Obama takes personally black millennials’ lukewarm support of Clinton, as though a mark of disrespect, disloyalty, lack of gratitude, unconcern about his own legacy—when he has done so much to advance the cause of black rights (even symbolically, his presence as POTUS). But what is his legacy? And why should blacks celebrate his tenure, much less esteem him as a person?
Obama’s legacy begins with armed drones for targeted assassination, a hands-on President, meeting with likeminded national security advisers off the Situation Room on Terror Tuesdays to identify, authorize, and give the plan to execute political murder, a present-day example of lynching from 8,000 miles away. No president in US history has so involved himself in the details of executing others. And no president has been so flippant in shrugging off the results of “collateral damage” (as witness this past week in Syria).
Washington has become a center of ghoulishness under his watch. Can blacks or anyone else with conscience shrug off the consequences of such immoral acts, particularly, for blacks, the insult of being invited to be complicit in the ways of evil? If Dr. King were alive, would he urge support for Obama, and now, Obama’s effort to elect Clinton? Would Clinton, devoted to war, war preparation, hawkish in every fiber of her immoral being, even be the Democratic nominee, if Obama had not already had two terms in the presidency, despoiling, perhaps permanently, a party that once gave us FDR, Henry Wallace, Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, fair, decent individuals sincere about the cause of peace?
Obama’s legacy does not stop with assassination, but spreads in geometric proportion to intervention, regime change, paramilitary operations, a basketful of militarism capped by, first, confrontation with Russia (egging NATO on to the Russian borders), and now more decisively, confrontation with China, via battleships, carrier groups, B52 flyovers, joint military maneuvers in adjacent areas, all for the purpose of encirclement, isolation, containment, perhaps—in Obama’s further embellishment of his legacy—rollback (to Third World dependence) a la John Foster Dulles.
Obama and Clinton are indistinguishable when it comes to belligerence, nuclear-arsenal modernization, deregulation, sympathy for Wall Street, chicanery, egomania, stealth and fear of transparency, hardly suited for a society that professes belief in democracy. If Obama has the likes of John Brennan in his entourage, Clinton has her husband, and the Family Foundation doing the dirty work of American foreign policy via the avenue of personal enrichment. Does all of this in any way force one into the arms of Trump? No, nonsense, not likely. It merely reveals the moral bankruptcy of today’s American political leadership.
Trump is a dangerous charlatan, Obama and Clinton occupying the same ideological ground with slightly more sophistication and political savvy. Would you buy a used car from any of the three? Would you entrust world peace or the life and well-being of your child or grandchild to any of the three? Perhaps the remedy, such as it is, is to boycott the polls, march on election day to show your contempt for such villainy, stand in earth-shattering silence, in places of public visibility (as we did in civil rights and antiwar protests years ago—when there was a better America), displaying contempt for the ruthlessness and deviousness of our so-called leaders. Their skins are thick. They won’t change their behavior and values, or even recognize the disapproval being expressed. Of course not, because they are empty souls used to self-promotion as a way of life, over the bodies of those they victimize.
Fifty-or-so days left: more crocodile tears lamenting lack of affection and loyalty, as meanwhile Obama, Clinton, Trump, the Three Musketeers of American fascism, plan new ways of inveigling themselves, their schemes, their thirst for aggrandizement, into the hearts of the American public.
