Give the Prize Back, Obama
Circle Jerks, “Paid vacation”
After months of waiting, President Obama is about to announce the new US strategy for Afghanistan. His speech may be long awaited, but few are expecting any surprise: it seems clear he will herald a major escalation of the war. In doing so he will be making something worse than a mistake. It is a continuation of a war crime against the suffering people of my country…
Like many around the world, I am wondering what kind of “peace” prize can be awarded to a leader who continues the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and starts a new war in Pakistan, all while supporting Israel?
I agree: Mr. Obama, give the prize back. I say this as someone who supported the 2001 invasion (with reservations). But the time to get bin Laden in Afghanistan is long since over: everything I’ve read since indicates he’s in Pakistan. Meanwhile, president Karzai’s own brother is a drug trafficker, he’s put warlords in charge of the rest of the “nation”, and doesn’t seem to have any control outside of Kabul. Oh and he’s corrupt too, but that’s probably pretty obvious.
And this is what we’re sending 30,000 new troops, at a cost of a million bucks each per year, to prop up? ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND OR ARE YOU DEVOID OF MORALS?
I am reminded, yet again, about Vonnegut’s wisest of words:
George W Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.
To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read it!
Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.
PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!
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So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin’ day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilise the reserves! Privatise the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.
Much the same could be said of Mr. Obama. No, he’s not as bad as Bush, but he’s embraced many of the same attacks on Americans’ civil liberties, and (so far as i can see) believes in perpetuating our state of permanent war. Only a drooling idiot would think that the public option, which grows weaker and more compromised by the minute, is anything like single payer or universal coverage. And don’t get me started on the trillions for Wall Street and bupkes for ordinary prople.
I voted for change. I’m not getting it.
