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I, for one, feel much better knowing Obama now has at his disposal a secret, gay army well-versed in torture and detention techniques.

"Hear, hear, MAtt! I agree wholeheartedly. I...cough, cough...think...cough, cough.... Sorry, I'm feeling a li'l swine-fluey just about now..."

funny, i just read almost the exact same comment somewhere on facebook...

Obama is an enigma, like the Mona Lisa.

If only John McCain had won.

Did anyone ever make this argument? I remember the "Hang on and just let him deal with the economy first!" arguments, but I don't recall anyone putting health care before (say) illegal detentions. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I'd love a cite.

Obama's pretty much doing what is expected of him by those who installed him -- making it all look plausible. Keep smiling. Mouth the logical apologetics. Keep the photogenic family front and center.

The perpetual genocidal war against the elusive, all-purpose boogymen du jour (and any hapless Muslim bystanders caught in the crossfire) continues indefinitely. Bush started and sustained it. Obama is "ending" it. Either way it goes on. (Vietnam repeating -- that mass ritual sacrifice conducted for over 15 years from Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson and finally to Nixon who ended it, but only after six years of expanding it. Much green redistributed to corporate America. Many yellow people dead.)

If socialized medicine or socialized anything else is in the offing, it's going to meted out in crumbs relative to what the top of the pyramid keeps for itself. The "Federal" "Reserve" private "banking" crime syndicate now has more visible legitimacy to go along with its usual totalitarian power. What is being lost by the masses (if they ever really owned it) in the manipulated financial crunch is being scooped up by the usual suspects, who now enjoy even more concentrated wealth, the rest of us adopting lowered expectations as the "responsible" thing to do. Bernie Madoff's relative drop in the bucket grabbed the spotlight when the crisis was at its initial hottest so the whole thing got conflated in the public subconcious with the imagined genetic cupidity of da Joooz, while the real criminals play the world like a Monopoly board.

At present the Bill of Rights is a vague memory of a glimpse of a souvenir. CIA, FBI, IRS, ATF, NYPD and any PD -- wtf? -- all thugs of the permanent regime, celebrated as heroes and superheroes on screens large and small. (What's the message of "Dark Knight?" There is evil so rampant and capricious out there that it can only be stopped by unbalanced but sexy vigilantes and a general suspension of individual civil rights.)

Meanwhile back in town, 5-billionaire garden gnome Michael Bloomberg, who immediately post 9/11 became NYC Mayor and then somehow in the middle of that financial crisis -- gosh! -- 20-billionaire Michael Bloomberg, has wiped his ass with two voter mandates for term limits. He blackmailed and/or paid off the City Council to let him buy a third term because, gee, according to him nobody else can lead the city through its current financial mire. (If he's such whiz, how come on his 24/7 Bloomberg financial network nobody warned of the mortage debacle and the market crash?) If Rudolph Giuliani as Mayor was "a small man in search of a balcony," Michael Bloomberg is a smaller man who just has to reach into his wallet to buy several balconies. He is making sure he gets those one billion Obama police bucks so NYPD/CIA mole David Cohen can enhance his covert Fourth Amendment-free follies, and there can be more 30-cop car motorcades parading around Manhattan lest anyone forget this is intended to be Monaco West, a gated community where swells can safely wander home drunk at night while their little black-dressed dates can clutch at and harangue any cute roughneck passerby without fear of getting cut.

As Bill Hicks liked to say, "Go back to sleep, America."

@J.D.
You had me at "perpetual genocidal war." Just saying the phrase gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling.

Perpetual genocidal war! Say it loud and there's tear gas spraying; say it soft and it's almost like slaying.

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