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"Shallow Throat": Is Obama Turning Into Bush Lite?
By Bernard Weiner (about the author) Page 1 of 3 page(s)
For OpEdNews: Bernard Weiner - Writer
Maybe this happens to you, too. You go away on vacation for a few months, come back and sort through your snail/email and back copies of magazines and 'net stories, only to find that a good share of the mail is third-class junk/spam and not all that much has changed in the news.
That's the way I feel these days. After pumping out about 300 essays since 9/11, recently I more or less took a three-month leave from publishing political analyses on the internet in order to reconnect with other aspects of my life, in particular to focus on three major creative projects: a new play (in February), a photo exhibit of new work (April), and a music concert based on my poetry (May).
Now I'm back, sort of, only to find that much of the political news remains the same as when I took my creative break: Obama is maintaining his high national approval ratings as he moves his agenda forward, the clueless Republicans continue as little more than the obstructionist Party of No. But some shiftings are beginning to happen in Washington that I don't fully understand.
So I arranged a meeting with Shallow Throat to see if the moderate Republican mole (who has been such a helpful source in the past**) could fill in the blanks in my knowledge while I was absent from the political scene for three months. We met at a noisy end-of-the-Metro-line cafe.
"So much of what President Obama is doing is right on track with the good things he promised to do during the campaign," I said, "so I am mystified why, in the past few months, he has moved away from other important positions he took as a candidate on a wide variety of subjects: canceling the promised release of more torture photos, defending CheneyBush's 'state secrets' positions in court, ratcheting up the war in Afghanistan big time, agreeing to 'military commissions' for show trials of terror suspects, keeping the murders of interrogated detainees out of the news, etc. etc. All of this caving to rightist positions makes him look like a typical political chameleon or, worse still, a hypocrite, or even worse, not much better than Bush Lite."
"I gather," said ST, "that you're talking about his willingness to give Bush and Cheney and the crew a total walk on their unconstitutional behavior and on their war-crimes. In effect, if my guess is correct, you and your liberal friends think on these issues he is selling out his principles and his base."
ACCESSORY AFTER THE FACT?
"Exactly," I replied. "The law is explicit: If you know of a felony (such as state-sponsored torture) and refuse to report it to the appropriate authorities for action, or impede investigations by covering up the facts, you can be charged as an accessory after the fact in those crimes -- domestically and in international courts. I still support Obama and the great bulk of what he's trying to do domestically, but I need to try to understand why on earth Obama is behaving this way. Hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of the lies, deceptions and illegal activities of the previous administration, and Obama, by doing nothing, is letting them all walk away from their crimes, setting a terrible precedent for more law-breaking by future presidents and their underlings."
"Well," said Shallow Throat, "since I'm not in the Obama Administration, I'm sure I know less than your Democrat friends in power. But I've got some reasonable speculations based on the scuttlebut I'm picking up and my own sense of how the Beltway operates.
"First of all, it's essential to realize that Obama is not an ideologue. He has ideals and goals, to be sure, but as you yourself wrote repeatedly during the campaign, he's mostly a pragmatist with some liberal leanings. As a realist, he knows there is a big difference between the nation at large, where he and his programs are massively popular, and the D.C. island, where his policies have to make their way through the dragons of special interests and win approval in a Congress beholden to those interests.
"Obama knows he can't do it all, can't fix the economy and everything else as well, in one fell swoop. He wants to get a few major initiatives enacted into law during these first two years -- health-care reform, for sure -- and he needs some Republican votes. So he's, in effect, trying to take national-security concerns out of the equation -- torture, war-crimes, terrorism, military tribunals, surveillance -- in order to smooth the way toward passage in Congress of his major agenda items. He isn't kidding when he says he doesn't want his first term to get bogged down by turning to time- and energy-consuming investigations into the nefarious crimes of Cheney/Bush-era.
"But Obama simply doesn't yet understand how things work in Washington. The partisan politics of any situation will always out -- starting with damaging leaks -- especially so in a situation where the opposition, in this case the Republicans, is looking for anything to drag Obama and the Democrats down. Hell, they've already announced their oppositon to his nominee to the Supreme Court and that person hasn't even been named yet! And they sure as hell are going after Obama and his proxies, or are trying to, on national-security issues."
HELPING OBAMA FAIL
"That's what I don't get," I said. "What can the Republicans hope to gain by playing this obstructionist game and by using the despised Dick Cheney as their spokesman? Surely, they read the polls. The American people are not buying the extreme politics they're selling. So why not make some alterations in their leadership and policies and move more toward the center?"
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