Barack Obama is our president. How I wish that were April Fools!
My embarrassment for working to elect this man knows no bounds. Seriously.
If one more person says, “Yes, well, he’s not perfect, but we could have had John McCain.”, I will laugh in his face.
I have written many posts on this and been chastised for it in the comments. Well, sorry-here’s another. This is the clincher, though. The treatment of Bradley Manning, whistle-blower to wikileaks in this, “Land of the Free, Home of The Brave” where we do not torture, has me absolutely steaming. Has anyone else read this?
To destroy Manning as a human being, the Pentagon for the past seven months has barred him from exercising in his cell, and to inhibit his sleep denies him a pillow and sheet and allows him only a scratchy blanket, according to Heather Brooke of “Common Dreams” (January 26th.) He is awakened each day at five a.m. and may not sleep until 8 p.m. The lights of his cell are always on and he is harassed every five minutes by guards who ask him if he is okay and to which he must respond verbally. Stalin’s goons called this sort of endless torture the “conveyor belt.”
Now, if I’m not mistaken (and this article would have me believe that I am not) then, John McCain was a POW in Vietnam, was he not?
In the 2008 presidential race, Gawande wrote, both Obama and McCain came out firmly for banning torture and closing Guantanamo Bay prison where hundreds have been held in years-long isolation, yet neither “addressed the question of whether prolonged solitary confinement is torture.” McCain spent two of his five years as a POW in Viet Nam in solitary, later stating: “It’s an awful thing, solitary. It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.”
I think with this issue, McCain might be on the winning side.
I’m not suggesting McCain would have been any better, all I am saying is Obama seems to be moving slightly to the right of McCain, and I can’t believe that McCain would have been all that much worse.
So, there you have it. I’ve said it. It’s not an April Fool’s post, it just happens to be posted on April 1st.
(Apologies to those who wanted me to cover, more in depth, the new mayor of Rochester- haven’t had the GAS meter repaired for that yet)