I remember being amazed
at how different Obama was at his first press conference as
president-elect. It was soon after the
election and long before the inauguration.
Now we can know a little bit about why.
The CIA Director, Michael
Hayden, flew to Chicago to meet with Obama, his top aides, and the vice
president-elect. His apparent purpose
was to put pressure on Obama to keep all the Bush torture policies. Of course, we can’t call it torture – torture
is illegal (wink, wink). But we can call it “RDI — rendition, detention and
interrogation.”
I call it torture.
How I wish that I could
say here that Obama said no and stopped all of it – or even part of it. What happened was that, even though he did
NOT give in and did NOT agree to the demands of the then-director of the CIA,
he later expanded the program and added in more assassinations.
Read more about it:
BUT, as I said in my
former blog (Why I May Never Vote Again), I may not vote again but it’s hard to
stop after all these years. One thinks
about what will happen if his presumptive opponent wins versus what Obama might
do in a second term.
Here are my thoughts:
With the rich folks able
to legally and openly buy an election, I may vote just to be defiant.
International policies of the two major candidates might be the same, but domestic policies may be very different.
Fact check sites for how
federal spending is actually going down in spite of the opposition saying it is
worse. One source:
Lies? They both lie.
p.s.
One recurring thought that I may write about in a
future blog is a single-term presidency.
It seems that the president may compromise more in his first term in
order to get (the power and money to be) elected to a second term. He can more freely make his place in history
in the second term. Maybe it’s time to
revisit the old idea of term limits for everyone and a single term for the president. Stay tuned.
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