Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Will Barack Obama Strike A Profile In Courage Or Just In Irresponsible Convention?

One of the greatest outstanding questions of this post-election disaster is if Barack Obama will have the courage to do something audacious and even unconventional enough to try to avert the disaster that having Donald Trump succeed him will be.  So far there's little indication that he has the courage or the character to do that.  I invite him to prove me wrong.  I beg him to. 

Barack Obama should declassify and release to the public what is known, now, about the ties between Donald Trump, his campaign and those he has already named to government posts and the Putin regime.  As some of the electors who are scheduled to cast the "real" vote for president this week have said, they need to know that before they can fulfill their moral duty to defend the Constitution of the United States.  It would certainly be a violation of that duty for them to select the puppet of a foreign dictator and they need to know if that's what they are doing before history can judge how faithful they are to the oath they apparently take.  Of course Barack Obama took an oath to do that at least three times, as a U.S. Senator and as President.  I don't see much of any indication he is going to do that.  If he doesn't release that information now, he is in violation of his oath to defend and protect the Constitution and the country.  And it would have to be full, public disclosure.  If such information caused the electors to defeat Trump, the public would need to know why. 

Those words in those oaths are as empty as they can be in most cases.  Most Senators don't actually do much that defends the Constitution, they're more likely to violate it and most presidents of recent times have violated many of its provisions.  The entire thing is only as good as the people who comprise the government at any given time and they are often unfit for the office they hold. There has never been a time when those words they mouth when they're sworn into office have been more rigorously tested.  

Barack Obama has a chance to make up for many of his worst decisions as president but not much of one and not much time to do it.   Given his past conduct, his total lack of willingness to do anything but the most conventional of things, I'm not anticipating him doing what needs to be done right now. He has far less than a week to do it.   If he's expecting to ever have some "profiles in courage" stuff written about him, he's just at that kind of moment when he'd have to show some to get an honest one of those.  

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