PUTNEY — It is time to pull the curtain aside and find out who the wizard really is. Barack's minions have bruited his god-like persona for the past year, and now that he is “large and in charge” it's time to perform.
It's been three months plus for the Obama administration, and the usual disappointment is setting in. A new president, especially one following an administration led by an intellectually challenged lemur, is a source of optimism for all of us. Unfortunately, the three-month report card is not going to go into a mother-of-pearl frame beside his peewee basketball trophy.
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A few weeks ago Obama held a press conference in the style of a town-hall meeting. One of the highlights was taking questions from the Internet. The single-most-asked question was, “Do you plan to legalize marijuana?” to which BHO replied, “What's up with these Internet people?” Does he mean the Internet people who got him elected?
What's up with them, I think, is that MJ is a rather benign drug whose users and sellers are filling up our prisons and costing us millions in tax dollars. What's up is that the alcohol and cigarette companies have a stranglehold on the legal drug market, and they don't want a hippie with a bong crashing the party. The decision not to take seriously the prospect of legalizing marijuana is political, not practical. You get a big fat “F” for this one, Mr. P.
POTUS just got back from Mexico, where he and President Felipe Calderón tried to sort out an answer to the drug-fueled carnage taking place just over the border. Mexican drug dealers have been fighting a bloody turf war with American-purchased weapons, and the bodies are piling up. Mexicans see the U.S. appetite for drugs, and our apparent indifference to human life as the problem.
Their vision is 20/20. We have gun shops, filled with assault weaponry, lining the border and willing to accept bags of drug money from murdering dealers for supplying them with the latest in high-tech munitions. Other than saying that, yes, the U.S. has its part to play in this, the president was noncommittal.
Well, we do have our part to play. Our politicians cause 90 percent of this problem by knuckling under to the National Rifle Association. The NRA has built a war chest that is used to crush any and every congressman or -woman who considers sensible gun laws. Is there another civilized country on the planet that allows the sale of assault weapons at gun shows without the buyer even showing ID?
How does the NRA get its enormous membership to endorse this homicidal policy? It just sends out a letter to all the mush-brained members and tells them that so-and-so is going to take away their rifles. That appears to do the trick. School shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech are just the price of doing business. Another F for you, Mr. President, for cowering before the NRA.
A lot of moderate Republicans voted for Obama because of the Bush policy of torturing prisoners. These representatives of America snatched people off the streets and sent them off to secret prisons far from American soil to be tortured. Who knows how many were killed? Now that internal e-mails from the Bush administration have shown that this policy was condoned at the highest levels, what does he plan to do?
“Nothing” is the answer.
He says that prosecuting CIA operatives for following orders would be harmful to their morale. (“They were only following orders” - hmmm, I'm getting some déjà vu here.) How about the morale of the families of those tortured and kept in a hole year after year? How about going after the people who authorized these atrocities? Shouldn't somebody be prosecuted for destroying our reputation worldwide, acting as a terrorist recruitment tool, and behaving like savages in our name?
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There are a lot of question marks in this column. The bloom is definitely off the rose for Obama.
Obama has got to quit playing political canasta. He needs to stand up for the principles he claimed to have during the run-up to the election. I would have expected this from a politically calloused Clinton had she won, but I hoped that Obama would be different. He came into office with a big “Change” slogan on his T-shirt. It's been washed a few times and “Change” is fading and “Business as Usual” is coming into focus.