Why am I beefing with the President of the United States?

December 14th, 2009

Well,

first off, I didn’t

go looking for a beef.

I supported him, donated to him,

campaigned for him.  I wrote my new book

in the hope that it might influence him toward, and

authoritatively support, a decision not to escalate a bad war.

I offered it to him politely and quietly, forsaking an

advance from my traditional publishers so

that I could get it out immediately

in electronic

form.

It’s the

oldest military manual

in the world, The Art of War, and one

of the world’s wisest books,

and it says things

like this:

The

wise leader knows

that even an army staked and nourished

at home drives prices up and impoverishes the people.

Greater still is the scarcity born of waging long

wars at great distances. No nation

has ever benefitted

from it.

If you

bother to read it,

you’ll see that it doesn’t go

after him, it goes after the ethically and

morally handicapped people who

ran the country before he

was elected. And it gives

him the advice of

millenia:

No

good leader

repeatedly raids the

families of his citizens for soldiers,

nor their purses for the gold

to buy weapons, nor their

peace to make

war.

But

a friend asked

me yesterday on Facebook

why I had turned on Obama, and

here is what I wrote

in reply:

“I didn’t

turn on him, man,

he turned on me when he

reauthorized warrantless wiretapping,

which violates the most fundamental principles

of the Constitution of which he is a scholar; when he

authorized outrageous timber sales like Orion North which

he specifically campaigned against last year; when he repeatedly

acted to protect people like Cheney and Bush from prosecution for

the war crimes of which they are, by any and every standard, guilty,

or for the treasonous act of revealing the identity of an undercover CIA

agent and director of national intelligence, a crime for which the traditional

penalty is death or life imprisonment; when he made back room deals with Big

Pharma — documented even as he was denying them — to keep their obscene

profits out of the health care negotiations; when he hyper-extended his

shoulders give the reach-around to Goldman Sachs and Wall Street

while 1 in 4 children in America is on food stamps; when he

doubled down on the senseless war and extra-judicial

executions in two countries where al Qaeda isn’t and

where the insurgency is composed of tribal hill

people who don’t want their neighborhoods

occupied by armed foreigners,

just like you and

I wouldn’t.”

Add to

that his playing fast and

loose with the legacy of Dr. King.

That’s how I see it, anyway, standing where that

greatest of heroes stood, invoking his name, acknowledging his

personal debt to him, and then using the occasion of

the Peace Prize to talk about how violence

and war are essential and

inevitable.

I hope

he comes to his senses.

I think he’s crazy smart and I know he

has character and substance.  His whole life shows that.

He’s not George W. Bush, a nitwit and an ethical black hole.  But

he’s surrounded by the same kinds of folks who surrounded Bush — people

who make money off war, people who make money off money,

people who make money off health care, people who

want their absolute power consolidated to an

even greater degree of absoluteness.  And

they are leaning on him.  And he

is folding.  And he

shouldn’t.