Spring Break
Obama resembles 'Manchurian'
Robert Zaller
Issue date: 10/30/09 Section: Ed-Op
|
Consider the evidence. Would anyone who voted for Obama a year ago have imagined that Guantanamo Bay would still be an active concern, and that a high-ranking administration official would defend it as one of the finest detention facilities in the world? (Especially true, I suppose, for prisoners never found guilty of a crime.) Would anyone have imagined that 120,000 American soldiers would still remain in Iraq, more than even contemplated by Donald Rumsfeld, and that the few brigades withdrawn would simply have been shipped to Afghanistan for the widening conflict there?
During the campaign last year, the Bush administration was widely ridiculed for bailing out the banks after permitting a culture of corruption to flourish unchecked. Would anyone have believed that Obama would have gone one better in generosity toward the malefactors of great wealth while watching complacently as the unemployment rate soared to 10 percent (really close to 20 percent if the long-term unemployed or the underemployed are counted) and foreclosures dumped millions of families on the street? Could anyone have imagined that he would recycle Bush's secretary of defense, while seamlessly extending the policies of his predecessor on both our failed wars? Would you have thought to hear the erstwhile professor of constitutional law tell us why habeas corpus could no longer be applied to enemies of the state, or see the first black president give the back of his hand to the still-suffering victims of Hurricane Katrina while on his way to a gala fundraiser? Would you not begin to wonder, in fact, whether George W. Bush had ever left office?
All of this might reasonably beg for explanation. That's what brought "The Manchurian Candidate" to mind. Of course, Obama wouldn't have been the product of the international Communist conspiracy, since, whether such a conspiracy ever existed, Communists no longer do. But the Left entertained a not dissimilar fantasy for awhile. This was a group called the Trilateral Commission, composed of captains of industry and finance, met secretly from time to time to coordinate global policies for capitalism and imperialism. The fantasy was not entirely off the mark; the power elite did convene for an annual frolic at the Bohemian Grove near San Francisco, and let us not forget the fully licensed, although virtually unaccountable, public bodies that perform such functions today: the Federal Reserve, the World Trade Organization, et cetera.
Be the first to comment on this story