Snake Oil

Obama bowed to the Emperor of Japan. The picture shows the Emperor and his wife, smiling, oddly, perhaps embarrassed but still pleased. Perhaps I'm reading too much into the picture. Of Obama's skinny ass as he bends way way over, deep. Better to puke on foreign dignitaries than to grovel like a lackey. Lookit me, bowin tuh duh emerper of Japland! I'm so humble and appropriate.

Those who represent in their very persons the greatness of America should be modest, but never humble. Obama is a fool, not because of any lack of ability or measurable intellect, but because he does not understand his job. All of his understanding of symbolism involves only words.

Most recently Obama has said that such and such a terrorist -- soon to be put on civilian trail in the very city of his, and Islam's, greatest triumph ... said Sheik of Falling Towers will definitely be convicted. Failure is not an option. So what's the message to the world? We're so enlightened and soft that we give terrorists full Constitutional rights. At the same time, the verdict is certain. Hm. But it's not a mixed message at all. Soft people are corrupt.

As a certain senator has observed, OJ got off. All it takes is a stupid jury. By giving Khalid Sheikh Mohammed his day in civilian court, the Obama administration sets the puppet stage, a Punch and Judy farce, except that farce is funny and this is a complete tragedy. Nine Eleven, as I have always said, was not a tragedy but an atrocity. An obvious distinction once it's made. This is a tragedy, again, because it brings on the dark fate of a man's flawed character. Man, or nation. When true confessions have been made, the path of justice is clear. Process should become secondary. Here, there is such a love of form over substance, verbiage over integrity, that we'll have to sit through a clamorous shadow play, Javanese in its incomprehensibility.

Ours is not a system of justice, nor a system of laws, nor even of process. It's not the legal system, it's the lawyer system. That says it all. No large, and perhaps no great nation can have a true justice system. As with a healthcare system, competence is always about the individual, and almost never about the bureaucracy.

I'm in a declarative statement sort of mood. Very Oscar Wilde tonight. My point is that given the clarity, of admitted guilt, and given the clarity of military justice, why has Obama set about subjecting us to this medicine show? It's enough to make me sick.

What a fool. What a fool. Like children dressing up in grown-ups clothes. Not oversized. They fit, tailored. Elegant, really. But it's playing. Silly people pretending. Surprised when the let's-say game of supposing has real-world consequences that represent reality rather than theory. But I'm repeating myself. It's almost as if I'm in love with the sound of my own oratory, and the variegated manifestations of my iterations.

This is why I write so little about politics anymore. It may be that Bush did not tend to exigent problems, focused on too narrow a thing. The current occupant of the White House is spraying gasoline rather than water on a conflagration. What a fool.

J