While I’m proud of what we’ve achieved together, I’m far more mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, “I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.” – Barack Obama, 2012 Nomination Acceptance Speech.
If this is true and sincere, I almost (only almost) could forgive his continuing surrender to the Cheneyesque post-civil-rights security state and his utter failure to roll back the increasingly imperial presidency.
The fact is, what most people like to tout as one of his greatest accomplishments – the assassination of Osama Bin Laden – I tend to view as one of the hugest symptoms of Obama’s surrender to the logic that permitted the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in the first place. Where was that man’s trial? Where was the justice? He was a criminal – why wasn’t he accorded the rights accorded criminals under rule-of-law? What about due process? What about the Geneva Conventions? Surely a New York jury would have convicted him. Bin Laden’s death was Obama’s darkest moment, and I wonder if the above quote might alude to that. I wish I could know that it did – but even so, could he be forgiven? Was Osama’s death anywhere close to as “necessary” as the U.S. Civil War (as suggested by the reference to Lincoln). That implies a rather grandiose self-view.
