Caveat: US Presidential Debate, Korean 8th Grader Edition

Yesterday, we had our own presidential debate. The debate proposition was: “Barack Obama should be re-elected as president of the U.S.” They divided about evenly between Romney supporters and Obama supporters, after the dust settled (we’ve been working on this all month).
I gave my most advanced students (ISP7 cohort – all 8th graders) many lists of the “Top 10 reasons to vote for X” style, but they crafted and chose their reasons themselves.
I’m amazed at how my kids have handled this debate topic. It’s incredibly difficult, and hard for them to connect to or understand, too – they’re Korean 8th graders, after all: they don’t know or care that much about US politics. I actually expected a much lower level of interest and dedication to this topic than they have shown – I was doing it more as a prelude to the real fun: we’re going to be tackling the Korean presidential election, next, which votes in December.

Caveat: The Space Emperor Creates Reality

I voted for Obama mostly as seeking for (hoping
for) a repudiation of George W. Bush. And so the reason I cannot vote
for Obama this time round is because Obama has utterly failed to
repudiate anything Bush did: Guantanamo still open, drone strikes are
more popular than ever, wars only wind down in defence-industry-friendly
ways, the Patriot Act persists, Bush's tax cuts persist, health care
reform (if it must be done) is in the pockets of the insurance industry
(seriously: let's compare Bush's oft-forgotten humongous new drug
entitlement with Obamacare and try to find philosophical differences),
etc., etc., ad infinitum.

There's some unpleasant irony in the fact that the Right (such as it is) accuses Obama of such things as socialism and betraying American values. To the former accusation, Obama is no more socialist than Bush – which is faux socialist, at best, though certainly more socialist (e.g. "big government") than anyone on the right wants to admit. To the latter accusation, well, I would have to say that GW Bush was he who most "betrayed American values" – Obama is merely continuing that trend. Here's an interesting thought: Colin Powell has endorsed Obama, again. Wasn't he, uh, GW Bush's Secretary of State during that most stunning of betrayals of American values, the Iraq invasion?

This
blog post at the website-whose-name-I-hate sums it up most excellently.
It seems I will be voting "third party" this year – back to old ways, I
guess – though I'm a bit hesitant to wear my politics so prominently on my sleave, as posting on this blog inevitably means.

The same blog post points to a somewhat apocryphal quote from Karl Rove, that is utterly stunning in its scope:

We’re
an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while
you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act
again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s
how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of
you, will be left to just study what we do.

Obama will be remembered as only the second emperor of the new imperium that Julius Caesar – ahem, George W. Bush – founded.

O Octavian, O Augustus, O Caesar: Obama.

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