Obama’s a cool guy, don’t get me wrong.  Smart, funny, gives thoughtful speeches he probably has a hand in writing.  Check this out, to get a taste of what I mean.

Presidents only have so much power, Washington is a corrupt town, money owns all American politicians.  No politician can obtain even local office without being financed by the wealthiest citizens, a presidential candidate least of all.  It has always been thus, although recent rulings about the coolness of undisclosed “dark money” make it much more in-your-face than ever before.  

The privileged few have a much greater say in our democratic republic than the masses of poor and working people, always have, always will.   George Washington, we learn, was the wealthiest man in America and, naturally, the father of our country.  Don’t want some poor boy as your dad, obviously.  The super-rich decide elections openly now — 97% of American elections go to the candidate that has the most money to spend on the best ads.  Go fight City Hall, boo hoo for you.

Yet, if Al Gore had insisted on fighting the unsupportable Supreme Court one-off that decided the 2000 election, as it was in his power to do as president of the Senate and person in charge of the official count of Electoral College votes, and somehow become President instead of the challenged George Dubya Bush, many terrible things would not have happened.   There would have been no preemptive attack on Iraq, with its massive, almost incalculable, octopus tentacled harms, for one thing.  It’s unlikely Americans would have employed torture against those suspected of hating our freedom.   So the president, the grievous similarities between the two highly compromised political parties aside,  does make a big difference and the buck often stops with him, or her.

Like it does with President Obama.  A man who sells his brand as brilliantly as Mr. Obama does while campaigning, speaks as convincingly as he does on many important issues– I hold him to a higher standard than a president who winks and smirks and has trouble not mangling his own sentences while doing the most damage in the shortest amount of time in the sincere belief that God and Jesus have his back and that he is doing their work.

Nobody alive today is to blame for slavery, except that practiced by our corporations — and most of those slaves are not Americans. Likewise, the hundred years of lynching and terror that followed the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War– nobody alive now had any say in that dark and brutal age of human rights.   Today protesters march against the same things that were in full force and effect fifty years ago– systematic, widespread police brutality against underprivileged (I love that word) non-white citizens.  Now a couple of cops are going to stand trial for what appears to be depraved indifference and the possible deliberate torture of a man they killed with a rough ride in a police van after an arrest that was possibly for no good reason except that he had an attitude of some kind.  Obama gave a couple of thoughtful speeches.   It’s a process, as he thoughtfully points out.

It’s churlish, I know, to point out how many of Cheney and Bush’s worst policies Mr. Obama has allowed to continue.  Pointing out, for example, that he’s massively escalated the once highly controversial policy of extrajudicial killings worldwide, signed off on the murder of an American boy not charged with any crime or associated with any threat?  Churlish of me!   I have to stop doing that, stop hating our freedom to love a president who came to office advertising Hope and Change.  Churlish and immature.  I hang my head and hope to grow up one day, like the rest of my friends.