MILLENNIAL REWIND

Visual courtesy of
Charles Boday and Martha Neighbors

"An administration open to multilateralism, as Obama’s appears to be, could make the transition to ‘one of several’ a matter of policy and practice. Among the many achievements I’m hoping for from an Obama administration, this could be one of its most significant and forward-looking."

*         *         *

When I re-read those words--the words with which I concluded the last post--I thought about the range and depth of hopes to which the Obama campaign gave rise.

And it occurred to me that in addition to everything else that Bush,Cheney, the neocons and the religious crazies squandered, they threw away eight years of time in which we might have moved forward, with no replay of the Gilded Age, the Robber Barons and a neoimperialist version of the Crusades.

Let it be recorded that this millennium commenced in 2009.

Comments

[Dan Icolari]

Thanks for your comment, Robin.

I hope President Obama (there, I've said it) doesn't shrink from being so 'disagreeable'--the cardinal sin, it seems--as to insist that we punish criminals for their crimes--particularly crimes as grievous as those of these moral zeros.

With reference to torture, after all, he has said quite clearly that no one is above the law. One assumes that includes disgraced ex-chiefs of state.

If Obama fails to pursue punishment for these criminals, it will simply be another example of the professional political class protecting its own--despite wars costing thousands of lives and dollars; the near-dissolution of a major and historic American city, and the lives left behind within it; the degradation of what remains of America's natural areas, either for profits or for votes, and often for both; and much, much more that I know I don't have to recount here.

It is not 'looking backward,' as Obama has implied, to insist that criminals be punished; it is insisting that the law be the single standard--no exceptions for the political class, like Bush buddy and pardonee Scooter Libby, the slime.

[Robin Locke Monda]

Eight years! It's a crime! That, alone, should put them all behind bars. The pathetic human being who is about become our ex-president will probably never know how low he has brought this country — not because the information isn't there for all to see, but because the man is incapable of thinking beyond what he's going to do in the next 10 minutes. It's horrifying. More horrifying, this country actually voted for him twice!