We voted for you, Mr. Obama, and elected you president because we believed in you and your message, a seeming message of hope; we saw you as a visionary, a strong leader, and an agent of real change that would end corrupt government and transform America. But in less than two years you have proven to us that you are not the man that you purported to be and your actions are in direct conflict with your message. Yes, you fooled us once but, you know what, you will never fool us again.
We Americans continue to watch and listen as President Obama and our military leaders try to invent new, innovative justifications to somehow get us to buy into the quagmire they have created in Afghanistan. Over and over we hear this monotonous message: "We have to finish the mission; the war is critical to the vital interests of the United States; the security of our nation is at risk." They are feverishly trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the USS Titanic but it's far too late and it's not going to work.
Our president is said to revere President Abraham Lincoln. If that's so, then I think that he needs to heed Lincoln's famous quote, "You may fool all of the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." While he may think he can continue to fool the majority of the American people into supporting his misguided, unwinnable war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he is merely fooling himself.
The term smoke and mirrors refers to a presentation by which the audience is intended to be deceived, such as an attempt to trick unsuspecting prospective clients into buying into some devious financial scam. Well, we Americans have been dazzled by a continuous display of smoke and mirrors since 2000 when Bush/Cheney tried to sell us on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And now we are still being bombarded with the same old justifications and excuses for escalating the Afghan/Pakistan war by Mr. Obama.
More and more, the American people are not buying into President Obama's now personalized war agenda; yes, we have been fooled for nine years, but after a while the same old act gets stale and no longer registers. Speaking of the same old act, here are some excerpts from Mr. Obama's June 23 speech in which he fired General McChrystal who, literally, talked himself out of his job with his wayward tongue:
Mr. Obama spoke of the "vital mission", how we must "succeed" in defeating Al Qaeda. He repeated the same old, "We must eliminate the safe haven from which Al Qaeda is destroying the Afghanistan society from within, and they must be prevented from attacking America." This is the old, "we need to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here." Once, again, the fact is that Al Qaeda is now in any number of countries and could attack the U.S. from any of them.
Listening to some of these "war" discussions on network or cable TV can be extremely nauseating as these hosts and anchors continue to discuss how we need to "go after the bad guys" when they haven't a clue about what's really going on or they have been verbally muzzled so they don't dare to state their true opinions. The national media are nothing more than a bunch of string puppets that dance around, controlled and manipulated by their corporate masters.
During the last war that America lost to insurgents, namely, the Vietnam War, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon used ever conceivable tactic, including an extensive display of smoke and mirrors, to convince the American people to continue to support a disastrous, failing war. Their policies and actions resulted in the deaths of 58,000 U.S. troops while two million Vietnamese died and America suffered a humiliating defeat.
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