"Barack promised change - and sure enough, things changed for the worse"
- Joe Bageant
El Presidente Obama promised "change" during his steeped-in-dishonesty run for the top job and he once more delivered on Friday by changing the subject. Obama decided to inject himself into the fulminating aftermath of the George Zimmerman trial. This is not only rubbing salt into a still-open wound but also providing a very fortuitous distraction from his NSA secret surveillers having their telephone spying operations that were again renewed by the secret court without any public acknowledgement. The Obama remarks on the slaying of Trayvon Martin and Zimmerman's acquittal not only serve as cover for the sinister machinations of the police and surveillance state but also only throw more fuel on the fire of our ongoing national downtrend in race relations, sure to fire up the rabble on both sides.
Now let me preface what I am about to say with this: I am a law-abiding gun owner and a firm believer in the second amendment. I also believe that citizens of this country have the right to use their firearms to stop harm to themselves and their families when threatened in a situation and location where it is merited.
Obama has idiotically (but predictably) seized upon the Zimmerman verdict in all of its serendipitous travesty to shift all attention away from his administration's dismal civil liberties and human-rights record. Now apparently aligning himself with Obama is the dyspeptic old fool John McCain, as usual slithering onto the Sunday morning bloviation circuit where state propaganda reigns. Consider that McCain also ardently defends big government whenever it comes to war, surveillance, show trials, and torture. McCain also grumpily bitched about the ridiculous manufactured scandal over this week's Rolling Stone magazine cover featuring Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. McCain practically sprayed flecks of spittle in denouncing the cover as "stupid", he obviously is still pissed off over the less-than-flattering expose that the magazine did of him a few years back entitled "Make-Believe Maverick". You know when you are truly fucked when "bi-partisanship" only seems to exist whenever it comes to the media kingmakers and the need to ensure that civil liberties will never be restored and the military industrial-and- surveillance industrial gravy train will continue to roll. That Obama and McCain and the rest of the ready-for-television assclowns are treated with reverence as voices of authority truly shows how prophetic that the movie Idiocracy really is.
But I digress...
The Zimmerman case itself was exactly what you would expect in the state of Florida, the diseased penis of America where the freak flag flies high and the governor is a Skeletor-looking dude whose main claim to fame was that he once presided over the company responsible for the largest Medicare fraud in U.S. history. This is not a normal state and ranks right up there with Texas when it comes to oddities, freaks, perversion, and general lunacy, so just keep that in mind when considering all of this. That being said and not to get bogged down in any of the racial aspects of this thing but had the tubby self-proclaimed neighborhood watch captain just listened to the cops and stayed in his car the nation would have been spared this entire sorry circus. Instead, with visions of Clint Eastwood movies dancing in his thick skull the out-of-shape 29-year-old ignored the police advice and went after the black teenager, a lithe and muscular young man who just may have had more than a little bit of thug in him. A fight of some sort occurred and Zimmerman was getting the worst of it and then Martin was shot; nobody will ever know what really happened. The ghoulish media, opportunists of both right-wing and left-wing stripes, worried gun-industry lobbyists, and the rancid Florida judicial system descended like vultures to feed.
The Zimmerman case was a mind-boggling mess from the get-go and the verdict was bound to a hellstorm of controversy no matter what the end result was. The only other witness to the incident is dead and as the saying goes, dead men tell no tales. Zimmerman's father was a retired judge who appeared to be pulling strings behind the scenes, Fox's Sean Hannity gave the shooter a national platform and Zimmerman's defense would be well funded. The state of Florida botched it by bringing the second-degree murder charge in the first place as reasonable doubt could have been established by a third-grader. The prosecution was so inept that at times it seemed to morph into Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden and it wouldn't have been a shock to see Dancing Itos show up. Then there was the disastrous decision of putting Trayvon Martin's mush-mouthed girlfriend Rachel Jeantel on the stand without even bothering to consider that her inability to think or speak clearly would be exploited ruthlessly by the defense should have them all disbarred. The jury selection was farcical and lacked diversity and their credibility was immediately trashed days after the verdict when one of the ladies, known only as "B37", went on national television in an obvious attempt to cash in. I suppose that the less cynical should be surprised but anyone who has been carefully watching the descent and dismantling of America for a period of time recognizes the symptoms.
And now Obama is getting involved. The man has already proven that he is grossly incompetent and could f*ck up a two-car funeral and cynical aspirations aside over knocking the NSA revelations out of the news this is only going to lead to more problems. Never has a president been marketed so successfully and then turned out out to be such an inept dope. The problem is that so much of the country is so dumbed down, brain-washed, and tuned-out that they still keep buying his bullshit even long after the sell date has passed. The man actually is making many Americans come to the conclusion that maybe George W. Bush wasn't that bad and after all he did once send me six hundred bucks. Obama just allows his rogue Federal Reserve Chairman provide an endless flow money to the degenerate gamblers on Wall Street whose schemes will soon deliver the killing blow to the mythical American Dream.
So this is the sorry state as it currently sits as of Saturday morning in the soon-to-be-smoldering ruins of this once-great country. Detroit filed for bankruptcy the other day; it should be lost on nobody that the city was at one time an example of American economic and manufacturing prowess but that was back in the days before corporations were able to offshore jobs by the millions. Offshoring is like crack cocaine to short- term profit-driven executives and hedge-fund hyenas and as brutally evident by 2013 Detroit - crack kills. And at this point free enterprise and honest capitalism is dead, we now have crack-ho economics as our national foundation. Nice.
Just imagine how a good explosion of race riots could bolster the case for not only more NSA spying, even stricter laws, more secret courts and of course further militarizing of the police. This will come in especially handy for Obama's successors when the economy finally careens into the abyss that is drunkenly stumbling towards thanks to Wall Street's overflowing punchbowl and Bernanke's heavy-handed bartending.