And Mr. Obama’s Goose

It has been four years since the debut of “Mr. Bush’s Goose,” a book I published in the final stretch of the presidential campaign that brought Barack Obama to the White House. He was destined to be a president that a wide variety of historians have labeled the worst in U.S. history, arriving at the White House — a mansion built by black slaves — as the first African-American president in the middle of a dreadful economic crisis. The world has changed a lot since then, and a lot — although not as much — has changed in the United States.

But some things have not changed or if they have changed, it has been for the worse. Bush never went so far in the use of drones, or unmanned aircraft, for the extrajudicial execution of America’s enemies abroad. Bush’s resolute attitude towards war, especially preemptive war in Iraq, never went as far as Obama’s when it comes to liquidating bin Laden in Pakistan, an ally country, which special forces staged without permission from or any communication with local authorities. And finally, the current president “already surpassed all previous administrations in its prosecution of leakers,” affecting security according to the former editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller.

The context in which these regressions in international law and freedom of the press have occurred is very different from four years ago. Bill Keller has also pointed out the hysteria of the Republicans over the leaking of information about the liquidation of enemies, the use of double agents or the cyber war against Iran, which are the issues that have led the Democratic Obama administration and Congress to take legislative initiatives that the former director of the NY Times qualifies as a law to keep people in the Dark (Keep Americans in the Dark Act). To summarize the problem: there are many continuing similarities between Obama and George W. Bush, although with the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, there are still few.

A few months before the Republican candidate was officially known and as yet, limited attention was being paid to the president, I wrote, with the same title of this posting, Mr. Obama’s Goose, a text on the continuities between the president of the preventive war and the president of change. Thus began that text: “He has not finished the goose. This is a game that never ends, no matter who is president of the United States. The golden rule of presidential power is deception, a word that has an interesting semantic range because it means so much deception and disappointment. There is disappointment that there was cheating, but not all of the disappointment stems from a delusion. Its roots lie in the historical depth of the deception, direct daughter of hope. There is disappointment that there was hope, because the expectations were raised very high.

“This is the case with Barack Obama and the audacity of his hope. Some accuse him of deception. There is the list of broken promises, with the closure of the Guantanamo detention camp in the lead, to be implemented in the first year and has not yet happened. Regardless of whether or not it is his direct responsibility for the breach, the foundation of the disappointment was shaken by Obama, long before, thanks to his daring, not to electoral promises and programs. Before, no one with a biography and a name like his could have been seriously proposed for the White House.”

Anyone who wants to continue reading, can do so from the digital edition of the book published four years ago, which at the time did not appear as an e-book edition, but now will be available to digital readers starting Sept. 7. The text in question is precisely the foreword I wrote for this new edition e-book, which readers can access by downloading the free ‘sample’ or a sample is now already available in some media (House Book or apps for iPad and iBooks) but not yet on Amazon.