Obama's First 100 Daze

That's where everyone's been.

In a daze.

One that's lasted longer than a mere three months and change.

If anything, there are people that have been in this stupor for four or more years, ever since Obama became one of two senators from Illinois. At least since he gave the speech heard 'round the world at the 2004 Democratic Convention, which may or may not be the point at which the corporations said, “By damn! This kid's got some potential! We oughta hitch our star to this guy!”

Today, the day after he celebrated the fact that he's been in office a whopping handful of time, all we're hearing about is how great his speech was. Brilliant, in fact. So brilliant that the Baltimore Sun, a newspaper that became irrelevant a long time ago, had this to say:

“Even on his best nights, John F. Kennedy did not seem as calm, confident and masterful as Obama did in an hour’s worth of prime time give and take with the press. As good as Obama has been in such settings before, Wednesday he seemed perfectly tuned to each shifting topic and tone. The president was appropriately sober, moral and earnest in talking about waterboarding as torture — without taking the bait and using the question to attack players in the previous administration for their excesses in prisoner abuse.”

You'd think someone could rid us of this Kennedy comparison but of course not.

What's interesting is the fact that the company that owns the Baltimore Sun is the exact same company that owns the Chicago Tribune. And who's the hometown kid? Yep.

You'll forgive me now as I go off on a tangent.

I especially enjoyed the last sentence about how Obama talked about torture but didn't "take the bait" and accuse anyone in the Bush administration of committing a crime.

How very convenient of our Constitutional Law professor president, wouldn't you agree?

Nevermind that the Bush administration shat on the Constitution, at one point referring to it as “a goddamned piece of paper”.

Torture? Perish the thought. No one in “the previous administration” would ever think of doing such a thing. After all, we have laws against that.

Yeah, because those fucks were so very concerned about law. Don't forget these are the same people that stole three elections in the course of six years and reigned with an iron fist and a gun to the world's collective head for eight.

What did Obama actually have to say about torture?

He said that he was very comfortable “banning” waterboarding.

He then was asked about Bush and company and said, “I think that whatever legal rationale was used, it was a mistake.”

This is what the Baltimore Sun called brilliant because Obama didn't “take the bait”.

So call a crime a “mistake” and everyone should be happy about it and hail you as being brilliant, savvy, smart, presidential.

I'd call it being a chickenshit but, hey, what do I know, right?

You might wonder why I put quotation marks around the word banning.

Well, I think it's probably because I find it so interesting that a guy that doesn't believe in torture, up to the point of calling it a crime (because then he shrinks away in terror), actually has a Secretary Of War that had no problem with the torture that he engaged in under the Bush administration. I think it's probably because I find it so interesting that he has a National Intelligence Director (Admiral Dennis Blair) that thinks torture works. He has a senior intelligence official that has been accused of covering up the torture of an American nun in Guatemala in 1989 and another that is an apologist for Augusto Pinochet.

Does this sound like change of any sort? Does this sound like torture is going to end anytime soon? Out of sight, out of practice. Not likely.

Lest we forget about Obama's adamant urging that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay not be recognized as people or that those being held in Afghanistan have no right to habeas corpus. Even Stephen Colbert thinks this is fucking ridiculous and if you didn't hear his audience's reaction to this point a couple weeks ago, you don't know what you missed.

Fortunately, not everyone has been asleep or zoned out.

We still have the Black Agenda Report, whose Bruce Dixon just did a report card on the prez.

And we have Paul Street, Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and Counterpunch.org, to name a small handful.

It's not too late to snap out of it and get objective about Barack Obama. No one can be “good” or “evil” all the time. It's time to wake up and start learning the truth, instead of just taking spoon-feeding from CNN, MSNBC and FOX.