John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN INTERVIEW BY NICK LEHR WITH DAVID BROMWICH IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“Why Barack Obama Was Particularly Unsuited to Live up to the Ideals of the Nobel Peace Prize

“A new book is unsparing in its assessment of Obama’s legacy”

 

I can’t believe how many people still are fooled by Obama’s boyish smile and baritone voice.

Perhaps the sheer contrast in style to the rude, incessant bombast and repulsive insults from his successor in office contributes to sustaining some illusion.

Perhaps also his being the first black man elected as president lends him a special aura, associations in people’s minds that do not really fit the man.

As though he were somehow associated with all those struggling people in the Third World and in the vast sprawl of ghettos which pockmark most of America’s cities.

(Of course, when he ran for office, he played off those very things, as when speaking to crowds of black Americans in the rhythms of old-style preachers with a much-repeated phrase like, “Yes, we can!”)

As though he weren’t at all associated with the brutal, soulless officials of Washington’s vast imperial establishment. Men who sit at meetings around large polished oak tables and decide the fates of others thousands of miles away. Who will live, and who will die. Men, women, and children.

Although much reduced from his earliest days in office, he does still have a following.

I agree with the author that early on he was seen as something of an anti-war figure. I saw him that way myself, briefly regarding him as almost heroic, but it really did not take very long to see how wrong that assessment was.

Indeed, by the time he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, it was already clear what sort of man he was. Of course, many of the Peace Prizes have been awarded on the basis of airy hopes, somewhat better than the numerous awards to outright killers and terrorists.

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/on-obamas-nobel-peace-prize/

Not only did he not keep his own promises, such as closing that shameful place called Guantanamo, this man spent eight solid years killing people.

He bombed somewhere every day of his two terms.

And he holds the distinction of having created an industrial-scale extrajudicial killing system, incinerating people far away who were never legally charged or tried for anything. The method frequently kills bystanders, too, but even the targets are legally guilty of nothing.

All in the name of freedom, the same freedom as is used in the name of the medal he awarded to Joe Biden, his Vice President, a strong inside advocate for creating the mass hi-tech operation for “disappearing” people.

Obama turned an extremely well-run country like Libya – maybe not a democracy, but a place where no one did without clean water and housing and free education and health care, and a place that remained at peace for decades – into a vision from hell. It remains so to this day.

And he worked very hard to do the same for Syria, having his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, oversee the transfer of savage fighters and storehouses full of weapons from the ruins of Libya through devious channels to the beautiful, historic land of Syria.

We even know from one of our finest living investigative reporters, Seymour Hersh, that she had a small amount of Libya’s stock of poison nerve agent shipped for ultimate use in Syria. Gaddafi, just as several Arab leaders had done, kept such stocks as a counter to Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal.

They wanted to create an incident so that Obama’s public warning about Syria’s government “not crossing red lines” (in its fight against the terrorizing mercenaries sent to destabilize the country) could be used to bomb the crap out of the place, just as had been done in Libya.

He only failed because of immense efforts by others (especially Russia’s Vladimir Putin).

He signed off on a coup against an elected government in Ukraine, something done for no other reason than to threaten and harass Russia, creating a series of conflicts and problems we have to this day, including a civil war in the country’s East, the Donbass, that has killed thousands.

He once quietly joked with words to the effect, ‘Hey, I’m pretty good at this killing stuff.’ I have no idea why he spoke in that strange way, but his words were recorded.

A penchant for brutal humor seemed to be part of the environment of his government. After the unspeakably grisly death of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi (there is a video you could not pay me to watch), his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was recorded saying, “We came, we saw, he died! Ha, ha, ha!”

He pressed hard against the elected government of Venezuela with economic measures that served only to reduce the lives of millions of ordinary people.

In addition to the immense amount of violence Obama oversaw as President, he had a very strong tendency towards secrecy, and went after whistleblowers with a vengeance.

Poor dear Chelsea Manning was imprisoned under him, an ordeal she almost didn’t survive.

Edward Snowden was forced into exile under his watch.

John Kiriakou went to prison under him for revealing the CIA’s use of torture.

And it was in his time as President that Julian Assange sought asylum from Ecuador.

The intelligence community’s massive new Utah Data Center, designed to hold unholy amounts of secret data about people was opened under this President.

He often was remarkably arrogant, something not widely noticed, but you can see it clearly in his posture and finger-pointing in some old photos.

https://chuckmangrotesques.blogspot.com/2016/10/john-chuckman-grotesque-obama-best.html

This truly was a monster, just one with a deceptively pleasant face.

 

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS

 

“Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett offers an intimate look behind the scenes of his presidency

“One of the most influential black women of the 21st century talks about her time in the White House”

 

Gee, does she talk about the CIA’s “Kill Lists” put into Obama’s inbox regularly for his signature?

I cannot be sentimental about this man.

The boyish smile was so deceptive and deceives people still. It deceived me when he first took office. I liked him in the beginning and thought him very promising.

But there is the intrusive fact that he bombed people somewhere for every single day of his eight years in office.

He killed literally hundreds of thousands across a number of countries, made a chaos out of Libya, started the horrors in Syria, ran a coup in Ukraine, and created America’s extrajudicial killing program with drones.

There is nothing sweet or nice to remember. A very dark figure.

________________________

Response to a comment saying Obama lacked Trump’s mental illness:

Yes, he did, except that he is almost certainly something of a psychopath with the all smiling he did and all the killing he signed off on, psychopathy not qualifying so much as a mental illness as simply an “outlier” condition which is repeated in a small portion of the human population over and over, like albinism or autism or freckles.

He even “joked” once, saying to a group of associates, “Say, I’m pretty good at this killing stuff!” Well, it doesn’t get more stomach-churning than that.

Of course, he tolerated and supported such terrible efforts as Joe Biden convincing him that America needed a massive new drone-based CIA extrajudicial-killing industry or Hillary Clinton’s terrible advocacy at the State Department for inducing chaos in Libya and an effort to repeat its success afterward in Syria.

Such is the human material required to head the American empire in our time. The empire requires almost a constant flow of aggression and bloodshed as part of its maintenance work, to say nothing of its expansion plans.

Only those emotionally-equipped to support that effort need apply for the job of President. With some, like Trump, it’s pretty clear early-on what is happening, but with others, like Obama, it does require a bit of time to understand. He is, after all, well known as being an extremely secretive man, a required characteristic for his tough record of going after whistle-blowers and those who leak things to the press.

Surprising how popular he remains, but then most people don’t really explore the details of events, even when it comes to killing hundreds of thousands of people and making refugees of millions. What they do know is comfortably confirmed to them, day after day, in America’s press and broadcasting, an activity which is an important part of their job.

And remember, the famous truth that millions of people, ordinary decent people, in the Soviet Union literally wept when the death of Stalin was announced.