Lately I've been getting e-mails from Michelle Obama asking me, beseeching me, really, to sign Barack's birthday card. I've been thinking about it. Ordinarily, if this was an office situation and I'd been asked to sign a card for an executive who was way way above my paygrade, I'd decline. Chances are I wouldn't know him or her, and to sign the card would be to insinuate myself into their personal life for no other reason than I wanted to score points or just get-along-to-go-along. But I admire the man, and might make an exception to my own rule. Perhaps more than any president in my lifetime I wish Barack Obama as many birthdays (happy or otherwise) as he can have. There is such derangement in this country that every day seems to offer up a fresh opportunity for some aggrieved and put upon fin de siecle white guy to imagine himself the hero assassin of the President. Can't cut more food stamps for the poor? Shoot him. Can't win the war in Iraq? Shoot him. Can't stop the tide of brown children from Central America who are coming here to take our jobs, and, as soon as they grow up, rape our women? Shoot. Him. All of that to say that birthdays are not preordained for that man; so I hope he'll have his next one.
But Michelle's request notwithstanding, coming as it does in the midst of a slaughter in Gaza, I can't sign the card. Because really, I've been so over Israel for decades. Back in the 1980's, June Jordan and other leftist academics (who are so fashionably lampooned by smug libertarians and the unctuous assholes who love them) were publishing works about Israel as an apartheid state. And Israel's support of its sister regime in South Africa. This is Israel: they spy on us, they have such power in the halls of Congress that both the Senate and House passed unanimous resolutions in support of this phase of the war. (Now, I ask you, where else in the history of the Obama's presidency have House and Senate Republicans unanimously agreed with him on Anything? Makes you wonder how that's even possible.) They are the recipient of billions of US tax dollars that purchases weaponry (and no doubt intelligence) that advantages them to wage asymmetrical, brutalizing war based on any rationale that suits Israel at the time. (See Gulf of Tonkin attack, Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, the kidnapping and murder of 3 Israeli teenagers.)
And now -- what? almost 30 years later -- we have to listen to the likes of Barack Obama, a man who certainly knows better, trot out all that hum-de-hum-hum about Israel's right to defend itself. Our stalwart friend in the Middle East, yada yada yada. (If I paid a man to have sex with me on a regular basis and laugh at my jokes do I also have to stand in front of mikes and call him my friend?) It would be insincere of me, Mr. President, to sign your card. I wish I could say the same for your support of Israel's actions; but I can't.
But Michelle's request notwithstanding, coming as it does in the midst of a slaughter in Gaza, I can't sign the card. Because really, I've been so over Israel for decades. Back in the 1980's, June Jordan and other leftist academics (who are so fashionably lampooned by smug libertarians and the unctuous assholes who love them) were publishing works about Israel as an apartheid state. And Israel's support of its sister regime in South Africa. This is Israel: they spy on us, they have such power in the halls of Congress that both the Senate and House passed unanimous resolutions in support of this phase of the war. (Now, I ask you, where else in the history of the Obama's presidency have House and Senate Republicans unanimously agreed with him on Anything? Makes you wonder how that's even possible.) They are the recipient of billions of US tax dollars that purchases weaponry (and no doubt intelligence) that advantages them to wage asymmetrical, brutalizing war based on any rationale that suits Israel at the time. (See Gulf of Tonkin attack, Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, the kidnapping and murder of 3 Israeli teenagers.)
And now -- what? almost 30 years later -- we have to listen to the likes of Barack Obama, a man who certainly knows better, trot out all that hum-de-hum-hum about Israel's right to defend itself. Our stalwart friend in the Middle East, yada yada yada. (If I paid a man to have sex with me on a regular basis and laugh at my jokes do I also have to stand in front of mikes and call him my friend?) It would be insincere of me, Mr. President, to sign your card. I wish I could say the same for your support of Israel's actions; but I can't.
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