Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Barack who?
It took less than a year in office for Barack Obama to become an apologist for George Bush. According to an article in the Chicago Tribune Obama was asked at a town hall meeting whether Bush should be impeached for lying us into the Iraq debacle, to which our junior senator reportedly replied "Well, FDR, JFK, LBJ -- we have a pretty long list of presidents who maybe were not entirely forthcoming with intelligence information before they went to war, so I'd be cautious against making legal cases against the administration."
All together now, "What the f---?!!"
If "everybody does it" is Obama's idea of legal defense then obviously the trial of former Illinois governor George Ryan should be stopped at once since the list of corrupt Illinois governors is even longer than that of "not entirely forthcoming" presidents. If "everybody does it" trumps investigation and prosecution we should just lay off the torture trial of former Chicago police captain John Burge since beating and abusing helpless prisoners is ubiquitous across human history. If the commonality of an offense is its own justification then no driver should ever be ticked for speeding, no student should be punished for cheating, nor any football player ever called for a foul. I doubt even Obama has become that complacent, yet.
Maybe there's something in the Washington DC water that suppresses people's (or at least politician's) senses of outrage. Maybe power is the opiate of the elite. Obama’s impeachment defense combined with his earlier attempt to excuse the administration of responsibility for torture at Abu Ghraib prison look like another in his endless attempts to become the Will Smith of American politics, "a black guy everybody can agree on."
I know Obama has a lot of fans around the country but it benefits no one to let him get away with insulting our intelligences and spinning the crime of war.
Let's hope Senator Obama's cynical sophistry is not the beginning of what Brits call "reverse metamorphosis," the transformation of a butterfly back into a slug.
It seems to me like Obama has been getting his advice from the business as usual DC insiders. Good luck, trying to float another "Great Speech" now that you have a track record.
