Obama’s Statement on Fast and Furious

Obama’s Statement on Fast and Furious

by Linh Dinh / June 22nd, 2012

Good evening, my fellow Americans. I’m here tonight to clear up some misperceptions about Operation Fast and Furious. Many of you are confused, even angry, and I fully understand. Why did the United States sell thousands of guns to vicious Mexican drug cartels, so that they could kill many people, including Americans? Doesn’t this make us accomplices to murders?

Of course, it does, but you must keep in mind that our hands are always stained by the blood of millions and millions of victims. That is the story of our history, it is our creed, because there is an awesome responsibility to being the greatest country on earth. We routinely preach peace and practice mass murder. Still, what was the point of Fast and Furious? Why did we give guns to our supposed enemy so they could shoot us?

The name is taken from a B movie, by the way. It’s about a fellow who breaks out of jail, kidnaps a woman, roughs her up a little, which makes her fall in love with him. Together, they then try to escape to Mexico. Michelle and the girls hated this film, and I didn’t care for it either. Violence on women is never excusable, under any circumstance. I just had Jeremy Lin, Eli Manning and Jimmie Rollins in town to tape a message condemning violence against women. Got to get those chick votes out. Give me some. In short, a woman should never be physically violated under any situation, context or lighting. Unless she’s hit by a drone in her sleep, that is. We don’t live in a perfect world.

When I came into office, I had no gray hair and never rambled, but now I do. Such is the stress of being your President. Back to Fast and Furious. Attorney General Holder explained that the idea was to track these guns to the hiding places and upper echelons of the drug cartels, so that we could catch or kill the bad guys, just like we did Bin Laden in Pakistan, but, of course, this rationale is nonsense, because our brave and hardworking agents can only do so much in Mexico. It is a separate country, after all. Not that we care too much about that, frankly. In any case, we lost track of these weapons almost immediately, often even before they crossed the Rio Grande.

But you shouldn’t blame the Attorney General for blowing smoke up your crack. We all do, all the time. Harassed by an ambitious pitbull like Representative Issa, it was hard for Mr. Holder to keep his composure, and he was right to characterize his adversary’s antic as “political theater,” though everything in Washington, down to the last screw on each door jamb, is political theater.

Back to your questions: Why did we provide guns to these mass-murdering, decapitating and torturing drug dealers? Why did we strengthen these ruthlessly greedy and even sadistic people, sort of like us, actually, when we’re supposed to fight them in the War on Drugs?

First of: The United States of America loves drug dealers. They have been our allies in war after war, including the Cold War and the War on Drugs. You must be familiar with The French Connection. Not too bad a movie. In real life, those Corsican gangsters were supported by our CIA. During the Vietnam War, we backed Chinese and Hmong drug lords operating out of Burma and Laos, with their opium and heroin being transported to markets on CIA planes. As our brave and honorable warriors fought the Communist menace, the CIA got many of these soldiers hooked on heroin. To fund America’s covert war against Nicaragua, we sold crack cocaine to African Americans, and now, in Afghanistan, this great, unparalleled country, a shining city on a hill, is again partnering with local drug dealers. Where there are drugs, America’s there to get in on the action.

And we have given guns to countless drug lords, so it’s no surprise we were caught arming the Sinaloa Cartel and even Los Zetas. Thanks to your addictions, these well-run organizations can funnel money to all these Mexican public servants, from the lowest to the highest. The honest ones, they kill. They also keep Americans too drugged up to rebel, so far, and I cross my fingers.

Let us remember that the British dumped opium on China to enrich themselves, debilitate the Chinese and fragment their society. With a much more exciting cocktail of drugs, not all of them chemical, your federal government is doing the same to you.

Many people have suggested that the quickest way to solve the drug problem is to legalize it. If drugs were legal, they would cost much less, thus cutting down greatly on the number of crimes committed by addicts. Legal drugs would also eliminate drug gangs, big and small, all except the biggest, of course. The CIA, one must remember, is a criminal organization with an extremely diversified portfolio. There isn’t a felony that it hasn’t or won’t commit. It can fix or tone down the Guatemalan President, for example, if he doesn’t stop making so much noise about legalizing drugs.

So now you see. Your ruling class won’t legalize drugs because it needs to make billions of dollars from illegal drugs and guns each year. Illegal narcotics fatten Wall Street, my puppet master, so who cares if thousands of cops, dealers, addicts and bystanders lie dead on bloody sidewalks from Juarez to Philly? This drug policy also provides a handy pretext to arrest vast swaths of America. Between that and the labyrinthine tax code, just about any of you can be branded a criminal. And if those fail, I can just declare you a terrorist!

So this is your country, America. We sell guns, drugs and porn, in the broadest sense of the word, and sponsor drug dealers, because that’s how we make loads of money. It’s all good. So with that, I wish you a pleasant good night. May God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.

Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a just released novel, Love Like Hate. He's tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union. Read other articles by Linh.

This article was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2012 at 8:01am and is filed under CIA, Drug Wars, Mexico, Obama.

Will Obama Have a Legacy?

Published on Saturday, June 23, 2012 by Common Dreams

Will Obama Have a Legacy?

by Ted Rall

 

In "The Book of Obama" I argue that Obama is America's Mikhael Gorbachev. Like Gorby, The One (Oprah's phrase) is the most progressive, decent and intelligent leader his system is willing and able to allow to rise to power; like the reformist of perestroika, Obama's fundamental not-so-badness—coupled with his…ineffectiveness? cluelessness? conservatism? exposes the fact that the system is the problem. That voting for a better/less evil leader can't bring about the changes we need, because what the 99% view as problems—unemployment, underemployment, the growing gap between rich and poor—are things that the system views as not merely desirable, but necessary. Its raison d'être.

Among progressives it's a given that Obama has been a disappointment. At my signings people keep asking me: Why? Why hasn't the president lived up to the hopes and dreams we invested in him? Sure, the Republicans have blocked him at every turn. But he doesn't seem to try.



Why not? Is he a wimp? Or were liberals wrong about him—was Obama an establishment conservative from the start?

I don't know what's in Obama's heart. Frankly, I don't care. It's all about policies: either you're for good policies, or you're not. If you are, you fight for them with everything you've got. If not…

Like most pundits, I tend to focus on the negative. So this week let's look at Obama's signature accomplishments, the things he actually did get done: healthcare reform, his statement support for gay marriage, and last week's Dream Act Lite, his order that Department of Homeland Security stop pursuing the approximately 800,000 young people who were brought to the US illegally.

It took three years for this President to do something that brought a smile to my face. So I owe him this: Nicely done, Mr. President. (Sure, it's just a political ploy, a play for the Hispanic vote. But other things Obama should do, but won't—unlimited unemployment benefits, assistance for foreclosure victims, a new WPA—would be popular too. Pandering to the people is called democracy.)

Millions of people—the lucky 800,000, their families and friends—finally have their foot in the door. Early signals from GOP bosses indicate reluctance, even if they win this fall, to revert to the bad old days of rounding up kids and deporting them to "homes" they don't know, whose languages they don't speak.
Yet, like so many of his more positive acts, it came later than it should. And it should have been built to last.
The Dream Act failed in December 2010, just after the Republican sweep in the Congressional midterms. It would have passed if not for the craven, bigoted "nay" votes of five Democratic senators spooked by the election results.

I keep thinking back to 2009. Democrats had both houses of Congress. A filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Obama enjoyed a worshipful media. Sky-high public opinion polls. Why didn't the president propose the Dream Act then, when it would probably have passed, sparing 800,000 kids terrible uncertainty—not to mention those who got swept up during the last three years? (While we're at it: what's the point of letting kids stay in the U.S. and deporting their parents?)

Back in 2009, was Team Obama guilty of political ineptitude? Obsessive focus on healthcare? We don't know. The result of their neglect of young immigrants amounted to political malpractice at least, bigotry at worst. (There were, after all, more deportations of undocumented immigrants under Obama than under Bush.)

Worse than too little and/or too late, Obama's announcement in support of gay marriage came so late that it might as well not have happened at all; by the time he spoke out, gay marriage had become a historical inevitability. Talk about political malpractice! What is more ineffectual than irrelevance? Like the Homeland Security directive on immigration, it came as big, good news to millions of people. But it could have been handled earlier, proactively, and—not incidentally—paying bigger dividends to the president's reelection effort.

Less clear but with broader implications was healthcare reform. "Have you had enough of Obamacare?" Tim Pawlenty asked a crowd at a pro-Mitt Romney rally. "Yes!" they shouted. But there is no Obamacare. Not yet. Even if the Supreme Court doesn't overturn the Administration's biggest achievement, it doesn't go into effect until 2014. After, perhaps, President Romney takes office. What was Obama thinking? If nothing else, wasn't he worried about his historical legacy?

My guess is that he cares less about his legacy, or changing things, than the political horse race. He likes winning as an individual more than he cares about changing the world.

Obama has a few chances left to prove me wrong. He could still close Gitmo by executive order. He could also propose a federal law codifying a women's right to an abortion, forcing the GOP to counter the 77 percent of Americans who told the most recent Gallup poll that they're pro-choice. It would be a bold move, one that would resolve the decades-long legal limbo that has left abortion rights in the hands of the Supreme Court. Is Obama incapable of bravery? Of vision? Or is he using the threat of a Romney SCOTUS to threaten women into voting for him?

No one knows.

All we can do is consider the president's actions.

Ted Rall is the author of the new books "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," and "The Anti-American Manifesto" . His website is tedrall.com.

Ten reasons why Mr. Obama is certain to lose the Presidential race in 2012.

June 17, 2012 at 12:40:53

Ten reasons why Mr. Obama will lose the Presidential race in 2012.

by Herbert Calhoun (about the author)

1. At best Mr. Obama has been a lackluster and even anemic Party leader and a  weak  President.   

The most cynical image of Mr. Obama is one showing him hiding behind the Oval Office desk, ducking all of the tough issues that come his way. Something he has done throughout his entire four-year term. Another is that he is the opposite of Harry Truman, the man who announced that the "Buck stops at the Oval office desk." For Mr. Obama, the "buck stopped with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reed," who he sent to the frontlines to do battle with the Republicans, in short to do most of his dirty work and then to take the fall for any and all his failures -- which indeed were many.

For four years, Mr. Obama has simply stayed aloof, above the fray, aloof both from the public and from the dirty business of governing. He has been America's "Black prima donna," repeatedly refusing to get his hands dirty, or to fight back at the Republicans, scared he may be characterized as an "angry black man." But now that he has his back up against the wall, he is back on the stump bouncing around out in the center of the ring like Rush Limbaugh. Most of us, his supporters, are asking: Where was he when we desperately needed a vigorous advocate of progressive causes at the dais of the Bully Pulpit?

But his most telling weakness has been the fact that he has not been much of a party leader, with Bill Clinton "out front" acting as his more illustrious "Assistant President," the party has drifted and languished without a coherent agenda or message. It underscores the fact that the Democrats as a party, are in a severe drift, simply follows the lead of the Republicans. Having no agenda of their own to speak of, and being unwilling to fight for progressive ideas and principles, Mr. Obama has been worse than ineffectual as a Party leader. He has not coordinated a party strategy designed to retake the Congress, which he will desperately need if he is to be an effective lame duck president. What this means to the average voter is that due primarily to Mr. Obama's own aloof prima donna-like performance, if he is re-elected it will just spell four more years of the same continuous Congressional gridlock that we have seen throughout his first four years. In these trying times, that would be a fate almost as bad as having GW back for another eight years.

As the "Blue Dogs" within the Democratic Party (like Joe Lieberman) have repeatedly shown, there is no down side to opposing their own party leader's initiatives. Leadership weaknesses do not get any worse than this. In contrast, when Republican Party members wander off the reservation, the Republican Party leader yanks their chains and disciplines them swiftly and rather brutally.

2. Mr. Obama is perceived to have double-crossed his base.

By abandoning them early on, in obvious pandering to the right wing, gratuitously referring to them as "whiners" and "professional liberals," Mr. Obama lost the faith of many progressives, who will now relish seeing him defeated, me included.   Our loyalty was never just to Mr. Obama the Black man, but to in his policies and to his vision for the country. And Mr. Obama has proven to us, his base, that at best he is little more than a moderate Republican, a Republican lite, as it were. In fact if one compares his record to that of President Richard Nixon, who progressives despised, Nixon comes out on top on the key progressive issues that we thought Mr. Obama would fight hard for. For instance, Nixon was stronger than Obama on the environment (he started the EPA, introducing the clear air clean and water act, OSHA, etc. Even on civil rights issues, Nixon was responsible for Affirmative Action and considered establishing inner city enterprise zones, etc.) For Obama, environmental and civil rights  issues  have both been off the table, as part of his not so subtle triangulating to the right. On the other hand and on the negative side, just like Mr. Nixon, Mr. Obama too has proven to be a calculating slick backroom Machiavellian operator: not exactly what his base thought he would be, but exactly what his Minister of 20 years predicted he would be.

3. Mr. Obama has no Democratic Agenda that he will fight for and seems not to know how to negotiate effectively.

In one of the most bizarre acts ever seen by a professional politician, Mr. Obama actually used the Republican rather than his own democratic agenda to set the terms of debate and as the basis for initiating all of his negotiations? He did this throughout his entire first term. Then, in a maneuver that in retrospect seems equally bizarre, having already out-sourced all of the negotiations to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reed, he then allowed them to trade away most of his political capital by repeatedly caving-in to every Republican demand, all as a unilateral and pre-emptive sacrifice to the non-existent altar of political bipartisanship.  

Without fail however, what invariably emerged, fit a predictable pattern that became the signature of Mr. Obama's first four years: He would stake out a position on the Republican side of the negotiating table, and then repeatedly cave in even further, until his opponents had everything they asked for and he had nothing but the crumbs that remained? Following his loses, he would then, as if choreographed, give a posturing, gauzy, post-negotiation speech claiming, like Neville Chamberlain, that he had heroically snatched victory from rather transparent defeats. Then he would serve up to us, his base, the residual loser's consolation prize of crumbs as if we were too stupid not to see that the Republicans had solidly beat him and won everything. With all of his smooth post-negotiation tap-dancing, Mr. Obama could do nothing to conceal the fact that all that was left for the public to see was a shameful continuous trail of him squandering all of his political capital by repeatedly caving to the Republicans. Sadly, this was done as a suicidal attempt to try to garner even a sliver of bipartisanism, always with the hope that the right would like him and embrace him as one of their own. But that too was a spectacular failure, as the Republicans, with Blue Dog democratic help, just repeatedly publicly snubbed, stiffed and insulted him.

4. Minority support for Mr. Obama is softer than the polls show, or that anyone could ever imagine.  

After four years of artfully dodging them, like they were the ugly date at the prom, neither Blacks nor Hispanics fully trust Mr. Obama, or have the same level of enthusiasm for his reelection appeals this time around as they did in 2008. Both believe that he backslid and triangulated on all issues dear to them. And given the way he treated them both, how could they not?

Even though the polls show that his black support remains strong, my anecdotal polls contradict this assessment. Most blacks profoundly distrust Mr. Obama because he has clearly and consciously "distanced " himself from them. Plus, he has not been out front on any of their issues, even when doing so would have been in the best interests of the country as a whole -- like improving the cities and a jobs program for the poor, etc.   In fact, even though his "Assistant President," Bill Clinton, has a warm and trustful relationship with inner city America, Mr. Obama has been unable to mouth the words "black," "poor" or "inner city" throughout his presidency. He seems to have been hoping against hope that he would not be branded the "first Black President," even though he is precisely that; and even though whether he likes it or not, he is in the black voters debit for their overwhelming support of his presidency.

In the history of the Republic, no group has ever supported a President of the U.S. at the 95% level as blacks have done for Mr. Obama. Despite this, few Blacks have missed his repeated backhanded insults and "distancing" maneuvers.  The best evidence of this is that whenever issues dear to blacks have come up on Mr. Obama's plate, he has carefully, quickly and repeatedly sidestepped them with a demeaning mantra that "he is the President of all the people." Quietly, blacks feel tremendously injured and betrayed by this treatment which mimics that they used to receive from Southern racists. And I am here to tell you that these feeling of betrayal will indeed show up in November 2012 -- both in lack of enthusiasm and in votes against Mr. Obama in the voting booth by blacks.

As well, there are other reasons why many blacks no longer trust Mr. Obama and thus are not as enthusiastic about him this time around as they were last time. One is the repeated and gratuitous insults he has reserved exclusively for Blacks. In Atlanta, for instance, he blamed black male irresponsibility for the inner city social meltdown; and ended a speech before the Congressional Black Caucus by telling members of that august body, to get up off their couches and out of their house shoes and back into the game? And then of course there were the Shirley Sherrod and Skip Gates incidents, which did not inspire confidence among his black constituents, since Mr. Obama handled both incidents like a rank amateur.

Likewise with Hispanics: they too have seen Mr. Obama engage in duplicitous behavior regarding their issues. Smiling in their faces, while aggressively tightening immigration loopholes and greatly increasing deportations, behind their backs. Also, up until it looked like Mark Rubio might become Mr. Romney's running mate, Mr. Obama had only engaged in sweet talk on Hispanic issues. However, now with the emergence of Mr. Rubio as the likely Romney VP, Mr. Obama has belatedly proven that he does indeed know how to act, but only when his election chances seem threatened. That kind of calculated hypocrisy has a way of flipping not just Hispanic voters, but all voters, just as they close the curtains behind them as they enter the voting booth.

5. Under Mr. Obama, the Wall Street Criminals have not just gotten off scot-free, but also have gotten another free ride on the Merry-go-round of America's Casino capitalism.

A litmus test for most voters, including independents, has been to see what this President would do to crack down on the criminals on Wall Street, meaning those responsible for the great crash of 2007-8. It does not seem that Mr. Obama has passed that test? What the American people saw did not inspire further confidence in Mr. Obama's leadership qualities, and at the same time, called into question his chummy relationship with the architects of that crash. Again we get to see him play the Obama shell game: On the one hand he supported and passed limp-wristed legislation that he touted as historic, while on the other hand and in the background and in the backrooms of K-Street, he made sure that the legislation contained enough loopholes to drive a Mack truck through and thus keep his Big Dog Wall Street contributors happy -- the American economic system be-damned. Now he is banking on the fact that we will see Romney as potentially much worse? But since we were wrong about him we could also be wrong about Mitt.

Also, it certainly did not help Mr. Obama's cause that the leaders of the gang of four, the real architects of the financial crash, landed with their feet firmly planted inside his administration, holding down all of the most important and the most prominent positions within it. But even more importantly, as the recent three billion dollar lost by Merrill-lynch (because of more Wall Street Casino gambling with investor's money) revealed, the Obama legislation designed to close the floodgates that allowed the crash to happen, seem uniformly inept and ineffectual. Glass-Steigall was not restored, credit default swap continue as they did before, etc.  

There are few people who do not believe that as a result of Obama's weak legislation, and his weak commitment to fixing the holes in our financial infrastructure, another crash is just around the corner. Worse yet, no one on Wall Street has gone to jail. And even with their 800 billion dollar bailout, it is business as usual back on Wall Street, with Main Street still on life support and obscene bonuses still flowing in the banks that are still "too big to fail -- all under Mr. Obama's careless watch. And to add insult to injury, Mr. Obama failed to stand behind Elizabeth Warren, a proven warrior in the fight against Wall Street corruption. Even many Republicans were rooting for her. 

6. Mr. Obama still carries the yoke of the Jeremiah Wright syndrome. Reverend Jeremiah Wright accused Mr. Obama of being just another (cheap) Chicago Politician, and sadly Mr. Obama has done little to disavow us of his ex-Minister's characterization of him. In fact, arguably he has done more to confirm Wright's characterization than to dispel it.   For instance, Mr. Obama has been accused by at least one author of playing a double game with his base: As he tells it, Mr. Obama's rich contributors get to sit at the table where largesse is dutifully doled out, while the poorer ones, the largest part of his base, are allowed only to eat "Red state-Blue state symbol pie." Moreover, Mr. Obama is so heavily engaged in triangulating that he hardly makes a move without first consulting his pollsters. Rev. Wright could not have been more correct: after four years, Mr. Obama comes off as little more than a  prima donna  Machiavellian manipulator, who is scared of his shadow, scared to get his hands dirty and one who has no issues that he will either make a full commitment to, or take a firm public stand, on.

7. The Obama's message of "hope and change" has been garbled and then quickly abandoned by the Hope Meister himself.

The Obama vision of hope and change either evaporated into thin air early on in his first year, or was dead on arrival. In either case, Mr. Obama quickly abandoned them both. In fact, abandoning his own pet projects and principled promises, seem to be a defining characteristic of the Obama management style.   His ability to quickly abandon his own pet projects and to show no commitment to any issues, including his signature healthcare initiative, is a disturbing index of why his leadership style is constantly being challenged and called into question.

The only projects that Mr. Obama has stood firmly behind are: his killing of Osama bin Laden, and the Tarp loan he gave to bailout the Detroit automakers. But the worse part of this is that instead of instilling and infusing more confidence in the American political system, Mr. Obama's thinly veiled Machiavellian moves -- failing to make commitments or take principled stands, double-crossing his base, triangulating and tacking to the right, out-sourcing legislation, hiding behind the Oval Office desk, trying to split the moral baby instead of defending it -- has done just the opposite. Young people are as disgruntled and disillusioned as are Blacks and Hispanics. Surely they will not fight in the trenches for Mr. Obama this time like they did in 2008.

8. This time, Mr. Obama is not running Against the Village Idiot:

Arguably, this time Mr. Obama IS the new village idiot, or at least his clone. Considering that Mr. Obama, despite his rhetoric, has adopted almost all of GW's failed policies, he can no longer credibly separate himself from the Republican Party's failed agenda. Most of his broken promises occurred because he hewed a course much too close to the failed Bush policies. Even Republicans see him as a GW clone. It leaves a reasonable Democrat, not just those who are disillusioned with him, scratching their heads and asking the following question: Given that neither Democrats nor Republicans bought into Mr. Obama's act as a "pretend Republican," maybe there is a better chance of getting rid of the gridlock in Congress by electing a "real White Republican" instead of a "pretend fake Black one?" Doing so, certainly can be no worse than painfully watching Mr. Obama wriggling as he continues to "tack" to the right, all the while allowing the Republicans to disrespect him.

9. Unlike in 2008, in 2012, Mr. Obama is destined to lose the numbers game.

Anyway you cut it, the average voter is going to see that in his first term, Mr. Obama was dealt a great hand that he proceeded to play badly. He began with the nation literally eating out of his hand. Even the most rabid racists were held in check by his aura and the enthusiasm for him and the vision he had for America's future. That is, until they realized that "this guy is soft" and "can be had."  

Unwisely, Mr. Obama began his Presidency by again trying in vain to win the racists voters to his side. Any fool could see that for many reasons this was not going to happen. It was a losing strategy from the start. The least of the reasons was that most people, including many racist whites who supported Mr. Obama the first time around, did so not because they loved him so much, or because he self-identified with blacks, or because they thought he was so great, but for one reason and one reason only: to get rid of the village idiot, who had screwed up the country so badly. Mr. Obama and his handlers seemed to have misunderstood and underestimated the importance of this overriding voter motivation.   To them, even an untried black man was seen as being preferable to Junior.

Over estimating the love the public had for him, Mr. Obama proceeded in a suicidal effort to try to win over and bind the conservative and Blue-collar whites to him. The way he did it was heavy-handed, cheap, transparent, and revealed more about Mr. Obama and his style of politics than anything else he has done in office. By shamelessly "triangulating" and "tacking" to the right, (pandering to the racists is a more accurate way to put it), Mr. Obama revealed himself to be exactly as his Minister of 20 years had described him: "just another (cheap) Chicago Politician." The way he "triangulated" and "tacked" was by using his own unsubtle "anti-Liberal/anti-Black dog whistle:" publicly chastising his base by calling liberals "whiners" and "professional complainers," insulting blacks, calling them irresponsible and telling the CBC to get off their couches and out of their house shoes, etc. and then also aggressively deporting illegal aliens. In short, by thumbing his nose at his own base, Mr. Obama had hoped to increase and consolidate his appeal to "so-called" independents and blue collar racist ideological Republicans. 

Arguably, this strategy has backfired on him. For all it did was leave a bitter taste in the mouth of his base, and gained him nothing among those who voted for him simply to get the village idiot out of office.  What Mr. Obama is up against now is his own over-reach and failed Machiavellian political strategy. He has finessed everyone in the political universe: the independents, blue-collar whites, blacks, Hispanics, youths, and liberals. So where can he now turn? 

Oh yes, to the non-existent moderates. A little known fact about American politics is this: during hard times, there are no moderates; it's just a vacuous label. During hard times like those of today, people only want results, and when they go into the voting booths this November they are only going to ask one question: Did Mr. Obama get us results? And the answer they are going to get, will resoundingly be no! Mr. Obama did not deliver, period.   Where are the Obama jobs, and even an Obama jobs program? Why is he not in Congress fighting to get his bills through? The answer is, Mr. Obama fights only for the one thing that all professional politicians fight for: To get re-elected.

10. All the racists who voted for Mr. Obama the first time it order to get rid of the Village Idiot, will go back home to the Republican Party this time.  

When Mr. Obama won in 2008, his political operatives, Axelrod, Emanuel and Pouffle looked like geniuses only because they got a free ride off of GW's back, and apparently they and Mr. Obama have been too naïve to realize the full value of this windfall. This time, those members of "Team Obama" (who have not already jumped ship) are in for a shock. They will discover that the old election calculus and coalition of 2008 will not work at all this time around. The racists, who voted for Mr. Obama the first time, have seen enough. They will go back home to the GOP. And many blacks that voted for Mr. Obama thinking he was one of them, will not go to the polls at all because Mr. Obama stiffed and mocked them, feeding them Kool-Aid and symbolism instead of real programs. They discovered after all that he was not one of them, but was just as Rev Wright had described him: another cheap Chicago politician.

Hispanics, as quiet as it is kept are more, not less racist towards blacks, than the typical American blue collar white, and given even half a chance they, like poor and blue collar whites, will vote for anyone except a black man. No matter what Mr. Obama does, his ability to hold onto the Hispanic vote is entirely out of his hands. It will depend (as will be the case with much of this election) on what Mr. Romney does or does not do.

If Romney runs a skillful campaign, subtly using racist dog whistles against Mr. Obama, its Kathy barred the door for our first black President. On the other hand, if Mr. Romney keeps his foot in his mouth, as he has been doing recently, Mr. Obama still will have a slim chance of pulling off a win. 

But even then he has to contend with the racist vote, writ large, which will mostly be hidden from the polls. A recent Harvard study suggested that in the last election, the hardcore "in the voting booth racist" vote cost Mr. Obama from 5-7% of the vote total. This time, conservatively, any reasonable prediction would recommend at least doubling that number. Add these imponderables that lean against him, to the fact that his numbers will fall dramatically among Blacks, who will not go to the polls this time; and Hispanics, who even when Mr. Obama is catering to them, will only vote for him under even the best of conditions, while holding their noses; and the youth, who have lost all enthusiasm for their Black prince, and it is easy to see that our first Black President's re-election chances are slime to none.

Retired Foreign Service Officer and past Manager of Political and Military Affairs at the US Department of State. For a brief time an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Denver and the University of Washington at (more...)

 

Is the Secret War in Yemen and Somalia Secret No Longer?

Published on Sunday, June 17, 2012 by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Is the Secret War in Yemen and Somalia Secret No Longer?

Obama openly described ‘direct action’ – military operations – in both Yemen and Somalia.

by Chris Woods 

 

In what is being viewed by some as a significant move towards greater transparency, President Obama has officially acknowledged for the first time previously secret US military combat operations in Yemen and Somalia.

 

Out of the shadows? President Obama in the Oval Office 2012 (Official White House photo/ Pete Souza) The US military has been mounting aggressive combat operations in both countries for some years. Attacks began in Somalia in January 2007, and in Yemen in December 2009. The Bureau monitors operations in both nations, and its data suggests that as many as 180 combat strikes may have taken place in both countries. However until now the US would not even admit that such attacks occurred.

News of the surprise acknowledgment came in a letter from President Obama to Congress on the evening of June 15 – a six monthly obligation under the War Powers Resolution passed in 1973, in which he is required to inform politicians about US military actions abroad. Obama openly described ‘direct action’ – military operations – in both Yemen and Somalia.

The U.S. military has also been working closely with the Yemeni government to operationally dismantle and ultimately eliminate the terrorist threat posed by al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the most active and dangerous affiliate of al-Qa’ida today. Our joint efforts have resulted in direct action against a limited number of AQAP operatives and senior leaders in that country who posed a terrorist threat to the United States and our interests.

There were similar references to operations in Somalia, with the President noting that in ‘a limited number of cases, the US military has taken direct action in Somalia against members of al-Qa’ida, including those who are also members of al-Shabaab, who are engaged in efforts to carry out terrorist attacks against the United States and our interests.’

Previously any such details were reported only in a confidential annex to the reports, with US officials refusing to confirm or deny even the existence of military strikes – an increasingly bizarre stance given the widespread reporting of such operations.

The Wall Street Journal noted that much of the impetus for the partial disclosure came from General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
His spokesman told the paper: ‘When U.S. military forces are involved in combat anywhere in the world, and information about those operations does not compromise national or operational security, Gen. Dempsey believes the American public should be kept appropriately informed.’

But the paper also noted that ‘officials said details about specific strikes in Yemen and Somalia would continue to be kept secret.’

Continued confusion

The Bureau is one of the few bodies to monitor secret US combat activity in the two countries. In Somalia, between 10 and 21 US strike operations have killed up to 169 people.  And in Yemen, the Bureau has recorded 44 confirmed US attacks  – with as many as 106 additional strikes. Total Yemen casualties are between 317 and 879 people killed. That range is necessarily broad because the Pentagon will presently not clarify whether attacks are the work of US or Yemeni forces.

The US military has variously used airstrikes, naval bombardments and cruise missile strikes in the two troubled nations. US military drone attacks only began in 2011. The CIA also operates its own drone fleet in Yemen – and those operations remain classified.

The unexpected move by Obama is the latest in a series of transparency moves by the administration. It came three days after 26 members of the US Congress wrote to the president raising serious concerns about the covert drone strike programme. The politicians – including two Republicans – wrote:

The implications of the use of drones for our national security are profound. They are faceless ambassadors that cause civilian deaths, and are frequently the only direct contact with Americans that the targeted communities have.  They can generate powerful and enduring anti-American sentiment.

The American Civil Liberties Union, while welcoming Obama’s partial declassification of military strikes in Yemen and Somalia, called for further disclosure: ‘The public is entitled to more information about the legal standards that apply, the process by which they add names to the kill list, and the facts they rely on in order to justify targeted killings.’

Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists told the New York Times: ‘While any voluntary disclosure is welcome, this is not much of a breakthrough. The age of secret wars is over. They were never a secret to those on the receiving end.’

June 12, 2012

Featuring fresh takes and real-time analysis from HuffPost's signature lineup of contributors

The Obama Administration Is Criminalizing Investigative Reporting

Dan Froomkin

Senior Washington Correspondent, Huffington Post

 

Criminally investigating the kinds of leaks that are the bread and butter of national security investigative reporting is a noxious overreaction by hyper-controlling government officials who don't want us to know what's being done in our name.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week that he has assigned two U.S. attorneys to lead criminal leak investigations into recent media reports about topics including how drone attacks are approved at the White House and how a computer virus attack was launched against Iran's nuclear program.
There is such a thing as a criminal leak -- for instance, when an administration official intentionally outs a covert CIA operative in an attempt to discredit an administration critic.

But leaks that expose secrets that have momentous public policy implications need to be treated differently, because they are a critical part of our nation's system of checks and balances. Knowledge is essential to the public's ability to restrain executive (and legislative) power.

In this case, part of the pressure for an investigation came from Congress -- from Sen. John McCain, who accused the Obama administration of leaking for political gain, and from the bipartisan leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees, whose most righteous anger seems to be reserved not for violations of international law, torture statues or civil liberties, but for those occasions when the public, thanks to aggressive reporting by journalists, knows more than they do about something.

If President Obama is truly concerned about these leaks -- which I'm not at all sure he is -- there's a very simple solution. He can call in top national security staffers and other top officials and demand to know what role they played in these stories. If they leaked, and did so without his implicit or explicit approval, and he really thinks that was the wrong thing to do, he can fire them. If they lie to him (like Karl Rove did to George Bush about his role in the Valerie Plame leak) then Obama has bigger problems with his staff than leaks.

Outsourcing the investigation to the Department of Justice instead is a cowardly ducking of responsibility -- with tremendously dangerous potential. This is especially the case because under Obama and Holder, the DOJ -- presumably to build up good will with the intelligence community -- has taken to charging such leaks as violations of the draconian Espionage Act, a 1917 law intended for the prosecution of people who are aiding the enemy. Furthermore, the official DOJ position now seems to be that there is no reporter's privilege at all in such maters, and therefore no need to even consider the nature of the leak, how much if any damage it actually caused, what the intentions of the leaker were, and how much it served the public interest.

The six previous times the Obama administration has charged government officials who leaked to the press with Espionage Act violations -- more than all previous presidents combined -- have already sent a chilling message to investigative reporters and the whistleblowers they depend on.

That is ultimately not a good thing for our democracy. And one would have hoped that a president ostensibly devoted to transparency would recognize that.
Cross-posted from NiemanWatchdog.org, where Froomkin is deputy editor.

 

Follow Dan Froomkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/froomkin

Obama's Kill List: Silence Is Not an Option

Obama's Kill List: Silence Is Not an Option

The Editors

June 6, 2012   |    This article appeared in the June 25, 2012 edition of The Nation.

The silhouette of U.S. President Barack Obama is seen as he sits in the back of the Marine One helicopter, landing on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington June 3, 2012. Reuters/Joshua Roberts
 
The “war on terror” has its own corrupting logic, leading otherwise morally responsible leaders to do unspeakable things. Such is the case with the Obama administration’s descent into the world of kill lists and drone assassinations.

The image of President Obama poring over baseball-card profiles of terror suspects in Jo Becker and Scott Shane’s now famous New York Times “kill list” exposé probably pleased the administration officials whose cooperation made the story possible, wrapping the president in glinting “warrior in chief” election year packaging. For those concerned about the constitutional protection of civil liberties and the rule of law, however, that image, and the extraordinary practices it represents, was profoundly disturbing. The drone policy the president has developed not only infringes on the sovereignty of other nations, but the assassinations violate laws put in place in the 1970s after scandals enveloped an earlier era of CIA criminality. The new details about Obama’s assassination program also remind us how the 2001 Congressional Authorization of the Use of Military Force established a disastrous policy of “borderless and open-ended war that threatens to indefinitely extend US military engagement around the world,” in the words of the only member of the House to vote against it, Barbara Lee.

The kill list makes a mockery of due process by circumventing judicial review, and turning the executive into judge, jury and executioner. Even worse, the “signature” strikes described in the Times article, in which nameless individuals are assassinated based merely on patterns of behavior, dispense with any semblance of habeas corpus altogether. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, signature strikes account for most of the attacks in Pakistan today, and they were recently approved for use in Yemen.

One of the darkest aspects of this story involves the administration’s method of counting civilian casualties: The CIA simply assumes that any military-age male in the vicinity of a terror suspect must be a militant too. Thus, counterterrorism chief John Brennan was able to state with a straight face in August 2011 that not one civilian had perished from US strikes outside Afghanistan and Iraq in more than a year—a declaration that was greeted with incredulity and outrage in Pakistan, where witnesses have attested to hundreds of civilian deaths.
The drone strikes are inciting even more anti-American hatred in troubled places like Yemen as well as Pakistan (see Jeremy Scahill, “Target: Yemen,” March 5/12). It is hard to argue that they are making us safer when, for every suspect killed, one or more newly embittered militants emerge to take his place.
This is not a prescription for American security but for an endless war that will sap our moral core and put in jeopardy our most cherished freedoms at home.
The new revelations also highlight the dangers of official secrecy, as we now glimpse some of what the administration was hiding through its invocation of the state secrets privilege in court proceedings. But as urgent as the demand for transparency remains, we know more than enough to conclude that President Obama’s continuation and expansion of George W. Bush’s “war on terror” has further eroded legal barriers built over decades to limit executive power. For those who believed Obama would restore the rule of law after Bush’s imperial overreach, learning the details of these operations has been troubling. Liberals raised a ruckus about Bush’s abuses. Silence now is not an option.

Read this editorial in Spanish.

TAKE ACTION: Kill the 'Kill List'