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by Dennis Loo
Rachel Maddow on MSNBC on February 26 interviewed Jane Mayer, New Yorker columnist and author of The Dark Side, a book about Bush and Cheney’s torture policies. Maddow asked Mayer how we can prevent any other presidents from suspending Constitutional rights by simply declaring, on his or her say so alone, someone an “enemy combatant,” allowing the government to then hold someone indefinitely, stripped of any rights, and subject them to torture.
A very appropriate question for Maddow to ask. Mayer, unfortunately, didn’t say what needs to be said: You prevent this from happening in the future by prosecuting those who did it in the past. Otherwise, it will happen again, as surely as the sky is blue.
Instead of saying this, Mayer said that Obama’s going to put something on the public record decrying it. But decrying something and saying that it’s wrong and that “America doesn’t torture” over and over again doesn’t mean diddly unless you back it up by actual prosecutions.
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The linguist George Lakoff (Don’t Think of an Elephant) posted a lengthy article at truthout.org on February 25, 2009 in which he attempts to decipher what he dubs Obama’s Code:
The word ‘code’ can refer to a system of either communication or morality. President Obama has integrated the two. The Obama Code is both moral and linguistic at once. The President is using his enormous skills as a communicator to express a moral system.
Obama’s “moral system,” according to Lakoff, is Obama’s “most effective way to bring the country together around fundamental American values.”
With respect to foreign policy, Lakoff describes Obama this way:
Obama's foreign policy is empathy-based, concerned with people as well as states - with poverty, education, disease, water, the rights of women and children, ethnic cleansing, and so on around the world.
How are such values expressed? Take a look at the inaugural speech. Empathy: ‘the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job, the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child...’ Responsibility to ourselves and others: ‘We have duties to ourselves, the nation, and the world.’ …
The same values apply to foreign policy: ‘To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and make clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds.
While I respect Lakoff’s work on framing a great deal, Lakoff fails spectacularly here to notice the difference between Obama’s high-sounding rhetoric and his administration’s vicious perpetuation of fundamental tenets and practices of the Bush Regime, most dramatically evident so far in his foreign policy.
Lakoff’s essay should be nominated for the First Annual “Are You Kidding Me?” Award. (Or perhaps there was somewhere in fine print a disclaimer stating that his essay was meant as satire.)
The idea that you can judge a president by his inaugural address’s words alone and ignore the realities of his policies is, to put it mildly, remarkable.
We are, after all, under Bush and now under Obama, making “farms flourish” and nourishing “starved bodies and feed[ing] hungry minds” with missiles and bombs. Contrary to his repeated campaign promises to bring out troops from Iraq within 16 months, those 16 months have morphed into 19 months and Obama’s still saying 50,000 “non-combat” troops will remain beyond those 19 months indefinitely. Saying that some troops are “non-combat” is like saying there are non-blood drinking mosquitoes.
Perhaps the blood being shed of wedding party attendees, large enough gatherings that they are being bombed by US forces in Afghanistan, is fertilizing the farms of Afghanistan.
No doubt the “hungry minds” are being filled like those having their penis sliced repeatedly with scalpels (as was done to Binyam Mohammed), or those beaten to death (as was done to taxi driver Dilawar whose legs were rendered like pulp) or those struck repeatedly and electro-shocked into a permanent coma (as was done to Sadiq Zoman), or those suffocated to death with a sleeping blanket, bound to him with wire like a “Yo Yo” (as was done to Maj. Gen. Abed Mowhoush who had gone to American forces to appeal on behalf of his son).
Things have actually gotten worse at Gitmo since Obama’s election. Why, pray god, is it going to take him a year to shut this obscenity down? And how is it empathy and moral to permit Bagram Prison to go on as it had under Bush indefinitely?
Empathy for the Devil.
You bargain with the devil at your peril. You know what happens. This is what Obama’s “moral system” means.
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