Obama vs. Osama

In recent news of Al Qaeda and associates:

—The Obama administration claims to have killed on Monday in Somalia an Al Qaeda “ringleader” out of Kenya. In contrast to the George II administration, which preferred to, Bobby Ford-like, strike at its “number two men in Al Qaedas” from afar, with cruise missiles and long-range gunships, this latest miscreant was dispatched by actual human beings who identified him visually.

—In an audio recording, Osama bin Laden, in what appears to be a textbook case of projection, dismissed Obama as “a weakened man,” and then renewed his recent shameless attempt to yoke his free-lance banditry to the Palestinian pursuit of a free and independent state.

—Reports emerging out of Pakistan indicate that the price of goosing the Pakistani military to chase Taliban fighters out of the Swat Valley includes hundreds of civilians murdered by Army troops and dumped like cordwood in the streets. Meanwhile, in neighboring Afghanistan, violence has spiked to levels not seen since the doomed legions of George II first stumbled into that country, nearly eight full years ago.

Obama Takes Mistake To The US Supreme Court

“Open the second shutter, so that more light can come in.”

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, last words

The United States Supreme Court will decide in October whether to hear the Obama administration’s ill-advised plea that it not be required to comply with a court order mandating the release of photographs documenting torture and abuse inflicted on prisoners in the War on Terra.

The Justice Department had initially declined to pursue the BushCo-era appeal, with presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs publicly describing the case as “unwinnable.” However, after intense lobbying from military officials and BushCo holdovers, Obama in May declared “that releasing these photos would inflame anti-American opinion and allow our enemies to paint U.S. troops with a broad, damning and inaccurate brush, thereby endangering them in theaters of war.”

Replied Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU, the plaintiff in the case: “It’s an awful idea to give violent extremists veto power over the Freedom of Information Act.”

As the linked New York Times report points out, the case turns on one of the very principles behind the establishing of this nation, memorably expressed by William O. Douglas in his dissent in Environmental Protection Agency v. Mink (1973) 410 US 73: “The generation that made the nation thought secrecy in government one of the instruments of Old World tyranny and committed itself to the principle that a democracy cannot function unless the people are permitted to know what their government is up to.”

Thank You For Talkin’ To Me, Africa

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recently completed 11-day journey through Africa offered further proof that, with the Obama administration, the age of “American exceptionalism,” as we have known it, is over.

In the past, American policymakers too often lectured, hectored African nations and peoples. Africans, by Americans, were condescendingly addressed, as if they were errant children.

Clinton, in contrast, approached Africans as equals. In Nigeria, she acknowledged that the American electoral system is subject to the same sorts of corruption, nepotism, and cronyism that can afflict African nations. And in Cape Verde and South Africa she stated that the US could learn from the African example.

Black Cat

British goofball Niall Ferguson has again thrust his Oxfords into his maw, this time comparing Barack Obama to the venerable cartoon character Felix the Cat. You see, inscribed Ferguson in the Financial Times, “Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky. And that pretty much sums up the 44th president of the US[.]“

Ferguson had previously brought shame upon all his generations by gabbling such atavistic British colonial nonsense as “those who are drawn to ‘the Other’ may be atypical in their sexual predilections,” and “when a Chinese woman marries a European man, the chances are relatively high that only the first child they conceive will be viable.” These profundities appeared in a tome titled War of the World, which supplemented Ferguson’s role as host of a series on 20th Century history broadcast on Britain’s Channel 4.

Across the great water there in England, 21st Century Britons are being driven mad by the ubiquity of this throwback, who is not only allowed to run loose on television and scribble in the Times, but is also spouting gibberish on the BBC.

Ferguson, complained Priamvada Gopal in the Guardian, is engaged in the “aggressive rewriting of history, driven by the messianic fantasies of the America right”; “[o]nly the desire to recover some imaginary good from the tragedy that was empire,” she concludes, “can explain the elevation of th[is] neoconservative ideologue to chief imperial historian.”

Cambridge Goddam

(This piece was originally posted to Daily Kos. All iterations of “this blog,” “this site,” and the like, thus reference that place, not this one.)

When they slapped the cuffs on Henry Louis Gates Jr., they took it all away from him. In his 58 years he’d done everything he was supposed to, played all the games, made all the moves, but now none of it mattered: when it came right down to it, he was just another uppity Negro, and he was going to jail.

“This was the supreme humiliation for Henry Louis Gates, because he has achieved a rarefied status and the considerations that are usually afforded to him went right out the window when the officer arrested him. In a minute, that cop erased all that Gates has had to work through to get where he is. That officer tripped every racial humiliation that Gates and his family have experienced since slavery.”

Brought it all back home. And today Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is sitting there on the piano bench, right next to Nina Simone, and he’s singing “Cambridge Goddam.”

Puma Pellets

One of the more bizarre spectacles of the 2008 presidential campaign had to be the PUMAs (Party Unity My Ass)—Clinton II dead-enders who absolutely refused to accept that she had lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama. Like those furtive, fugitive WWII Japanese soldiers who scurried for years around remote South Pacific atolls, declining to follow the Emperor into surrender, PUMAs could not concede when their Queen did. They left the party, claiming the party, in failing to crown Clinton II, had left them. Stubborn and ornery as unreconstructed Confederates, there were never that many of them, but they made a lot of noise: pounding their keyboards on renegade blogs, keening loudly on gossipy TV shows. Resembling those bullfrogs that swell up to intimidate potential predators, they managed to convince some people they were bigger and fiercer than they really were. In the end, they even encouraged Bomb McCain—when ordered by Karl Rove to eschew Joe Lieberman as his vice president—to shoot his own campaign right in the stomach, by choosing the moose-brained Sarah Palin as his running mate . . . on the theory she would stampede the PUMAs to the GOP, allowing him to ride them into the White House. Didn’t work out too good, that one, did it, John?

Like cancer cells beaten into remission, they glumly clung on through the general election. Then, not even President Obama’s selection of Clinton II as his Secretary of State mollified them. On blogs like No Quarter, a nut-bunker maintained by former CIA spook and fervent Islamophobe Larry Johnson, and The Confluence and Alegre’s Corner, a couple of shriek-shacks knocked together by refugees from Daily Kos, the PUMAs practiced a sort of political schizophrenia: damning or ignoring everything that could be said to come from Obama, while gushing over anything that could plausibly be linked to Clinton II. And they’re still at it.

There were also always closeted PUMAs in more high-profile positions, of course. These, however, were, from the convention on, generally well-behaved. Until this week. Now, for some reason, they’ve decided to commence the handwringing: the Queen is being Ignored.

Powell Coming Out

People are permitted to grow wiser as they grow older, and when they do, we should try not to give them a hard time.

While campaigning for president, Bill Clinton promised to lift the military’s ban on gay service personnel. Once in office, his plans encountered stiff opposition from senior members of the military, conservative Congressmembers, and various assorted bluenoses from across the fruited plain. Even as Senator Sam Nunn presided over a carnival of a congressional hearing, during which assorted beribboned potentates and scholastic hacks soberly intoned that the Republic would Faint Dead Away if openly gay people were permitted to take up arms, Colin Powell, then serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, quietly assembled support for a “compromise,” in which gay people might serve, so long as they did not openly declare themselves, or engage in sexual relations. In return, the military would cease its punitive “homosexual hunts.” Clinton, eager to put the issue behind him, so that he could get on to bungling health care, caved. And so Powell’s policy, soon dubbed “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” sailed through Congress, to be anchored into federal law as 10 USC 654.

While maintaining that the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy “was correct for the time,” in an appearance this past Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, Powell signaled that it is now time for that policy to go.

No Fear

The New York Times this week dispatched a reporter to Hawaii to determine whether the fear merchants of North Korea and the American right had succeeded in scarifying the islanders.

Seems a Japanese newspaper, Yomiuri, reported on June 17 that, according to an “analysis” by the Japanese Defense Ministry, “it is believed” North Korea “might” fire a long-range ballistic missile “toward” Hawaii, “maybe” around July 4.

The shadowy, assumption-riddled Yomiuri piece seems primarily geared towards instilling fear in the Japanese people, spinning scenarios of the missile landing near the Japanese island of Okinawa, or dumping a first-stage booster over the Chugoku or Shikoku regions of Japan. But it was the Hawaiian speculation that was immediately latched onto by US-oriented fear limpets—despite the fact that the article explicitly states that any missile must land at least 500 kilometers short of the main Hawaiian islands.

And so, people prone to flogging and/or feeling fear having been in a flap for nearly a week now, the Times set out to discover if the Hawaiians themselves were wringing their hands and running for shelter.

No.

Out Of Africa

Barack Obama has been quite the globe-trotter in his first few short months in office. He has journeyed several times to Europe, once to the Caribbean, touched down in Asia, and recently tip-toed through the minefield of the Middle East.

In July, Obama will make his first visit as president to sub-Saharan Africa. Over two days in Ghana, says press secretary Robert Gibbs, Obama will “highlight[] the critical role that sound governance and civil society play in promoting lasting development.”

I’m not sure I’m comfortable with Gibbs’ choice of words. To these ears they echo eerily an address on Africa delivered by Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, in February of 2008, wherein The Decider outlined his vision of an Africa captive to the interests of international capital. Which itself echoed words inscribed by the exiled Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o in his 2006 novel Wizard Of The Crow.

The President Of The United States