October 22, 2011, Current events
Not that I held any kind of brief for former Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi (one of the near infinite number of spellings of his name... which, along with his thousand outfits, made him a one-off, even if he was a nasty mother f***er responsible for the murder of my countrymen on Pan Am Flt. 103 and God knows of how many of his own countrymen)... but while the United States, which now sends killer drones to murder the [American citizen] children of enemies of the state, Roman Empire style, and which nonetheless refuses to prosecute its own torturers, or of course, its criminal-run banking sector, incongruously asserts that the mob lynching of Qaddafi was "justice"... just part of the perversity of that word [as in "United States Department of Justice"]... the only "justice" for the late Col. Qaddafi comes not from NATO bombers and their allied angry mobs, but seemingly from the incomparable Dmitry Orlov, in the form of this "Where's Muammar?" piece... the opening snippet:
[48-hour update: Muammar is in his home town of Sirte, dead. He died like a warrior, surrounded by his loyal followers, who fought on against insurmountable odds until the very end. He is survived by his enemies, who, if they are lucky, will die the death of cowards—in a hospital bed, fussed over by money-grubbing physicians. And if they are not so lucky—imagination runs wild. Being the scum of the earth is not illegal, but there is most likely a limit to how long people will be willing to go on believing that. I raise my glass of tea to Muammar, a unique and colorful dictator who made other bloodthirsty tyrants look like mice.]
I'll note that having added a notch on his Presidential belt for Qaddafi to go along with al-Awlaki (and his 16 and 19 year old sons) and of course, for OBL, and for not closing Guantanamo (and indeed, making things worse down there than they were under Bush), for not prosecuting torturers, and replacing government sanctioned torture with government sanctioned homicide, including of citizens, for expanding the doctrine of state secrets to heretofore unimagined levels, for accelerating the national security state, for extending tax cuts for the rich, for seeing to it that no social programs of any kind (except tax cuts for the rich) can possibly be passed into law, for keeping us in wars in at least seven countries (Iraq and Libya, while they last anyway, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and now Uganda), for an Administration that called his own supporters "retards," for stepping up immigration raids to levels not heretofore seen, for gutting public-protecting government regulation while simultaneously continuing the illusion that we are overregulated (and hence, delegimating all good government) and for seeing to it that every theft and abuse by the banking sector was not even investigated, let alone prosecuted by his government, for a "health care reform" likely to be gutted by courts before it even takes effect, for setting up a budget stalemate guaranteed to destroy social security, Medicare, and most other social programs... and oh, for so much more... it seems clear to me that my college classmate Barack Obama has been the most successful RIGHT-WING President in American history.
It's too bad (for him, anyway) that actual right-wingers just don't like him. Perhaps if he just switched parties to the one that he's more seemingly philosophically aligned with, he might do better in the coming election. As if it mattered, of course, to us mere peons [at least us down here in the "99%"] as to whether Goldman Sachs-sponsored Barack Obama or Goldman Sachs-sponsored Mitt Romney is "elected" to wield dictatorial powers on behalf of the financial oligarchs, as outlined above.
Just saying.