"I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that"
-President Barack Obama
Liberals disgust me. With 2014 being an election year and the looming announcement from Queen Hillary the Inevitable that she is running for president in 2016 liberals and their beloved Democratic Party are closing ranks and circling the wagons to protect Team Blue Jackass from heretics unwilling to line up and salute the party flag. Obama is now well into his second term and the American torture and concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay is still open for business, a pox upon our once great country and one that along with the abominable practices there – namely torture and the prevention from it officially becoming a “death camp” only because the US government is force feeding prisoners who are attempting hunger strikes – continue and will continue because after all, it is an election year and God forbid if the Democrats make it any easier for their more overtly fascist opponents to call them “chicken”.
Obama ran on closing this monstrous facility and to this day, five and a half years into his second term it has yet to be done. Oh, but the Democrats and the liberals blame those bad, bad Republicans for their ongoing obstructionism and preventing Barry from carrying out his agenda - horseshit! Obama had two years when his party controlled the Congress and the only thing of substance that managed to get accomplished was bailing out the criminals on Wall Street whose bad gambling bets wrecked the economy. Obama could have - and could still close the goddamned wretched place any time that he chooses, after all the Bush-Cheney regime firmly established the American version of the Führerprinzip or as it is known in The Homeland: the Unitary Executive. This renders moot any Democrat whining that Obama is powerless - he does manage to get a lot done when it comes to unleashing the NSA Stasi against the public and having his ruthless underboss Eric Holder to use the arcane 1917 Espionage Act as a bludgeon to suppress whistleblowers and those who report on them. He also manages to do one hell of a job of conducting extrajudicial assassinations against American citizens, covering up torture and other high crimes of his predecessor and instigating hostilities with a nuclear armed Russia because he was insulted by President Putin.
Obama is far from the helpless, besieged by racists and obstructionists and teabaggers historic leader that he is made out to be and the same liberals who shrieked for Bush and Cheney's heads on pikes for far less than the loathsome Obama regime has pulled are falling into line and shuffling towards the Kool Aid vat just as they always do. Obama gave his much hyped foreign policy speech at West Point where he gave the commencement address to the future corporate cannon fodder of illegal wars of aggression and vowed to close the facility again. The speech was more of the same teleprompter drivel in which Obama laid out the proverbial line of bullshit long enough to fertilize the Sahara with his interventionist rhetoric and defense of that most obscene of concepts that is American exceptionalism. I excerpt the following from the transcript:
Think about it. Our military has no peer. The odds of a direct threat against us by any nation are low, and do not come close to the dangers we faced during the Cold War. Meanwhile, our economy remains the most dynamic on Earth, our businesses the most innovative. Each year, we grow more energy independent. From Europe to Asia, we are the hub of alliances unrivaled in the history of nations.
America continues to attract striving immigrants. The values of our founding inspire leaders in parliaments and new movements in public squares around the globe. And when a typhoon hits the Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help. (Applause.) So the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century past, and it will be true for the century to come.
But the world is changing with accelerating speed. This presents opportunity, but also new dangers. We know all too well, after 9/11, just how technology and globalization has put power once reserved for states in the hands of individuals, raising the capacity of terrorists to do harm.
Russia’s aggression towards former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors.
AND
I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.
And that’s why I will continue to push to close Gitmo, because American values and legal traditions do not permit the indefinite detention of people beyond our borders. (Applause.) That’s why we’re putting in place new restrictions on how America collects and uses intelligence -- because we will have fewer partners and be less effective if a perception takes hold that we’re conducting surveillance against ordinary citizens. (Applause.) America does not simply stand for stability or the absence of conflict, no matter what the cost; we stand for the more lasting peace that can only come through opportunity and freedom for people everywhere -- which brings me to the fourth and final element of American leadership: our willingness to act on behalf of human dignity.
America’s support for democracy and human rights goes beyond idealism; it is a matter of national security. Democracies are our closest friends and are far less likely to go to war. Economies based on free and open markets perform better and become markets for our goods. Respect for human rights is an antidote to instability and the grievances that fuel violence and terror.
At that point the commanders should have ordered the cadets to break ranks and get out the shovels. I mean for God's sake - can't we even manage to produce coherent bullshit in this country anymore? The neocons howled like dogs being castrated because it just wasn't Hitlerian enough for their tastes but the meat of the speech - on the continuation of US interventionism for vaguely defined humanitarian missions must have made the panties of both warmongering femme fatales Susan Rice and Samantha Powers get wet. Nothing quite sells like sending in the US special ops and hit teams to rescue a couple of hundred of hapless Nigerian schoolgirls who were kidnapped by Islamists largely empowered by the US destabilization of Africa and the Democrats are at the end of the day as bloodthirsty as their criminal cohorts across the aisle. Hillary will be perfect for the coming wave of American whip ass that will be unleashed for "humanitarian" or "Responsibility to Protect (P2P)" Team America style incursions and nothing could be more pleasing to the party base, fucking hypocrites that they all are.
In my daily online travels I frequent a number of progressive sites where I often voice my opinion in the comments sections for articles and I have noticed an alarming amount of what appear to be long dormant Hillary Clinton sleeper cells being activated. You can always tell these because first off the person making comments is asinine and secondly, many of the accounts show a creation date of 2008 and 2009 with minimal comments over five years until a recent spike of activity. There are also many pieces and articles popping up like toadstools out of piles of cow shit after a morning rain calling for unity behind a “far from perfect” candidate because the Republicans would be much, much worse.
The unenlightened always play to the silly pack of low information types – or much information that is no more than DNC propaganda – with their fear of the GOP war on the rights of some besieged and helpless identity based group. The good thing now is that thanks to the horrific track record of Barack Obama that a lot more people than before do not buy into that two-party hogwash this time around and it is causing a huge problem not only for Democrats but for the entire sham system itself.
Former New York Times foreign correspondent and author Chris Hedges, himself more of a socialist – calm down libertarians, he did sue Obama over the National Defense Authorization Act – called out liberals for the hypocrites that they are shortly after the election of the man of hope and change. From his December 7, 2009 column entitled “Liberals are Useless”:
Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.
I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.
AND
I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best way to “credentialize” yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these “revolutionaries” found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.
I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods like Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot washers. They worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better life, which few of them ever got. We used to run five miles after our nightly training, passing through the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Projects, and they would joke, “I hope we get mugged.” They knew precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with across the Charles River. They would have felt awkward, and would have been made to feel awkward, at the little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals at Harvard, but you could trust and rely on them.
I went on to spend two decades as a war correspondent. The qualities inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are qualities I admire—self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don’t. So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are.
Hedges of course was vilified by the liberal elitists and the Democrats after he nailed them so precisely and now as the cheer-leading and activism begins for the newest great liberal hope Hillary so will any who dare to speak such blasphemy. I have long advocated for an alliance between thinking progressives, leftists, libertarians and principled conservatives against our true enemy - the entire corrupt two party US political system itself and thanks to Obama the choir that I preach to is growing by the day.
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