The biggest casualty during the Obama administration has been the anti-war left. Most of the anti-war left was a fog. It’s like people who play Dungeons and Dragons. They dress up on the weekends, have a good time, and go back to their normal lives. Most of the anti-war left was made up of partisan Democrats who weren’t really upset with war, but angry that there was a Republican in the White House. The wars have continued under new ownership and the hypocrites have gone back to their lives. Yes, they’re still “angry” about Iraq, but their arguments are easy to dismiss.
Noam Chomsky is a true believer in the anti-war dogma. He doesn’t greet the death of Osama Bin Laden as a significant accomplishment. Chomsky just uses it as another excuse to bash President Bush.
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.
Noam Chomsky is a Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. I guess that means he is the ultimate “decider” of what is considered “uncontroversial.” Meanwhile our current President continues to authorize drone attacks in Pakistan and the policy of holding prisoners indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay. Chomsky cannot be bothered by the present when he’s so obsessed with the past.
President Obama will spend the next few weeks (or months) basking in the glow of his accomplishment. Who can blame him? Who can be surprised? This is the President who couldn’t give a normal convention speech and took his campaign to Germany (that sure didn’t work out). Our President is someone who has no trouble talking about himself.
In the grand scheme of things history will look back at President Obama and judge him based on what he did or didn’t do about the nation’s fiscal problems. Obama’s biggest concern isn’t fixing our financial problems. The sole focus of the the Obama administration is getting elected. The power of the incumbency has never been stronger. At what cost? Obama wanted to be Lincoln. Sadly, he’s more like Pierce, Filmore, and Buchanan.
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