Interestingly, whether he recognises it or not--and Cheney being Cheney, this isn't so easy to "presume"--this "outcome" is also one he has no-one but Obama to thank for. And that is by any measure, a big "thing". For Cheney and Obama!
More than that, if there is any substance to Robert Parry's earlier assessment that Obama "desperately" wants to be one of the "elite inhabitants of Official Washington's bubble", and we accept that Cheney and his adoring throng are representative of this cabal of "elite inhabitants", we are left with no other conclusion [than] that the president has exhausted any and all semblance of credibility and integrity.
All of which brings us back to Obama and his legacy, and in particular [to] some of the unrequited expectations we might consider in determining the substance of said "legacy". As it turns out, in assessing that legacy through the prism of those "unrequited expectations", we indeed appear to have a big menu to choose from. The effective amnesty extended by Obama to Cheney and Co. for war crimes during their disastrous tenure must surely then be a significant criterion for defining Number 44's legacy.
If, as Ambrose Bierce once noted, amnesty is 'the state's magnanimity towards those whom it would be too expensive to punish', then it is with Obama this adage reaches its apotheosis. This applies as much to the Washington criminals like Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and others who opened up the Pandora's Box in the Middle East and South Asia with the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles. It also applies to his refusal to aggressively prosecute the Wall Street criminals (the Lloyd Blankfeins, Jamie Dimons and their ilk) for their role in bringing the global economic and financial system to the brink of disaster.
Put simply, Obama's unblemished record of amnesty for the sundry intelligence, financial, military, bureaucratic and political elites responsible for the above debacles should be key benchmarks in determining the shape and substance of said legacy.
Compounding this track record--at once entirely at odds with it and bringing it into razor-sharp focus--is Obama's well documented, unprecedented and uncompromising persecution under the Espionage Act of whistle-blowers, investigative journalists and leakers, the very people he promised would be protected under his administration. Snowden's comment earlier bitterly underscores this reality. It would not be engaging in hyperbole to suggest in this he makes the Bush regime look timid by way of comparison.
And as for the president's much-touted transparency, whether in domestic or foreign policy, most would argue it didn't even show up for duty to go AWOL in the first instance.
Insofar as foreign policy is concerned, it was William Blum who brought into sharp relief also the myriad anomalies, double standards, inconsistencies, logical conflicts and outright hypocrisies that have characterised the Obama presidency in this area, by framing a series of telling questions that might be presented to the president at a White House press conference.
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