I’ve bemoaned President Obama’s war crimes often enough, but attention must be paid, continuously, to the fact that it is the publicly proclaimed policy of the United States government that the President has an unrestrained and unreviewable power to murder anyone whom he pleases, if that person is so incautious as to venture outside the United States. In old, old histories of the French Revolution, a great deal was made of the infamous “lettres de cachet”—direct orders of the King allowing, among other things, the indefinite imprisonment of undesirable persons. But now President Obama makes Louis XIV look like a petty bourgeois and himself like a Robespierre.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party works itself into increasing hysteria, wanting to smash our economic system to pieces, cutting taxes but not Medicare and increasing defense spending exponentially to fund new wars against countries that can do us no harm, treating foreign affairs as the moral equivalent of high school football in Texas, where the only alternatives are “victory” and “treason.”
So, while many people have good reason to remember 2011 with enthusiasm, I won’t miss it. I only wish I had reason to hope that 2012 will be better.
Afterwords
I’ve discussed the Jacobin tendencies of the Republican Party before: debt repudiation, xenophobia, foreign wars, hysterical puritan morality? It all fits. I wish I knew where it would end.
