President Barack Obama
Photo by Luke Thomas
By David Bryson, MD (Yale ’63), guest editorial
November 10, 2009
It has been almost a year since the Obama Takeover. What bothers me the most is Obama’s poor score on transparency, a promise he made unrelated to the day-to-day items on his plate. Here are five cases of his failure to be transparent:
Emanuel/Blagojevich wiretap
When it was announced that former Governor Rod Blagojevich had been wiretapped speaking with the transition team about his choice for a new Senator to replace Obama in Illinois, all suspicion pointed to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel as the man on the phone with Blago. Almost certainly Obama wanted old family pal and confidant Valerie Jarret to take his place in the Senate. When confronted with this superhot disclosure, Obama hemmed and hawed saying he needed time to identify what person or persons had done the talking. When it was finally announced that it was Emanuel and only Emanuel who was caught on tape, with no details added whatsoever, it was Christmas vacation time with Obama in Hawaii and Emanuel on the other side of the planet in Africa – a perfect example of the fog of politics.
Gonzales’ perjury
Once in office, Obama had a choice to investigate probable illegalities of the former Bush/Cheney administration. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, for example, lied under oath about the dismissal of federal prosecutors. Obama’s instinct was that “this is now MY White House” – let’s forget the past. This violates his oath of office to uphold the rule of law, the bedrock of official transparency.
Seal snipers assassinate Somali pirates
The shooting of the three pirates in the boat being towed with Captain Richard Philips off the coast of Somalia was packaged as a great triumph for Obama. Yet the rules of engagement allowed lethal force to be used only if the Captain faced sudden/imminent danger. In fact the three shots were fired by Seal snipers not because of new danger, but because the pirates accidentally positioned themselves in the gunsights of the snipers. Obama could have told the truth – we faked out the pirates – they couldn’t see the snipers in the dark. Instead, Obama & Co. spun the fiction that the Seals were forced to fire at that moment. Quite unnecessarily and misleadingly, the Commander-in-Chief trumped transparency.
Minimizing the importance of a public option
A few months ago Obama said that the public option was central to health care reform. Then, as his plan was being trashed and sausaged, he told us the public option was only a “sliver” of health care reform, holding his thumb and index finger less than an inch apart to emphasize its non-essentiality. This 180-degree about-face was not explained or discussed.
Obama has told us several times that, unlike the media, he is not linked to the 24/7 news cycle. This is absurd. After Obama jumped into the pissing contest and criticized Officer James Crowley’s arrest of Professor Gates, greatly inflaming the media firestorm, he then appeared the very next morning to backtrack on his mistake. Obama created the Beer Summit and its #1 rating in the 24/7 news world.
“To the victor belong the spoils.” This old saying can be revised – “The victory spoils the victor.”
The Hunger Site
November 13, 2009 at 6:51 am
These comments must make Representative Joe “You Lie!” Wilson so so happy.
November 11, 2009 at 12:38 pm
“Obama is a sociopath, but, it’s nothing personal,” http://tinyurl.com/yz725tm
November 11, 2009 at 11:55 am
Jerry, could you count your 180 degrees that are anymore than a matter of style?
November 11, 2009 at 10:28 am
great article, great photograph: It shows him as the Corporatocrat figurehead he has become.
November 11, 2009 at 7:41 am
Excuse me; Bryson did point, in one of his examples to a wholesale, institutional “transparency” failure re his failure to investigate former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, for perjuring himself about the dismissal of federal prosecutors:
“This violates his oath of office to uphold the rule of law, the bedrock of official transparency.”
November 11, 2009 at 5:56 am
Interesting detail, but, a slightly curious list, because of its a list of specific incidents, rather than wholesale institutional and policy lies, about:
1) The Afghanistan War. Obama says its Al-Qaeda, but most of who read Fog City know it’s oil and natural gas and oil and gas transport corridors.)
2) The expansion of AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command. Obama says it’s good for Africa, but most of us who read Fog City know it’s a newly aggressive phase of imperial resource theft in Africa, which has, for one, surpassed the Middle East as a source of U.S. oil imports.
(Or, do we know this? I’m not sure how many people know that the U.S. is fighting a new kind of war in Africa—AFRICOM. It skips the “Vietnamization” and “Afghanization” phases and largely Africanizes the war, with African proxy armies, though we are sending more U.S. soldiers and expanding bases all over Africa. )
3) The faux withdrawal from Iraq . (We all know that Iraq is still occupied, with mercenaries and security operatives replacing troops deployed, and still wracked by violence.)
4) Obama’s Home Save plan, which is, like the California Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2009, an Orwellian bank enabling operation.
5) Health insurance reform, which now seems quite obviously to have been undertaken to enable health care profiteers, again with the Orwellian pretense of being undertaken for the general good.
But, here’s one very specific, very large failure of transparency: Obama is lying about the Reliabl Replacement Nuclear Warhead.
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-8257-SF-Energy-Policy-Examiner~y2009m5d20-Barack-Obama-is-lying-about-the-Reliable-Replacement-Nuclear-Warhead
Obama is a sociopath, but that shouldn’t shock anyone. He’s a U.S. President, and Commander-in-Chief of the largest, most lethal arsenal in history, with a budget many times the size of the next 10 national military budgets combined. Ipso facto, a sociopath.
November 10, 2009 at 6:11 pm
You can say what you like, but Obama is 180 degrees than what was in there 8 years prior.