Does Obama swing both ways?

First, he promises us change. He’ll stop “the dumb wars.” Then he escalates the troops by 30,000 and $30 billion to pay for them in Afghanistan. Then he says Iraq is over, we’re out of there, but there’s a boatload of mercenaries left behind and a religious civil war in progress. Then he says he’ll straighten out the financial filth on Wall Street and we find out it’s dirtier than ever. Right, Jon Corzine? Right, Lloyd? Right, Jamie? Up front, he said he’d get rid of GITMO. But three years later he signs the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and with a stroke of the pen turns the world into GITMO, including U.S. Citizens. Though he says it doesn’t apply to U.S. Citizens, it can be changed if he deems it necessary. Got it both ways.

I mean, you all know by now or should that means indefinite military detention if you are suspected of aiding terrorism, with no more specific charge, evidence, trial or lawyer. And indefinite as you know means they can hold your butt forever, as in sayonara, baby. If you don’t believe me, see Michel Chossudovsky’s THE INNAUGURATION OF POLICE STATE USA 2012 “National Defense Authorization Act”. It’s all there. It was signed on New Year’s Eve as millions reveled in year 2012, drunk as skunks, horny as goats in Times Squares, as in cities all over the nation, were about as clear-thinking as bears in heat. Well, better watch it, grrrrr! The hunters have been turned loose.

I mean Obama seems to have landed in the black as of now but left the world in the red, as in blood and ink and warning signals. As to the Greening of America he promised, he’s selling “clean coal” (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) for electric power and nuclear energy from all those old rickety, leaking nuclear plants—shades of Fukishima with radiation greater than the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It leads me to ask, which way Obama is swinging to protect the Constitution he studied at Harvard University to become a constitutional lawyer.

Or is he swinging towards an ever-widening police state, knocking down sovereign states like Libya and Syria, soon Iran, like Lego pieces. All to win the game.

I mean, I’m watching him swing back and forth, back and forth and I’m getting dizzy, nauseous (as in Sartre’s Nausea), existential dread from a roller coaster ride swinging back and forth as it dives down then zooms up, mirroring, too, the dollar, the DOW and the drones bombing Pakistan. I’m saying (to myself) this guy’s gotta go. I don’t know if he’s a friend or foe, if he’s a patriot or a PATRIOT-Act[or]. It seems to be in his DNA, this swinging from side to side, watching the eyes, counting the poll numbers—that thrust of passion for the truth from the gut gone. And a coy smile on his face, as if he’d outwitted us all on either side. Jesus.

This is not a game. Are you gonna get the money lenders out of the temple or not? Are you for the decent, every day people you eulogize or not? Is it all a big game of chess as your adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote of in his book on gaining and gaming world hegemony, which seems to be where we’ve landed, all hands on deck to deck the African continent after the Mideast. And so on. Kurt Vonnegut must be turning over in his grave, memories of that Dresden fire-bombing.

But maybe Obama is swinging both ways. And that’s his style. It’s in his genes. Momma Ann Dunham worked for NGO’s fronting for the CIA. Grandma laundered money for the Agency from a Hawaiian bank. And what was step-papa Lolo Soetero doing, “a reserve Indonesian army officer called back into service in the army in 1965 from his CIA-supplied scholarship at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii . . . a foot soldier in the putsch cabal of General Suharto, the man who the CIA designated as the leader of the 1965 coup that deposed Sukarno and targeted between 500,000 and 1 million members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) for elimination.” Ouch.

Where am I? What side am I on? Who am I? Is it all just words? Just keep smiling “cause when you’re smiling/the whole world smiles with you.” It better smile with you or you can blow its butt into eternity. Hey, words to the wise. This seems to be the game being played. Winner take all, loser get lost—at any cost. So much for drinking the Kool-Aid and thinking you can walk away with Democracy ala carte.

It’s one way or the other. And I think we just got the other.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.