Obama’s Illegal War

Eric Renderking Fisk | April 29th, 2011 

A couple of weeks ago I was going to hammer out three pages about how President Obama received an award for “Transparency in Government” in a private ceremony and how it totally contradicts many of his campaign promises. I was also going to lament on the oxymoron that’s this event was. The jokes write themselves while at the same time there’s no way anyone can excuse this away. You can’t justify this.

At the same time nobody can say any more about that; it’s ironic, hypocritical and the lack of media outrage about this story that should be the lead in every news broadcast on the three major networks each night and top of the hour on all the Twenty-Four Hour news networks. Networks like MSNBC who have been ousted as blinded Obama supporters and sock-puppets of the Democratic Committee need to jump on this news story hard to dispel the “illusion” of bias, just as people would demand that FOXNews should do the same for the same reasons.

What many republicans had to learn during the Nixon fiasco, when one of your own does wrong you have to be the loudest and demand changes, it’s better to sacrifice your own rather than take the whole organization down with you. Perhaps now it’s time for the democrats to do the same in the light of a few current issues that are plaguing the country in general and the DNC’s credibility specifically.

We can all see via our own first-hand experience that the economy is in trouble and the Middle East is on the verge of a broader collapse than we’ve seen in a long time. There’s no agreement from anyone that there’s plenty of work that’s needed to get done to bring the cost of gas down, the rate of employment up, while at the same time we need to demonstrate leadership over-seas. At a passing glance it seems that that these are insurmountable problems in and of themselves, but on close examination they’re all interrelated. Since The United States doesn’t have its own house in order and there are anywhere between 9% (the official number) and 20-something percent (rumored) unemployment numbers, domestic oil production is hampered by a moratorium against drilling for oil in the gulf, and the debate on deficit spending could be bringing us to a second civil war while the S&P downgraded the countries credit rating; how can we take a leadership role in the world stage with a “do as I say, not as we do” stance?

That brings me to this so-called war against Libia that The United States and the rest of our NATO allies are now engaged in, specifically Barack Obama’s campaign promises to end the misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan… only to keep those going while Guantanamo Base remains open. Obama seems to be keeping the “Big Brother” mentality alive with double-speak. Dubya Bush might have been the worst president because of the wars over-seas and the unconstitutional policies during his years in office, but Barack Obama is still a great leader because of the wars over-seas and the unconstitutional policies during the two years he’s been in office so far. It makes perfect sense only if you’re in a Lewis Carroll novel.

This trip through the looking –glass is made even stranger when we look at how the media reported the number of people who died in Afghanistan and Iraq during every news cast while Dubya was in office but there’s nothing about the casualty list since Barack took office. How is it that when the republican was in office, those numbers mattered; the media demanded to show the flag-draped coffins? Now that the democrat is in the oval office, someone they clearly campaigned for, the deaths of these solders don’t matter or might as well not even exist.

This Orwellian nightmare is brought to vivid life when we see the empty public parks and squares where protestors used to gather regularly with their weathered signs about ending our involvement in the conflicts in Middle East and how George W. Bush should be charged for war crimes. Where did the anti-war protestors go?

There were protestors who were gathering by the hundreds if not thousands leading up to the conflict in Iraq making their voices heard that they would not tolerate “blood for oil.” Yet here we are now with air-strikes and talk of arming the rebels in Libya which is a supplier of oil to our NATO allies but there are no protests. Our blood for someone else’s oil is more tolerable?

The obvious conclusion to all of this, from the “Transparency In Government” award ceremony held in secret then no media outrage, Guantanamo is still detaining terror suspects, the continuation or expansion of the same Bush/Cheney policies that were vilified before January of 2009, the expanded conflicts and higher death tolls in the Middle East, the pacifist posturing by many on “the left” until Obama took the oath of office; it was never about ending the war.

What was all the "Bush Is Evil" angst really all about then?  How is one wrong, but the other is not?