John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS
“Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett offers an intimate look behind the scenes of his presidency
“One of the most influential black women of the 21st century talks about her time in the White House”
Gee, does she talk about the CIA’s "Kill Lists" put into Obama’s inbox regularly for his signature?
I cannot be sentimental about this man.
The boyish smile was so deceptive and deceives people still. It deceived me when he first took office. I liked him in the beginning and thought him very promising.
But there is the intrusive fact that he bombed people somewhere for every single day of his eight years in office.
He killed literally hundreds of thousands across a number of countries, made a chaos out of Libya, started the horrors in Syria, ran a coup in Ukraine, and created America’s extrajudicial killing program with drones.
There is nothing sweet or nice to remember. A very dark figure.
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Response to a comment saying Obama lacked Trump’s mental illness:
Yes, he did, except that he is almost certainly something of a psychopath with the all smiling he did and all the killing he signed off on, psychopathy not qualifying so much as a mental illness as simply an “outlier” condition which is repeated in a small portion of the human population over and over, like albinism or autism or freckles.
He even "joked" once, saying to a group of associates, "Say, I'm pretty good at this killing stuff!" Well, it doesn’t get more stomach-churning than that.
Of course, he tolerated and supported such terrible efforts as Joe Biden convincing him that America needed a massive new drone-based CIA extrajudicial-killing industry or Hillary Clinton’s terrible advocacy at the State Department for inducing chaos in Libya and an effort to repeat its success afterward in Syria.
Such is the human material required to head the American empire in our time. The empire requires almost a constant flow of aggression and bloodshed as part of its maintenance work, to say nothing of its expansion plans.
Only those emotionally-equipped to support that effort need apply for the job of President. With some, like Trump, it’s pretty clear early-on what is happening, but with others, like Obama, it does require a bit of time to understand. He is, after all, well known as being an extremely secretive man, a required characteristic for his tough record of going after whistle-blowers and those who leak things to the press.
Surprising how popular he remains, but then most people don't really explore the details of events, even when it comes to killing hundreds of thousands of people and making refugees of millions. What they do know is comfortably confirmed to them, day after day, in America’s press and broadcasting, an activity which is an important part of their job.
And remember, the famous truth that millions of people, ordinary decent people, in the Soviet Union literally wept when the death of Stalin was announced.