was nothing short of criminal and as an example to the world we will cease and desist from any further illegal detainment of prisoners of war and we will outlaw any further use of torture. Torture will be defined in the most liberal manner so there is no chance that legal machinations will allow abominable acts to be justified by ambiguous language. The rule will be that if it looks, smells and feels like torture, then it is torture. Torture is not only inhumane and morally repugnant but it also is completely ineffective in gaining accurate and operable intelligence. Pursuant to that, an independent investigation chaired by a panel of ethics experts will be inculcated and those responsible for the heinous acts will be brought to justice and charged with war crimes, accordingly.
That would be change I could start to believe in, but fat chance of that happening. Obama's stance is damage control, not justice. He plays for the same team who sponsored and sanctioned Cheney's and Rumsfeld's abominable behavior. Same manufacturer, different brand, same result; a confiscation of the metaphorical soul of humanity...or what's left of it.
Posted by: Obamageddon | May 22 2009 14:55 utc | 6
@Don Bacon
This is so wrong it makes my head hurt. These people need to be given a fair trial or released. No IFs, ANDs, or BUTs. Sorry, but Americans should accept the consequences of their mistreating prisoners of war.
Hey Lizard, yeah, I know Dick well. I love his stuff and agree that he was more a philosopher than a sci-fi writer.
Dick's not a genious, he's just adroitly extrapolating a trajectory. I agree with his prescient extrapolations and the stylistic flair in which he presents his calculations.
Posted by: Obamageddon | May 22 2009 15:32 utc | 8
Franz Kafka is alive and well in the United States when the national news has an important debate between keeping the resistance fighters in jail forever or also torturing them too, in the meantime.
The eighth forbidden word on American television is “occupation”.
Posted by: VietnamVet | May 22 2009 15:36 utc | 9
The FBI has arrested four men over an alleged terror plot to attack a synagogue, a Jewish community center and a military base in New York. The men are being held “on charges arising from a plot to detonate explosives near a synagogue in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, New York.” The four had also planned to use Stinger surface-to-air guided missiles “shoot military planes located at the New York Air National Guard Base at Stewart Airport in Newburgh, New York, the government claims.
Now these are clearly dangerous people. Considering that Gitmo prisoners haven't been charged with anything, according to the Obama Doctrine the Bronx Four should definitely not be prosecuted but should be imprisoned forever, preferably not on US Soil. "These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States." They should be kept in "prolonged detention" which of course would be "carefully evaluated and justified."
Unfortunately (for Obama) these four men are expected to appear in court in White Plains, New York, today. Clearly the Obama Doctrine is not consistent and therefore makes no sense.
I know! How about some sort of international criminal court?
Posted by: biklett | May 22 2009 16:01 utc | 11
Don, is your latest comment at #10 satire? If so, it's rather obtuse. If these guys were really dangerous, they wouldn't be on trial right now. They'd be working for our intelligence services with full immunity from accountability for their actions.
These stooges are a farcical sideshow when juxtaposed with the manufacturers of high fructose corn syrup.
Posted by: Obamageddon | May 22 2009 16:07 utc | 12
Today's LA Times has a cover photo of Obama and Cheney, and presents the two men as somehow being in contradiction of each other, which I found telling. The media's still spinning the "one side vs another" meme - they just cannot put it together that these two men are basically one in the same.
Except one's a white guy, and the other's Dick Cheney. DOH!!
Posted by: Jeremiah | May 22 2009 16:18 utc | 13
Ob,
My goal in writing is not necessarily to give my opinion, because who cares what my opinion is. Rather I often try to get people to think by taking them in a new direction (#5 & #10 above). I know it might be confusing, but the point is not what I think but how I can influence you to think, which I guess I did.
The US is on a path it cannot reverse. Well, not with Obi-man in charge at any rate.
Cruelty, torture even murder of random prisoners under dubious (in fact illegal, in view of the US signing various accords etc.) BS and procedures not to mention secret detentions and so on have now become part of the war on terra.
They serve power (it is thought), show muscle, strength, instill fear. The actions are presented as 'preventative'...
Other aims are accomplished as well.. Enemies can be painted as evil but if one can't subsequently then treat them as evil - inherently alien, non-human - there is something amiss. Killing poor Pashtun peasants is not on, they have to be demeaned in status so that the killing can proceed, as there is no other justification, really. Capturing evil ayrabs and indulging in barbarous practices requires for Americans a legal framework and justification of a kind. Otherwise too many military etc. wouldn't do it, would disobey.
Not flash news I know, but history apparently repeats itself, muted by the soporific jingles on the blue screen. The public airing about torture and the the arguments about what is permissible, the moral justifications for whatever action, serve to accustom an inure the public, to dim then annul any moral sense.
Some torture ends up by being fine, or functionally necessary - to save American lives or whatnot. It is a slippery slope that is historically documented. The US public seems on the whole (?) to be completely indifferent, and the trigger of 9/11 and al Quaida still works like a charm.
This is completely normal for a populace who is used to belligerence abroad and the myth of peace at home, has an exaggerated and incorrect view of self-worth as a nation, keeps a rigorous distance from any kind of 'problem' - political correctness and scandals etc. prevent any action - and moreover who don't trust their Gvmt. in the sense of not being involved in.any collective action, having any allegiance beyond the trivial folklore of flags or pres worship, want to be left alone, just don't think communal decisions lead to anything positive - each to his own. freedom and all that.
Harsh perhaps (hypocrisy being an unforgiveable fault in the eyes of many) but lets not forget ex. the French in Algeria, Saddam, etc.
Posted by: Tangerine | May 22 2009 16:39 utc | 15
Don 10) You have to learn to NOT take the news at face value. Four stooges acted upon by Israeli agents provocateurs to make meaninglessly effete threats, are now charged with possession of **weapons of mass destruction** in an attempt to blow up, we're told, Jewish temples and US military bases. How convenient! You'll also notice a rash of Holocaust television earlier this month, reminding US that Hebron and Alexandria are the true Axis of Evil. They're on CSPAN now, chopping liver.
If you want a parallel study that illustrates this, link: http://tinyurl.com/opnb4y
Obama cannot dictate to the dictators. The NTSB tape of AA 77 (Pentagon "attack") does not match the timeline or the video. The "attack" destroyed the new wing, with all the records of the $2.3 TRILLION the Warcrafters embezzled from the American People, just as the "attack" on the WTC 7 destroyed all the IRS and SEC records of the $10 TRILLION the Wallcrafters embezzled from the American People. And the much vaunted Y2K data backup warehouse in NJ requiremen, that should have had copies of all those documents was "never found", although all of YOUR bank records and stock transactions were all backed up and mirrored by a Israeli backdoor on the software, and even today all of our communications and transactions are being monitored by NSA subcontract with two Israeli fronts, even as the global media is propagandized.
Obama is just lucky to be given the airtime to voice liberal theology. The drums of war will soon drown him out, and Cheney's AntiChrist legions will assume the stage. It's just a matter of time until the US economic freefall becomes all too obvious, right about the time of the next stage of Final Solution Global Crusade of Terror.
Posted by: Molly Thatcher | May 22 2009 16:52 utc | 16
Tangerine, excellent points, especially this one:
The public airing about torture and the the arguments about what is permissible, the moral justifications for whatever action, serve to accustom an inure the public, to dim then annul any moral sense.
I will add that it's not just the U.S., though. Let's not forget China. Per Jeremiah's link:
Youths Shrug Off Tiananmen: Apathy has replaced protests in the square, and many Chinese see no need to learn from the 1989 crackdown.
Does anyone else see the stark irony in placing this article on the front page with their lead story? What have Americans learned from a history rife with torture? Of course, it's justifiable only when it's not "us" being tortured.
Posted by: Obamageddon | May 22 2009 17:02 utc | 17
Window dressing changes, and tons of lofty rhetoric, but no movement toward real change in the empire's system. That's what I'm reading from Obama. Could that change? I'm not holding my breath.
Posted by: ben | May 22 2009 19:24 utc | 20
Our vey own Col. Walter E. Kurtz. Except this time, instead of judging "his methods unsound," the Army has decided to let him lead the way.
"We must kill them. We must incinerate them. Pig after pig. Cow after cow. Village after village. Army after army. And they call me an assassin. What do you call it when the assassins accuse the assassin? They lie. They lie, and we have to be merciful, for those who lie. Those nabobs. I hate them. I do hate them."
"But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that … but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means."
"..and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us, and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember … I … I … I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized … like I was shot … like I was shot with a diamond … a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God … the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men … trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love … but they had the strength … the strength … to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly."
"You have to have men who are moral … and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling … without passion … without judgment … without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us."
"Have you ever considered any real freedoms? Freedom from the opinions of others...even the opinions of yourself?"
"I worry that my son might not understand what I've tried to be."
Yep. Walter Fucking Kurtz. Welcoming us to the Apocalypse. And you thought it was just a movie.
triangulating ? No, this isn't triangulating. He knows he was put there to end this evil un-american bullshit, but is doing the opposite.
Obama decides the only thing wrong with Bush's policies is that they weren't done well enough.
So he's going to make sure he chisels Bush's policies in stone, cleans them up, makes them permanent and part of the United States legal framework.
sub rosa and cohesion Policy...
Posted by: George Oilwell | May 22 2009 20:57 utc | 21
Been perusing the front pages for a while, posted a few samples online:
It strikes me how the papers are framing the two men as somehow diametrically opposed - they are "tangling" or "hostile" in some way. This is complete theater.
But what *really* got my attention was the two characters themselves - Obama and Cheney, being presented as equals. One of these characters is the current sitting president, and the other is the *former* VP. Where is the current VP, Joe Biden? The ex-codpiece in Chief?
Of course, it may all be nothing, but I find the preponderance of newspapers framing the issue similarly very interesting.
Posted by: Jeremiah | May 22 2009 22:16 utc | 22
And the train kept a rollin...
Governor plans to completely eliminate welfare for families
Posted by: Uncle $cam | May 22 2009 23:17 utc | 23
[comment by Debs is Dead via email]
My the national socialists are getting bombastic aren't they, but just in case anyone should say they were too over the top, there is a new line of defence of "I didn't say what I meant, I was just being an asshole".
Anyway on to stuff that matters. Firstly however bad China treats it's citizens it isn't in the business of exporting that treatment elsewhere so essentially it is none of our business. (especially us being citizens of other countries whose treatment of their citizens is frequently worse).
It would be nice if China cleaned up it's act but since even 100% success on that would still leave hundreds of millions of citizens of other countries living in terror of becoming a target of a deliberately misguided drone packed with enough high explosive to blow them and everyone that ever mattered in their existence into a fine pink mist, an aerosol of randomly distrubuted body parts, what ever China does is low down the list of wrongs in need of righting.
Chris Floyd makes a good point when he offers himself up for the defense of Cheney, Bush and the rest of that rabble, in the minuscule odds chance they should ever be made to face trial for their crimes.
Faced with prosecution for their admitted deeds, the principals of the Bush Administration would have only one defense: precedent. They would have to show that their actions had been accepted practice in American government for many, many years -- from the very beginning, in fact -- and had never been regarded as prosecutable offenses before. To imprison them now -- or even execute them -- for carrying on the standard policies and practices of bipartisan governance stretching back for generations would surely constitute cruel and unusual punishment. It would be selective prosecution. It would be nothing less than the "criminalization of political differences" -- for the historical record clearly shows that aggression and torture have always been treated in the American system as political implements, tools of political policy, and not as criminal matters.
This is as it has ever been since amerikans first targetted the indigenous people of the east coast of the North American continent. A whitefella pokes an unwhite person with a stick, the unwhite person responds so then the whitefella cries out "This is no good boys I done been wronged" and then all the whitefellas get together overwhelmed with mock outrage and slaughter every man woman and child who is a/ close at hand and b/ unlucky enough to be unwhite.
Of course the land and water and other resources which are now vacant were only ever a side issue. (Shit better put up my umbrella it's been raining pigshit ever since those damned flu ridden things sprouted wings).
Alex Cockburn makes this same point in this weeks Friday round up:
Not so long ago CounterPuncher Prof. Bruce Jackson of SUNY, Buffalo, sent us an illustration from the May 22, 1902 issue of the original (pre-Hearst) Life. The only military action the US had going at the time was in the Philippines, where Pershing was fighting the Moros -- Muslims who wanted independence from US rule. A pipe-smoking GI pours water into a funnel held in the mouth of a barefoot prisoner by another GI, who sits on the prisoner's genitals and points a pistol at his throat.
Incidentally the Moro people are still resisting after more than a 100 years of water boarding. When I visited Mindanao on a trade union study trip in the late 80's they were still commie guerillas that amerika was arming and training the filipinos from the more northerly islands to slaughter. Since 1990 and the changes wrought by the fall of the 'soviet bloc' the commies have been morphed into muslim fundamentalists so the funds required to continue their genocide, makes its passage through amerikan legislatures, relatively comment free, I spose.
The Moros (a horrble slang terminology which seeks to coagulate an entire spectrum of indigenous cultures into one ugly and easy to hate mass - however the people themselves have since adopted it as a badge worn with pride as evidence of their centuries of resistance) haven't changed noticeably in that time the few who correspond still sign off letters as 'brother' which I suppose we used to regard as 'comrade' but are now encouraged to believe is some sorta weird sem-fag muslim carry-on. Fancy that considering other men who you are not related to as your brother. There should be a law agin it. oops better /snark - just in case.
I have never been able to figure out what it is that the people of the Southern Philippines are meant to have done to deserve this horror story of amerikan oppression. True Mindanao is a bloody big island rich in resources but during much of the time that whitey has been slaughtering the people there, bigger chunks of much richer planet earth were left alone.
I suspect Mindanao has a touch of the Afghanistans about it. That is it can't be allowed to stand as a symbol of successfully giving whitey the finger.
Anyway the point I wanted to make was that nothing will change with amerikan crimes as long as doing something is believed to be sitting around writing nasty posts about the better way to skin a cat.
If anyone ever did imagine that this problem could be fixed at the ballot box surely they have been disabused of that illusion by the events of the last few months. That means if you really do want amerika to change, you better get organised and do something about it.
[end comment by Debs is Dead via email - b]
Don Bacon's comment is exactly right--and this is exactly why the whole problem of Gitmo is bigger than Bush, Cheney, or Obama.
US has made enemies--bitter, implacable enemies--with its actions of the past. However much we want to chalk it up to Cheney and Bush and pretend that everything is reset to status quo ante with the accession of the Obama regime, the truth is that we are still US and the people whom we antagonized are enemies of US. These people aren't saints--they will not forgive, Obama or no Obama. They'll seek revenge, like every normal person. They won't give US the benefit of doubt on the account of Obama. So, we will be stuck in hell for a long time, filled with the people whom we've wronged through our sins, no matter who our leader is. Naturally, of course, we will want to minimize the harm to us in the short term--and to do so, we will do more violence, violate more principles, and make more implacable enemies, until we no longer have the strength to do it and have to face the music. This will go on a long time, no matter what happens in the domestic US political scenes.
Posted by: kao_hsien_chih | May 23 2009 5:05 utc | 25
facing an anticipated global shortage of fossil fuels, not to mention the declining influence of its sole superpower status or its financial solvency, the u.s. govt will see itself being forced to step up its ride on the dark side & have to get nastier w/ those unexceptional nations/peoples. two, three, many more spinsters like obama will be needed to make u.s.americans feel better about themselves in the process.
Posted by: b real | May 23 2009 6:26 utc | 26
U$ 23) That ain't nuthin'...a thousand miles to the north up in Seattle, Governor Gregoire announced her new Climate Initiative, the first time in living memory that government has instituted what will become a $947 BILLION "climate tax" bleed on its own people, when there is absolutely no evidence, and certainly no laboratory confirmation, that CO2 is a significant cause of recent imperceptible warming, or that there ever was a stasis in the cycle of glaciation, that reducing CO2 by some kind of magic retro-genie back to the Stone Age, will affect climate in the least.
Walk through you local supermarket. Aisle after aisle of whirring freezer cases full of frozen tombstones, compressors burning kWHrs 24x7x365 until the pull date, then another tombstone burning another 1000 kWHr ad infinitum. Beginning tonight, the charger on some disabled veterans wheel chair will be taxed just the same as a freezer-burned tombstone pizza. Beginning tonight, the incubator keeping a premie alive will be charged the same tax as the lights flaming the debauch of Las Vegas.
But forget for a moment, that tonight the American Dream went into retrograde and permanent recession. The climate tax will affect the entire world, if not directly, if not agreed upon, then by tariffs. The cold chain in India and China will remain a dream for more than a billion people. In India, 40 MILLION tonnes of food will rot, and 120 MILLION people will starve. In China, those numbers are even higher.
The Final Solution will come not with a bang, but a whisper, ping of a dying ember.
http://www.navigateconferences.com/downloads/CooLogistics%20-%20Chilikuri.pdf
Now you'll begin to see the insanity, the bad science, the greed, 'green grants' for $Bs in nonviable solutions like 'clean coal' fraud, or 'bioalgae oil' fraud.
Our government sees that $947 BILLION windfall, it sees climate change legislation opening the door to a new era of socialist oligarchy, where the will of the people is subsumed forever to the technocrats, and within that press of stones, the worms and weasels whose exchange contracts and hedges on energy amount to $600 TRILLION.
Cheney, Obama, war crimes, oilogopoly, none of that will matter. "Green jobs", like gas station attendants, like satellite dish installers, the manufacturing will all be done in China, only paying jobs will be the hordes of new technocrats, launching like may flies from the surface of the pond, choking your face and hair, little technocrat gnats and no-seeum's in every home, in every shop, little green-shirted econazis telling you to turn out your lights, and stop watering your lawn, and pay $500 a year to relicense your vehicle, while the lights on the towers in Gotham and Babylon burn like diamonds, and the political whores and the lechers swirl in giddy drunkenness on capitol lawns. $947 BILLION dollars a year, their bacon is saved!!
"Climate change!" "Change you must believe!" "Yes we can!" In the blink of an eye tonight, while you were reading a book, or watching TV, or drinking a beer in some bar, it began. Silently, like a zephyr swirling the snow on some arctic ice shield, slowly growing, moaning, fiercer, roaring, louder, it's coming, and finally here.
The Whirlwind. American Katrina. The Carbon Tax & Trade Charade... Our Chernobyl.
Posted by: Pierre Lingus | May 23 2009 7:11 utc | 27
Obama's a moral coward and a political snake in the grass. wrote Obamageddon.
One could discuss the fact that no US admins today will inculpate or prosecute previous US admins (torture issue), but there are ways around it, in the style of pre-emptive pardons, very strange that, but never mind for now, and other crowd pleasing moves could be used. That is a genuine problem for Obiman but it could be imaginatively overcome. Seen from the outside.
Obama made an electoral promise to black farmers. There are very few of them, maybe around 1, 2 %. The land being a means of production -to use old hat terminology- they have been driven off it though historically one might expect that they, on the ground, with knowledge, familiarity, a willingness to work, could gain a stake. Nope. Didn’t happen.
Black farmers receive far less than white counterparts, sometimes no, subsidies from the Gvmt. that runs big Agri. Obama promised to correct that injustice. He has since reneged.
See the Black Agenda blog, one article:
http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/black-farmers-confront-obama>link
from:http://www.blackagendareport.com/> Black Agenda Report
I don’t have the details so refer to that blog or - > look for other sources. See how disgusting that is, B.O. was elected by a groundswell of human rights anti-racist groups, so called minorities, and so on, and the simple things, cheap even, he could have done he turns his back on pronto.
Posted by: Tangerine | May 23 2009 13:55 utc | 28
yikes it is hard to post with even one link or leaving the thing on the screen for an hour while the veggies are peeled and the next door little boy is restored to happiness....
Posted by: Tangerine | May 23 2009 13:57 utc | 29
Yep, Tangerine, the O man fooled those who voted for him based on the color of his skin. I know a few who did just that. They didn't give a damn who or what he was.....they were voting for him because he was Black. How pathetic. As it turns out, the O man's only chocolate on the outside. He has a creamy white filling.....or is it green? Both?
Posted by: Obamageddon | May 23 2009 14:35 utc | 30
Aspiring white, though that sounds peculiar, as he need not. After all he has no African-American roots at all (except his wife, possible acquired for the purpose, from the top tier, like Condi class, but who am I, and such remarks are maybe out of bounds, so just forget it..)
He is tanned, cosmopolitan, sexually ambiguous, in with the financiers, glib and elegant, from Chicago, and was possibly one of the selected and held on hold in a wait and see policy. I reckon if I was running things I’d have 7 or so in the wings, on hold, see how it works out. After all paying for them is no big deal, they can go to think tanks and have mansions with pools and some stakes in some big corp, and maybe in the senate or at the head of some agency, whatever. Then you can pick and choose, who is the most pliable, suitable, sellable.
Obama knew he was on the list, or even expected, planned, to top it. The man has one qualification only, he has written two books.
Both about himself!
Bush was a complete disaster. No question. Obama is something new, something different, and it is taking ppl a long time to catch on, measure what has happened.
Posted by: Tangerine | May 23 2009 19:50 utc | 31
Thx for the Floyd link - great writing, that one.
My best to Debs.
Posted by: Jeremiah | May 23 2009 20:35 utc | 32
The comments to this entry are closed.
we already have some of the most reprehensible criminals in the world housed in US prisons; sociopaths that would not only kill you, but defile your corpse and eat your flesh. obviously this line of reasoning will never be considered by the MSM.
even as a cynic who expected O man to be a monumental disappointment, the speed and degree of his promise-breaking is surprising.
Posted by: Lizard | May 22 2009 13:22 utc | 1