From the article appearing in the Guardian: “The Bush administration carried out roughly 50 attacks that killed around 500 people; under Obama, the government conducted more than 500 strikes that killed more than 3,000.”
…including “hundreds of children,” per this same article.
And now Donald Trump has dramatically expanded the use of civilian terrorizing drones, just as President Obama dramatically expanded the use of that same, patently illegal, mass-murdering program from what it was under his predecessor.
More than any other policy, the drone assassination program – mostly killing by profiling, with no clue as to the targets’ identities – makes the rest of the world hate and fear us. It’s outrageously illegal, with drones operating routinely in nations with which the U.S. isn’t even at war.
Creating far more “terrorists” than we kill.
Our nation’s descent into warmongering neo-fascism well precedes Trump’s arrival, noxious though he is. Because this trend isn’t really about the occupant of the White House. If it were, President Obama would have decreased the number of drone strikes – and decreased the deportation of immigrants, rather than exploding the drone program and becoming the ICE-expanding, Border Patrol-swelling, all-time “Deporter in Chief” (separating over 5,100 children from their parents/legal guardians in 2011 alone, per a study reported in McClatchy news, the one media outfit that got its “WMD” coverage right, prior to the illegal 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq).
By and large, the neo-fascist tendencies of our government have very old roots – and have become more pronounced with each president after John F. Kennedy. U.S. presidencies, today, are more about optics and theater than about policies, which are determined outside of public scrutiny.
Whether we’d gotten Mitt Romney or Barack Obama in the White House, prior to Trump, we’d still have the insurance industry giveaway – minus cost controls – that is the “Affordable” Care Act, complete with Obama’s Medicare slashing follow up…
We would still have no public debate or awareness as our government launched a second Mujaheddin – arming and coordinating al Qaeda and ISIS, most conspicuously, the “moderate rebels” – for the purpose of regime-change operations in the Middle East, resulting in hundreds of thousands of corpses and millions of refugees (yielding, globally, the largest number of refugees in recorded history: over 65 million, per the United Nations).
Bush’s obscenely unfair tax cuts for the rich were bad enough for one decade, but they were made permanent by Barack Obama, locking in that inequality, when all he had to do was let them “sunset.” Romney certainly would have done the same.
Also, President Obama’s war on journalism and whistleblowers was far more aggressive than George W. Bush’s, who went so far as to militarily target and kill journalists in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet Obama would pervert the Espionage Act, using it to hunt journalists and their sources twice as many times as all of his predecessors combined. And he would effectively repeal habeas corpus, the First and Fourth Amendments, Posse Comitatus, and the Smith-Mundt Act. The government can now deploy the military against Americans on American soil, legally propagandize the public, spy on all our communications, and kill anyone, anywhere, without a hint of due process… without even charging that person with a crime.
Does anyone truly think that Obama outdoing Bush for sheer evil, on this front, was a reflection of his values, vs. “Dubya’s?” Of course not. Morally, George W. Bush is not fit to lick Barack Obama’s shoes. But on policy, bumptious, incompetent Bush discredited fascism while elegant, brainy Obama rescued and normalized it… while aggressively shielding and facilitating Wall Street’s $16 trillion heist, wiping out the post-Civil Rights Era economic gains of African-American households and cratering the middle class.
Honestly, can you imagine our reaction if Donald Trump had done these monstrous things, entrenching the very machinery of totalitarianism for any would-be American dictator!
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: This is so not about personalities.
The deep state long ago committed the country to a suicidal, world-destabilizing course, and these unaccountable, law-shredding, profiteering neo-fascists are more bold and reckless with every passing administration. When they couldn’t get what they wanted out of Obama, they simply defied him. Same goes for Trump: https://invitation2artivism.org/?p=2781
The last president to refer to their lawlessness and the danger they pose to our country was Eisenhower. A lifetime ago.
So, here we are: Policies under Trump are more appallingly fascist than policies under Obama… whose policies were more appallingly fascist than Bush’s… whose policies were more appallingly fascist than Clinton’s. And on and on.
In short, it’s the direction of the country we need to be worried about, not hush money paid to prostitutes or fellatio in the Oval Office. Not the neo-McCarthyist, WWIII-courting Kabuki Theater in Washington, DC, designed to push Trump ever further into the neocons’ camp — but the policies… which keep getting worse with each passing president.
Appallingly so.
