September 6, 2012 by Sam Rolley
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Are you better off than you were four years ago?
This, pundits say, is the question that will make or break the second-term ambitions of President Barack Obama. Chances are, however, if you happen to be of the “hope” and “change” crowd that in 2008 got President Obama the keys to the White House, the answer is a resounding “No!”.
If you are a libertarian-minded, Constitutional-loving American, this dispatch will be of little value to you. You already understand that within the confines of the plutocratic two-party political system there is no hope for achieving smaller, more liberty-oriented American governance in the upcoming Presidential election. You have already likely decided to stand by, hoping for some politically miraculous event that puts a worthy candidate before you. You’ve probably already resigned yourself to writing in the name of a candidate with little or no chance of winning, marking a third-party section of the ballot or simply not voting.
This correspondence is aimed at anyone who openly declares support for Obama. If the hopey, changey warm fuzzies have yet to wear off, here are a few things to consider about how Obama has fooled his base:
He thinks that his supporters are all either high or suffer the effects of short-term memory loss.
Obama has gone to great lengths to try to make voters believe that he wants to rethink how America deals with drugs. The Nation’s “War on Drugs” is ridiculously flawed and functions only as a profit maker for the prison-industrial complex and a profit protector for the Big Pharma drug cartel.
For the casual marijuana user, Obama offered this in his book Dreams of My Father:
Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though.I had discovered that it didn’t make any difference whether you smoked reefer in the white classmate’s sparkling new van, or in the dorm room of some brother you’d met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school and now spent most of their time looking for an excuse to brawl. You might just be bored, or alone. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection. And if the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism.
Unfortunately for Obama, no matter the amount of pot casual recreational drug users and medical marijuana patients fire up, his own “hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism” is no laughing matter.
Obama, promising to end the raids that had begun under President George W. Bush, said on the campaign trail in 2008, “I’m not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue.”
Despite laws in some States that made legal the use of medical marijuana, Obama’s Department of Justice has widely used Federal resources to conduct raids on medical marijuana producers in places like Colorado and California.
So, he backtracked.
“What I specifically said was that we were not going to prioritize prosecutions of persons who are using medical marijuana,” Obama said in a recent explanation of his policy. “I never made a commitment that somehow we were going to give carte blanche to large-scale producers and operators of marijuana — and the reason is, because it’s against federal law.”
And what’s more, remember the horrific tactics used by the Justice Department in its White House-linked Fast and Furious debacle, whereby it essentially put illegal weapons in the hands of Mexican drug cartels, resulting in numerous murders? Well, as the conspiracy unraveled to put on full display the dangerous incompetence of both White House policy experts and appointed Department of Justice officials, Federal crackdowns on State-sanctioned medical marijuana producers were ramped up.
In the name of damage control, after being exposed as a Presidential administration hell-bent on shaping public perception of firearm ownership by putting guns in the hands of murders, the Choom Gang President unleashed the dogs on the medical marijuana industry in California to distract Americans and appease the anti-medical marijuana, anti-alternative medicine, pro-prison and pro-Big Pharma lobbies.
The move not only destroyed jobs, but it destroyed lives.
Of course, Obama wants you to forget all of that. And convenient pre-election leaks from White House “insiders” indicate that a second term for Obama means a new look at American drug policy. Oh, yeah, and he commissioned the Generation Y equivalent of Cheech and Chong to do a commercial for the Democratic National Convention:
Of course, Cheech and Chong were likely unavailable because in old age they’ve wised up; and, tired of worrying about the Feds, they’re now pushing magic brownies that lack illegal substances but are chock full of fiber:
If you’re high enough to believe the President, you may want to check into a local rehabilitation program.
President Obama thinks that if you aren’t high, you’re at least very, very stupid.
This is the Nobel Peace Prize-winning President whose record on foreign policy is no better from a peace or human rights perspective than that of President George W. Bush or any other warmongering neocon.
Obama had this to say to supporters in a recent campaign speech at the University of Colorado at Boulder, “This November you get to decide the future of the Afghanistan war. Governor Romney had nothing to say about Afghanistan last week. We are bringing our troops home from Afghanistan. I set a timetable and we will have them all out by 2014. Governor Romney doesn’t have a timetable.”
Barely a year into his Presidency, Obama ordered a troop surge in Afghanistan, with the idea that America would get the job done by brute force and begin bringing troops home by the middle of last year.
At the Republican National Convention, actor Clint Eastwood asked an imaginary Obama why he didn’t just cut the losses and bring them home before the surge. Eastwood suggested that America should have consulted the Russians with regard to advice concerning military success in the country. And in his ramblings, this is the most valuable point the actor made during that speech. Obama, after all, did run in 2008 on the notion that he would end Bush’s wars.
Just less than two months before the Presidential election, Americans are witnessing gross American failures in Afghanistan, despite Obama’s increase in troops.
The country cannot stand on its own, despite ongoing American efforts.
The efforts are getting American soldiers shot by the very people they are trying to train.
Later this year, the long-overdue troop drawdown is slated to take place. The country isexpected to revert to total Taliban control.
The Obama Administration continually pretends that it has achieved great success in ending the Iraq war. What goes unmentioned, however, is far more telling than the President’s continual self-promotion as a war ending leader.
Obama doesn’t remind voters that he actually ran more than two years behind schedule on his plan to end the Iraq war.
And he doesn’t mention that he actually scrapped his own plan for troop withdrawal and followed the plan put in place by the Bush Administration.
How’s that for change?
The real change made in foreign policy by Obama is this: increased deadly drone strikes, illegal wars — albeit quieter ones– and using the excuse of “protecting the world from human rights abuses” to put the United States at risk of involvement in worldwide war with military superpowers like China and Russia. It is not change, but a continuance “forward” of Bush foreign policy that will continue no matter which major party candidate is elected.
But, at least he single-handedly killed Osama bin Laden.
To list all of Obama’s lies and transgressions would take far more room than this article will allow, but a simple reflection on the reasons why you may have supported Obama in the first place should give ample opportunity to understand why he has failed his base.
Many of us who are conservatives have continually expressed disdain for the Republican Party’s nomination of a candidate with so many Obama-like qualities and its subsequent blackout of the one candidate who could have unified people who favor small government, end to war and a focus on individual liberty. And pointing that out seems to bring many Republican diehards to a boil as they angrily accuse anyone who refuses to walk a party line of being an Obama supporter. But I can assure you we are not. We just believe that Romney is the lesser of two liars, rather than the lesser of two evils as they would suggest.
No one wants to vote for a liar, but those of you who elected Obama the first time must realize you already have once. Do you really want to do that again?
