I have said for years to my "conservative" friends that I am not political, that I thought most politicians of whatever leaning were crooks and liars, and as such, for years, I didn't vote for either party's candidates in national elections. I refused to give in to the lesser of two evil arguments in 1984, '88, '92, '96, '00 or '04. Yes, I thought Reagan was an ideological buffoon, Bush senior was an elitist criminal, Clinton was a pathological, ego-driven liar, and Bush, Jr. was an out-and-out intellectual infant, but I also thought Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry were two-faced wimps, and Bob Dole in 1996? I would have voted for my own grandfather before I voted for that cranky nut-job!
However, in 2008, for the first time in my adult life, I saw an actual adult running for president and so, I voted for Barack Obama. I've written about the reasons why, including what constitutes an emotional adult.
Of course, my right wing friends immediately jumped on my vote as proof that I was a "liberal democrat" all along. Well, to that I say... whatever.
I also say this regarding certain things the president has done recently: Obama is wrong.
He is wrong for protecting the people involved in authorizing and implementing a policy of torture and illegal spying on U.S. citizens in the United States, and he is wrong for continuing the illegal confinement of prisoners at Gitmo who can't be tried in court, now, because of that torture.
Can I understand his possible rational, adult reasons for these positions? Yes. Perhaps he doesn't want to inflame radical, fundamentalists groups further against the U.S. than his predecessors did, and perhaps he believes some of the detainees at Gitmo are extremists who want to harm America, and certainly, he is weighing the political fall-out from a public Bush-Cheney administration legal laundry cleaning which some people will find very distasteful, not to mention that it will surely expose many wimpy Democrats who knew about the Bush-Cheney crimes and looked the other way.
But it doesn't matter.
President Obama is still wrong - because you cannot have a rule of law, especially when it comes to war crimes and crimes against humanity, and selectively break those laws because of a political agenda or because it is inconvenient or even potentially dangerous. A nation, just like an individual, cannot grow and prosper and be healthy while selectively acting out psychopathically. Can't happen. It must and will come back to haunt you when you try to have it both ways. Playing it that way may help Obama politically, in the short-run, as Bill Clinton's two-faced, please-everybody policies helped him get elected twice, but the karma to come will be swift, as the Clinton's discovered. But more importantly, that karma will fall on all of us as citizens of this country.
As I say to many people I work with in therapy - there are no end runs or short-cuts around the healing process or the truth. Same thing applies to healing ourselves en masse as a nation.
That's it.
No comments:
Post a Comment