"Furious" Too Late
I voted for Barack Obama, of course, but I wasn’t among those audacious in my hope. With good reason, it turns out. No, I won’t stoop to "I told you so" like the wing-nuts on the right who insist they knew what he would be like. Frankly, I didn’t know he would turn out to be the president we’ve seen for the past year and half. Few people expected that this man would be a war-mongering wuss who preserved much that was wrong with the Bush-Cheney regime and who did little to lead.
My goodness, after the previous eight years, you’d figure even a mediocre politician with a decent soul would have been champing at the bit, waiting to cut through the shrouds of secrecy with a scythe of transparency. That there would have been an urgency in his voice when he expounded on his plans for health care, education, energy, the environment, and the economy.
But instead we’ve got a guy whose change we couldn’t believe in; a president who is spending much time and energy perpetuating politics as usual, attending lavish fund-raisers and offering candidates federal jobs to quit races. He’s expanded our covert military operations to 65 foreign countries and failed to close Guantanamo. He’s held only a couple of press conferences. He is losing the faith of almost everyone, at home and abroad.
You may know the apocryphal story of a newspaper vender in his kiosk on the side of a major boulevard, I think it was in Paris. An enormous angry crowd storms down the avenue and out of sight. Minutes later, a man races up to the kiosk and out of breath demands, "Have you seen a mob...I’m their leader."
An AP headline the other day read, "'Furious' Obama heading to Gulf for spill update." It appeared after a spate of pieces by major columnists asking why Obama wasn’t as upset as the rest of the country is. It kinda says it all...at least so far.
©2010 SetonnoteS
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