Columnist – John Sammon
Maybe Obama can undo the Bush Cheney years. I doubt he can on his own.

The Founding Fathers who talked about freedom and designing an egalitarian state were themselves elitist, racist and corporate (Alexander Hamilton called the public an ass). America has not lived up to its promise, for it was a promise only made, not intended to be kept. Basically, the system has been and still to this day is founded on the principle, the (white) cream, the privileged elite among us, rises to the top.

Obama remains something of an anomaly. Elected by a popular vote, how long he remains in office and is viewed with favor depends on the degree to which he attempts to change the corporate influence on American life and the unquestioning obedience to it of the American people.

Here are 10 reasons why:

1.   Look at the numerous wars we’ve fought or instigated, always in the name of righteousness. Look at the list of our opponents. A few were evil, corporate and powerful, for example, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany, developing dictatorial states who attempted to copy the imperialism of England and the United States. Remember, Japan was a hermit kingdom that simply wanted to be left alone until we forced her to open her doors for exploitation and she began to modernize at a rapid rate. But many wars have been dynastic in nature, colonial, undertaken against impoverished Third World nations for natural resources, from the Philippines in 1900 to gain a colony in Asia, to Iraq, deposing a dictator we had equipped and encouraged because he wouldn’t act like a proper puppet, and we wanted his oil.

2.   Capitol Hill is ruled by corporate lobbyists, whose loyalty is not to the country, but to their respective corporations and the profit margins they gain by not only exploiting you as a customer, artificially jacking up the price of oil, or skyrocketing the price of medicines, or developing overseas markets to take advantage of cheap or slave labor even if it means eroding jobs here at home and promoting unethical, obscene regimes abroad. China for example. Thus, it’s not the government and the people of the United States. It’s the government, the lobbyists and the people in order of influence, with the people a distant third. Dynastic and monetary power rules.

3.   The American people, many of them, it sounds harsh to say, are fairly stupid, and docile, fertile ground for manipulators. Many of them get their filtered news from corporate controlled television conglomerates or hate radio. Stupidity is not a matter of simply not knowing. It’s not wanting to know, not caring that you don’t know. Tuning out. Never doubting. Not reading. Not learning.

4.   THE PRESIDENT IS ABOVE THE LAW. They, the powers that be, love to say it isn’t so. But time and again it’s been proven. Nixon should have done jail time. Bush and Cheney should be prosecuted for lying America into a war over false weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Always, the reasons for not doing it are the same, it’s inconvenient, it makes us look bad, we need to move ahead. The problem with excusing wrongdoing because it was allegedly patriotically motivated is that it encourages future wrongdoing. It also creates two separate classes of accountability, us, and them.

5.   The United States is truly a Roman Empire-style colossus, stockpiling every kind of weapon imaginable, arming much of the world with these weapons, but castigating countries we don’t like for trying to acquire the same weapons.

6.   There is a developing disturbing psychological quirk only I report. American military officers and soldiers have taken to posing with the bodies of defeated foes for photos, such as the dead sons of Saddam Hussein. Or, the still-living wretches thrown into Abu Ghraib Prison, tied up and photographed often in bondage, pseudo-sexual positions. Wanting to project power by using bodies as perverse propaganda props makes me doubt the sanity of people who, like Frankenstein’s monster, have been sent out in the world to do good in our name.

7.   Our former president loved posing in uniform like Benito Mussolini, even though he was only a Vietnam-dodging, National Guard week-end warrior who skipped meetings.

8.   In the reactionary hysteria after 9-11, everybody drove around town displaying flags from car antennas in a tacky display as though they were bumper stickers. This was new. Misuse of the flag in a cheap football pep rally-like attempt to stifle dissent and to glorify solidarity for government policy is perhaps the most basic of all fascist tendencies.

9.   To a corporate democraphobe (dislikes democracy), the following rating system applies, war, good, weapons, good, profits from outrageous prices, good, spend on schools, bad, help people in need with training, bad, shared health care, bad, immigration, bad.

10.   A McCarthy-style climate of fear, of enemies, traitors, subversives, Islam, even though we love Saudi Arabia, has been promoted.

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   Columnist – John Sammon
We became a terrorist state under the former Bush Administration, and unless Obama can un-do some of what has been accomplished, that’s what we are. The trouble with declining morality and lowering yourself so that you’re little better than the supposed evil enemies you’re fighting is…it’s hard to go back….once you’ve started down that road. Here are the 10.

1. The US abandoned all pretense of due process of law, captured alleged enemy terrorists, locked them up in Cuba and threw away the key, without trial, without conviction. There’s no way you can justify this by saying it’s a dangerous world. We didn’t do this to the top Nazis we captured in World War 2.

2. Approval of torture of prisoners. There’s no way you can argue its justification. Even if we say water-boarding is not torture, it’s only a matter of time before we add another, like hooking a car battery up to someone’s genitals. One leads to another. Torture to extract a confession is torture, an illegal act. It is not due process to make a finding of guilt or a confession through the presentation of evidence. It is the use of pain or fear to extract a confession. A country that abandons the Geneva Conventions is a terrorist state.

3. The US only fights tiny impoverished countries much smaller than itself. If this isn’t terrorism, then it’s certainly a form of imperialism, like the English fighting Zulu warriors in the 19th century. What were the English doing in Zulu-land in the first place? Robbing and exploiting. We do the same. We beat our chest about how tough we are. But a huge country that only fights much smaller countries is a bully.

4. (Related to 3). We have a long history of exploiting Third-World Countries for their natural resources, everything from bananas to oil. This has made us particularly detested in South America, and has strengthened the hand of rogue anti-American regimes there.

5. The government passed laws to eavesdrop and spy (wiretap) on American citizens because once again, the terrorists are out to get us and it’s a dangerous world. Every extremist government from long before Hitler, passed draconian laws eroding the rights of its own citizens, to supposedly protect them.

6. A government that can never admit it was wrong, or even look into the possibility it was wrong, is a government out of control. Nixon was pardoned by Ford because to try Nixon for his crimes would be messy, divisive. Nixon was supposedly doing it (cheating, lying) on our behalf, for us. Likewise, when Bush and Cheney lied to the American people to cook up a war in Iraq, they did it for us (I didn’t ask them to). They will be let off. What’s more, not even an investigation of their conduct will be attempted; because it might make us look bad. It would be divisive. When convenience and alleged patriotism trump morality and doing what’s right under the law, you’ve set a precedent for future misconduct. This represents the arrogance, invulnerability and unaccountability of power.

7. The Iraq conflict is the most under-reported, no-unpleasant-questions-asked war since the Spanish American (also a wrong war). The government stifled the release of pictures of American bodies returning home in caskets, and the former president stage-managed press conferences, with pre-scripted questions, taking questions from pre-selected, friendly reporters, while screening out potential trouble-making reporters, in other words, those who ask unpleasant questions. The former president often appeared only in front of crowds of compliant soldiers. The media’s complicity in Iraq represents a new low in respect for the truth worthy of Joseph Goebbels. How far Obama will reverse this trend remains unclear.

8. The government has a long history of supplying ruthless dictatorships with military equipment and supplies to get them to behave, then acts surprised and angry when they don’t. Our so-called leaders, who don’t understand or study history, learned nothing from the Munich Agreement of 1938. We tried to bribe Saddam Hussein by equipping and encouraging him, and we agreed to provide North Korea with nuclear technology twenty years ago in the hope they would use it for peaceful purpose. A state that supplies and equips countries it later labels “terrorist” with weapons or potential weapons is itself a terrorist state, or at the very least, an accomplice.

9. (Related to 8). We are far and away the world’s largest arms exporter, and have turned much of the world into an armed camp, thus making the likelihood of war much greater. People today in many parts of the world fear us more than they do Osama bin Laden, with good reason.

10. One of the two political parties that have run the country for over 100 years, the Republican Party, the former party of Lincoln, is today led by off-the-deep-end extremists who believe God sides with them. They believe war is a useful instrument of foreign policy, instead of a defense measure as envisioned by The Founders. They call on Divine Providence and punishment, even assassination, for anyone who disagrees with their world view. They are intolerant, close-minded, reactionary, racist, sexist, and have a zealot’s contempt for other people and other religions, other than their own brand of Christian Fundamentalism. They also have a thinly veiled disgust for the kind of basic compromise necessary to make any form of Democracy workable.

Reference: An account of American terrorism in Vietnam — The Secret War Against Hanoi: Kennedy’s and Johnson’s Use of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam, by Richard H. Shultz, Jr., 1999, HarperCollins Books, New York At a time when acts of military aggression perpetrated or planned by the US government are typically justified in the name of fighting “international terrorism,” a book has appeared which documents America’s role as the organizer of the biggest campaign of terrorism and sabotage since World War II. [ READ MORE ]

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Politico: For the last eight years, Democrats have been counting the days until George W. Bush leaves the White House.

Now some of them can’t seem to let him go.

On Friday, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) distributed a video showing “how the policies of the Bush Administration have failed the nation and continue to affect our ability to confront the current economic crisis.”

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The movement to impeach George W. Bush is a series of actions and commentary within the public and private spheres voicing support for the impeachment of United States President George W. Bush. The phrase is also used in a broader sense to refer to a social movement and public opinion poll data that includes both Democrats and Republicans which indicate a degree of public support for the impeachment of President Bush. The reasons offered for Bush’s impeachment include concerns about the legitimacy, legality, and constitutionality of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the controversial electronic surveillance of American citizens by the National Security Agency. .. [READ MORE]
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 Columnist – John Sammon
How do you deal with someone who’s malicious, dishonest, mentally deranged, or all three?

George Bush finally held his final press conference, and for perhaps the thirteenth time in recent weeks, he went on the air to once again explain to the American people that he really was a great president after all. This is unprecedented.

A president doing something unprecedented?

No president in the history of the country has launched an active political campaign like he was running for office, at the end of his presidency (the last two months), in which he appeared again and again and again to deny all the mistakes and stupidity he previously committed, and the flat out lies he told.

All of them (lies, mistakes) are now proven facts.

No president has ever done this before. Try to sell himself at the end in an effort to convince us of something.

Despite the fact that Bush is leaving with the economy in the worst shape since the Great Depression, and one from which America might collapse, Bush is really a great president. He’ll tell ya.’

Despite the fact Bush launched two wars, one under false pretenses, that have now lasted longer than World War Two, with no decisive victory. Despite this, Bush is really a great president. He’ll tell ya’ so.

Despite the fact that Bush undermined the Consitititution with illegal wiretap spying on American citizens under the justification that it’s a dangerous world, under the noses of Americans, many of whom were too ignorant or lazy to care, Bush is a great president. He’ll tell you.

Despite the fact Bush locked up suspected terrorists in a gulag camp in Cuba, a kind of American Bastille, and threw away the key without trial (even Nazi Herman Goering had a lawyer), in violation of everything America is supposed to stand for (legality), and which made America the disgrace of the world. Despite this, Bush will tell you he’s a great president.

And a host of supposed lesser gaffs, like calmly eating a sandwich in the White House oblivious to everything while fellow Americans, most of them black, starved and rotted in New Orleans’ Super Dome after Hurricane Katrina. No buses to pick them up. No food delivered. No emergency. No care. No concern.

Kind of like when Marie Antoinette said, “Let them eat cake.” (Katrina is what finally did in the Bush Administration in the eyes of (most) of the American people because the scenes of suffering couldn’t be filtered or censored like those in Iraq.

But don’t worry. Bush has an explanation (blaming others) for Katrina too.

   [Enlarge]

Bush is leaving. He won’t have command of the airwaves any more to do spin or rewrites on recent history. But what of the twenty five percent of the American people who still support Bush? How do you deal with someone who, if I said the sun came up yesterday, he’d say, “no it didn’t.”

How do you deal with blindness, willful denial? You can’t. There’s no dealing with it.

I have a question for all the brainwashed rednecks. Bush is a Republican. You are a Republican. If you admit Bush was a lousy president, then you’re admitting that you were wrong….because you voted for him. You can’t admit you’re wrong, right?

Why then, can I admit that I was wrong? I used to be a Republican. I once voted for Richard Nixon. No joke. That was wrong. I was wrong. It’s no disgrace to be wrong, to be human. I thought Nixon was a decent man. I don’t know why I thought this. He was a thief, a cheat, and a liar (Nixon denied all this).

If I can admit I was wrong about Nixon, why can’t you admit you were wrong about Bush?

What kind of Democracy (or Republic) do we have if you can’t admit the truth? If the truth is whatever you say it is? Both political parties have occasionally provided bad presidents. Why can’t you concede this?

If you can admit that not all presidents have been good, if you can agree to this, then it’s possible, Bush could be a bad president.

He is, or was rather.

Copyright 2008 Sammonsays.

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   Bill Ayers [Enlarge Pic]
Former Weather Underground member William Ayers told Hardball’s Chris Matthews that he takes responsibility for past actions and is thankful the American saw through the manipulations of the McCain/Palin team, and elected Barack Obama as president.

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Fugitive Days: A Memoir

Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly: “Memory is a motherfucker,” begins 1960s-era political activist and Weather Underground member Ayers, who went underground with several comrades after their co-conspirators’ bomb accidentally exploded in 1970, destroying a Greenwich Village townhouse and killing some of the activists involved. Ayers (A Kind and Just Parent), now a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, grew up well-to-do, attended private schools and became politicized at the University of Michigan. He describes his spiraling New Left involvement as he became aware of what he casts as the injustice of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, inner-city race relations, and police brutality and battle tactics, especially in Chicago during demonstrations at the 1969 Democratic convention. The terrific first half of the memoir details 1950s and ’60s U.S. culture his own childhood, shaped by images of the atomic bomb and TV war movies; the influence of Bob Dylan, Mao and Che Guevara on American youth but the book really takes off once he goes underground. He and his colleagues invent identities (often using names such as Nat Turner or Emma Goldman), travel continuously and avoid the police and FBI as Nixon bombs Cambodia and My Lai is ravaged. Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn raised two children underground before turning themselves in in 1981, when most charges were dropped because of “extreme governmental misconduct” during the long search for the fugitives. Written without self-righteousness or apology, this memoir rings of hard-learned truth and integrity and is an important contribution to literature on 1960s culture and American radicalism. From Library Journal: “Memory is a motherfucker,” writes Ayers (A Kind and Just Parent). In the 1970s, he was a head of the radical Weathermen and one of America’s Ten Most Wanted, along with his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, but he is now a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago. His memoir is a breath of fresh air in this self-absorbed age. Ayers discusses his reservations about the use of violence to achieve an end to violence (reservations he held then as well), but he is unrepentant in believing that America was the aggressor against North Vietnam and that right-minded people have an obligation to resist unjust wars. The book is uneven in tone, alternating fluffy passages about the passage of time with straightforward narration of Ayers’s more than ten years on the lam. The sentiments expressed in the book still seem noble, however, regardless of one’s opinions of the means used by Ayers’s comrades. There are many lessons still to be learned from such narratives. Recommended. David Keymer, California State Univ., Stanislaus See all Editorial Reviews