Maximilian Forte writes:
A regime that banishes truth, shuts down accountability, and ignores its own laws, is a regime that invites anything but peace.
Soon after taking office, President Barack Obama declared on the White House website, on a page devoted to “Transparency and Open Government,” that his,
Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.
Obama then clearly stated, in a section headed by “Government should be transparent,” that, “Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.”
This was not a once-off statement, an accident. It was repeated. On 20 January 2009, on the White House blog, his administration stated, in a section titled “Transparency”: “President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history.” (Unlike the blog of Iranian President Ahamdinejad, the White House blog is closed to comments—and I would have linked to Ahmadinejad’s, except American hackers believe you should not be allowed to see his blog.)
What “transparency” there has been comes in the form of a massive deluge of data that should always be publicly accessible—being about the public itself, and hardly about Obama’s government. Moreover, it is data in such quantity, unsorted and out of context, that no one except one dedicated computer scientist has been able to make much use of, and it proves to be pretty banal stuff.
When it comes to Freedom of Information Access requests, one year into his presidency, with its promise of greater government transparency, “the Obama administration is more often citing exceptions to the nation’s open records law to withhold federal records even as the number of requests for information declines” (source). Major government agencies cited an executive exemption from FOIA at least 70,779 times during the 2009 budget year, up from 47,395 times during President George W. Bush’s final full budget year (source)—the most transparent government in American history is in fact more secretive than Bush’s. Indeed, as AP reported, “the administration has stalled even over records about its own efforts to be more transparent” (source).
At some point, we have to get outside the blue-red box. When they were elephants and jackasses, I knew who was who, now I get confused. But even a person who was color-blind could do as well as the mesmerized American voter. Obama is a President of the United States; he is therefore, a figure-head and a puppet. He no more runs the country than either you or I do. He will do whatever his handlers tell him he must.
If Howdy Doody were president, we would have almost the same result.
SOB.
seamus, never in my life has hope been so mercilessly dashed—now that I’m a weak old man with grand-children to cry for. The fact is that the Dems are out for money because American politicians see votes, not as people choosing but as coins giggling. This is the prologue to Fascism and the first victims will be the Lieberman-like folks who think that they can arouse and control the anti-democratic fascist sense of corporate-centered myopic order so useful to date in muzzling critics of Israel, suffocating its opponents and beating to death people only slowed down from keeping up goose-stepping by doubt. Unfortunately, the bottomless hole in Israel’s appetite for American dollars is turning into bottomless hubris. Zionists get a perverted pleasure from duping and pushing around those they arrogantly can’t help believing are inferior “dumb-goyim.” This chutzpah, more than anything else, is what will arouse the bruised pride of all these short-term compliant peoples as it had in the past. And, alas I fear, instead of being reasonable, driven by the “bottom liners” corporate cannibals, the enraged masses will put World Jewry through another era of painful darkness. At that time, the little neocon devils on the shoulders Dem&Rep politicos who told them that it’s alright to crush protesters– much as Trotsky had done with Lenin– will have no appeal to humanity when corporate cannibals only sense the feel of gold or the taste fresh meat tenderized by torture. And the “dumb goyim” masses will then only shrug their shoulders, educated NOT to protest, stay in line and adapt to evil by not caring what the state does for the state knows best and takes care of us.
Israel will then be a falling house of crooked cards which never ever cared for the well being of Diaspora Jews when there’s no money in it. Many of our best and brightest Jewish brethren will be lost through flight or injury and America will decline as Germany did without a friend in the world.
How I miss the old days when all we feared was nuclear extermination. Now, thanks to neocon “liberals” like Lieberman we must worry about America’s extermination at the hands of Dems for sale and Republicans who kill freedom for lobbyists. That America we leave to our kids will, therefore, be a wasteland and Obama can consider himself to have been the first minority man to lead and nurture the freedom killing nation into its demise through his compromising with evil empty character. Were he as dumb as Bush, you could have hope that he might learn at some point en route to catastrophe. But he was Teddy Kennedy’s hand picked alternative to the Clintons’ corrupt character and proved to be both unprincipled, unfeeling and a coward…that makes for the ideal antecedent to DARKNESS AT NOON.
2011 will be a year of tears that no one in 2012 can fix unless a miracle gives Obama a bony spine, courage and a hear instead of a “flexible” primitive notochord. God has abandoned us to a pre-vertebrate presidential species. We end, not by flood, but seizing ourselves by the throat.
Merry Christmas and may Jesus inspire Obama (for there is no other hero riding from the horizon) to think of his daughters’ future instead of his re-election.