Obama: The Best Of The Worst

Four years ago today, I was convinced that Barack Obama had to win the US presidency and was ecstatic when he did. As a Canadian, my main concerns were US foreign policy and international law. Obama had pledged to shut Guantanamo, seek dialogue with old adversaries, roll back the perpetual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and address climate change. His victory speech at Grant Park in Chicago was the culminating moment of a long struggle to reclaim the American project back from the dark forces represented by that two-headed hellpanda, McCain/Palin.

New possibilities and new intensities were being revealed that evening. It was a celebration of Kant's "true enthusiasm...directed exclusively towards the ideal, particularly towards that which is purely moral." Out of Obama's victory emerged a preview of what was to come during the Arab Spring and Occupy movements and what Alain Badiou refers to in The Rebirth of History as the "inexistent of the world":

"The inexistent has risen. That is why we refer to uprising: people were lying down, submissive; they are getting up, picking themselves up, rising up. This rising is the rising of existence itself: the poor have not become rich; people who were unarmed are not now armed, and so forth. Basically, nothing has changed. What has occurred is restitution of the existence of the inexistent, conditional upon what I call an event."

Such events open up new possibilities and contain elements of "prescriptive universalities" in which the entire world can recognize itself.

Then change turned rancid. Obama took his mandate and elided it with what had come before. He not only reneged on the core pledges I care about, he forged a bipartisan normalization and legitimization on issues related to war and national security. The long list involves prosecuting whistle-blowers, criminalizing WikiLeaks, extending the Patriot Act and conducting an illegal war in Libya and very likely Yemen. Obama's victory also silenced the critics that had been vociferous under Bush-Cheney. As Matt Stoller argues in "The Progressive Case Against Obama":

"Under Obama, because there is now no one making the anti-torture argument, Americans have become more tolerant of torture, drones, war and authoritarianism in general. The case against Obama is that the people themselves will be better citizens under a Romney administration, distrusting him and placing constraints on his behavior the way they won’t on Obama. As a candidate, Obama promised a whole slew of civil liberties protections, lying the whole time. Obama has successfully organized the left part of the Democratic Party into a force that had rhetorically opposed war and civil liberties violations, but now cheerleads a weakened America too frightened to put Osama bin Laden on trial. We must fight this thuggish political culture Bush popularized, and Obama solidified in place."

If that's the best US democracy can deliver, then something has to change. The best of the worst still stinks.

Romney: Netanyahu's Double Folly

A new low is unfolding in the US. A foreign ally is openly colluding with the Republicans to influence the outcome of an election. Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu and his fellow plutocrat, Mitt Romney, are attempting to box in the Obama administration over military action against Iran. Israel is explicitly taking a side in the election: Team Romney and his NeoCon bloodsuckers.

Today, Bibi and his cohorts were making the rounds, exploiting reports that President Obama had snubbed the Israeli PM by refusing a request to meet with him at the UN later this month, and suggesting that the US administration was failing to take the Iranian nuclear issue seriously.

Within hours Romney was quoted as saying, "I can’t ever imagine saying no" to a meeting with dear Bibi. The choreographing couldn't have been better, but their transparent cravenness was an unfortunate oversight, an unforced error that has left both significantly diminished. As David Remnick writes in The New Yorker:

Netanyahu seems determined, more than ever, to alienate the President of the United States and, as an ally of Mitt Romney’s campaign, to make himself a factor in the 2012 election— one no less pivotal than the most super Super PAC. “Who are you trying to replace?” the opposition leader, Shaul Mofaz, asked of Netanyahu in the Knesset on Wednesday. “The Administration in Washington or that in Tehran?”

Romney's sick opportunism makes him look feeble and desperate, while Netanyahu is increasingly being seen as a threat to Israel's security. By meddling in the presidential election only a month and a half before the vote, Netanyahu is committing a double folly. 

War Is Peace: Obama & Bush

"We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state" ~ Jack Balkin, law professor at Yale

Everyday Obama gets one step closer to surpassing his predecessor's delusional and illegal policies. He's actually worse than Bush because he's legitimizing that agenda by forging a bipartisan consensus between Democrats and Republicans on issues related to war and national security. The growing list involves prosecuting whistle-blowers, criminalizing Wikileaks, extending the Patriot Act and conducting an illegal war in Libya and possibly Yemen. Now Obama, just like Bush, is being accused of breaking the law and overruling two of his top legal advisers over the U.S. role in Libya. His excuse for not consulting Congress? The Libyan conflict doesn't rise to the level of a war:

“We are acting lawfully,” said Harold Koh, the State Department legal adviser, who expanded on the administration’s reasoning in a joint interview with White House Counsel Robert Bauer....“We are not saying the president can take the country into war on his own,” Mr. Koh said. “We are not saying the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional or should be scrapped, or that we can refuse to consult Congress. We are saying the limited nature of this particular mission is not the kind of ‘hostilities’ envisioned by the War Powers Resolution.”

I originally supported the intervention and agreed with Juan Cole that it was justified. I still feel that way, but Obama must go to Congress or else this whole thing stinks as badly as Bush at his worst.

Erik Prince: Onward Christian Soldiers

"I'm an American working for America" - Erik Prince

The Security Industrial Complex of the USA is getting stronger everyday, thanks to the Obama administration. Just when you thought the mercenary torturers and assassins known as Blackwater might have gone the way of Kid Rock and Ed Hardy lids, they spring up in the deserts of the United Arab Emirates reincarnated as Reflex Responses (R2). Erik Prince, a former Navy Seal and the Crusader in Chief of R2, has made explicit his policy not to hire any Muslims because those folks are so darn unreliable they won't kill their own fellow Muslims. Prince has been working with the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi to set up his band of lawless renegades in the Muslim state for a cool US$529 million. What a patriot!


According to the New York Times and Jeremy Scahill, R2 has been hired by the UAE to help with security in the wake of the Arab Spring, which means part of their task will include crushing any democratic uprisings or demonstrations that might occur. The contractors are mainly Colombian and will receive up to US$150 a day. This represents a huge raise from US$34, the amount they were earning back when they were really dumb and rampaging through Iraq killing innocent civilians and getting away with it, thanks to the Obama administration.



These goons make Rambo look like Justin Bieber as they shred the law into coleslaw. As he has done in the past, Prince is again likely breaking the law by training foreign nationals without the authorization of the US State Department. But not to worry - Obama has got him covered. His administration is doing the unthinkable - normalizing Bush’s worst breaches of international law.

President Obama & the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, April 26, 2011

Part of R2's remit may include Iran, situated just across the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. Nothing like a Christian Crusade tucked inside the Trojan horse of the UAE to deliver peace to the Middle East. Unless of course, your industry is the US Security Industrial Complex and your interest is creating a demand for your services. Get your war on.

Ding-Dong! Munchkins Celebrate

"I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure." - Mark Twain

"Ding-dong! The Witch is Dead!" chant the little people of Oz, reveling in the death of the wicked asshat, Usama bin-Laden. At this point, almost ten years after the 9/11 attacks, that's how it looks - only little people from a little land would take such joy in the demise of a depraved paper tiger. At least his death has succeeded in helping the U.S. get its war back on and in revealing a carny tribalism at the festering heart of the American project.

Like the Wizard of Oz, bin-Laden was an illusion, a spectacle designed to simplify the genuine tragedy of 9/11. His death now serves to distract a nation from its decline and ramp up Obama's 2012 re-election campaign. It's no surprise that within only a few hours of bin-Laden's death, the focus turned to Obama's poll numbers.

"I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet retired spot and kill him."

Like Mark Twain, I too take pleasure in the death of a bad man, especially one who started the fight. But the pleasure isn't ostentatious or designed as a spectacle for public consumption - it's a somber and private one to be experienced away from the herd.

John Yoo & Obama: Pity The Fools

"He's got a mind like a sewer and a heart like a fridge" - Man Out Of Time, Elvis Costello

Look at that oily smile - doesn't it just scream, "Punch Me!"? It's John Yoo, one of the war criminals who provided legal cover for the Bush and Cheney torture regime. But he was just doing his job. When called to duty by the U.S. President you don't have a choice...unless, of course, you've got a better option with Morgan Stanley, Halliburton or Fox News. Poor John never had one of those offers. He was just a lowly Professor of Law at Berkeley when Bush came to call.

Yoo jumped when asked to issue rationals and excuses for executive privileges and gross extensions of presidential authority in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraqi invasion. Oh, and the torture of children. In December 2005, when Yoo debated University of Notre Dame law professor Douglass Cassel, this exchange took place:

Cassel: "If the President deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?"

Yoo: "No treaty."

Cassel: "Also no law by Congress — that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo..."

Yoo: "I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that."

What a guy. Nothing else sums up the degeneration of the Obama administration than the continuation of the Bush/Cheney war crimes as illustrated by Yoo's ugly endorsement. With Obama's recent decision to allow military trials to resume at Gitmo - reneging on his promise to close the prison camp - he appears to have made the calculation that progressives have nowhere to go in 2012; they'll stay loyal and remain hopeful that he'll transform the U.S. state of torture and war in his second term when re-election isn't a concern. I pity the fools.

This is how the U.S. is now governed - both parties have collided, they have become one regarding the criminal lengths they will go for "security." Pity the fools.

The Worst Intensity: OPR Report On Torture

My biggest disappointment with Obama over the last thirteen months has been his failure to prosecute the war crimes that he seemed so determined to redress during his campaign. Dick Cheney now feels immune to brag about his support of torture during and after his tenure as VP and the lawyers that twisted the legal system to give cover to those crimes have now been tapped gently on the wrist for exercising nothing more than poor judgment. The precedent is set and there's nothing to stop a future administration from doing the same and even going further.

It's decisions like the OPR Report On Torture Memos that have fueled the backlash against Washington from both left and right and caused much of Obama's current strife. The lawyers and politicians get off, while grunts like Lynndie England get the blame. As Andrew Sullivan writes:

"That Lynndie England went to jail for doing things that John Yoo made legal, and Yoo does not even face disbarment, tells you all you need to know about the current state of justice in America. In the end, the current president and attorney-general have assented to this massive injustice. The responsibility is theirs'."

But even more appalling is the realization that the US suffered so much more under Bush than I previously thought. His administration's dark legacy continues to influence policy and the center has shifted so far to the right that injustices like those war crimes are now debated as legitimate tools to be employed. Failure to do so now brings hoots of "coward," while Obama appears to lack the courage of his convictions. It's that old Yeats poem, "The Second Coming" all over again:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Here is George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley discussing the loss of "one of the core principles of Nuremberg" with Keith Olbermann:

The Crime Of Tolerance: Let's Make A Deal

"Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil"
- Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

If Thomas Mann was right, and tolerance in the face of evil is a crime, then what does a poor guy like Lando Calrissian do, clown shoes or not?

With all the compromises made around US health care, the parallels are obvious. Thanks to Darth Lieberman's ever shifting parameters, it's now just a withered shade of what it could be. That's what happens when the insurance industry gets to call the shots. Has Obama become his greatest foe, an embodiment of Blake's "The Grey Monk"?

The iron hand crush'd the Tyrant's head
And became a Tyrant in his stead

Or when he says, as he did in Oslo last week, “We can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace,” has he mastered Keats' "negative capability"?

As Yoda said, "Do, or do not. There is no 'try."

From Nairobi To Shenzhen: Mark Obama Ndesandjo

Yet another of Barack Obama's half-brothers is alive and well in...Communist China. Mark Obama Ndesandjo has just unveiled a book in Shenzhen - From Nairobi To Shenzhen - based in part on his relationship with his often abusive father, Barack Obama Sr. Apparently, it's part fiction because Ndesandjo couldn't remember having any good experiences with him. As a result, he decided to add fictional details to make the character of Obama Sr. seem more authentic.

"My mother used to say of my father, 'He's a brilliant man, but a social failure' and I remember times in my house when I would hear screams, when I would hear my mother's pain. And I was a child, and I could not actually, I could not actually ... I could not protect her."

I haven't read the book, but Ndesandjo's journey sounds interesting. In 2002, he ended up in China after working in the US and earning degrees from Brown and Stanford. He's 46, married to a Chinese woman and has been teaching piano and English just over the border from Hong Kong in Shenzhen, and is involved in consulting. By all accounts he appears to be loving life. Here's a news report from Chinese TV last year:



The book is available online from Aventine Press, a self-publishing company less charitably known as a "vanity press" because it publishes works at the author's expense.

Obama's Nobel: A Call To Action

Que? How can this jive novice even qualify for the Nobel Peace Prize? What were they thinking??

Well, from outside the US it's easy to see; Obama has changed the world. Less than a year ago it was smothered in the clutches of a boffin-headed doughboy from Wyoming and an ignoramus whose only claim to leadership was his pedigree. Bush and Cheney pushed all of us to the abyss. From where I sit in Hong Kong, the rump of China, the world looks and feels a hell of a lot better than it did only 11 months ago. The fact is, Obama's tone and efforts to roll-back the reactionary, fear-based diplomacy and policies of the last 8 years are well worth recognizing with a Nobel.

Pundits are already doing everything they can to turn winning into losing and are undermining this achievement. They can't recognize the transformation because they're too busy reporting on death-panels and Iranian nukes to notice the ground beneath their puny feet has shifted. These jerks don't know what a good thing they've got.

Sure, Obama has given a lot of speeches, said a lot of words. But a speech is more than words when the most powerful man in the known universe delivers it. His speeches in Prague, Cairo, Accra, and in the United Nations Security Council were bold actions that cost him political points domestically (such is the pathetic state of affairs in the US). They moved people in ways that bombs, bullets or a dynasties will never. Obama has steered spaceship earth back on course. And that takes more than words - it takes action, it takes hope.

Andrew Sullivan has it right:

"I see this prize as an endorsement of his extraordinary reorientation of world politics, and as an encouragement to see it through. In the midst of our domestic battles, and their ill-temper (from which I have not been immune lately), this is an attempt to tell us: look up for a moment, see how far we've come in pivoting away from global conflict, and give this man a break for his efforts and the massive burden he now bears.

And, in the darkness that still threatens, know hope."

Obi-Lama: Lost In The Robes

Why do it? Why not simply arrange a tryst on the forest moon of Endor rather than kowtow to the dark side? Has the Force forsaken him?

Okay, I know Obama's meeting with the Dalai Lama has been postponed, but it's the first time since 1991 that he's come to Washington and not met with the president. He even has the best interests of the US at heart, as well - about the huge gap between the rich and poor he said:

"This is unhealthy. You have to take it seriously about those less priviledged people. If they can get happier, then the whole American people will get benefit."

And Beijing dimisses him "a wolf in monk's robes"...

Obama: Spock With Sex Appeal

The Vulcan from Newsweek:

I used to love Star Trek. You know, Star Trek was ahead of its time. There was a whole—the special effects weren't real good, but the storylines were always evocative, you know, there was a little commentary and a little pop philosophy for a 10-year-old to absorb.

Excuse me - a 10-year-old?


Okay, I get it - those questions about his citizenship are indeed well founded. And that cool detachment? It originates from Deep Space: the final frontier. Its four-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before...

Norūz: Happy New Year Iran!

March 21 was the first day of Spring and the first day of Norūz, the Iranian/Persian New Year.

The photo above was taken this summer by Yuko when we visited Persepolis. It dates from the 6th century BC during the reign of the Persian Empire and is the Zoroastrian symbol representing the spring equinox. The bull symbolizes the Earth and the lion, the Sun.


We're standing in the shade of a Homa, a bird from Persian mythology. Whoever the Homa landed on became king of the empire. That's me attempting lift-off:


Seems everyone's gettin' in on the Iran action - below is Obama's Norūz message:

Je Est Un Autre: Life In Dream City

Zadie Smith has an excellent essay in the New York Review of Books called "Speaking In Tongues" examining multiplicity and Obama's ability to speak "everyone":

"In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues. That's how you get from your mother to your father, from talking to one set of folks who think you're not black enough to another who figure you insufficiently white. It's the kind of town where the wise man says "I" cautiously, because "I" feels like too straight and singular a phoneme to represent the true multiplicity of his experience. Instead, citizens of Dream City prefer to use the collective pronoun “we.”

Throughout his campaign Obama was careful always to say we. He was noticeably wary of "I." By speaking so, he wasn't simply avoiding a singularity he didn't feel, he was also drawing us in with him. He had the audacity to suggest that, even if you can't see it stamped on their faces, most people come from Dream City, too. Most of us have complicated back stories, messy histories, multiple narratives.

It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His enemies latched on to its imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City, this ill-defined place where you could be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time, where you could jive talk like a street hustler and orate like a senator. What kind of a crazy place is that? But they underestimated how many people come from Dream City, how many Americans, in their daily lives, conjure contrasting voices and seek a synthesis between disparate things. Turns out, Dream City wasn't so strange to them."

Smith is right, of course. Most of us do come from varied backgrounds and if we're honest, contain multitudinous voices and identities. This may seem like a shock to some, but it's a fact worth celebrating for the rest of us. As Arthur Rimbaud noted at sixteen, "Je est un autre" ("I is another"). This realization is the golden key to dream city, the elixir (aka: compassion) that allows us to cross boundaries, understand and even voice the "other" if we're lucky.

Smith also references the great American poet, Frank O'Hara who put it his own way: