Hell yeah. Once the GOP failfest ends (and, alas, someday the fun must end), one candidate will be left standing who must run against Sir Change-a-Lot. The incumbent, in turn, needs to find something with which to fire up the masses — you know, the ones he promised this, that, and the other four years ago, and then went mysteriously AWOL to hang out with his buddies from Goldman Sachs…
But he’s clearly working on it, and now he’s got himself a real winner. The slogan for 2012 may be “Bring Back the Cluster Bombs.” Yep, the administration of the (premature and entirely unworthy) recipient of the Nobel peace prize is pushing to allow more widespread use of cluster bombs — the arms industry’s generous and only slightly selfish contribution to the mortuaries and prostethics industries around the world. Damn, but it takes a real man’s man to aggressively promote the increased production and use of a weapon that is second only to land mines in sheer godawfulness. The US never did sign on to the treaty banning the use of cluster munitions, so we’ve been free to use them in places like Yemen, where lots of small soon-to-be terrorists have been killed very, very pre-emptively. We generously supplied cluster bombs to our most favorite friends in the whole world when they were last busy trashing Lebanon. The Israeli Defense Force managed to drop over four million cluster bombs in Southern Lebanon as a kind of lethal, sophomoric fuck-you to the country on their way out the door, and those bombs are still claiming victims today, five years later. In fairness, though, cluster bombs are equal opportunity maimers, devastating the lives of boys and girls alike when they come across the “bomblets” in their fields and bombed-out neighborhoods. Yep, the gift that keeps on giving — if you happen to believe in misery and destroyed futures. How could the President not want something like that to be part of his legacy?
It is such a courageous — some might even say outrageous — position to stake out. Once again, playing to the right of even less-than-moderate Republicans will no doubt build all sorts of inroads with those stupid hippies he needed to dupe to get elected the last time.Some of their fellow travelers are even trying to rain on Obama’s cluster bomb parade. Silly peaceniks. Will they never learn?
(h/t Greenwald)
