Let’s start with two facts:
1. The United States of America is a rogue state built on and maintained by terror
2. Barack Obama will do absolutely nothing to change or challenge the realities behind fact #1
 
In the name of providing context, let’s look back to the “good war” (a phrase in which—as Studs Terkel said—the noun and adjective don’t match) for an example of time-honored US terror tactics: In World War II’s Pacific theater—cheered on by the likes of Time magazine, which explained that “properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves”—US General Curtis LeMay’s Twenty-first Bomber Command, laid siege on the poorer areas of Japan’s large cities. On the night of March 9-10, 1945, the target was Tokyo, where tightly packed wooden buildings took the brunt of 1,665 tons of incendiaries. LeMay later recalled that a few explosives had been mixed in with the incendiaries to demoralize firefighters (96 fire engines burned to ashes and 88 firemen died). The attack area was 87.4 percent residential. By May 1945, 75 percent of the bombs being dropped on Japan were incendiaries and LeMay’s campaign took an estimated 672,000 lives.
 
In a confidential memo of June 1945, Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, an aide to General MacArthur, called the raids, “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings on non-combatants in all history.” Secretary of War Henry Stimson declared it was “appalling that there had been no protest over the air strikes we were conducting against Japan which led to such extraordinarily heavy loss of life.” Stimson added that he “did not want to have the United States get the reputation for outdoing Hitler in atrocities.” After the “good war,” LeMay admitted: “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side.”
 
The men that devised and carried out this heinous attack are widely considered to be part of this country’s “greatest generation” yet, by any sane definition, what I just described is terrorism …far worse than anything allegedly perpetrated by official US enemies.
 
Rosa Luxemburg sez: “The first revolutionary act is to call things by their true names.” Well then, here goes: Whether we—or Lord Obama—choose to admit it or not, the vaunted “American way of life” was built on a nearly exterminated indigenous population, the African slave trade, and all those killed in places like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Southeast Asia, Central America, the Middle East, etc. It was built on stolen land using stolen oil. Our way of life was built on terror and it is maintained by terror: e.g. cops, prisons, military, and the psychological oppression of propaganda.
 
The exalted Pope of Hope is merely shilling old Kool-Aid in shiny new recyclable bottles. Until we act, we remain accomplices to his global and domestic crimes.
 
Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net