Here’s what it comes down to:  If Barack Obama really believed all the rhetoric of his presidential campaign….and all of his positions….then he is a traitor to his own beliefs. If, on the other hand, he didn’t believe all the rhetoric of his presidential campaign, then he is a traitor to his earliest, most fervent and most cult-like supporters—-that would be YOU!

And, even though I ended up voting for him—purely out of the greater fear that Palin, the stupid fish from Alaska, would swim downstream into the White House, I can see just how incompetent he is proving to be and how little he still understands about the workings of the capital city he now calls home.

A Bush In Obama’s Clothing

There are times when I wonder whether this is all a very elaborate Republican joke—on us!

The fact is, President Obama has opted to continue the Bush administration practice of extraordinary rendition (that’s where we send terror suspects off to places like Egypt and Morocco where they can be tortured into confessing to crimes they did not commit); he has opted to back the Bush administration policies on the non- release of damning information about the treatment of so-called enemy combatants by the CIA, U.S. military and independent contractors; he has already vastly increased the number of U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan and reportedly is ready to raise that number still more; he has re-written the mission in Afghanistan to emphasize nation-building, all but guaranteeing a Vietnam-like experience for the United States; he has decided to reappoint as fed chairman the very person who was at the helm of that agency when the ship of state hit a sub-prime mortgage iceberg and began to rapidly sink; he has failed to be the post-partisan president he promised he would be and, instead, is , perhaps, one of the most partisan presidents to occupy the Oval Office in recent, and not so recent, times; he has “saved the big banks” while letting the big banks’ customers drown in a sea of mortgage debt; he is caving to a handful of GOP nut jobs and Democratic idiots and backing away apparently from his stance on a public (government) alternative to private health care; he has refused to put teeth into his mortgage reform agenda by backing legislation that  he originally proposed to grant bankruptcy judges the right to modify home mortgages; he is looking increasingly foolish in his efforts to “talk” to Iran about its obvious nuclear weapons program; and his domestic agenda seems defined more and more by what is shaping up to be a jobless “recovery” to the longest and deepest recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Too bad you can’t recall a President

California is a nutty state. No question about it. But, perhaps, it has one feature that the federal Constitution ought to emulate if we ever get around to having a Constitutional Convention (don’t hold your breath,though): In California, a governor can be recalled if enough people in the state feel he is totally botching the job and vote to remove him from office.

That is how Arnold became Governor!

For a U.S. President, the only legal mechanism for removal from office is impeachment (indictment) by the House followed by a conviction in the Senate. But that remedy is reserved only for the commission of high crimes and misdemeanors.

But what if a President is not guilty of a crime but just is either a fuck up or turncoat to the platform he ran on to convince people to vote for him in the first place?

Unlike the British parliamentary system, there is no vote of no confidence that might be able to dislodge a sitting U.S. president from office. But without such a tool, we often end up with year after year of ineffective or unqualified or insincere or just plain stupid (think George W) chief executives in the White House.

I can only hope that the army of Obama addicts addicted to the intoxicating milk of his smooth rhetorical delivery will, at least, admit that they have been had. And, by so doing, become as vocal in their efforts to get Obama to keep his campaign promises as they were in their efforts to drive him into the world’s greatest seat of power in the first place.

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