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April 29, 2012 Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Global-Profiling President
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: If you missed the conversation Jeremy Scahill and I had this weekend on Book TV (CSPAN-2) about my book The United States of Fear and how the Obama administration has turned the planet into a global free-fire zone, you can still catch it by clicking here. Tom]
The Obama Contradiction Weakling at Home, Imperial President Abroad By Tom Engelhardt He has few constraints (except those he’s internalized). No one can stop him or countermand his orders. He has a bevy of lawyers at his beck and call to explain the “legality” of his actions. And if he cares to, he can send a robot assassin to kill you, whoever you are, no matter where you may be on planet Earth. He sounds like a typical villain from a James Bond novel. You know, the kind who captures Bond, tells him his fiendish plan for dominating the planet, ties him up for some no less fiendish torture, and then leaves him behind to gum up the works. As it happens, though, he’s the president of the United State, a nice guy with a charismatic wife and two lovely kids. How could this be? Crash-and-Burn Dreams and One That Came to Be Sometimes to understand where you are, you need to ransack the past. In this case, to grasp just how this country’s first African-American-constitutional-law-professor-liberal Oval Office holder became the most imperial of all recent imperial presidents, it’s necessary to look back to the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency. Who today even remembers that time, when it was common to speak of the U.S. as the globe’s “sole superpower” or even “hyperpower,” the only “sheriff” on planet Earth, and the neocons were boasting of an empire-to-come greater than the British and Roman ones rolled together? Click here to read more of this dispatch. |
