A STRANGE, SOULLESS MAN AND HIS UTTERLY FAILED PRESIDENCY
John Chuckman
How vividly I remember the photos of Obama in Berlin during
his campaign in 2008: streets literally flooded with people keen to get a
glimpse of a promising young politician, expressing for us all how exhausted
the world was with the most ignorant and contemptible man ever to have been a president.
Reporters said a quarter of million turned out to see a man who was a junior
senator and had no claim yet to being a world figure. It was intoxicating to
think this bright, attractive figure might replace the murderous buffoon, George
Bush, and his éminence grise, Dick
Cheney, a man who might comfortably have served any of the 20th
century’s great bloody dictators.
A few years later, in 2013, an estimated 4 to 6 thousand
showed up for a major speech by then-President Obama, and one is surprised even
that many showed, but then there is always a set of people who just want to be
able to say they saw a celebrity. After all there are inexplicable people who
travel to places associated with genuine monsters, notorious murderers and
torturers, and have snapshots of themselves taken standing in front as though
they were at the Grand Canyon or Disneyworld.
In 2009, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, excited at seeing Bush
replaced with a promising man, just as the earlier crowd in Berlin, awarded
President Obama its Peace Prize after he had been in office for less than year
and had achieved nothing of substance towards peace or any other worthy goal.
But the Peace Prize often is awarded in hopes of influencing and encouraging a
leader rather than in recognition of genuine achievement.
In Obama’s case, the hopes and encouragement fell stillborn
and lifeless, and he has proved himself one of the least worthy recipients,
keeping historical company with killers like Kissinger or Begin, winners whose
awards also were based on futile hopes and encouragement. Obama’s distinctions
in the sphere of peace include abandoning the Palestinians to their tormenters,
abandoning the Egyptians to a new tyranny, pitching the people of Syria into a
bloody civil war, never speaking out about the suppression of people in places
like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and Yemen, pitching the people of Ukraine into
chaos, establishing a new hi-tech death-squad approach to the extrajudicial killing
of people, not standing up to Israel over its unwarranted threats of war
against Iran, and force-feeding the military-intelligence establishment so that
it resembles a gigantic waddling Pâté de
foie gras goose.
He has done nothing for his own people, signing not one
worthy piece of legislation to better the lives of less fortunate Americans.
His only major domestic legislation is a costly, almost unworkable compromise on
health care that will enrich insurance companies in the only Western nation not
having a form of national health insurance. He will also leave his country with
an almost incomprehensible debt, a debt America’s people are not asked to pay
down through taxes and other appropriate fiscal and budgetary measures,
ultimately leaving all the world’s holders of dollars to be cheated through the
dollar’s future decline, a scam that beggars the size of Bernie Madoff’s pyramid
operation or the Nigerian industry in e-mail invitations to share in vast
wealth just by providing your bank account. It is irresponsibility on a
colossal scale, all of the gains from the scam having served American interests
from investment bankers to the military and military contractors. Obama’s
force-fed military will have all its stuffing supplied involuntarily by non-Americans
who have no interest in what he has done. In truth, America doesn’t have a
single honest dollar to spend on anything.
The sense of dignity Obama displayed in the early days is
gone too, simply evaporated, although I am open to the suggestion that my
judgment is affected by grim disappointment in his non-achievement and display
of what I can only regard as a form of moral cowardice, not different in quality
to that displayed by George Bush. He made some noises early on about closing
America’s torture gulag, about ending its pointless wars, about pushing Israel
into a decent settlement for millions of Palestinian captives, about new starts
in general, but it has all blown away like so much dust on the wind. Now we
have a man who almost never utters an inspiring or even meaningful word, never
takes a risk to do anything worthwhile, and actually looks quite ineffectual at
times. Imagine, the first black President of the United States at the funeral
of a world-figure like Nelson Mandela, sitting next to his wife and flirting
with the blond prime minister of Denmark, taking “selfies” during the service?
It was contemptible behavior. It wasn’t the silly flirting that mattered: it
was the complete lack of a statesman’s demeanor, communicating to millions of eyes
the sense of a small man behaving like a hormonal teenager on a solemn international
occasion.
I remember, too, another picture of Obama, taken in Hawaii
where he had gone to visit during his campaign a gravely ill Madelyn Dunham,
the grandmother who had raised him. The picture showed him walking profile in
sandals, and the image immediately gave the impression of a self-confident,
independent-minded man which I quite relished. But all sense of that image of
Obama is gone, save the almost surrealistic right wing descriptions of him as a
communist, a view whose origins it is difficult to imagine, although his
wearing sandals a few times might qualify in the Palinesque world of American
right wing politics.
Of course the American institution most accurately described
as communistic is its massive military-security-police apparatus, a monstrosity
whose scale and scope make the old East German Stasi seem almost quaintly
amateur, although aspects of it would immediately bring a smile of recognition
to the lips of retired Stasi agents: matters such as the soliciting of general public
informers, the blackmailing or bribing of others to serve as informers inside
groups and organizations, the interception of virtually all messages, or the
scrutiny of what people are reading at the library and on-line. This all predates
Obama, and he has done nothing but ardently support its growth. But I guess you
just cannot do enough for these ghastly institutions to avoid being called a
communist by people who share Sarah Palin’s intellectual gene pool.
During Obama’s first election campaign, there was a mindless
controversy over his not wearing a flag pin on his lapel. That is the kind of
seemingly insignificant detail which sets the “you can never have enough patriotism”
mob to a fever pitch, bellowing voices about freedom from intolerant men with
bellies sagging ponderously over their belts, comparable in intensity to prayer
vigils over embryos or “support the troops” parades in small towns (who cares
that they’ve invaded some unfortunate land no one ever heard of and are busy
killing civilians?). Remember Jonathon Edwards, that syrupy-voiced wealthy tort
lawyer running for Vice President in 2004, offering a homily in one of his
speeches where he suggested American families should gather together each
morning to discuss the blessings of America over their bowls of Coco Puffs? Presumably
Papa Bear would lead the service before he and Mommy Bear and all the Baby
Bears rushed off in gas-guzzling trucks and four-by-fours through a landscape
of sprawl to their corporate cubicles and private schools. And Edwards was regarded – ugh, foul word
that it is considered in America - as a liberal.
How refreshing I thought Obama at the time of this nonsense
over whether someone else’s patriotism was being adequately displayed, again a
self-confident, independent-minded man who did not see the need to follow the
herd of American politicians who resemble nothing so much as members of the old
Soviet Politburo with red star pins on their lapels. He didn’t need to parade
the obvious fact of an American running for office in America. He didn’t need
to display what has become an American fetish, a voodoo charm, the totem of a secular
religion, and, at the same time, a symbol, for a great many of the world’s
people, of arrogant power and almost endless bloodshed. Of course, today Obama
is never seen without a ridiculous flag pin. He probably has a drawer full of
them in a bureau of his bedroom, a Secret Service man being solemnly tasked to
keep it stocked and to drop a few (respectfully, mind you) into his pocket as
back-ups for any trip. It must be the last thing Obama’s butler at the White
House does each morning, too, making sure a pin is on the suit to be worn that
day, the correct lapel, leveled properly, and polished. How very inspiring,
like a Rotarian executive preparing for a club luncheon.
We perhaps can never know what has motivated Obama’s
behavior as President. Certainly the memoirs of retired Presidents rarely
enlighten us on anything of importance. Is he, as some in his own party have
suggested, simply not up to the job? Of course, when they say that, they are
not using the same criteria this writer does. In America, even the supposed
left is never far from mounting a horse and charging up San Juan Hill. Is he
merely responding to the fact of the awesome power of America’s unelected
government? Is he satisfied to give them their way, enjoy the 8-year ride, and
retire with full pension and benefits, avoiding that haunting nightmare of the
last President who seriously challenged just a few of the establishment’s
assumption, John Kennedy, in the streets of Dallas?
