Kati, you are the only one I can talk with in this
remote sea of right wingers, true believers, and other odd characters. I have been for some time finding it harder
and harder to blog. I’m not sure why this is, perhaps I am just getting too
old, have little creativity left, am lazy, increasingly uninterested, or, I
have finally just grown weary of watching the witless Washington warmongers
wishing for more wars and, otherwise, for all of our real and important problems
to somehow magically disappear without requiring and action or effort on their
part. I realize they are too busy collecting their bribes to have much time for
governing.
I confess, my little feline
friend, I do not know what to make of it all. I certainly do not know what to
think of President Obama, who seems to have a strange and complicated problem
of bipolarity in both the domestic and foreign policy realms.
Domestically, Obama appears
to be on the right side of the general public as he is for jobs, a minimum
wage, fair pay, unemployment insurance, universal health care, education, and
infrastructure improvements, the environment, immigration reform, and even
taking action against global warming. How can I not respect him for these priorities?
On the other hand, he seems to be in bed with the Big Banks and Wall Street and
is obviously in favor of pumping as much oil and gas out of the ground as fast
as possible. He may even approve the ghastly Keystone pipeline. I think he also
believes in nuclear energy although that is an issue that seems to be dying. And,
although he talks transparency, he doesn’t “walk the walk,” has been very
secretive and hard on whistleblowers, as well as on immigrants. Some of these
latter interests do not seem to jibe very well with the former, and seem to me
a kind of bipolar witlessness.
When it comes to foreign
policy I am even more bewildered. He has managed to more or less extricate us
from our two failed “wars,” and has even managed up until now to keep us from
starting new ones, with Syria and Iran at least, this in spite of the attempts
by the Neocon hawks and Israel to push him into such foolishness. I believe he
should get much credit for this. But I had thought he and Putin were getting
along reasonably well and cooperating in some important areas, but now the coup
in Kiev seems to have ended that important relationship. Why Obama would have
joined with the E.U. to overthrow a democratically elected (although granted,
terrible) President in Ukraine (presumably to draw Ukraine into NATO), and is
now supporting a new Ukraine government that includes neo-Nazis as well as
anti-Semites, and is urging them to attack, murder and burn the pro-Russians in
the Ukranian east, I do not understand. This seems to me clearly inconsistent
with his otherwise foreign policy attempts, again apparently bipolar
witlessness.
It has been suggested that
Obama’s mistake was keeping on many of the Bush appointees and some of his
opponents (as Lincoln is reported to have done). Thus while Obama might have
been in favor of diplomacy his Secretary of State and others were more hawkish
and have influenced him to do things he might not have elected to do on his
own, the cases of Syria and Iran are good examples. Hillary Clinton and Gates
apparently wanted to get militarily involved in Syria and damage Iran. I
suspect, Kati, there may well be some truth in this explanation, and it may
well be that Obama was not completely “in the loop” when it came to the coup in
Kiev. It is also quite possible, I believe, that Obama and Putin may be
secretly cooperating to keep the Ukraine situation from getting completely out
of hand. Of course I do not know what goes on in the corridors of power. I like
to think this Obama/Putin collaboration might be true. If it is true Obama is
owed even greater respect.
Of course when it comes to
witlessness nothing can compare with the behavior of Republicans. They have
positioned themselves as being opposed to virtually anything that might help
ordinary people. The polls are quite clear on minimum wages, unemployment
insurance, jobs, and etc., but in spite of the obvious majority of support for
anything the desires of common people are irrelevant and the desires of the 1%
are favored by the GOP. Now they have even set up a new committee to
investigate Benghazi even though the facts of that tragedy are already known
and have more than abundantly been made clear. If their goal is to win elections
this is witlessness carried to an obvious extreme. Kati, you are such a good
listener. No matter what I say you just lie there on my lap and purr. I forgive
you your occasional witlessness as you, being a cat, don’t know any better, and
what you do doesn’t harm anyone. The witlessness of humans is not the same.
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