Going Negative on the Presidency

Going Negative on the Presidency


Edmund J. Smith



Call me names. I’m used to it. Today is a time of liberal giddiness, admixed with the resigned acceptance ‘ no one can do everything’, now frequently joined to the exhortation that we must each do what we can to make the world a little bit better. About the latter, though, I wonder: is this supposed to be a new orientation? Maybe before, when the boogie man was in power, even this modest proposal was impossible to fulfill.
A political science honcho, or even a plain old news junkie, could call me out as an ignorant lout, with no right to speak. Ask me who my home state’s Attorney General is. Dunno. Ask me who the governor is. I know her first name. Jody…something…
I’m good at certain kinds of historical facts. Like I think I am probably a couple million people closer to knowing how many we killed in the Vietnam War.
I’ve decided to shave with Occam’s razor. That’s about paring issues down to their essence. In the case of presidencies, it comes down to this for me: what is the presidency? This leads back to the question of what the United States is as a political entity. If it is an empire (which I and many others maintain) then the position of president is similar to that of emperor.
Even emperors are not all powerful. Those who rule absolutely would be called dictators (Stalin, Hitler, Bush, Caesar); if they share power or are dominated by their adversaries, we call them moderates (Eisenhower, Kaiser Wilhelm, Kerensky), but they still are part of a dictatorship. Ultimately, if the power sharing doesn’t work, they can purge their adversaries or may themselves be purged either by coups, impeachment, or assassination.
Having lived through ten administrations (about a fourth of the U.S. presidents have paraded through office in my lifetime), I think I am seeing a pattern. Through each presidency, there have been wars, coups, and plentiful interventions on a lesser scale. By way of experiment, I voted for Clinton- the first and last time I would vote. This vaunted liberal, in league with his buddies, demolished social welfare, ushered in NAFTA, joined NATO in destroying Serbian Bosnia, maintained the economic isolation of Cuba, and economic embargo on Iraq, and, and…. But this was a liberal, progressive president.
The reasons I point these things out is because you don’t. The biggest criticism I heard about Clinton during his time in office was his sexual improprieties with Monica what’s her name. That was the stuff of SNL routines, like jokes about Dan Quayle’s spelling of potatoes and Sarah Palin’s studied know-nothingism. Apologists for progressives frequently use the ‘his–hands-were tied’ excuse. Well, I guess Clinton was able to overcome his bondage, since the U.S. was able to drop bombs as part of the NATO alliance while his hands were tied!
So, having spanned fifty years and ten presidents since WWII, we are up to Obama. A breakthrough, many say. Let’s see. What about the other breakthroughs. Have we fully appreciated them yet? What about Colin Powell. Hey kids: 1st African American Secretary of Defense. His military leadership guided us through the first destruction of Iraq, featuring 200-500,000 casualties, including many birth defects due to the use of depleted uranium. Oh well, but he was Black! Then there was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. First African American Secretary of State. And what has she done? Supported U.S. backed dictatorships everywhere from Columbia to South Korea. Played a major role in promoting lies about weapons of mass destruction. Point-person for supporting proxy regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. But she is African American…and a woman!
But there have been all kinds of breakthroughs for oppressed groups lately. Let us not forget ‘No-Right-To-a- Speedy-Trial’ Gonzalez, surfing on his water board. Has he not been championed in our public schools as ‘America’s first Hispanic Attorney General’? More progress.
As an estimated two million people make there way to Washington to hail the new Chief, I see that m job is cut out for me. In electoral terms, this would be called ‘going negative’.
Obama, still as senator, has taken the lead in backing the bail-out plan for the trillion-dollar thieves known as the Banking and Mortgage companies. Did that money evaporate? Does anyone ask about getting at least a chunk of it back from these profiteers? No, let’s just underwrite their new leases on life. Has Obama promised to end the war in Iraq? Presently there are no plans to close any of the military bases there. Perhaps instead of a hot war we’ll have a perpetually occupying Army (like Israel on the West Bank). Of course he did promise to win the war in Afghanistan. Hmm…what could that mean? And he did promise to ‘bring Ben Laden to justice’. That means more incursions into Pakistan. As far as the Palestinian question is concerned, his new progressive Secretary of State (a woman!) had already threatened, when she was still a presidential candidate, to level Iran if it attacked Israel.
The man who has the political acumen to invoke such figures as Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln had voted, as senator, to protect media monopolies from lawsuits for spying on phone calls and emails. But is that not consistent with the goals of the Patriot Act and the office of Homeland Security?
One could always invoke the ‘he-had-no-choice’ argument. He had to appease the financial community to get their support. He had to appease the military-industrial complex (remember them?) by promising some sort of intervention in order to win their confidence.
And if Obama was not young, handsome, intelligent, and well-spoken he would not have won your endorsement, despite his having himself endorsed all these terrible things. And it must feel good to have voted in (another euphemism) a Black person, though it is hard to avoid recognizing that he will preside over the murder of many innocents of all colors. Let’s look at Gaza.
For three weeks, Israel reigned death on the people of Gaza, mostly women and children, while the U.S. blocked U.N. ceasefire initiatives, supported Israel’s actions as self defense, and anyway supplied Israel with most of these weapons (including the chemical weapon, white phosphorus). During this time, Obama had the ‘good manners’ to refrain from decrying these war crimes, citing the proper protocol expected of an incumbent. Israel showed appreciation for his restraint, promising to withdraw their troops from Gaza in time for the inauguration. It is the equivalent of a killer cleaning up the family room where the murder took place in time for guests to arrive for dinner later in the day.
Now, who is expecting Obama to be sworn into office, clear his throat, and state unequivocally that the state of Israel is guilty of crimes against humanity? Oh, that might be rude. Why lay blame? Why go negative?