misperceptions

The photograph shows a victim of a predator drone attack, murdered by us for no reason, in one of our endless wars in the Middle East. Our military arrogantly and callously refers to these innocents as "collateral damage." The karmic burden of this particular outrage rests on the soul of Barack Obama.

Over a year into his administration most Americans are still trying to figure out who this guy Obama really is, which is partly his fault and partly our fault.

Frank Rich has a very sharp and thoughtful column in the NYTimes this morning analyzing Obama's sometimes vague and cloudy politics and our own inability to see him clearly. Rich says:

When the 2008 Obama called Afghanistan an essential war and vowed to take out terrorist havens in Pakistan, he wasn’t just posturing to prove he was as hawkish as Hillary Clinton — which is what some chose to hear. Though he nominally supported a public option as a plank of health care reform, it was not a high priority and he rarely mentioned it, according to a review of his campaign speeches, interviews and debates by Sam Stein of The Huffington Post. Obama never said anything to suggest that he was interested in economic interventionism as bold as, say, the potential nationalization of failing banks. He was unambiguous in his professed opposition to same-sex marriage and largely silent on gun control. And as Jake Tapper of ABC News chronicled last week, Obama had even opened the door to offshore oil drilling in the weeks before Election Day.

Liberals and progressives are now divided over things like the Afghan War and warrantless wiretapping, because we all expected Obama to put an end to these things. The problem is, when he was running in 2008 a lot of us were seeing the person we wanted to see, not the real guy, who is at best a slick politician who is very hard to pin down and seldom gives a straight answer.

Conservatives, white racists, and born-again Confederate pukes also saw, and still see, the Obama in their minds -- a black thug sitting with his feet up on the White House dining table eating fried chicken -- rather than the real one.

Personally, I was hopeful about the guy, but I'm glad to say I was never fooled. He did say he'd close Guantanamo and end the "excesses" of the Bush years. That gave us the impression he'd stop the Cheney torture regime and close down illegal government spying on American citizens. He hasn't done either of those things.

He did get a kind of tepid health care reform bill passed. It does little more than establish the principle that government needs to somehow intervene in the care delivery process to moderate the excesses of insurance companies. I guess that's about as much as we could reasonably expect from a government controlled and manipulated by corporate buccaneers.

But when it comes to illegal wiretapping and the U.S.'s foreign wars of aggression, I really wish all the nice liberals would get their heads out of their butts and see the real Obama we're actually dealing with.

The thing about warrantless wiretapping is it's illegal, and when a government breaks its own laws, it's almost as if they're also giving citizens the right to break whatever laws they want. And when a government uses drone aircraft to murder civilians halfway around the world, in an invasion they can't explain the reasons for, it's as if they're giving the rest of us permission to throw molotov cocktails.

Here's the thing: if Bush and Obama can be terrorists, so can I. A government that lectures me about law and order when it's breaking both its own laws and the laws of human decency can go tell somebody who cares, because all they're talking about is their law and my order.