I don’t know much about the political bent of Esquire Magazine. Is it left-liberal? (Bound to be.) Is it comfortably mainstream? (Ditto.) It looks like a déclassé New Yorker.
What I do know is that for “finishing off a 16-year old Yemeni boy—the son of Anwar al-Awlakias”—this writer, other non-beltway libertarians, and reporters outside the orthodoxy (the good folks at RT are an example) called Obama a murderer AROUND THE TIME HE COMMITTED THAT MURDER, not a year later.
Tom Junod of Esquire, a seemingly affable fellow, has only NOW come out with a “highly critical article about President Obama’s drone strike program.” To CNN, “Junod described Pres. Obama’s presidency as ‘lethal,'” and “told anchor Brooke Baldwin “why he wrote the article and the work that went into it.”
Read it, if you don’t mind the cloying format: a letter to the beloved Strong Man.
The point is that the establishment—Democratic and Republican—decides when Truth should be allowed to emerge. It’s not a conscious process; but a reflexive one. It’s not that these interests know the truth when they see it. Rather, reflexively, they marginalize those who speak it, until such politically opportune times when the truth can be spoken. Then they act (quite sincerely) as though they discovered said truth and are performing a great public service by speaking it.
“Had a rare video surfaced in which a black toddler was being brutalized by agents of the Transportation Security Administration, President Barack Obama would have enough solidarity, and some to spare. ‘If he had a son, he’d look like the boy whose breeches were breached by adults who should know better.’
I don’t wish the homegrown terrorists of the TSA to become equal-opportunity offenders; I want Congress to call off these attack dogs, now.
Still, I am unconvinced that when they travel, black women, tots, and geriatrics are subjected to the same invasive searches as are whites.
My own experience this month was uneventful. I was spared the rogering I’ve endured in the past, thanks, I believe, to the advice of WND’s Commentary Editor: wear loose clothing. A young TSA agent waved me by.
I did see a tall and handsome TSA worker working-over a little old man (aged 80, perhaps). The agent was black; his victim Caucasian. It looked as though the former was examining the hunched old man’s colostomy bag. It took the agent forever. He appeared to be enjoying himself.
I lingered as long as I could, to bear witness. The cruel ordeal was still underway when I left the scene, some 15 minutes later.
Dare I say it? The girl who—no doubt by fluke—did not violate my constitutional, fourth-amendment rights to be free of “unreasonable searches and seizures” was Caucasian.
A previous flying experience saw me subjected to—what are the odds?—the ministrations of a large African-American woman, who summoned me with a crooked finger for a pat down. In no time at all, her giant digits were on my chest and between my legs.
Amassed online is a critical mass of images in which TSA workers, often minorities, are feeling up and humiliating the most vulnerable members of white America—kids, old men and women, often infirm and incapacitated.
Twenty one and a half percent of TSA employees are black, and 13.1 percent Latino. At 10.5 percent and 10 percent respectively, the equivalent representation of aggrieved groups in the private sector merely mirrors their numbers in the larger population (serving, no doubt, to keep litigation at bay).
Moreover, like most federal agencies, the TSA is known to provide sheltered employment to a segment of the population which Sibel Edmonds, a courageous whistle blower, has described as “low-level, incompetent, scandalous, molesting, abusive, and in some cases criminal people who have been creating one scandal after another.”
TSA action is immortalized in countless YouTube clips. …”
If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive libertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.
UPDATE I: The serious Japanese are Laughing (and it takes a lot to make them chuckle):
UPDATE II (June 2): To the repulsive David B, in Comments:
My rational, sane readers know my writing as the kind that cleaves to reality, is objective, and objectivist. Aesthetics, art, music: These are aspects of the culture that I comment on at length. This is nothing new. I’ve commented on my idea of female beauty and manliness. These, like my concept of what constitutes good music, are absolute. These assessments exist irrespective of what I find sexually attractive or politically desirable. I thought Jackie Kennedy was spectacular as a woman. Does that mean I am attracted to her? Does that imply I’m a Democrat? What nonsense. The Don Draper character in “Mad Men” is good looking, objectively speaking. Does that mean I want to jump his bones? Iman the model in lovely. And black.
Crass, stupid racialists see the world through their narrow prism of politics and race. They are postmodernists, in this sense, reducing objective reality to subjective likes and dislikes that serve their personal ego-related and political needs.
I’ll repeat the reality I observed at the Newark airport recently: The black gentleman I observed assaulting the helpless, ancient white man was tall, fit, well-groomed and good-looking (in the sense that he could have obtained employment with a modeling agency). Do these objective observations mean I was attracted to him? How stupid can you be?
Did I despise him for his actions? You bet.
His actions, more than anything else about him, condemned him as a man and human being.
The Surveillance State has metastasized under Barack Obama. Bush must be proud. Released under a freedom of information request are lists of humdrum words and phrases used by Department of Homeland Security “analysts” in patrolling “the internet and searching for domestic and external threats.”
Examples are “death, looting, riot, threat, radiation” and many more.
I wonder if keywords that appear in reports about the keywords are scanned too by big brother THE FUCKER?
Big Media have discovered what “BHO: Uncle Sam’s Assassin” revealed quite some time ago: Obama is a serial killer. “The POTUS’s growing fleet of armed Predators and Reapers is operated by both the CIA and the Military’s Joint Special Operations Command, each, evidently, with its own Kill List, and all under, ‘a complicated web of overlapping authorities.’”
The New York Times has framed the assassinations-sans-due-process pursued by the president with zeal as something the Great Man has had to do despite moral misgivings.
“‘How old are these people?'” asked the Great Man. (Or so his stage managers claimed.) “If they are starting to use children,” he said of Al Qaeda, “we are moving into a whole different phase.”
This, as he perused pictures of teenagers (“terrorists”) whose time was up.
The NYT, whose time in print is also drawing near, notes that the “the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture“ “has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentary and the president’s own deep reserve.”
In contrast to the NYT, Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” doesn’t finesse the facts: “President Obama personally oversees a ‘kill list’ containing the names and photos of individuals targeted for assassination in the secret U.S. drone war. According to the Times, Obama signs off on every targeted killing in Yemen and Somalia and the more complex or risky strikes in Pakistan.”
UPDATE I: In an editorial the NYT tries to redeem itself, conceding that, “The logic, such as it is, is that people who hang around places where Qaeda operatives hang around must be up to no good. That’s the sort of approach that led to the false imprisonment of thousands of Iraqis, including the ones tortured at Abu Ghraib. Mr. Obama used to denounce that kind of thinking.”
UPDATE II (June 1): INCLUSIVITY IS THE WORD. Via RT:
…there’s also been some dispute over the way civilian casualties are counted. The CIA often counts able-bodied males, military-age males who are killed in strikes as militants, unless they have concrete evidence to sort of prove them innocent, and some folks at the State Department and elsewhere have questioned that kind of a process.”
The 15, turbulent months “since Mr Mubarak was forced from power” have been marred by “continued violent protests and a deteriorating economy.”
According to BBC News, “Foreign direct investment has reversed from $6.4bn (£4bn) flowing into the country in 2010 to $500m leaving it last year. Tourism, a major revenue generator for the country, has also dropped by a third.”
But, as members of the American chattering class will tell you—they had all tripped over one another to show-off their solidarity with the popular uprising in Egypt—none of this matters.
The Egyptian people are about to vote for a president, which, apparently means they have won the universal rights they fought for.
“I know nothing so miserable as a democracy without liberty,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in the mid-1800s. He speaks for me. I find myself unable to get lathered-up about democracy for others, while I live in the democratic despotism that contemporary America has become. Tocqueville “foresaw the coming of the social welfare state, which agrees to provide all for its subjects, and in turn exacts rigid conformity.” Above this race of conformist men “stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratification and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. … it seeks … to keep them in perpetual childhood.”
