https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/01/obama-drones-strikes-civilian-deaths
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/21/obama-worse-than-bush
What makes these clips so compelling is that they show not evolution, but transformation. On this issue, at least, Obama has become the very thing he was against.
I think Obama always was and is a politician, so he doesn’t have to make sense or be “morally sophisticated” (as they say).
… Obama’s room for maneuver is constrained by the institutions in which he is now embedded
This is a cheap and tired rationalization. Everyone’s “room for maneuver are constrained by the institutions in which we are and will always be embedded”, but we choose to do what we do based on our own moral compass. George Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Daniel Elsberg, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, … were very much “embedded” too; as so-called “’embedded’ journalists” within the U.S. military are …
As I wrote the day before Obama’s first inauguration:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/jan/19/obama-inauguration
“He has been elected to represent the interests of the most powerful country in the world. Those will not be the same interests as those of the powerless.”
America did not come by that power through its own innate genius. It acquired it, as do all empires, in no small part through war, invasion, subterfuge and exploitation. Spying and lying about it comes with the job description for which Obama applied and was reappointed.
That shows how little have you learned about gringos. They are the master race:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism
Of course, when they go around invading poor nations, in their rampage killing people who can’t defend themselves on an equal basis, they do it because as “good Christians” they hear “God” telling them “to fight for ‘freedom’, ‘justice’ and ‘democracy’ in the universe”, for “the greater good” … it is terrorists who kill us for having a “free” media …
Perhaps, I am not a good Christian. I don’t hear “God” telling me things. I even disbelieve, haven’t found actual proof of “God” saying such things to anybody.
None of this is inevitable. But changing it cannot be entrusted to a single person at the top. It will change because there is a demand from Americans that is both large in number, deep in commitment and active in pursuit, to enable a fundamental change in America’s role in the world. That does not exist yet.
Those are more cheap and tired rationalizations. Wouldn’t you expect more, better from a “constitutional lawyer” who sat for 12 years in law school to then throughly wipe his black @ss with the very letter and spirit of the supposedly sacrosanct U.S. constitution?
Where Obama is concerned, this excuses nothing – but explains a great deal. Given the timidity of his campaign agenda, his supporters must, to some extent, own their disappointment.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/10/struggle-obama-voters-wish-better
He never said he was a radical, nor proposed anything radical, even if he was happy at one time to be marketed as one.
Yes, all he said was “yes we can” to mesmerized the hopes of a significantly large part of gringo populations. I was one of the idiots whose eyes was wet for a moment during his inauguration speech, when he turned to his beautiful daughters and told them “daddy is now U.S. President …”
Obama, however did something very good to me. He consolidated my belief about not participating in the farce called voting, in “representative democracy”. To me it is quite literally like factually believing in voo-doo. I did vote for him because a friend on mine (the priest at St. Mary’s in Manhattanville Harlem) asked me to “just vote for him”.
Just a few months passed and all those (mostly) ladies at church who had lived through segregation and the civil rights movement and had been making parallelism between him Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and brother Malcolm were wondering: “what happened?!?” (some people even wondered if he was mentally OK). To me Obama has been one of the greatest bullsh!tters who have ever walked the earth. “The Obama effect” will resonate in U.S. consciousness for years. He morally disenfranchised the glimmers of hope some people still had in “the system” … I wonder to which extent it will help Trump.
When given the choice of representing the interests of those who voted for him and the interests of American military and economic hegemony, he chose the latter. That’s not the change people believed in.
At least Bush was part of them, so he didn’t need to suck it up harder in order to become one: “some people call you the elite, I call you my base”
// __ George W Bush – The Elite My Base
youtube.com/watch?v=mn4daYJzyls
~
truth and peace and love,
RCL
