About that Obama “Movement”

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Rampant misgovernment, I think we can all agree, is the bane of the human race. Only a few misguided voices to the contrary, the United States is hardly an exception, quite the opposite, in fact. The worst fruit of that ongoing U.S. misgovernment so far is well summed up by Canadian philosopher, John McMurtry:

In the US’s so-called War on Terror, by far the greatest and most systematic terrorization of civilians is in fact perpetrated by the US state itself. Unarmed citizens are murdered across the world as ‘collateral damage’, ‘illegal enemy combatants’ or other license of impunity. The US state conceives itself as above international law along with ally Israel, but this reality is taboo to report and so too all the killing and terrorization of civilians. One can truly say that “the historical record demonstrates the US is provably guilty of continual lawless mass murder of civilians across the world”…

Against this murderous backdrop, the inconvenience experienced by Hyattsville Life and Times columnist Hugh Turley on March 21 so that President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle could watch her Princeton alma mater’s women’s basketball team play in the NCAA tournament might look like a very small thing, indeed, but we should see it as part of the same big picture. He and thousands of others were made late (including possibly for airline flights causing them to miss them) because the main thoroughfare of Route 1 was blocked off so the small armada of vehicles that go with the president could traverse the 11 or so miles from the White House to the University of Maryland’s Xfinity Center. Turley begins:

One recent Saturday, I was driving my wife to an appointment in Laurel, 30 minutes away. We left our Hyattsville home allowing enough time to arrive 15 minutes early.

As we passed through College Park on U.S. Route 1 going north, I could see police were blocking the road ahead. I turned at Greenbelt Road to take another route. Near the beltway I tried to get back onto Route 1 and realized police were blocking every street and driveway. Traffic on the neighborhood streets was now jammed in every direction.

I turned on the car radio to hear a traffic report and learned the Baltimore Washington Parkway (MD 295), Kenilworth Avenue (MD 201), part of Interstate Highway 495, and U.S. Route 1, were closed for “an official movement.”

“Who do these people think they are, disrupting the lives of the American people?” Turley concludes his article entitled, “An Imperial Traffic Jam.”

Some other questions come to mind. What were they thinking? Don’t they know how bad this looks? Is it a good idea for someone whose position depends upon public approval to demonstrate such a callous disregard for the well being of his fellow citizens, needlessly inflicting hardship upon large numbers of them so that he and his wife might experience some frivolous gratification? Think of how you feel when you are sitting in a traffic jam and a car rushes by you on the shoulder so that he can get ahead while at the same time making the jam just that much worse for everyone else and multiply it many times over, and that is the feeling inflicted on people by the Obamas for their own very unofficial business.

Upon reflection, though, what we see here is not the act of self-indulgent thoughtlessness that it might appear upon first blush. If one thinks of it as simply another opportunity to make us feel like subjects instead of citizens and to reinforce the notion that we are besieged and “security concerns” trump everything else, then the apparently callous action make some sense. If this were all about the whims and convenience of Barack and Michelle, there’s a lot quicker and easier way for the Obama’s to have gone to the game. They could have taken the presidential helicopter. They might have been attacked for abusing the perquisites of the office, but pointing out how preferable it is to the alternative could have easily deflected that. *

The central problem is that our propaganda press is all part of the selling job for that alternative. Thus we see that Turley’s is the lonesome voice in the Fourth Estate calling any attention at all to this most recent outrage inflicted upon ordinary people. The completely unnecessary permanent blocking of the central avenue of Pennsylvania Avenue for “security reasons” seriously interferes with the smooth movement of traffic through the heart of the District of Columbia, but not a murmur of protest has been heard from the news media. Similarly, they have accepted with equanimity the “siege decorations” that increasingly blemish the nation’s capital. The former was done to reinforce the complete absurdity that Timothy McVeigh’s truck bomb caused all the damage to the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City and the latter is for the purpose of hammering into our minds the notion that terrorists of the false flag 9/11 stripe are out to get us.

We demonstrated what a sham those “security measures” are around the city with our article “Homeland Insecurity?” in which we show that the big Homeland Security building, which happens to be off the tourism track, has no such external security and is, in fact, cluttered in front by numerous exotic food trucks every weekday around noon.

We have said more than once before that the various inconveniences and invasions upon our privacy and our dignity such as we undergo at airports are all just for show to reinforce the official terrorist-siege narrative, but the road blockages for “official movements” might have an even more ominous and sinister motive. We might consider them of a piece with the lockdown that occurred around Boston in pursuit of the Boston Marathon bombing patsies, the little publicized FEMA camp roundup drills that recently took place in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the upcoming Operation Jade Helm, in which some 1,200 elite military personnel will treat a number of states in the Southwest as enemy territory to be infiltrated. Think of it all as practice for the controllers and acclimation for the controlees.

If we might paraphrase John Donne: Never send to know upon whom the movement falls; it falls upon thee.

* It might have been a bit slower like the rest of us go—Mapquest tells us that it’s about 30 minutes from the White House to the Xfinity Center with normal traffic—but the First Couple could have traveled incognito quite securely like Hillary Clinton did across the Midwest in her van this week.

David Martin

April 15, 2015

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