The Universal Obamaphone

It had to come to this. Bill Greider at The Nation warns that, in addition to tapping the phones of 35 other world leaders, the NSA might be spying on President Obama.

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The latest hot controversy launched by Citizen Snowden’s revelations involves the National Security Agency’s listening to the personal cellphone of Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany. Embarrassment all around and the White House now says it is “reviewing” what other foreign leaders the NSA may be eavesdroping on.

But here Is a more explosive question that needs an answer: Is the NSA eavesdropping on Barack Obama?

Officially, this will be promptly denied, of course. But can we believe opaque denials from the same intelligence officials who have previously lied to the press and misled Congress about the unlimited range of NSA snooping? More to the point, can Barack Obama believe them?

That would be terrible if it were true, almost as bad as forcing President Obama to buy Obamacare.

President Obama has shown an alarming tendency to be unaware of most everything. To begin with, he was unaware that the NSA was spying on world leaders until he read about it in the papers. Although he argued that Obamacare would let Americans keep their existing plans, his administration apparently knew all along that millions would lose — have already lost — their coverage.  How to explain this contradiction? Well, Obama was probably unaware of what Obamacare would do also.

Why, he didn’t even know there were problems with the Obamacare website until two days after it launched, despite the fact that nobody could seem to log on to it! Good thing he reads a lot of news, otherwise he might still think the consulate in Benghazi was razed because some guy in L.A. made a YouTube video.

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It’s getting so that even Andrew Sullivan is beginning to doubt his word.

It is becoming clearer and clearer that one major power-broker in Washington is resisting the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s allegedly devastating report on the torture program run by the Bush-Cheney CIA. That major power-broker is the Obama administration.

You might be surprised by this, given the president’s opposition to torture and abolition of it. But the evidence is at this point irrefutable – and given extra punch by the invaluable Jane Mayer, who caught a fascinating document related to the Senate confirmation this week of Stephen W. Preston, the top lawyer at the CIA., for a new post as the top lawyer for the Pentagon. …

Why is Obama allowing Brennan to undermine Obama’s own position? Why is the president allowing the CIA to prevent the very transparency he once pledged to uphold? I don’t know. But what I do know is that it is now Obama who is the main obstacle to releasing the Senate Report on Torture. He needs to tell his CIA director to give up his struggle to keep us all in the dark. He needs to stop dithering and tell Brennan to get out of the way of the report’s release – so we can all see, digest and understand what was done, in secret, in our name.

“Why is Obama allowing Brennan to undermine Obama’s own position?” The answer is simple. There are two Obamas. The public Obama and the private Obama.  There is the Obama who pretended to be morally superior to Bush and Cheney and there is the Obama who figured he could go one better if he interrogated prisoners in secret.

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There are probably also two sets of books, two sets of employment figures, and two of everything, as in some Manichean Noah’s Ark — if you will pardon the mixture of metaphors.

There’s the Obama who knows that you kill the enemy in war. And then there’s his twin who promises never to hurt a fly. There’s the Obama who promises to slash the deficit and the Obama who fights tooth and nail to raise the debt limit. There’s the Obama who promises a world without nuclear weapons. And then there’s the one who has let the nuclear arms race in the Middle East and Asia race to unprecedented speeds.

But here’s the thing. Most of Obama’s supporters knew that already, just as they must have guessed the NSA was spying on foreign leaders. What they really object to is being forced to confront the lie. But it’s not a lie unless you are caught at it, is it?

Actually a lie is always a lie. In my book The War of the Words, I argued that the malaise overtaking Western civilization is fundamentally an information crisis, an epidemic of falsehood, of which Obama is just a harbinger. We are swamped by our own lies. We spend money we pretend we have but don’t have. We speak in a language of systematic falsehood called political correctness that allows us to hate each other politely. We spend billions of dollars to prevent a wholly imaginary condition called global warming, like lunatics weaving some fictive garment.

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A perfect example is a CNN piece in defense of Obamacare titled “a canceled health plan is a good thing” by Sally Kohn. She writes:

If we as a nation object to the inherent and deeper flaws within the private health insurance system in America, then we should embrace a single-payer system. But instead, because conservatives were so wed to propping up the private insurance market, we got Obamacare. It’s disingenuous to turn around and point fingers at Obamacare for faults that have always been — and will always be — pervasive in private health insurance.

Whatever happens, it’s your fault for not accepting the lie. We do this in the belief that if we don’t acknowledge falsehood then it’s not there. But it is and it’s killing us. We are in the position of a person who, after embarking on a process of deceit, has lost track of the truth. We’re lost and won’t even admit it.

Our information database is almost wholly corrupt and the only thing we can think of is to increase the velocity of our own lies in the hopes that if we broadcast crud through a shiny enough receptacle it somehow becomes true. The Atlantic reports that Chinese Communist Party has finally seen something in President Obama it wishes to emulate.

In a bizarre quest to graft innovation on to anachronism, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is preparing to supply millions of its members with special cell phones that will instantaneously deliver the latest ideological instructions and propaganda themes while enforcing better “discipline” among increasingly decadent and corrupt party officials.

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That way the Party can listen to itself. We have something similar — it’s called the MSM. But the Red Chinese Obamaphone brings deceit to the masses high-tech style. The innocuous self-looping Obamaphone may be the most dangerous instrument ever invented. It’s an echo chamber of deceit.

The reason that lies kill is the same reason that the truth saves. The truth allows us to see reality approaching and thus avoid the perils with which we invariably contend. What an administration has done is blind and deceive itself. It is consequently now naked before its enemies, defenseless against itself.

Here’s a question for Bill Greider. If President Obama was unaware that he was spying on himself, would you believe the denial?


Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with you friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.

The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
Rebranding Christianity for $3.99, or why the truth shall make you free
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99, reflections on terrorism and the nuclear age
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99, why government should get small
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99. Fiction. A flight into peril, flashbacks to underground action.
Storm Over the South China Sea $0.99, how China is restarting history in the Pacific
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