Breeze, I have had a hunch for a while but would like you to confirm it: are you 12 years old?
To you and anyone else who has buckled up and is firmly-strapped on the Obama Kool-Aid bandwagon, I would like to say a few words on behalf of those who are not fooled.
We will not ignore the feeling that is growing and gnawing in our bones. We will not ignore what is now clearly a pattern in neo-American politics wherein the parties we used to believe were separate and distinct are now merging into a corporate-supported, criminally-inspired behemoth. We will not ignore extend hope to a man who has given us absolutely no reason to do so, a man who prevaricates about his background, is not forthcoming about his records, rescinds campaign promises, fails to vet key members of his cabinet and has received unprecedented and disturbing sums of money from the Wall Street interests that he claims to want to bring under control.
We will not ignore be fools. And I, for one, and sick and tired of buying the dream, the hype, the hope that clearly no longer exists in a country that has been highjacked.
I understand that you, like I, am genuinely pained by what has become of this country and long for a bygone era when those elected to lead us exhibited a greater degree of integrity, independence and honesty.
But we are no longer living in those times, and it is pointless to fawn or even support a man based on nostalgia and some desperate hope that he can or even has a desire to help us, when he is being marketed and incessantly pushed onto an unsuspecting and naive public by the same media and the same interests that led the GWB-coup in 2000. The media simpered and fawned over GWB in 2000, and they are now doing the same thing with Obama. Forgive me, but that didn’t turn out so well for this country. I choose not to trust their judgment at this point.
We simply choose not to wait until we get kicked in the teeth by a man who clearly has no problem saying one thing when he means another, giving the finger to his base, pursuing Bush’s ideology in foreign policy and continuing the Bush-inspired destruction of our currency through ungoldly bailouts that are doomed to fail.
We choose not to be pacified with the celebratory closing of one torture base when hundreds of secret U.S. installations for torture are scattered around the globe. We choose not to be pacified when a president tells us he is freezing salaries for a handful of White House staffers the day after spending $160 million on the most expensive inauguration in history. We choose not to be pacified when a president pledges that he has the expertise to *fix* the economic crisis we face while appointing a Treasury Secretary who conveniently forgets to pay his taxes. We choose not to be pacified when a president pledges to stand by gays and lesbians, but then curries favor with Evangelicals by granting a spotlight at his inauguration to a man who fights to deny rights to those faithful constitutents. We choose not to be pacified by a president who pledged to combat FISA, then does precisely the opposite. We choose not to be pacified by a man who pledges to reverse Bush’s non-sensical stem cell executive orders, then conveniently decides to punt the issue to Congress so it can sit and fester.
We choose not to wait because we have already seen this movie, and we know how it turns out. And if you think that a man like this is our “first real ray of hope in many, many years,” then that is truly the most depressing thing I’ve heard in quite some time, because it means that our best hope for the future has been manufactured, packaged and determined by Madison Avenue and $600 million of very clever marketing.
