Wednesday, July 10, 2013

An Elegy for Barack Obama’s Conscience

by Citizen Mofo



Barack Obama was once the lone sane Senator
Who showed discernment and a conscience
By speaking out against that damn dumb war
With simple, forceful eloquence.

And so we made him President.
But his actions since give cause to wonder
Where has that conscience gone, and that discernment?
It’s not that, like Bush, he’s made one blunder

After another out of sheer vacuity.
The things he’s done he’s done with care,
Prepared with intellectual acuity.
It’s just that there’s no more conscience there.

I refer in particular to the drone attacks –
Pure murder, immoral and illegal –
And no lying lawyers can change those facts.
Now, when did we grant the regal

Authority to kill citizens at will
To our President? To kill kids and to kill moms?
He may as well be chalking up each kill
On the White House walls beside Osama’s and Sadam’s.

Gameboy war, this high-tech barbarity
Makes killing pixel people easy, without feeling.
They claim collateral damage is a rarity
But what’s the truth with which we should be dealing?

Let’s check the tally: Four U.S. citizens
Have been murdered by drone to date.
Hundreds of women, nearly two hundred children,
All murdered to fan the flames of hate

And create new jihadists far far faster
Than we could ever hunt them down.
Mr. President, O murder-dealing master,
I wish your conscience were still around.

Unlike Lincoln, who grew in humanity
Through four bloody years of civil war;
Or FDR, who rolled with firm urbanity
Through the Depression and the Nazis and through the door

To greatness – Obama, on the other hand,
Is regressing and shrinking, further and further,
From the Senator who was once the lone sane man
With a conscience. Now he’s steeped in the blood of murder.

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