The Sugar Makes the Poison Taste Sweet [View all]

President Barack Obama reviews his speech one last time while waiting in a room at the U.S. Capitol
prior to delivering the State of the Union address in the House Chamber in Washington, DC, January 28, 2014.
(Photo: Pete Souza / White House)

The Sugar Makes the Poison Taste Sweet
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed

Thursday 30 January 2014

The President of the United States gave the annual State of the Union address on Tuesday night, and if you ask the right people, they'll tell you it was well and truly a barn-burner. President Obama dropped so many left-leaning, frown-inducing lines on the Republicans arrayed before him that Speaker Boehner, visible over the president's shoulder, changed hues from his standard orange to alarming red to call-the-paramedics purple on several notable occasions.

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But then, if you're smart, you read the damned speech in detail...and if you did, like as not you have some serious questions to ask.

(snip)

And then...and then, there was Cory Remsburg, the last invited guest Mr. Obama made note of. Remsburg, an Army Ranger, was injured by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan during his tenth deployment.

His tenth deployment.

His tenth deployment.

Cory Remsburg rose up before that parliament of whores, disfigured, maimed for life, and was duly recognized for his service and devotion to country. He received a deafening ovation from a room filled with the worst people in the country, many of whom voted over and over again to send him back to war ten times over, who cheered so loudly to cover over their shame...including the president himself, whose Afghanistan "surge" played its own part in putting Cory Remsburg in the path of the bomb that left him barely able to stand, blind in one eye, and forever damaged.

The President of the United States made no mention of the insanity of any soldier having to endure ten deployments, made no mention of the concept of actions and consequences, even as he stood before the loudest microphone on the planet. Perhaps he and his people thought the face of Cory Remsburg said it for him, and if so, that is another sorry example of the eleventy-dimension chess being played by an administration which is trying to run a country that only knows, politically, how to play checkers.

There are times when real leaders have to say things out loud into microphones, even when those things are so obvious that they bleed on the pavement. What happened to Cory Remsburg was wrong. It was, in fact, a crime, a long act of profiteering that has fed tens of thousands of men and women like him into the meat grinder, to be spat out into a VA system that is utterly overwhelmed and paralyzed before the avalanche of bodies it is tasked to help.

Instead, Mr. Obama said this: "My fellow Americans, men and women like Cory remind us that America has never come easy. Our freedom, our democracy, has never been easy. Sometimes we stumble; we make mistakes; we get frustrated or discouraged. But for more than two hundred years, we have put those things aside and placed our collective shoulder to the wheel of progress..."

We have put those things aside? Cory Remsburg, and the tens of thousands of soldiers who share his damage, cannot put those things aside. Mr. Obama turned that soldier's plight into a pep rally for the country that fed him to the bomb that almost killed him. "Sometimes we stumble; we make mistakes" was the only apology that ravaged Ranger got from his Commander in Chief. He deserved far more than that, as do all the men and women not lucky enough to get applause from Congress on television.

It is easy peasy for politicians to talk about putting difficult issues "aside," out of mind, away. That's the bread and butter of the Teflon not-my-problem political hack. Leaders, real leaders, address those difficult issues head-on. They challenge we the people to take them head-on, as well, and that is how we heal and rise and move on. That did not happen on Tuesday night. Again.

If you ask the right people, they'll tell you it was a great speech.

Ask me, and I'll tell you I saw a man talk like an Occupy protester while promoting the same tired, failed economic principles that spawned our yawning inequality in the first place. I saw a man talk like a Greenpeace activist while promoting or ignoring the dirtiest fuel industries in the business. I saw a man honor a ten-times-deployed wounded veteran with an "Oops." I saw a man talking very eloquently out of both sides of his mouth, again, and it made me sick in my soul.

"Between the idea and the reality," said a poet, "falls the Shadow."

It's the sugar that makes the poison taste sweet.

The rest: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21542-the-sugar-makes-the-poison-taste-sweet