The Vacuity of 'Hope', one year on:

One year of The One

"“Saturday Night Live”, a comedy show, reckons his two big accomplishments are “jack” and “squat”. “Yes he can” proclaims the cover of Newsweek, “(but he sure hasn’t yet)”...

Mr Obama did little to dispel the idea that he could work miracles.

In his inauguration speech, he declared: “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” Yet roughly once a week since that day, he has ordered the assassination of suspected terrorists. These assassinations, carried out with Hellfire missiles fired from hovering drones, are often messy. According to the New America Foundation, a think-tank, it took 15 attempts to kill Baitullah Mehsud, a Taliban leader in Pakistan who was finally blown to scraps in August. Hundreds of people, some of them children, have died in these drone attacks. Mr Obama would presumably include “not killing children” among his ideals. Sometimes, however, he sets aside this ideal in the interests of safety.

That may or may not be the right thing to do. But it is absurd to pretend that there is no trade-off “between our safety and our ideals”. Were that so, Mr Obama would already have closed the prison at Guantánamo Bay; yet nearly all the prisoners he inherited are still there. Meanwhile, he says he will continue “rendering” freshly captured terror suspects to third countries. And American soldiers are still being discharged for being openly gay. Is this “change we can believe in” or merely Bush with panache?...

A recent attempt to exclude Fox News, a conservative network, from a pooled interview with the White House pay tsar was so crude that even liberal networks objected."