PHIGS AND OTHER EUPHEMISMS

I don't pretend than anyone should care what I think, but just to be honest about my state of mind, I wish to say that I don't give a fig about the reasons for the outcome of the American presidential election.  That the majority of Americans voted for the lesser of two evils is hardly a cause for joy.

I am glad that Mitt Romney didn't win.  There is something postive in that:  the majority of Americans didn't vote for wealth and injustice, for anti-social government.  But a majority of voting Americans did vote for Barack Obama:  and Mr, Obama stands for violence, belligerance, murder, illegal detention, torture, and lies and broken promises.

Let me itemize these allegations

     Violence, belligerance, murder:  offensive wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria; unmanned "drones" used to kill suspected "enemies" but also killing innocent people who, when dead, are called "enemies."

     Illegal detention, torture:  at the illegal U.S. concentration camp at Guantanamo, where unindicted prisoners have been tortured for as much as twelve years; and at Fort Leavenworth, in the United States, where PFC Bradley Manning has been held illegally  for more than 900 days without being charged with a crime, and who was for more than a year tortured in solitary confinement at Quantico.

      Lies and broken promises:  about our wars, our enemies, about closing Guantanamo, ending torture, supporting "whistle-blowers."

So I am not cheering.  I did so four years ago, naively.  I had supported Lyndon Johnson in 1964--and then came Vietnam.  I supported Jimmy Carter in 1976--and then he tried to start World War III by invading Iran--to free 48 (or was it 52) secret CIA operatives in the US Embassy in Teheran.  Bill Clinton was a good president--but he started his presidency by bombing Basra, in Iraq, because an Iraqi man was accused of plotting to kill George H. W. Bush.  (The man was never even brought to trial.)

Obama is among the worst of our warrior presidents--and we have had a lot of them!  He inherited the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and enlarged them to include attacks on Pakistan and Syria.   He has introduced CIA "drone" attacks, and enlarged our attacks on civilians.  (US news reports call our victims "enemies";  European news sources regularly identify the victims of our blind attacks as "civilians.")  Nixon and Kissinger's napalm war in Vietnam  and the "Christmas Bombings" of Cambodia, and Colin Powell's burying Iraqi troops in the sand with bulldozer blades attached to tanks
in George H. W. Bush's Iraq war were probably worse that Obama's use of unmanned drones, in terms of the numbers of innocent people killed.  But murder is murder, and mass murder is mass murder, never mind the size of the mass.

So I am not cheering.  I hope maybe Obama will spend the next four years trying to do the right thing,to govern morally.  But I'm not sure he can.  When you have done what he has done for four years, can you suddenly quit being evil, and become a good man?