Headline of the week

Professor Obama gives the nation a severe dressing-down

Obama to address Guantánamo and drones in major defence speech


Now this seems like a subject for Comarade Mike Flugennock to illustrate : the God-Emperor speaking — quite sternly, in that schoolmasterish voice of his — to an audience consisting of the hapless hooded inmates of his Guantanamo concentration camp, interspersed with a number of eager and attentive drones.

Katrina van den Heuvel and Melissa Bracegirdle-Blatherskite being prominent among the latter. Really, is there anybody else in North America who can still stand the sound of this awful murderer’s snappish little sermonettes, his admonitory body language, his dyspeptic peevish scowl?

The Guardian item linked to above repeats a familiar trope:

Having pledged to shutt the camp in his 2008 campaign, and again after taking office, Obama was blocked by Congress with following through with the promise.

Those bad old Republicans again, the fontes et origines of every horrible thing Obie has done. How tired — really, how revolted — I am with this deeply dishonest mantra.

Somebody really needs to explain this to me. Obie is the commander in chief of the US military. Guantanamo is a military base. As far as I know, Obie does not need Congress’ permission to move — or no, I should say ‘redeploy’, like a real Laptop Bombardier — military forces from one place to another. He could move the whole Gitmo operation to, oh, say, Plattsburgh overnight, and congress couldn’t say boo. What am I missing?

As for the poor inmates — doubly fucked, first by Bush and now by his stay-the-course heir and successor and, apparently, his pupil — their status seems to studiedly vague. They are not ordinary prisoners, charged with a crime — people who would have to be tried or released in some reasonable amount of time. They are not prisoners of war, who are subject to rules too. No, they’re some kind of weird ambiguous perquisite of the Unitary Executive, as lettres de cachet were of the Bourbon monarchy.

But that being so, Congress has nothing to say about them either. Congress happily abandoned that power to the executive Sauron years ago. Obie could release them; he could charge them with a crime and try them; for that matter, he could have them all summarily shot and buried in quicklime, entirely according to his good pleasure; and once again, congress would have no say in it.

So I for one will not be listening to Obie’s ‘major address on counterterrorism’. It will be, as usual for Obie, half excuse and half dressing-down, a strange nauseating blend of truculence and self-exculpation and smarmy hypocrisy, a dish so foul it would sicken a starving hog.

8 thoughts on “Headline of the week

  1. They also have largely been cleared of whatever unchargeable crimes they were originally imprisoned for, but it’s claimed there’s nowhere to release them to. So they hang out in limbo attempting to starve themselves.

    I’ve never really understood how anyone can tune in to these speeches. Read a transcript, if you must, but Christ…

    • Yes indeed. Reading the transcript is much better. The falsity and incoherence of the thing scream fortissimo from every comma.

  2. At least we know that Obama is president of the worst killer country in history. So what can we expect from him? Nonetheless, it is incredible that he can pretend he has no power against all those evil forces conspiring against him. Robert Caro, in his biography of Lyndon Johnson. shows what a president intent on something can do. Which makes the apologetics of Ms. vanden Drivel and company so pathetic (and let’s add self-serving; this shit keeps her on the TV shows). Still more nauseating is the crackpot realism of certain leftists who said we should ignore Obama’s murderous actions because his reelection was our best hope for a resurgence of the left. This was combined with nonsense about how Obama hasn’t been able to show righteous anger because white people can’t stand an angry black man. One person I know said that those awful Republicans just won’t let a black man succeed! Another said that he hoped for Obama’s reelection because if Romney won, all progressives would then blame Republicans for all the bad stuff that would happen, as opposed, I suppose, to blaming the capitalist system. Boink, I may need that drink sooner than I thought.

    • @MichaelYates: OK. Go to ‘the Summit Inn’ a short ride from Uniontown, Pa. and have a couple of your favorites with your significant other on the big veranda (with good views back towards Pittsburg) and tell me what it cost you and where you want the reimbursement sent.

      Boink

  3. Speaking of people who need to be sent to Guantanamo:

    http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/the-michael-moore-of-the-grade-school-lunchroom/

    Some kid manages to smuggle a camera into one of NYC’s factory farms. Once again, Bloomberg’s panopticon fails to keep us safe from the terrorists. That camera could have been 6 oz of C4 with a blasting cap attached.

    Then there’s this little Jihad Jane, no doubt attempting to win her place in Muslim Valhalla by taking out a few or her schoolmates:

    http://www.dailytech.com/Florida+Teenager+Expelled+Arrested+for+Accidental+Science+Experiment+Explosion/article31481.htm

    This is why Homeland Security needs 1.6 billion rounds of hollow-point ammo.

    As always, gotta love the comments section on stories like this:

    “This POS made a bomb. She knew what the result would be and she did it on school grounds. If she did this at my daughter’s high school, I would hope she would be treated the same. You cannot endanger your classmates and feign ignorance.”

    When am I gonna get off this fucking planet?

  4. The Guantanamo detainees still retain an aura of political dynamite to those in Washington, although at this point they’re probably actually down to the power of cheap Mexican fire crackers. But being the cowardly and utterly cynical pieces of shit that they are, they know that a bunch of accused terrorists rotting away in a Cuban prison aren’t going to exactly be able to mount a viable marketing campaign. And it’s not just the Guantanamites, prisons in general have been allowed to proliferate, and the desire to lock people, precisely because of how easy it is to forget about someone when you can’t see them.

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