Obama Enigma

By Ed Raymond  
Staff Writer

President Barack Obama, Our 21st Century Enigma Machine

Don’t get me wrong in this one. I’m still a firm supporter of President Barack Obama and plan on voting for him again in 2012. The alternative of Michele and the Seven-Eight-or Nine Dwarfs at this point is just too horrible to contemplate. But I thought Obama was green behind the ears in 2008 and I still haven’t figured him out, even though he is almost three years in. Coming out of Chicago politics, I thought he would be wise to the Lee Atwaters, the Karl Roves, the Jack Abramoffs, the Grover Norquists, and the other “Capo Bastones” or “Sotto Capos” of the Republican Party. These are the underbosses and the executive officers of a political party who do the dirty work.

The other day during a press conference when he showed some political fire, he said: “Maybe I’m naive … ”  My problem is, I can’t see why he would be. How can you be naive while working in Al Capone’s town as a community organizer with flocks and decades of Daleys? And Al’s guys didn’t build tunnels between speakeasies so they could move to a different prayer room. No doubt Obama is a smart guy. He can recite constitutional law, chew gum, has a nice touch around the basket and can excite young voters. But in some ways he is a real enigma. He is just the opposite of his predecessor George W. Bush. Christopher Hitchens’ description of Bush is the most accurate I have found: “He’s unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of these things.”

I spent my first year with Obama groaning and gnashing my teeth over his attempts to work closely with Republicans for the supposed good of the country. My God, Barack, these guys aren’t interested in the people’s welfare, they are only interested in being in power so they can double-down and win the lottery at the Washington Casino. Meet these guys halfway? Are you nuts? They might win elections with the Supreme Court’s help, but they proved between 2000 and 2008 they are incapable of governing.

The Real Enigma Machine Is About As Complex As Obama

Maybe I’m finally beginning to understand Obama a tish better, but he still reminds me of the code machine developed by the Germans shortly after 1918. The Enigma machine was a totally different ciphering machine. The first of its kind, it used an electrical system to change plain text messages into code. Even if the machine fell into enemy hands, it would be useless because it used several gear-like rotors turned by a minuscule electric current. It was designed so that it would take 100 machines working 24 hours a day for 5.8 years to exhaust all of its possibilities for coding messages.

It took British code-breakers and mathematicians about four years to assemble enough rotors of the machine to figure out how it worked. A brilliant thinker by the name of Alan Turing led the team that finally broke the codes. Incidentally, Turing was gay at a time in England when homosexuality was outlawed. He accepted chemical castration instead of a jail sentence at the end of WW II. He committed suicide in 1946. He was later honored posthumously by Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the 1990’s and was named as one of the 100 most important people of the 20th Century by Time Magazine. In my code, Obama equals Enigma.

Further Complexities For Us And The President

In May, when Florida’s Miami-Dade Community College had its graduation ceremonies, among those graduates marching across the stage were 181 students carrying different flags representing their particular heritage.  Would another country in the world have such a diverse graduation list? We have hundreds of thousands of young people who entered this country illegally with their parents when they were babies or young children. Some discover they are not U.S. citizens when they apply for scholarships, student loans or other government functions. Their parents were often recruited as cheap labor by “coyotes” (labor “contractors” hired by U.S. corporations) to work the lettuce and tomato fields, the meat and poultry processing plants in Nebraska and Minnesota, the carpet manufacturers in Georgia, and the bedrooms and restaurants in hotels, motels, and fast-food joints across the country. Republicans and Democrats and the Walton family made billions in exploiting this cheap labor over the protests of American labor, but illegals were treated differently by the political parties. Republicans wanted the “wetbacks” to fly home after work so they didn’t dirty the grounds they had landscaped and cleaned, while the Democrats wanted them to stay and become Democratic voters.

Obama supported the Dream Act, legislation that will allow children brought to this country by illegals to attend college on federal grants and scholarships or gain citizenship through military service. They must have come to the U.S. before the age of 16, have lived here at least five years, and possess good moral character and a clean record. The Republicans voted against the bill because it had the smell of amnesty.  Obama didn’t sell it enough.

Is he so smart that he gives half the farm away before negotiations even start because he “knows” people will accept his idea because it makes so much sense? Why did he negotiate away the “public option” in his health care proposal before he sat down with the Republicans? Why negotiate with yourself and lose before getting to the debate? I spent 28 years at negotiation tables in the Fargo Public Schools and don’t recall anyone ever conducting negotiations by losing arguments with themselves before sessions start.

Where The Rubber Brain Meets The Concrete Road

A story out of a small town in New York last week created several intriguing questions for me about Obama politics. According to the Associated Press, bareheaded 55-year-old Philip Contos was participating in a protest ride about mandatory helmet laws with 550 other “Hog” riders when he lost control of his 1983 Harley, flipped over the handlebars, and had a one-point landing, with brain succumbing to concrete. He was DOA at a local hospital. The protest organizer of the anti-helmet rally, American Bikers Aimed Towards Education (ABATE), said it had told its members helmets were optional.

I’m one of those damn liberals who support reasonable laws to protect people from themselves, such as mandatory seat belt and helmet laws. About half of the people killed in auto accidents are not wearing seat belts and end up flying through windshields or being crushed under cars. If I were running an insurance company, I would not insure or pay a dime toward a death or accident settlement if the person were not wearing a seatbelt or helmet at time of injury or death. If a biker wants to feel the wind rush through his hair, he can always take a ride in an open cockpit or a roller coaster at a theme park.

If Contos had survived his involuntary headstand on concrete, his chances of living like a nursing-home vegetable were pretty good. Did he have enough insurance to pay the New York state nursing-home rate of about $75,000 a year for his remaining 24 year-lifespan? If not, why should society pay $1.8 million to keep his uninsured, unhelmeted, brainless carcass in a nursing home because he lacked commonsense?

Would Obama support seat belt and helmet laws? The right-wing shills say he is the most liberal president we have ever had in modern times. Oh? I’m a news junkie and an Obama supporter, but I don’t know whether he would support these laws or not. Libertarians like Ron Paul would say such regulations are for “little people” who do not understand what real freedom is. Ah, the rush of the wind through long hair, the freedom of speeding along in a car without the confines of a seat belt ...

Just Where Does He Stand?

Obama shocked the Democratic Party majority and me, not just the liberals, when he traded an extension of the Bush tax cuts for some itty-bitty adjustments in unemployment insurance and some other minor crumbs on the Washington Buffet table. Over eight years the Bush tax cuts alone cost us $3 trillion of revenue from the very people who made trillions out of Wall Street stock manipulation and fraud—without adding jobs to the economy. Throw in two unfunded extended unnecessary wars and a flawed Medicare prescription program with pumped up drug prices and huge doughnut holes on the Bush credit cards, and we can add another $5 trillion on the total debt of $14.3 trillion today.

Why did Obama add 30,000 troops to our force in Afghanistan when we should have pulled the 70,000 stumbling over mountain paths and patrolling IED-littered urban streets in Kabul and Kandahar—in a war we lost eight years ago? Of course all the Republican chickenhawks would have been screaming “CUT and RUN! CUT and RUN!” at him. Many of them under 42 could have volunteered for action.

Whenever I see a fellow Marine hanging on to the side of a 10,000 ft. mountain on some goat or Taliban path, I just cringe. What the hell is he accomplishing there? I think of parts of Tennyson’s “The Charge of The Light Brigade” every time I see a small Marine outpost near the Pakistan border in some hellish valley between two 15,000 ft. mountain ranges. It was about the Battle of Balaclava for Sevastopol in 1854.

            ... Into the valley of death rode the six hundred
            Not tho’ the soldier knew someone had blundered:
            Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why,
            Theirs but to do & die, into the valley of death
            Rode the six hundred.  Cannon to right of them,
            Cannon to left of them, cannon in front of them
            Volley’d and thundered; stormed at with shot and shell,
            Boldly they rode and well, into the jaws of death,
            Into the mouth of Hell rode the six hundred…

It’s been my experience with the military that generals can get you into a lot of trouble by saying “Yes, we can.” But the people who can really get you killed are the career captains, majors, light colonels and bird colonels. They will have troops charging valleys and climbing hills again and again to get combat promotions to general. What will be the difference if we stay in Afghanistan for 50 more days or five more years? The same thing that is happening in Iraq today. Two bombings yesterday killed 35 and wounded about 75 in Northern Iraq. Just what was “victory” in Iraq anyway?

What Does Obama Mean When He Says, “I Believe That Gay Couples Deserve The Same Human Rights As Every Other Couple In This Country?”

Doesn’t that sound like an endorsement of same-sex marriage? Is there same lawyerly verbiage in that line I don’t understand? But after making that unequivocal statement he became equivocal again. He said he wasn’t endorsing same-sex marriage! He says his thinking is “evolving.” Is he going to “evolve” until November of 2012? Is he so smart he thinks he can get away with this “evolution” nonsense for 16 months?  His spokespersons on CNN and other outlets don’t help him at all. Donna Brazile on CNN doesn’t have enough facts at her command and often even loses arguments with herself. His new press secretary is not exactly a dazzler brimming with humor and information.

I like Obama. He talks a good game but his Enigma rotors are screwed up. He seems to play point guard only in the fourth quarter, often when its too late. He seems to forget he’s #1. He has to remember he is not the sixth man. Neither a leader of government or a floor leader in basketball can act that way. Neither FDR or Harry Truman were shy in taking a firm stand and giving Republicans hell occasionally. They did it just to keep in fighting trim.

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