In the run-up to World War II, Franklin Roosevelt played the role of the reluctant warmonger. Rather than initiating the action, he took care to be always responding to the war cries of his hopped up left-wing supporters – who were demanding US intervention on behalf of the beleaguered Soviet Union. The American people wantedto stay out of the European war, and the President had to ever-so-cautiously lead them down the primrose path, deceiving them every step of the way while he and Winston Churchill plotted behind their backs to get us into the war.
As the 1940 campaign came down to the wire, Roosevelt intoned: "I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars."
A year later, in alliance with "Uncle" Joe Stalin, we were at war on two fronts.
Back then, it took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the death of 2,400 service members and civilians to get us into a world war. Today it takes a video of the horrific deaths of two American journalists traveling in a war zone, played over and over in an infinite loop of orchestrated hysteria. If they’d only had YouTube in Roosevelt’s day he would’ve succeeded in lying us into war much sooner.
In an age where imagery takes the place of text – and of rational thought – the ISIS public relations department certainly knows its business. If the whole point of using social media to transmit horrific images of their deeds is to lure us into re-invading Iraq, then they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. While it seems like only yesterday that the President disdained ISIS as "junior varsity," today he is mobilizing a mighty worldwide "coalition" to wipe out a group he claims is capable of attacking the United States.
And it must be said that if this President is employing FDR’s old methods, he has noneof the old boy’s charm. Addressing the American people like a rather testy teacher who, one can plainly see, would rather be almost anywhere else, Obama launched into his dreary peroration exuding a skunk-like aura of insincerity. No flowery, inspiring introduction: no soaring rhetoric to thrill the slavering masses, already pumped up by our war-mad media, just the matter-of-fact bare-bones edict of the master of the world:
"My fellow Americans, tonight I want to speak to you about what the United States will do with our friends and allies to degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL."
Note the use of the future tense, and the certainty with which the President asserts it: "… I want to speak to you about what the United States will do"!
Although the Constitution forbids it, American presidents have been taking us into war without congressional consent ever since Harry Truman bypassed the Republican "isolationists" and sent US troops to Korea. This President, like any Roman Caesar, claims the power to take us into war by a simple act of will. Some in Congress arequestioning this, on both sides of the aisle, but we’ll see how far that gets: not very far, I suspect.
The President segues easily into a campaign commercial extolling his achievements in the war on terrorism: we got bin Laden, we sewed up Yemen, and we knocked off that dude in Somalia. And all these shiny presents come packaged in the rhetoric of war-weary "isolationism":
"We’ve done so while bringing more than 140,000 American troops home from Iraq, and drawing down our forces in Afghanistan, where our combat mission will end later this year. Thanks to our military and counterterrorism professionals, America is safer."
Obama’s makeup as a quintessentially political creature is here on full display: he knows perfectly well the American people, in their present mood, won’t tolerate talk of new wars unless it’s framed by the promise of some respite.
Oh yes, and "America is safer." Gee, that’s funny, but Americans don’t feel any safer. Could that be due to the panic-mongering of government officials, and their media megaphones, who are ginning up fear of a bunch of savages situated somewhere out in the no-man’s-land between Iraq and Syria?
Amid all the requisite condemnations of the Islamic State’s supposedly unique brutality, Obama blandly says of them: "They kill children." Can he really not be aware of the alarming proportion of children among Gaza’s dead?
Mustering all his capacity for professorial disdain, Obama declaims:
Just trying to imagine what would happen if he did actually stop it somehow. if he did manage to evade all those 'lone nuts' out there, after the next jackass is sworn in, how many of those million dollar speaking engagements will be there be? and the Barack H Obama presidential library will be placed in deepest Englewood, il
ReplyDelete