I kicked Barack Obama’s ass (a little)

How hilarious is this logic?: we railroad the entire country into a war on false pretenses, but then insist no one criticize what we do there because that would ‘put our brave soldiers at risk’(!) We’re not responsible for the situation in which they find themselves as the advance troops in a war of conquest; rather, YOU are the disloyal bad guy for pointing out that the people in country X don’t wish to be killed and tortured, which we authorized (and encouraged) the troops to do. Marvelous.

The greatest disappointment of 2009, Year One of the Obama Administration, is the extent to which he and his team have seamlessly absorbed and utilized this twisted thinking. Ironic that those of us who voted and worked for ‘CHANGE’ should now have hopeless reactionaries like Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman standing shoulder to shoulder with Obama to uphold and defend the Bushite legacy.


The Graham-Lieberman Amendment that was shot down yesterday would have empowered Obama to withhold further Abu Ghraib photos on the grounds that the actions portrayed there are so terrible that the release would endanger American soldiers associated with this behavior. Even more marvelous! Therefore, in the future whenever we do shit that is really disgusting, that is grounds for suppressing the information because the revelation would make us look terrible and engender resentment from the victims.

This is the moral sewer into which Obama has allowed himself to be dragged.

Given that we are not yet a dictatorship, some of us mobilized to denounce this scandal. I personally phoned my congressional representative’s office (Charlie Rangel) and spoke to a guy named Anthony who was very cordial and interested in what I had to say. He knew something about the Freedom of Information Act and pointed out that it provides for national security exceptions.

I acknowledged this but replied that the Graham-Lieberman measure was designed to override the law and simply deliver arbitrary power to the president to suppress the material without court review. This precedent would mean the death of FOIA, a law that has served us well for 40 years as a check on government abuses.

The two senators whined that Americans will now be exposed to danger, exactly the mentality that Bush and Cheney used on us for eight years to justify everything they did. Who cares if innocent Iraqis are ‘exposed to danger’ and much worse? Piss on them and their country, too, right? The racist and colonial overtones of this episode are particularly revolting given that they are now defended by the nation’s first non-white president.

I don’t know if Charlie Rangel got the message that one of his constituents was incensed by this maneuver, but the amendment was taken out of the conference committee text. I think of it as a modest little reminder that we Obama fans aren’t gulping down everything on his menu.

Extra credit question: What U.S. senator often in the news lately is rumored to keep an apartment in his home state to rendez-vous with his secret boyfriend?