by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
Being President of the United States requires moral multi-tasking. One minute you’re gloating over the bodies of people you’ve targeted for death, the next you’re bemoaning all the senseless violence in the world. “As the United States becomes more and more firmly entrenched as the world’s bully, it is insulting in the extreme for Obama to act the part of comforter-in-chief.” The fact that U.S. presidents don’t find themselves morally conflicted, tends to indicate they have no moral underpinnings, at all.
Freedom Rider: Mass Murder Hypocrisy
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
“The president is supported by millions of Americans as he overthrows governments and kills human beings.”
It isn’t clear when presidents were suddenly expected to appear at the scene of every disaster taking place in the nation. George W. Bush may be responsible for this dreadful trend, after he was criticized for flying over the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf coast in 2005. If he actually had a functioning emergency response system and rescued stranded hurricane victims, no one would have cared that he flew over without touching down. But the wrong lesson was learned.
Barack Obama is taking no chances. He shows up for every disaster. A tornado can’t touch down, flood waters can’t rise, and wildfires can’t spread without the president and his team creating new photo ops with unlucky citizens temporarily thrilled to see the president despite the fact that they have survived some sort of calamity.
Now even man made disasters aren’t exempt from presidential overkill. When a Colorado man shot more than 70 people in a movie theater, the media hype went into over drive, and the president who presides over his own “kill list” was front and center as he dished out heaps of sympathy.
Despite the hours of airtime spent on the story of the former graduate student who over-identified with characters in the latest Batman movie, there really isn’t that much to say about this incident. America is a country full of very crazy people who unfortunately also have access to large amounts of firepower. It is a bad combination, and the mass shooting has long ago lost its ability to shock.
“A tornado can’t touch down, flood waters can’t rise, and wildfires can’t spread without the president and his team creating new photo ops.”
The place of mass murder may be a post office, college campus, high school, congressional town meeting, or in this case a movie theater, but the story is the same. A person thought to be deeply disturbed proves himself to be just that. Survivors and grieving families are interviewed, reporters compete with one another to see who can be more melodramatic, and we all wait for the next massacre.
It is unseemly for any president to use a domestic murder scene for political purposes, but as the United States becomes more and more firmly entrenched as the world’s bully, it is insulting in the extreme for Obama to act the part of comforter-in-chief.
Barack Obama not only assassinated American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, but also made the decision to kill his 16 year-old son. The Awlaki family certainly grieved for their loved ones, just as the families of the Aurora, Colorado shooting victims did. But we aren’t supposed to think about the Awlakis or the nameless families of drone victims in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Nor are we supposed to think about how the United States has made common cause with jihadists to overthrow the Syrian government, and in the process killed thousands of men, women and children.
Barack Obama is good at being president, which means that he is good at masking the acts of evil he commits. He may instruct his minions to tell the world that he personally peruses his kill list and determines who should die. He then doesn’t hesitate to act like the leader of a grieving nation and visit shooting victims in their hospital beds.
“America is a country full of very crazy people who unfortunately also have access to large amounts of firepower.”
The hypocrisy is open, sickening and blatant, but Obama always goes where his predecessors dared not. It is also important to point out that the president is not alone in hypocrisy. He is supported by millions of Americans as he overthrows governments and kills human beings. Americans still see themselves as good people, and their political leaders as the arbiters of what is right and wrong in the world.
Obama is correct in assuming that very few Americans will see his expressions of sympathy for what they are, a level of amorality that can only be achieved by someone who aspires to the highest office in the country. His words are either laughable or chilling, depending upon ones mood at the moment of reading them. “Now, even as we learn how this happened, and who’s responsible, we may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize their fellow human beings like this. Such violence, such evil is senseless. It’s beyond reason.” Perhaps it does take one to know one.
The president has moved on from the scene of the crime committed by the certifiably crazy person. Unlike powerful world leaders, the shooters’ act of evil will be scorned by millions of people. Too bad he didn’t have a high office and a fleet of drones at his command. If he had that kind of power, he just might win a nobel peace prize, no matter how many people he killed.
Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.
The People’s Summit vs. G20 and the International People’s Tribunal recently took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to counter the G20 Summit that occurred in the same city. Black Agenda Report…
The settler colony known as the United States inflicts violence upon Black people as a function of its existence. But the murder of a mother and her infant daughter by Missouri police officers…
The domestic expression of imperialism has once again been made clear with the installation of a new cobalt refinery in an Oklahoma town. Through the extraction of raw materials from the global south…
Nonprofit organizations of all orientations are under attack, with threats of withholding funding, for their association with Palestine solidarity activities. Climate justice organizations have…
Harry Haywood’s work is a guiding light to help Black people analyze our position in the U.S. and rethink how we might engage in electoral politics. Are we building power toward revolution or are we…
