Oh, fuck you, corporate media. You sorry piece of amalgamated shit. I’ve been watching you over the past few years, Media, run yourselves ragged looking to spin the old Right/Left wing yarn of how everything President Obama does is more Nixonian and Bush-like than Nixon and Bush ever were, and it’s becoming an exercise in unintentional comic relief, quite frankly. Vote-depressing hilarity.
Everything President Obama does is always worse than, or equal to, some Republican President’s crimes against the Constitution and humanity, according to the empty ambulance chasing corporate media tools.
We’re told that we didn’t vote for this!
We didn’t vote to end the Iraq war; to end the instituted Bush policy of waterboarding and sadistically-conceived torture techniques and whatever the hell was going on at Abu Ghraib.
We didn’t vote to put an end to wars(or new wars)based on outright lies in which tens of thousands of people are sent to their graves while the war waste continues to poison the landscape for a billion years.
You, the American people, did not vote to end discrimination by health insurance corporations, or discrimination against gays and women in the military.
(And it’s no wonder the drone war has expanded. Not much of a choice, really. George W. Bush lowered recruiting standards for gangs, Neo-Nazis, and young men prone to civilian killing, sexual assault, and suicide.)
You did not vote to tax the wealthy, or to regulate Wall Street’s derivatives game. You didn’t vote for an end to wealth inequality. You didn’t vote to preserve the vote, or a woman’s right to choose.
You voted for an end to politics, while voting to put the Republican party in control of The House of Representatives, with a drunken filibuster kicker in the Senate.
You voted for a fictional President. One who acts as both dictator and constitutional scholar. One who ‘Wags The Dog’ and shows weakness in the face of international terrorists and deflects inquiry at home with as little as a, “go fuck yourself.”
In the late 70′s, when President Jimmy Carter gave a prime time speech to the American people warning of our fossil fuel entanglements, setting a national goal of reduced dependence on foreign oil, the right wing flack machine revved up its outrage engine and next thing you know, Ronald Reagan was being sworn in as President and coincidentally the American hostages in Iran were released in what was an obvious backdoor deal, and treason. The arms race was afoot, spending was out of control, wealth redistribution rolling, deregulated markets monopolizing, national confidence was riding the wave of a falsely crafted image of America: The Cowboy– A right wing character composite sketch that left out all the mass-market manipulation, wealth redistribution, war crimes, and brain damage.
When President Bill Clinton was presiding over a booming economy, spurred on by early government investments into the research and technology that would become the internet, Republicans were shutting down the government to do things like make marriage a discriminatory ideal, and welfare a Scarlet Letter. The Right Wing flack machine spent the entire Clinton presidency generating what’s been referred to as, “Clinton fatigue,” complete with false scandals, insinuations, and the media’s eye-witness character composite sketch was subsequently more than enough to tilt the perceptions of the stolen election of 2000 to George W. Bush– because we needed to heal together as one nation, under Republicans, and because Al Gore said he invented the internet, don’t ya know?
Eventually we would go on to realize that we had voted, not only to redistribute a trillion dollars to the top 2%, but to then throw an estimated $2.8 trillion down the corporate cronyism Spider Hole of Doom during the Iraq war.
What liberals and the media seem to forget is that most of us voted for smarter government, not perfect, but smarter. A responsive government that doesn’t use torture, or wealth redistribution at home and abroad as a weapon on democracy. A government that does not discriminate against women and gays. A government that utilizes the best possible intelligence to avoid terrorist attacks without manipulating our fears for profit, and crazed notions of absolute, permanently-unchecked power.
We voted for a government that doesn’t think “empathy” is a dirty, filthy word only used by anti-American Communists; a government that doesn’t practice partisan cronyism as a general rule; a government that understands these great responsibilities and applies good judgement in the face of adversity; a government that doesn’t lose its collective shit when a nipple on a statue is exposed, or one that loses its moral compass when bodies are floating face down on the streets of a major American city.
I can only imagine what America would look like today had we not let the flack machine play the country against Jimmy Carter, or Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
You look what Jimmy Carter has done in his post-presidency and he’s built homes for the poor while teaching, written several books, and even received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Al Gore, who never had a chance to show what he could do as President because the corporate media has ‘a thing’ for inflated egos, false equivalencies, and unearned confidence, but he went on to make one of the most influential documentaries in history on the subject of climate change, a very real scandal and cover-up, and received the Nobel Peace Prize for his outstanding work and activism.
What in fuck’s name did the Bushes do with their lives, or Reagan for that matter? Other than continue to meddle in government, or paint self-portraits? Even Bush 41′ needed to be dragged out and forced to do some good by Bill Clinton.
At the very least, we voted for an administration that at least knows what the 4th Amendment says.
Here’s the Bush administration’s point-man way back in 2005, Michael Hayden, former Bush CIA Chief who quickly went on to head up the NSA arguing in favor of warrantless wiretapping that there is no “probable cause,” or protection from unreasonable searches and seizures in the 4th Amendment:
Just to be very clear–and believe me, if there’s any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it’s the Fourth. And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. And so what you’ve raised to me–and I’m not a lawyer, and don’t want to become one–what you’ve raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is “reasonable.” And we believe–I am convinced that we are lawful because what it is we’re doing is reasonable.– NSA
Just to be clear, this is the actual text of the 4th Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
How quickly they want us to forget where we really came from. This character composite sketch of President Obama is missing the eyes and ears of reality.