Obama: Illusion V. Reality

I never bought into the whole Obama hysteria thing. I probably should have. I was his target demographic back in 2008. A naive, idealistic, first time voter who despised Bush and was totally in love with some version of the 1960's that only really exists in the hearts and minds of the very young. Obama's whole song and dance seemed to be designed with me in mind but I just wasn't buying it. Something just didn't quite smell right. Maybe it was the way he could say so much, so beautifully, without really saying anything at all. Maybe it was the fact that his voting record as a first term senator was suspiciously non-existent. But mostly I think it was the way he used antiwar rhetoric to condemn Iraq while simultaneously pushing for intensified involvement in Afghanistan, as if a "good war" could somehow cancel out the acidic karma of a bad one. I tried explaining these things to others on the left to no avail. I vividly remember trying to convince my 12th grade journalism teacher, one of the smartest men I've ever known, that voting for this smooth talking used war salesman would blow up in his face like a firecracker and I remember the totally blank look on his face, as if I was speaking to him in Swahili.

I dearly wish I could tell you I was proven wrong but not nearly as dearly as I wish I could tell you that my generation of left-wing voters realized that they were. But people only see what they want to see and presidential legacies are a lot like presidential campaigns, all smoke and mirrors and malignant mythology. A great example of this phenomenon is the collective memory of former president Jimmy Carter. Regardless of whether you consider yourself left or right or somewhere in between, you likely see old Jimmy the way most of the rest of the country does- as a soft-spoken, ill-equipped but well-intentioned peacenik. The facts however don't represent this illusion.

While Jimmy made a few peace deals to fill his otherwise bleak presidential library, his most lasting impact can be felt from his decision to back Zbigniew Brzezinski's plot to send Islamic mercenaries into into the newly secular republic of Afghanistan in order to suck the Soviet Union into a brutal and unwinnable quagmire. This plot became the still ongoing Afghan war and these mercenaries, dubbed Mujaheddin, would become the founding fathers of the Islamic terrorist menace that haunts us to this day. This was hardly an isolated misstep for President Carter either. He also OK'd the use of American Army hardware for South Korea's Kwangju Massacre, which gave Tienanmen a run for its money, resulting in the deaths of as many as 2000 peaceful student protesters and similarly kept weapons flowing to Suharto's Indonesia during the height of the East Timorese Genocide which cost the tiny island nation nearly a third of it's population. But this isn't how America remembers Jimmy Carter. Instead he's nearly universally revered as a Nobel Peace Prize winning elder-statesman. I fear this wholly undeserved fate of illusion is also what awaits soon to be former president Barack Obama as well.

Much like Mr. Carter, Mr. Obama is responsible for a couple of outstanding peace deals, namely with Iran and Cuba, but those achievements are largely legacy projects designed to boost the president's flagging international PR. They stand alone as exceptions to a very violent rule. Also like Jimmy, Obama's largest impact will undoubtedly be his contribution to the proliferation of international terror. Aside from his promised bloodbath in Afghanistan (ironically the one promise he kept), the Nobel Laureate vastly expanded the playground of head-chopping Salafist psychopaths with his gruesome regime change experiments in Libya and Syria, the ripples from which are only beginning to expand, from the empowerment of Boko Haram to the European Refugee Crisis. All over gold-backed Dinars and strategic oil pipelines.

Obama has also built on the Bush legacy of constitutional degradation and executive authoritarianism by awarding the presidency all the powers of judge, jury and executioner with his grossly expanded use of homicidal drone warfare, checking off the names of civilians to be slaughtered one by one from a list delivered to him by the CIA weekly like the Sunday paper. He's also approved the expansion of the surveillance state to damn near Orwellian proportions and hunted down any soldier or civil servant brave enough to expose these crimes against democracy like dogs, even if he did decide to let a couple of them go. All this from a man who promised my generation a new era of transparency. It almost sounds like a sick joke in retrospect.

But this isn't how the 44th President of the United States of America will be remembered. Just turn on CNN and listen to an endless procession of putrid homilies to the historic legacy of America's first black president, as if his race automatically transforms the man from LBJ to MLK. And the saddest thing about this whole gross spectacle is that I still feel like the only leftist of my generation who's not fucking buying it. Seemingly righteous kids from Occupy to Black Lives Matter gather in mourning of the election of Donald Trump as if it were the end of a second Camelot rather than a simple changing of the guard. But people only see what they want to see and until children grow up, they'll always prefer the comfort of illusion to the sobering harshness of reality.


Peace, Love and Empathy- CH

Sure, Fine, Fuck-It, Whatever

2016 was a harsh year. The weather sucked and everyone who mattered died. But mostly it sucked because of the election. A dizzying circus of whole-sale horse-shit that felt like it would never fucking end until, finally, it did. A grabby, race-baiting, reality TV personality somehow managed to beat a seasoned, Wall-Street, murder machine. Sure, fine, cool, fuck-it, whatever. I was just glad it was fucking over and I'd never have to right about the goddamn thing again. I could go back to writing about obscure foreign conflicts and gender dysphoria. You know, easy shit. But to quote Al Pacino in the worst Godfather movie- "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!". You see, dearest motherfuckers, the 2016 Presidential Election is the Christmas gift from hell. It just keeps giving all bloody century long. 2016 never fucking ends.

It all should have ended on November 8th. When the American electorate defied the Washington/Wall-Street establishment and their dickless harpies in the mainstream media by voting down their precious Lord Killary in favor of an unsanctioned ass named Donald Trump. It wasn't a clean win. The Donald took the Electoral College, while the queen of war took the Popular. But the Donald beat Killary fair and square by the establishments own stupid fucking rules. Needless to say, the establishment was not pleased. In fact, they were downright apoplectic. Watching the idiots on MSDNC squirm in their shit-caked britches as they realized how clueless they were is probably one of the few truly happy moments I experienced during the election. It wasn't supposed to go this way. The media elite and their DNC puppet masters had only egged Trump on in the first place because he was the only creature on earth more repulsive than the Clintons. Donald was a candidate designed to lose. But they had underestimated how truly disgusted the American people had become, not just with Teflon oligarchs like the Clintons but with the crooked media who exalted them. Trump was a fuck-up. He got 1.5 million fewer votes than that country-club Ken doll, Mitt Romney did. But Killary fucked up way worse. Pulling in a whopping 5.4 million fewer votes than Obama did in 2012, getting shellacked the worst in Rust-Belt states like my native Pennsylvania, where Trump took nearly every county (I voted for Stein).

To put it simply, the establishment fucked up. They had taken working folks for a ride one too many times. This should have been clear during the primaries, when Killary had to cheat just to beat a Fabian fossil like Bernie Sanders, who got zero press time and went out of his way to shoot himself in the fucking foot. All the polls showed old Bernie massacring Trump in a regular election but the establishment didn't listen. They just kept pushing their rotten candidate down peoples throats. Never mind that Killary had become a symbol of everything that was wrong with Washington. A trigger happy, globalist, Wall-Street shill that never stepped foot on a country she wasn't willing to bomb and never flew over an American factory she wasn't willing to outsource. She was the home-team fave and Trump was a grabby jackass who pretended to be a billionaire. He was the guy the cool kids invited to their parties just so they could get him drunk and bet him to bark like a seal. But Trump didn't matter. They could have put Seymour Butts on the ticket and he would have won. People had just had enough. They didn't vote for Trump. They voted against the establishment.

The Democrats and the media could have learned an important lesson here. They could have took this sobering moment to learn a lesson about taking advantage of the people you depend on. But that's not their style. So they decided instead to piss on these people and call them all dupes of the Kremlin. They went back to that tired, old warhorse that failed to get their lazy asses across the finish line during the election and blamed all their own failings on the Russians. According to them, Killary didn't lose because she's a repulsive excuse for a candidate. She lost because of a massive, convoluted conspiracy involving FSB hackers, Wikileaks and "fake news" sites like this one with the dastardly Vladimir Putin playing the part of the man behind the curtain, pulling all our levers. Never mind that they don't have a lick of verifiable proof to support this preposterous farce. And never mind that even according to their own hopped up conspiracy, the worst the Russians are guilty of is educating the American public about the Democrats own dreadful behavior behind closed doors. The establishment is pissed and their gonna have their fucking hissy-fit even if it means starting World War 3. After all, if Killary couldn't give them their precious nuclear holocaust they would just have to get it themselves.

So here we are. It's 2017, Donald Trump is my president and McCarthyism is alive and well. Sure, fine, fuck-it, whatever. Can I go back to writing about Rojava and vagina envy now? Because if I have to write one more article about this stupid, goddamn election, I swear to Kropotkin's ghost, I will literally die. Fuck 2016 and give it back to the Russians. I've had enough.


Peace, Love and Begrudging Empathy- CH


P.S. This post is dedicated to the two trolls on YouTube who threatened to rape me yesterday for being a mouthy genderqueer feminist. The rage they provided me with was the fuel I needed to tare through my seasonal depression and finish this piece. Keep it up, you malignant cunts. Your stupidity gives me wings.