A states’ rights defense against Barack Obama

{mosads}Seventy percent of America and practically all of Congress supported the Iraq invasion. But what Obama is trying to avenge here is an idea: The idea that killing someone with gas is worse than killing the same woman, child or random non-combatant bystander with an M-14, M-16, a phosphorous grenade, napalm or the tritonal bombs we dropped blindly from B-52s all over Vietnam, killing and deforming possibly millions of people.

Most who have experienced warfare in Iraq, Vietnam or World War II have actually seen the flat bodies of the dead left behind by undifferentiated, mass killing. The distinction of deaths caused by gas is the academic and noncombatant’s distinction, like Obama’s and the Bush crew.

Early into the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, I wrote an article titled “A states’ rights defense against Dick Cheney” making the claim, citing Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions, that the only defense against a federal government gone senseless or amok was states.

It became a prototype for the Tea Party: “Until now, Northern people have never challenged the principles of federalism. Generally speaking they were satisfied with their lot and had won the day [the Civil War]. From the early part of our passing century we had conquered the world. From 1865 onward, complaint of the nature of the federal compact had come only from the South. But now, for the first time since the Civil War, the federalist principle is being challenged by northern people and that is a consequence of the war on Iraq.”

The same goes today for the Obama group, including the entire undergraduate coffee house crew (or cult) that has cost now so many lives through their innocence: National Security Adviser Susan Rice, U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Obama.

George Kennan, 97 years old and on his deathbed, came to our aid back then and supported these first attempts for state-based civil disobedience in Vermont and New Hampshire against the federal government.

He claimed in his notes and last works that the hubris of a very large country causes monster hubris. Possibly Obama, who like Bill Clinton (and of late, Miley Cyrus), sees himself as a global god king on the MTV circuit, experiences this to far greater degree than even Bush and Cheney, who didn’t particularly like the outside world.

Kennan: “There is a further quality of greatness of size in a country that deserves mention here. One might define it as the hubris of inordinate size.”

Bush then, today Obama.